The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (28 page)

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solo, and while that normally might have excited her, she also worried about what effect such premature talk of that sort would have on Mary’s and Flo’s psyches. Mary, for all her anodyne compliancy about group matters, was terrified that the group might fail. And Flo, who was so insecure to begin with, had not gotten over Ross moving her out as lead singer. As much as Ross thirsted for a shot at solo fame, for now she had no desire to upset the girls and genuinely wanted them to taste the nectar of success together.

Attempting to re-cement her delicate bond with Mary, Diane agreed to go with Mary to Chicago where the latter’s cousin was to be married. They hopped a Greyhound, on their own dime, and had such a good time they stayed on, living with Mary’s relatives. Time flew, and they were still there two weeks later, happily isolated from the brain-scrambling Peyton Place on West Grand Boulevard.

“We were running away from Motown. We really needed to get away,” Wilson said of the brief sabbatical, during which they had quickie flings with two members of the Chicago soul group the Dells, whom they met at a club. When they came back to Detroit, Diane was off again, hitching a ride with the Temptations, who were as spectacularly unsuccessful in their three Motown years as were the Supremes.

They had gotten a gig in Atlanta, and they took off for their native Deep South, with Diane in tow.

“We were very close friends with Diane from way back,” Otis Williams says. “She was like our kid sister. She said she wanted to go visit her relatives in Mississippi. We said sure, come with us; we’ll drop you off, then pick you up on the way back.” He continued: We were very protective of Diane. For all her reputation as a difficult person, to us she was always real vulnerable, breakable.

Because we saw that side of her, which she didn’t let others see.

We would never let her walk anywhere alone on that trip. We’d be like her security guards.

It was kind of refreshing, too, to see her in that context.

She was just a confused 20-year-old girl, a sweet girl, not someone trying to be, y’know, Miss Diva. She spoke about how scared she was that the Supremes wouldn’t make it. She thought she might have to quit the business and go to college like her daddy wanted.

Hey, we knew how she felt. The possibility of failure was beating us all down. So we’d cheerlead for her and she’d do the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 146

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same for us. We’d say, “You’re gonna make it big!” And she’d go,

“No, you’re gonna!” But Diane was really questioning herself.

People rarely saw her that way.

During this abyss, Ross seemed to have convinced herself that everyone at Motown, with the sole exception of Gordy, was conspiring against her. A particular foil, she openly stated, was Billie Jean Brown, a young woman Gordy had hired while she was still attending Cass High School to write liner notes before he promoted her to no less than the gatekeeper of all recorded songs. “She was Creative Control,” Eddie Holland says. “Meaning she’d listen to whatever tapes the producers had made and if she said, ‘That needs remixing’ or ‘It sounds too slow,’

you’d have to redo it. You can imagine how much she was either loved or hated, but Berry trusted her because she had really great ears. She didn’t know anything about how to make a record but she knew if it sounded like a hit.”

It was a thankless task, a monumentally unfair one to hang on a novice, and Ross’s complaints that Billie Jean had it in for her were not atypical—especially since all Motown acts cut more records than were needed and very few were ever released. (By Wilson’s estimation, for every Supremes release there were at least five others that sat in the can, where they sit to this day—even though the acts themselves were docked for the expenses of recording every one.)

Diane even moaned about it to Gladys Horton, looking anywhere she could for sympathy. Horton, stunned that her old rival was crying on her shoulder, of all people’s, recalled her saying that “Billie Jean hates me.” As Horton told author J. Randy Taraborrelli, “Next thing I knew I was comforting her, and crying with her. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her, ‘you’ll have your hit too, just you wait.’” In her assessment, “Diane was really complicated. She’d be runnin’ your ass down with a car one day and then have you cryin’ your eyes out feelin’ sorry for her the next.”

Horton was so sorry for her that when Diane, still wet-eyed, asked if Gladys would let the Supremes get star billing over the Marvelettes at one show, she acquiesced. “To me, it was nothing but a show,” she recalled. Not so blasé was Esther Edwards, who Horton says got “angry at me because I begged her to let them star the show and the Supremes didn’t have a hot record.”

But that’s how it went down, another small victory for Diane.

If Ross could use tears to connive, she had hardly lost her bravado, all her worries aside. This was always evident when the Supremes were 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 147

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on tour with hotter acts, making her want to cut down the other performers by aggrandizing herself. Increasingly, her new obsession was torturing Martha Reeves, who’d replaced Gladys Horton on her own

“hit list.” Not by coincidence, of course, the Vandellas had taken off under the tutelage of HDH. But adding fuel to Ross’s ire was the fact that there wasn’t a soul at Motown who didn’t think Reeves was a far superior singer with a brighter future.

This was the prologue when, just before an engagement at the Ho -

ward Theater in Washington, D.C., at which the Supremes were booked as the opening act for the Vandellas—another source of anger for Ross—Diane did some nosing around and found out where the Vandellas had bought their dresses for the show. Placing a call to the dress shop, she ordered three identical frocks in the Supremes’ sizes, then went and picked them up, paying with the money Gordy had wired her as a clothing stipend after she cried to him that they needed new stage wear. Wilson and Ballard, who knew nothing of the circumstances and always deferred to Diane’s educated sense of style and fashion, excitedly slipped into them minutes before the lights went up.

This thievery went beyond Ross’s dance-step-stealing. And when Reeves saw them out there opening the show in the same dresses the Vandellas were already wearing while standing in the wings, the steam coming out of her ears could have melted her wig. After the Vandellas’

set, which as Diane no doubt hoped was less polished because their concentration was disrupted by the dress issue, the Vandellas raced to the Supremes’ dressing room. There, Reeves banged on the door, then kicked it open and glowered at Ross, sputtering “You did us dirt.” Mary and Flo were too startled to move in and defend Diane, and besides they were terrified of Reeves, who with her oversized beehive wig, long bony frame, and angry jut-jawed face was no one to mess with. As they cowered, once more a fight loomed between Diane and another woman in the Motown clan. But rather than get her back up as she had with Sharon Holland, Ross almost by rote picked up a phone and began calmly dialing Berry Gordy’s personal line.

Probably thinking “What
now
?” when he picked up, Gordy listened to Diane’s latest spin on an outrageous caper. When she stuck the phone next to Martha’s ear, he wearily intoned, “Now Martha, Diane didn’t mean you no harm. Just leave her alone,” and defused further fireworks by telling them with a sigh that he’d buy them all new dresses.

Reeves could only walk away shaking her head at Ross’s childish-ness. Nor did it end with this incident. During other Vandellas gigs at the local clubs, they would be excited when Gordy would come 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 148

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through the door to see the shows—until they’d see a giddy Diane on his arm, preening like Nefertiti. She’d then make faces during their set, indicating her displeasure at Martha’s singing, and whisper her critiques to Gordy, who’d take notes. For Reeves, the humiliation was almost too much to stand. Diane, on the other hand, was loving every minute of it.

Gordy’s habitual and, to some, delusional support for Ross brought them in mid-1964 to the chain of events that finally broke them out of their rut. The catalyst was an invitation in early May from Roz Ross, Dick Clark’s assistant, for a new Motown diva, Brenda Holloway, to join the ’64 edition of Clark’s Caravan of Stars. Clark’s was the mother of all rock tours; running from Memorial to Labor Day each year; with its two dozen acts and forty to fifty stops all over the country, it made the Motortown Revue seem like an intimate gathering, and such was Clark’s cachet that any brush with his orbit was of inestimable value to an act, especially one needing a boost. Indeed, most acts chosen for the Caravan had a potentially big hit climbing the chart—as was Holloway’s “Every Little Bit Hurts,” which was actually recorded in L.A. as part of a seminal West Coast Motown operation—and thus having a place on Clark’s bus was a double-bonus. An act could perform live across the American landscape while its record was played on
American
Bandstand.
In fact
,
Clark flew back to Philadelphia one day each week during the tour to tape a week’s worth of
Bandstand,
armed with anecdotal evidence of the acts that were reaping the best reception.

One of the biggest benefits for black acts was access to white middle-class record buyers. While Clark himself was clearly colorblind—his tours were well integrated and even as far back as the ’50s he’d been heroic in booking black acts, including Motown ones, on
Bandstand—

Motown had not been a presence on the Caravan. Perhaps this was a matter of timing or, more cynically, had to do with Clark’s close ties to the Philadelphia label Cameo-Parkway, whose own roster of R&B acts such as the Orlons, Dee Dee Sharp, the Tymes, and, of course, Chubby Checker seemed to get automatic calls to sojourn with the Caravan.

Then there was the fact that while the Caravan, too, played many Southern venues, its audiences were by and large white; it was this reality, Clark admitted in his memoir
Rock, Roll and Remember
, that guided the tours’ format, which, he wrote, “always closed with a white romantic teen idol, like Bobby Vee, Fabian, Gene Pitney, or Paul Anka.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 149

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Little known as she was, the sultry, drop-dead-gorgeous Brenda Holloway more than qualified as an exception, and indeed her inclusion was a major coup for Gordy. But he wanted more. He wanted another act on that bus—the Supremes.

As it happened, the timing was right for them, too. A month before the Clark Caravan entered the equation, the group had been tabbed to cut an HDH song with a standard relationship-breakup theme, its genesis being not Brian’s breakup with either Diane or Sharon but Lamont Dozier’s parting with a girl who, he said, “wanted more from me than a casual fling, a commitment I wasn’t ready to make.” Noodling on the piano, throwing out phrases that fit the mood, he matched to a punchy riff five words that would change his life.

“It hit me thinking about how something so strong as love could be so fragile and then go poof, just like that. It’s like, where did our love go?”

Bingo!
Another HDH song was born. A very different song, as it turned out. Far more melancholy and fatalistic than the kiss-my-ass declaration of independence of “Come and Get These Memories” and, as such, much more measured. Dozier and Brian Holland composed the charts as an unadorned melody, with the simplest eight-bar chord progression, and no frills. To the untrained ear, it would have sounded tedious, even listless. And Eddie Holland’s lyric, on paper, only hinted at the blistered heart of the protagonist who sang, “Baby, baby, baby don’t leave me,” while contradictorily pining for a love that “stings like a bee” and for the lover who betrayed her by “leaving me behind.” It was an unmistakably adult plaint that rendered most Motown love found/love lost songs kid stuff; thus, because the song had to make the whole concept of love into an open wound, it would need to be carried, uncompromisingly, by the lead vocal. But who could do it?

Entrenched Motown lore has it that HDH intended the song for the Marvelettes, and that they hated it, whereupon it was shuttled to the Supremes as a table scrap. This narrative is recycled by Mary Wilson and Katherine Anderson, who remembers it this way: “HDH

asked Gladys and Wanda to sing that song, but they didn’t want to do it. We were not that kind of group to sing it. We were a very high-energy group.”

Which is precisely why the narrative is fanciful—not least because it presumes, dubiously, that Motown acts, particularly the girl-groups, had any say about what to record. In truth, it is nigh impossible that anyone could ever have believed the languid sensuality and subtle 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 150

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ambivalence of the lyric could be accommodated by the Marvelettes’

schoolgirl kitsch or overheated dance routines.

BRIAN HOLLAND: No, we wanted that for the Supremes. Because we had already established a hit with them, a semi-hit, let’s say, and we wanted to take them to the next level.

EDDIE HOLLAND: Yeah, we wanted to come up with something different, something that hadn’t been done with them. And it was a really different kind of song. Well, so what? Different is good. Shit, we knew that song was a No. 1 hit from the get-go.

Still, the choice of who would sing it wasn’t necessarily Diane Ross.

At least not for Eddie:

I knew that Mary had a soft voice, and we needed a sweet, sensuous vocal for it. I mean, to me, I didn’t care who the lead singer had been. All I cared about was getting the lead right.

They all could sing, right? Well, Flo couldn’t sing hardly that good, not for our purposes, ’cause we looked for a lot of depth and Flo didn’t have that. I said, “Mary can sing this song.” Because I’d never heard Diana sing that way. She’d always sung in that high, little-girl sound. I said, “We need the right feel for this. If we get the right feel, this is gonna be a monster hit.” But I didn’t know what I was up against. Brian and Lamont, they looked at me and said, “Are you crazy? Diane’s the singer. Diane can sing soft and sexy, let’s just drop her key, she’ll sound older, sensuous.” And I thought, well, they just don’t wanna go up against Berry, because Berry had decided that Diane was the lead singer and that was that. It was frustrating to me, but I was outvoted. And when we got in the studio and dropped her key, I knew I was wrong. They were right. She had the sound. I hadn’t seen what Berry had all along. Diana Ross is gifted with a beautiful and unique tone in her voice. It’s genuine and commercial. She’s completely unique as a singer. You can’t find any other singer who sounds like her. That’s why she can make any song her song. That’s why Berry was so patient with them. He knew what he had in Diane.