NOVEMBER 9

In his new autobiography, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, Berry Gordy relates how he used his experience as an assembly-line worker at a Detroit automobile plant to create his Motown “hit factory”; fortunately, the resemblance to Lee Iacocca’s best-selling Horatio Alger fable ends there. The rest of the book doles out generous helpings of the show-biz gossip that makes the tell-all genre so appealing to so many: Without Gordy to fill us in, how else were we to know that the original title of Marvin Gaye’s post-Motown tune “Sanctified Lady” was “Sanctified Pussy,” or that Smokey Robinson was a terrible poker player? Gordy signs copies of his book at 12:30 p.m. at Olsson’s, 1200 F St. NW. (202) 347-3686; he presides over “A Motown Celebration” at 7 p.m. at the Museum of American History’s Carmichael Auditorium, 14th & Constitution Ave. NW. $13. (202) 357-3030. (Eddie Dean)