The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (18 page)

Not that there weren’t any operating costs, and quite legitimate ones, given the expense involved in paying musicians (who, unlike the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 86

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singers, had a union that needed to be mollified), pressing plants, distributors, promoters, sundry middlemen, company salaries, studio equipment, and keeping the lights on at Motown. There was also, as has often been surmised but never proven, the possibility that Gordy greased the palms of a few Mafia types to ensure that production at the pressing plants and shipment of records down at the Black Bottom docks would continue undisturbed. And, of course, there were the emoluments for disc jockeys, such as their “Christmas presents.” In fact, as Gordy would soon learn when the flush of excitement and the initial rush of royalties for “Shop Around” subsided, his arrangements with distributors would keep the money coming only if Motown’s hit parade proceeded unabated; otherwise his brethren around the country reserved the right to withhold monies from
him
. In his 1979 book
The Story of Motown,
Peter Benjaminson reported that Motown cleared only around $100,000 a year in profits from 1959 to 1962, most of which Gordy “immediately reinvested in the business, leaving himself with very little to operate on.” Already, there were rumors on the street that Gordy had in desperation nurtured his alleged Mob ties to keep Motown solvent; that he had made “secret” deals with loan sharks and Mob bosses, pledging a handsome return of the company’s future business. Such scuttlebutt, to his dismay and to the detri-ment of the company, only grew stronger, from whispers to open speculation in the media. To some onlookers, this explained Gordy’s continued importation of white executives who soon came to dominate Motown’s inner councils; to others, it explained his real motive in keeping his books away from the prying eyes of the RIAA.

Whatever the state of his books, by all appearances Berry Gordy was not hurting in 1961—especially considering the arrival of a fleet of glistening new Cadillac convertibles and the annexation of more property along West Grand Boulevard, several other townhomes having been purchased as an expansion of Motown office space. While Motown contracts were ironclad in their penury—Gordy prone to making self-serving and highly arrogant statements to the press such as “It’s my money, I make the money,” thus relegating his “family” to the status of mere courtiers—on a personal level he could be extraordinarily generous, when the spirit moved him, as when he reached deeply into his pocket for bonuses and handed out gifts to favored acts and toadies.

Still, even one of the most tended-to of Motown recipients would remain essentially in the dark. “To this day,” Mary Wilson said in the early ’80s, “I still don’t know exactly how many millions of copies any of our records sold, though I still receive royalties.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 87

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Being a member in good standing of Berry Gordy’s “family,” then, required a strange compact. You were free, and even expected, to trill about his beneficence as a big brother figure. But if you had any designs on examining his account books, he’d be Big Brother—not only agent and manager for all of his acts but the accountant as well.

Yet for the Primettes, all of these considerations, the fuzzy math, the questionable ethics, were irrelevant on January 15, 1961. On that day, they fused into the fabric of Motown, their cache and identity instantly transformed. In fact, when the contracts were signed certifying Berry Gordy Jr. as their overlord, the group name typed in was not the Primettes. Gordy, as he had done with Smokey Robinson’s Matadors, wanted a change to a classier, more market-friendly moniker. A few days before, he handed the task to his ubiquitous receptionist.

JANIE BRADFORD: I was good at that kind of thing. I had an ear for names. I named the Satintones, too. I thought that was the coolest, sexiest name ever; it was so, I don’t know,
tactile
.

You could “feel” it. Same with Supremes. That’s a great color word; it makes you think of something grand and elegant. My hedge was that it didn’t really tie in to girls. Girl-group names were always something with a feminine concept, something soft and girly—the Satintones actually would’ve been a fantastic girl-group name! I was fooling around with “Satinettes,” but it was too close to the Satintones. They didn’t need to be another “sister” group.

So rather than come up with one name, I just gave them everything I could think of, girly or not, whatever I thought would work for them. And I didn’t want to get caught up in that “ette” thing. You literally could have used any word and put an “ette” on the end of it and it would be cute. Take a girly concept, flowers, spices, emotions. You could have “Passionettes,” but that’s too sexy. Or “Pamperettes,” but how would that have looked when Pampers diapers came in? You could have cars,

“Lincolnettes” or “Mercuryettes,” or maybe just “Mercurettes,” but the car thing was for guy-groups. You could try a commercial thing—“Chiclettes,” like the gum; that would be perfect for a bunch of chicks, right? But that would be too contrived, too cute.

When I got around five names, I wrote them on little pieces of paper and put them in a hat. I did use one “ette” name, Jewelettes, even though it sounded too much like “Juliettes.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 88

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The others, to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t even remember. And when Florence came in, I handed her the hat and said, “Pick one.” The other girls weren’t there, so it would really be Flo’s choice, and she was the one who naturally would have made the decision, anyway. She had quite a bit of control then.

And she reached in and the first one she pulled out was

“Supremes.” Of course, she could have said, “No way, I don’t like it.” But she loved it. I think she liked that it wasn’t the most feminine name, because she didn’t like the sweet and innocent kind of music. She said, “Girl, we are the
Supremes
!” Although Flo might well have weeded through all the paper in Bradford’s hat until she got to “Supremes,” it is interesting to play

“what-if ” had whatever it was that guided Ballard’s hand that day led her to pick “Jewelettes”—or any of the other names that have become so dwarfed by history’s embrace of the Supremes that even Bradford can’t remember what they were, even though months later when she found the scraps of paper in her desk drawer she had them framed as prized memorabilia. The other four options, unearthed by Mary Wilson, were the Darleens, the Sweet Ps, the Melodees, and the Royal-tones. Which begs some fair questions: Would Martin Scorcese’s moonstruck Masha in
The King of Comedy
ever have yearned to be a Sweet P for just one night? And would the Darleens ever have been chosen as the Muses for “I Hear a Symphony” or “Reflections”?

As with most things, Ross and Wilson have related differing versions of the rechristening, though their narratives (in Ross’s case, two whole sentences) do bisect with Flo Ballard making the final call. In the Ross view, that occurred after Bradford had “handed [Flo] a list of what she considered good names.” Ballard, she said, “picked ‘the Supremes’

because it was the only one that didn’t have an ‘ette’ on the end”—Ross evidently either having forgotten or never having known of the many other options besides Jewelettes.

Wilson, for her part, omits Bradford altogether while injecting herself and Ross. “Flo was in charge of keeping a list of the names we’d collected,” she wrote. “We were each pretty vocal about our favorite choices, but Flo kept her opinions to herself.” When Flo “read off her list,” she adds, “none of them really impressed any of us, but . . . after a minute [Flo] said, ‘I like this one—the Supremes.’” These alternate takes again cause Bradford to bridle. “There are all sorts of stories,” she says with a deep sigh, “and I can understand the girls not wanting to give credit to someone not in the group for pick-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 89

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ing the name that became so much a part of them. But. . . .” After a pause, she adds: “Look, I don’t toot my own horn. But don’t try to steal my thunder.”

In truth, the only one whose opinion counted was Big Brother Berry. That he found “Supremes” more than acceptable was made evident by the fact that it was typed into the contract. And if Ross and Wilson weren’t completely sold on the name, once the deal was finalized it began to grow on them. Wearing it like a sash, they treaded the halls of Motown with the impresa of a next new thing. To Gordy, and thus soon copied by everyone else, they were now identified not by name but as “the girls.” Gordy, in his memoir, further gurgled that

“[t]hey were the sweethearts of Hitsville” and that around the lot they were already something like icons; Wilson, he offered, “was probably the most popular with the guys,” Ballard “sarcastic” and “kept us laughing all the time.” But it was Ross who was Berry’s “girl,” possessed of

“a drive in her that could not be denied. Nor could her appeal—which she used to full advantage.”

That, to say the least, would become
molto
evident around Motown soon enough; but even before Gordy laid an amorous hand on Diane Ross, he couldn’t get enough of her. Days after the signing, he made her his secretary, a function for which she was uniquely unqualified, as Ross has confirmed. “The truth is,” she has said, “I wasn’t his secretary. I couldn’t even type or take shorthand.” Clearly it took Gordy’s hand to wave “the girls’” first record into the pressing plant. Doing so for any Motown record was the result of an informal procedure that would become a regular Friday afternoon ritual, at which Gordy would assemble a dozen or so cronies and decide by vote which tracks made the cut. Naturally, whatever the vote, Gordy had the final say, and he had to overrule an emphatically negative verdict on “I Want a Guy.” Flo Ballard had made it known that she hated it, and even his loyal adjutant Smokey Robinson turned thumbs down, primarily because of Ross’s adenoidal vocal. But Gordy seemed to live in mortal fear of disappointing his secretary.

And so in early spring 1961, pop culture history arrived at an en-nobling moment, one that at the time seemed to be significant of absolutely nothing. On March 9, “I Want a Guy,” with a minor Gordy song called “Never Again” on the flip, was released as Tamla 54038, under the name “The Supremes.”

Gordy threw his promotional machine behind the record and once more leaned on the deejays. And nearly everyone who heard it chose not to hear it again. With distributors unable to move it, jocks reluctant 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 90

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to play it, record stores refusing to stock it, and its sales negligible, “I Want a Guy” died a quick death.

Gordy took the failure in stride, figuring he could afford to wait for the girls to find their collective voice and niche. He just didn’t know how long he’d need to wait. Or was it Diane Ross—his “girl”—whom he was really waiting on? Several months before he’d given contracts to the group, Gordy had been chatting with Mable John at Motown when he remarked, “I think I’m gonna sign that Diane Ross girl.”

“What about the other girls?” she asked him.

“Oh yeah,” he said, clearly as an afterthought. “Them, too.” John admonished him not to even think of breaking up a group of young girls; that, she warned, was asking for trouble.

“Would I do that?” he said as he walked away, leaving a laugh to echo after him.

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All through 1961, things kept falling into place at Motown, none of which had much of an impact on the incipient Supremes.

This, despite Gordy’s conscious efforts to get “his girls” some traction. In fact, throughout the first three months of the year, he put them frequently into Studio A, with Berry taking another crack at producing them on “Buttered Popcorn,” a song he’d cowritten with Barney Ales, whom he’d bumped up to vice-president of sales. For this one, he put Ballard instead of Ross on lead. Turned loose over a gritty rhythm track—with piano riffs, appropriately, by Popcorn Wylie—she busted a raw-throated vocal, serving up some unsubtle sexual cant with a hook about “liking it salty, gooey, and sticky,” though Ross, perhaps still smarting over ceding the lead, would later play dumb in putting down the record, insisting she didn’t even know who wrote it and that “I’m still trying to figure out what it was about.” Gordy might have wished his name wasn’t associated with it, since he immediately shunned it. Ales, believing it was hit material, was set to commit the Motown sales force to the record when it was released on the Tamla label on July 21, backed with a ballad written and produced by Smokey Robinson, “Who’s Loving You,” with Ross on lead. Ales was even able to pull the first few copies of “Popcorn” off the market and substitute a more sprightly version for sale. However, Berry grew distant from the record, then outright hostile about it. Ales tried to get him on board, to no avail. After a raging argument between the two men, Ales was directed to take the sales force elsewhere, rendering

“Popcorn” an unpopped kernel that got nowhere near the charts.

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Ross may not have mourned its fate, possibly divining, or hoping, that its failure would be traced to the lead. And, as it turned out, for whatever reason, this was the last time a Flo-fronted Supremes song would ever be issued as a single.

Ales’s redirection was well justified, and proved that Gordy could be admirably objective when it came to a record’s hit potential, not withstanding his gaffe with “I Want a Guy.” The context for his decision on

“Popcorn” was that one of the most happening things at 2648 West Grand Boulevard during the first half of 1961 was the other girl-group Gordy had sent away months before to get some experience, the teenagers from Inkster with that strange name the Casingyettes (a wry inside joke by the girls acknowledging their limitations, as in “we can’t sing yet”). When they returned, at Gordy’s instruction, with an original song called “Please Mr. Postman,” his ears perked up, and he sent them into the studio with Brian Holland and Robert Bateman. By then, it had many fathers; originally co-written by the group’s Georgia Dobbins and a friend, at Motown it acquired no fewer than three more co-writers—