The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (30 page)

and 15, No. 2. Then, in the August 22 issue, it rested at No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts. It would stay there for two weeks, and be in the Top Five for another three.

Being far removed from the power centers of the industry, Ross, Wilson, and Ballard were, at first, unaware of the maelstrom.

“We knew it was out,” Mary recalled, “but we weren’t sufficiently interested in the business side of music to be reading
Billboard
or
Cashbox
, and without a radio on the bus we had no idea who had a hit.” Nor did Clark for a while. At the start of the tour the Supremes had pretty much the same status as on the Motortown Revues: They were among the “others” on the promotional fliers and programs, usually opening shows with “Where Did Our Love Go,” or older material better known to audiences such as “Buttered Popcorn,” to the same kind of lukewarm applause. This, even though they’d had a recent hit, or

“semi-hit,” in “Lovelight”; other acts such as teen idol-wannabe Bobby Sherman and the Brit group the Zombies couldn’t boast even that. But it wasn’t current hits that determined the pecking order on a Clark tour; it was name recognition. And, here the Supremes were eclipsed by everyone on the tour, including up-marquee acts like Gene Pitney, the Shirelles, the Drifters, the Crystals, the Dixie Cups, Major Lance, Bobby Freeman, Lou Christie, the Jelly Beans, and Brenda Holloway, as well as dimming bulbs like Johnny Tillotson, Mike Clifford, and Clark cronies Freddie Cannon and Dee Dee Sharp.

Still, perhaps not all the Supremes were insentient naïfs. One tour-mate, the Crystals’ Barbara Alston, was so struck by Diane’s ego-tripping 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 158

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that, later, when history unfolded to Ross’s advantage, Alston assumed Ross knew it would go down just that way:

I remember when they came on. We didn’t know who they were but we’d heard their record and loved it, and we were excited they’d be on the tour. We liked them immediately—Mary and Flo, I mean. Because Diana just made herself unavailable to everybody. They were nobodies, and Diana was, well, strange looking, skinny with those pop-eyes. But Miss Diva thought she was somebody. She would recite over and over, like a mantra, “I’m gonna be like Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, I’m gonna be in TV and movies.” We’d all look at her like, “That girl is crazy.”

But I know now that she wasn’t crazy. She just knew the plan that Berry Gordy was building around her. That had all been planned out. You don’t brag on yourself like that unless you know someone’s got your back. Why else was she sitting up there in front with Dick Clark? She never mingled with us peons in the back. It was like she was Dick’s best friend. There had to be a lot of things going on behind the scenes that only she and Berry Gordy knew.

To be fair, another Crystal, Dee Dee Kennibrew, disputes Alston.

“Diana was
not
difficult, not to me,” she says firmly. “She thought a lot of herself, which she should have. She carried herself in a certain way and a lot of people think that means you think you’re better than everybody. But that’s from people who let jealousy get in the way. She could have walked around like Queen Elizabeth with a tiara on her head for all I cared, because it wouldn’t have affected me. I was focused only on doing my own thing.

“And I
know
Diana didn’t only sit with Dick. I have pictures of her sitting next to Lou Christie, falling asleep on his shoulder. Most of the time, Dick sat next to Ed McAdam, his tour manager. So you see how the memory can play tricks based on what happened to people much later, and what you want to believe.”

Alston also believed that Flo herself could read what was just then being written on the proverbial wall:

I became very close with Florence on the tour. She sat with me, we roomed together. I loved Flo, and I don’t think she felt many people did. Not at Motown, not within her own group.

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One thing that really upset her was that she felt she was being pushed back, that the Supremes were her group, she started it, and now Berry Gordy was making it Diana’s.

She was definitely aware of what would happen. She knew things were going on between Diana and Berry, and that they were going to break up the group once it hit really big so that Diana could be a huger star. Florence knew she wouldn’t be there for long.

She told me, “Barbara, please don’t tell anyone about this.

I’m not supposed to know any of this is happening.” She felt they’d get rid of her in a second if she made trouble, so she kept it inside, all bottled up.

Mary was different. Mary may have known what was happening in the shadows—but she may not have
wanted
to know.

She wanted to believe that Berry was looking out for all of them, so she just went along like a good little girl and didn’t rock the boat.

But, listen, how hard was it to see what was gonna happen down the road? I mean, Diana didn’t even try to hide it. She would say, right in front of Flo and Mary, “You know, girls, we’re going to be called Diana Ross and the Supremes.” That was the first part of the plan, right?

Whatever the subterranean machinations were, if the Supremes figured they’d stepped up in class with this tour, one glance in the direction of either of the two buses carrying the troupe no doubt disabused them of the notion. If anything, conditions were
worse
than on the Motortown Revue. The vehicles looked and smelled like garbage trucks, with litter everywhere, half-eaten food and Styrofoam cups lying in pools of unidentifiable ooze, and the strong odor of urine making it evident that more than one aboard had used the bus as a portable toilet; every now and then, Clark recalled, the driver would call out, “Whoever is pissing in the back of the bus, please stop,” and Clark would add, “If you gotta go, please piss out the window.” It’s a wonder that Ernestine Ross didn’t pull Diane off the bus and take her back home in a Greyhound the first day they arrived.

Moreover, whereas Gordy had a double standard about tawdry activity on his tours, Clark’s only standard was pretty much anything goes. Booze flowed like water, with Clark himself footing the bill for 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 160

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forays to liquor stores. “We’d drink ourselves into a stupor by the middle of the night, riding along through some godforsaken Midwestern cornfield,” he admitted. Even the driver, he said, would get sloshed, and if he couldn’t focus on the white stripes of the road, one of the performers would take the wheel. Nor did Clark, or the putative chaperones, seem to care who was doing what to whom in the back seat. Just surviving the tour seemed to be the objective.

The Caravan’s venues were a world removed from the Apollo or Howard Theaters; usually they were small school auditoriums, roller rinks, cheesy ballrooms, racetracks, or county fair grounds. In the South, the black entertainers on board faced redneck resistance at eater-ies and public bathrooms, and Clark saw to it that they were not hung out to dry by the majority of whites; by his decree, no one ate unless everyone was served, and often his
éclat
alone was enough to bend the Jim Crow laws. Sometimes, though, Clark could be seen getting in the face of a redneck who wouldn’t bend, threatening to put him out of business. On one occasion, a claque of racists at a gas station came at the bus brandishing ax handles and clubs. In the nick of time, two highway patrol cars showed up and escorted the riders away.

“The Zombies couldn’t believe what they were seeing,” Alston recalls of the Brit group. “They were, like, ‘This is America?’” For the Supremes, of course, the sights and sounds of racism were hardly new, and they were able to keep their focus on their now-more-important act. In an echo of Stevie Wonder and his harmonica, they would practice their harmonies late into the night while everyone tried to get a few minutes of shuteye. Clark, too tactful to identify them as the possible culprits, told of his irritation in his memoir, saying,

“Some dummies stayed up all night to sing their act over and over,” times that he might not have thought Ross was so “special.” A tour not being a tour without a blowup between Diane and another woman singer, she traded angry words with Brenda Holloway and, nearly, punches with her newest foil, the youngest and most combative of the Crystals, Dolores “Lala” Brooks. Only 16 at the time, Brooks developed the same instant dislike for Ross as did Alston: Oh, she was such a pain in the ass. There was a sweet side to her that I could see, but because of Berry Gordy, he made her think she was superior to everybody—better than Mary and Florence, too, which was a terrible thing to do to them.

You could see there’d be problems there once they got very popular. Mary and Florence would stay humble, but Diana was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 161

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a big showoff right from the start. I remember she’d call Berry, and he’d inform her of where their record was on the charts.

And she’d sashay onto the bus and say to Mary and Florence, but loud enough for everybody to hear, “Oh, guess what? It’s gonna be number so-and-so.” Or, “Guess what? We’re gonna be on
Ed Sullivan
.” It was great for them, she had a right to be excited, we all were excited for them. But it was like she wasn’t really happy until she knew she had rubbed our noses in it.

Brooks couldn’t contain herself when after a show Diane made a crack about the Crystals’ shoes, which, since that group had been on tour longer, were in less than pristine condition. Lala called her a smart-ass and soon fists were again clenched.

“She may have thought I was just a kid and she could cut me down, but I’m from Brooklyn. I wasn’t about to back down. But then Florence got between us, and on the bus both Florence and Diana’s mother came over to me, apologizing for Diana. I told them, ‘She really pisses me off,’

and they said, ‘We know. She pisses us off, too. For everybody’s sake, just cope with it.’”

The detente got only as far as the first chance Diane had to humiliate Brooks again. That happened after Bobby Freeman, apparently paying no mind to the term “jailbait,” began cozying up to Lala. “It was nothing, he was just being friendly. But Diana saw it and she suddenly was sweet-talking Bobby, just to get my goat. So we got into it again and that’s when Dick Clark separated us and put us on different buses, which is what Diana wanted.”

Concludes Brooks:

That was Diana Ross to a T. I always thought she wasn’t the greatest singer, but you have to give her credit for being manipulative. She didn’t care who she stepped on or over. She was building herself into a product, a “look,” marketing herself with the skinny look when it wasn’t yet fashionable, the big eyes, the fashionable gowns, and great producers covering her faults as a singer.

For myself, their songs weren’t that much. As a black woman, I didn’t
feel
them. The Crystals’ records had a lot more soul; the music carried us, not the image of the lead singer. And if I wanted to hear music, I’d sooner run out and buy a record by [’60s R&B singer] Baby Washington. But not many people have heard of Baby Washington, or Lala Brooks. Everybody on 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 162

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the planet has heard of Diana Ross. That took a whole lot of manipulation, to get there.

When the week of August 22 began,
Billboard
’s Hot 100 had a new leader. Having replaced the previous week’s No. 1, Dean Martin’s

“Everybody Loves Somebody,” the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go” was now king of the hot-wax mountain after a wild, month-long ride up the incline—and perhaps as a conditioned reflex among black record-buyers because of the soul dues the Supremes had paid, it achieved the distinctive honor of holding down the No. 1 slots concurrently on the pop and R&B charts, the ultimate crossover hit.

With the hottest act in the land on his bus, Clark had already moved the girls up both in salary—to $800—and on stage. By the climactic week, the formerly “no-hit Supremes” whom he had to be begged to take on the tour were top-billed in the programs and had gone from worst to first, now closing the show as the headline act. As soon as Diane would coo “Baby, baby,” audiences began to whoop and holler, dancing through a sped-up, sometimes unrecognizable facsimile of the song to the clunky accompaniment of Clark’s weary house band.

Far cry from HDH’s layered symphony or not, the crowds both black and white were in the palms of the Supremes’ hands. In just a few weeks, the days of polite applause were gone forever.

The song would hang in the penthouse for two weeks and on the pop chart for twelve weeks—one week longer than the late summer’s other big mover, “A Hard Day’s Night.” By the time it had fallen off the summit, displaced by the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” the Su premes were also gone, from the tour, summoned home while in Oklahoma City and ferried back by plane, their way paid by Motown—perhaps the clearest signal of all that the days of the Supremes paying their own way on Greyhound treks to and from Detroit were over.

Gordy, having gotten what he wanted from the Clark excursion, needed to get the Supremes on other roads before they could have any time to cool off. Tracking their ascension to No. 1, in early August he had pressed and released the second Supremes album, mandatorily titled
Where Did Our Love Go
, which included their last three singles and B-sides and two fresh HDH productions cut early in the summer,

“Baby Love” and “Come See About Me.”

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(Some clarification: The dates when many Supremes—and other Motown—songs were recorded are mysteries. Although required by the American Federation of Musicians to file with the Detroit local contracts listing the musicians and their union scale ($61 per session as of 1964), Gordy and Mickey Stevenson rarely did this promptly, as Gordy paid his house band more as salaried employees, and more still out of pocket on an informal basis when he cared to. The “Where Did Our Love Go” session—at which HDH also apparently cut the rhythm track for what would be Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street”—is postdated July 15, 1964; “Baby Love” and “Come See About Me” were actually cut at the same session, according to the Hollands and an
ex post facto
session sheet dated, absurdly, March 10, 1965. On some of these sheets, some musicians who hadn’t played were listed, either out of faulty memory or intentionally by Gordy and Stevenson to secure a few extra bucks for favored cats, and some who had played were left out, such as vibist/tambourine man Jack Ashford, who played a tangy vibe line on “Where Did Our Love Go” but is missing from the behindhand session contract. Remarkably, some contracts went unfiled until even the 1980s, when royalties accrued from songs used in the soundtrack of the highly successful movie
The Big Chill
.