The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (26 page)

We were doing this right from the start. We weren’t following any plan, it just fell into place that way. Things happen for a reason, man. Berry didn’t know it would happen that way, but he knew
us.
He knew Smokey, he knew Norman and Barrett. We were like his sons, so it was all very sort of hereditary.

It was a natural thing.

Indeed, it was as if Holland-Dozier-Holland had sprung fully formed from Medusa’s head. All through 1963, the troika rumbled in high gear. One of their earliest works, the Marvelettes’ “Locking Up My Heart,” released in February, hit No. 44 on the pop charts, 25 on the R&B. Then, without pause, came Martha and the Vandellas’ “Come and Get These Memories,” a song that they admit was a mish-mash.

“We did everything different in that one,” Dozier recalled. “We used 11ths and 13ths [chords], we used country, jazz, and gospel elements.” When Gordy heard the tape, he demanded to know “Who wrote this?” Bracing for the worst, the three disciples let out a breath when he continued, “Wow, that’s different. I like it.” He liked it even more when the record went 29 pop, 6 R&B in the spring. The follow-up, “Heat Wave,” with its infectious Charleston beat, established both group and producers as Motown elite-worthy, going No. 4 pop and hitting the top of the R&B chart; and the next, the nearly identical sounding “Quicksand,” did almost as well, charting at 8 and 7. Between Vandellas smashes, HDH also hatched Marvin Gaye’s astounding gospel rocker

“Can I Get a Witness,” which went to 22 and 3.

All these were pivotal benchmarks, proving that HDH had a way with a winking lyrical and melodic hook—more subtly amusing and 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 134

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musically versatile than Smokey’s compositions—and no fear of rewriting pop boundaries. They could also ace that most elusive task, creating a convincing girl-group song.

Another early collaboration, though, wasn’t as impressive. But Diane Ross had made it inevitable that the paths of the Supremes and HDH would cross.

In fact, Ross had had her eyes on Brian Holland for some time, as un-concerned that he was married as she had been with Smokey Robinson.

The younger Holland may have been “cute,” as Flo once remarked, but there had to be more to it for Diane to become involved with him. As much as she may have been attracted by the dumpling-cheeked, sensitive young producer—and he to the saucy, sexually aggressive young singer—her attention was focused not on Holland or his wife but, rather, on the Marvelettes.

Diane, of course, detested them for their slew of hits—all under Holland’s direction—while the Supremes were stuck in the mud. And she could claim only picayune victories over them—by filching a dance step or two from them here and there or insulting Gladys Horton’s looks or clothes. Indeed, it had not taken long before, inevitably, her loathing for Horton finally boiled over. The big boom happened on a 1963 Motown tour, when, during a show in Philadelphia, Gladys decided to turn the tables and dish on how Diane looked.

The Supremes were opening for the Marvelettes and had just concluded “Let Me Go the Right Way,” to scattered applause, when Horton could be heard from the wings saying something to the effect that Ross’s dress was so baggy, “it looks like a nightgown.” As Mary Wilson recalled it, Diane came offstage “steaming.” She marched up to Horton in the brief interim before the Marvelettes would go on and got in her face.

“Did you say our dresses look like nightgowns?” she asked angrily.

With perfect timing, Gladys twisted the knife. “No, Diane,” she said, “I didn’t say
their
dresses—I said
your
dress,” and sauntered onto the stage.

Diane, whom Wilson nailed as having “a very high opinion of herself and a low tolerance to criticism,” didn’t let the matter drop. She scribbled “DIANE IS GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS AFTER THE

SHOW” on a napkin and handed it to a stagehand with instructions to deliver it to the Marvelettes’ dressing room.

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The story that’s been passed down through the years, more than likely with some embellishment, goes like this: After the show Horton was helping a blind boy (not Stevie Wonder) across the parking lot when Diane, stalking her from a distance, jumped into John O’Den’s station wagon, which the two girl-groups were sharing. She fired up and gunned the engine and with a deafening squeal of spinning tires made a beeline right for Horton—braking just a few feet short of where Gladys and the unsuspecting boy were standing.

Horton squinted to see who was at the wheel, her famous voice bellowing into the night, daring Ross: “Come on—hit me, you crazy bitch!” If she was willing to take a few broken bones to get Diane Ross confined to a jail cell, Ross wouldn’t bite. Instead, she flipped her middle finger in the air and drove away, her demonic laughter pealing.

Lost in the telling and retelling of this tale have been a few relevant details, such as what sort of
detente
the two bitter rivals could possibly have struck in the station wagon riding home after such a hair-raising episode. All Wilson says is that Ernestine Ross, who had come along as a chaperone, was “shocked” and “reprimanded Diane for her behavior,” though Diane “didn’t seem to be listening.” Horton, for her part, used to tell the car story herself. But in a 2004

biography of the Marvelettes,
Motown’s Mystery Girl Group
by Marc Taylor, she is considerably more contrite, downplaying the parking lot contretemps as “kiddie stuff ” and saying, “I have a lot of respect for Diana,” cutting her slack as “just a girl who spoke her mind” and “a hustler who always knew what she wanted.” Curiously, Horton’s confrere Katherine Anderson says she doesn’t remember this incident, though one would think it would be impossible to forget. But she acknowledges that Ross run-ins were common, and over the top.

“We had a lot of volatile situations with Diane because she thought she was the shit, better than everybody else. She was a bitch and when she wouldn’t get her way she’d make a spectacle of herself and then run to Berry for support. It got very tiresome. We always wondered why Berry put up with it.”

This time, at least, he didn’t. When Diane called Gordy from the road, to preemptively tell him of the incident and somehow justify it as Horton’s fault, he was horrified by the psychotic reaction and forced her to apologize to Gladys immediately. With a smirk, she did, the paleness of such a weak attempt to keep peace within the family obvious to all but perhaps Gordy. “When Berry wasn’t around,” wrote Mary Wilson, “he wanted Diane to learn not to get caught up in petty fights.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 136

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But as everyone at Motown knew, Diane did petty; it was one of her real talents. Which is why she had no qualms about trying to even the field with the Marvelettes by appropriating their producer, who, perhaps, could be pillow-talked into giving the Supremes some of those sure-fire songs that might otherwise have gone to Gladys Horton to sing lead on.

The relationship between Ross and Brian Holland warmed up in the last months of 1962. The drill was the same as with Smokey. The two of them, Wilson recalled, “would work late in the studio [and] before long everyone at Hitsville knew what was up.” It was hard not to, since once again Diane indiscreetly boasted of her new “boyfriend.” She’d even leave love notes on Janie Bradford’s desk for Brian, not bothering to fold the paper so her panting prose was visible to all. Bradford, who found herself acting as the conduit in more than one secret tryst, has a good laugh as she says, “They paid me well at Motown, so I will not betray their secrets. But Diane never made it a secret.” For Ross, the romance may have been just another pit stop on the way up—nowhere in her memoirs does she profess the deep affection for Holland that she does for Smokey Robinson. Still, that Brian Holland was the fly to the spider puzzled many around the shop. Because while Holland was surely one of “Berry’s boys,” and thus seemingly inclined to use willing women whenever possible, Holland was a different kind of cat. Introverted and unassuming—“a real gentleman,” says Wilson—he seemed not to be Ross’s type of man. Her type was more the swaggering, hard-driving “bad boy” personified by Berry Gordy.

Still, Holland reeked of Motown power; for Diane, opportunity was written all over him. What’s more, it appeared that he was attracted to her type; his wife, Sharon, was strong-willed and controlling, not unlike Ross. Then too, looks can be deceiving. Holland could seem meek and cerebral, almost nerdy, if one overlooked the great soul music he pumped out of his inner being. But word on the street was that as he became richer, more famous, and more desirable, he easily adapted to the promiscuous Motown culture, apparently carrying on a number of affairs; and that the Holland marriage was falling apart, either as a result of his philandering or because, as the talk went around the water cooler, Sharon “wasn’t giving him what he wants.” All these years later, it is potentially perilous to broach the delicate subject with Holland, whose Buddha-like calm dissolves like a brioche if the attempt is made. Then, his narrowed eyes—and Eddie Holland’s protective growl—end the probe before it begins. But the telltale fleet-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 137

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ing, misty musings about the enduringly “pretty” Diana Ross emanate from the same place as does his music inspiration, deep inside him—

right alongside the cleaved heart she may have left him with. Smokey may have stated for the record his long and genuine love for Ross, while obscuring how deep that love went, but one suspects Brian Holland actually
feels
it—so strongly transferred to “I Hear a Symphony” that he had to stop driving and sit there weeping. This emotional investment was a key element of the Supremes’ oeuvre, and why it remains so convincingly heartfelt.

One would have needed to be psychic, however, to imagine such a profound long-term aftermath at the start of the affair. After Holland was persuaded to work with the Supremes and specifically asked Gordy to do so, HDH came up with a song for them called “Run, Run, Run.” Taking the organ-based gospel intonation of “My Heart Can’t Take It No More” further, when the song was cut on May 7, 1963, Holland added flourishes like the feverish piano triplets and windy sax straight out of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound.” Ross, a bit too preciously, emoted Eddie Holland’s sermon of a lyric—“Come gather ’round me and hear the news,” she began—while Mary and Flo chanted “run, run, run” behind her on the style of a C. L. Franklin choir.

Despite the HDH pedigree, though, Gordy sat on the song for nine months, worrying that the flop of another well-crafted R&B song might be one flop too many for the group to absorb. Before releasing anything by the Supremes, he wanted to send them back out on the road to sell themselves to a broader audience. The first means toward that end was the second Motortown Revue, to commence in the fall.

By then, he needed them to have a more upbeat, poppy song to push.

And when the new girl-group maestros composed a song in that vein,

“When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” instead of giving it to the Marvelettes or the Vandellas, Brian Holland told Gordy it might be a good bet for the Supremes, just as Diane Ross had planned it.

HDH themselves thought the song wasn’t up to their usual snuff.

“It was okay, far from our best work,” says Eddie Holland, but the demo with Eddie singing lead and Dozier pounding the piano bristled with energy. “We’d had success with the up-tempo stuff, the ‘Heat Wave’–‘Quicksand’ groove,” Brian goes on, “so we were in that mood and we just went all out with it on that song.” Construing their lengthening track record as carte blanche on all song matters, they went all out on the title, too. Says Brian: “People said, ‘You know, Brian, Berry had a problem with a long song title a few months ago.’ I said, ‘Tough.’

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We didn’t care what Berry or anyone thought.” A laugh. “I think maybe we’d gotten a little arrogant.”

Gordy stayed with the title, deferring to HDH, and the big-gun producers went into the studio with the girls on October 1—though judging from the way Brian and Lamont blew out the session, the Supremes were practically an afterthought. As it progressed, they ladled the tracks with great gobs of instrumentation, drums thundering, hands clapping the beat, and an adjunct background chorale with a new Motown group called the Four Tops grunting a loud “
yeaaah!
” at the break.

To more musically educated ears, the vital core of “Lovelight” was the inspired drumming of Benny Benjamin, who didn’t always make sessions because he was frequently hungover, but when he did he filled out a drum part as brilliantly and eccentrically as James Jamerson did with the bass lines. Although he was Alabama born, Benjamin tried to jive everyone into believing that he was from the Caribbean, so fond was he of Caribbean jazz beats. Handed straight drum parts by Motown producers, he accented them with island beats that worked ideally with the Mary Wells songs. On “Lovelight” he hit a New Orleans–style

“second-line” beat, an island riff popularized previously on the Ikettes’

“Iko Iko.” In fact, music historian and arranger Allan “Dr. Licks” Slutsky, who produced the magnificent 2003 retro-documentary about the Funk Brothers,
Standing in the Shadows of Motown,
says, “I hear Zigaboo Modeliste in that song,” referring to the drummer of the celebrated New Orleans rhythm section, the Meters. “And all the rhythm section instruments—guitars, piano, Jamerson on upright bass, tambourine—

shadow Benny’s groove, as does Mike Terry’s baritone sax, which also shadows the beat but in his own way.”

Slutsky echoes what has become a bone of rabid contention for HDH—that the production of their nonpareil songs owed much, if not everything, to the Motown rhythm section rather than to their own genius. “It’s doubtful that HDH knew about the second-line style,” he speculates. “Probably what happened is they heard Benny messing around with the beat before the session and built everything around that.” As the years wore on, sentiments like that would become fightin’