The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (33 page)

That road, Diane had resolved, would not be treaded unless one other small yet critical alteration was made, not to the group’s image as a whole but to
hers
as a glamour-puss. Obediently, Gordy in early September instructed his promotion and publicity people that, from here on, the super-nova of the Supremes was to be identified in all Motown literature by the name she always swore was on her birth certificate and so much better reflected who and what she was.

Officially, in the periscope of popular culture, she was now
Diana
Ross.

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The timing of the Supremes’rising made the trip to England necessary and inevitable. Gordy had first seen the marketing value of a

“Reverse Invasion” when the Beatles fawned on Mary Wells, calling her their “sweetheart” and favorite female American singer, and “invited” her to come to their country and tour with them. In mid-’64, in the wake of “My Guy’s” worldwide success—including reaching No. 5 on the Brit chart—she did just that, opening for them at several shows and garnering rave notices in the rabid English music press. Further turning the spigot, Wells cut an album,
Love Songs to the
Beatles
, that partly consisted of songs the Fab Four had written for her.

When Wells left Motown, she derailed plans that had been made for a second British tour scheduled for early October. But then “Where Did Our Love Go,” released in the U.K. in September, caught fire. In fact, the record emerged as a cause célèbre in a “revolution” being fought over what records could be played on the government-run stations on the BBC. For years, in the guise of protectionism, these stations shafted “foreign” records, an injunction that seemed especially rigid—

and cruel to discerning music lovers—when it came to records by black American artists, who of course had stirred the early work of the top Brit acts. In response, “pirate” stations began popping up offshore, broadcasting the “good stuff,” with an early favorite being the Su -

premes’ smash. When listeners began tuning out the BBC shows, the policy began to melt; now played equally by the pirates and the big stations, “Where Did Our Love Go” shot up the chart.

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Switching the Supremes for Wells without missing a beat, Gordy also arranged a quickie album to drop some British chamomile into the Supremes’ musical palate. He had them cover a number of Invasion hits by groups like the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and the Beatles. The twist was that they also did two Motown hits that had been covered by the Brits, “Do You Love Me” and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”—a roundabout irony if ever there was one (and probably an inside joke on Brian Epstein, who, when his Beatles took three Motown songs for one of their early albums, had forced Gordy to accept a lower royalty than usual; now, he would piggyback off British songs to pump royalties on his own company’s songs). Gordy produced the tracks himself and farmed them out to his L.A. producers Hal Davis and Marc Gordon to finish. But the album,
A Bit of Liverpool
, was a jolly old mess reeking of self-conscious preening, right down to the cover shot of the girls perched on the stoop of a trolley car clad in skin-tight Beatle-style “suits” while leaning on bumbershoots, and it was DOA.

With the album’s failure (though it did manage to get to No. 23 in the States and, ineffably, to No. 5 on the soul charts), Gordy learned that an inferior Supremes product wouldn’t go over well—not that this stopped him from repeating the mistake. For the girls themselves, it was an augury that by deviating from the HDH “formula” they’d see a word attached to them that would indeed “sting like a bee.” That word, naturally, was “sellout,” which Mary Wilson recalls seeing for the first time in reviews for
A Bit of Liverpool
. But not for the last.

The two-week British tour began on October 7 and proceeded along Gordy’s scripted storybook tale. The dark-skinned American princesses—“
Negresses
,” as some in the British papers called them, not knowing or caring how offensive this was to the Supremes—arrived at Heathrow Airport, greeted by a small horde of fans assembled by the Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society, whose president had been called to Motown weeks before and given his marching orders. Everywhere the girls went, photographers were at the ready, and a rash of interviews had been set up.

The theme of the interviews was pre-ordered; as Wilson summed it up later with a pinch of cynicism, “We were exotic darlings, sexy and cute, and all the more interesting because we were black and hailed from what the [Brit] press liked to portray as a rat-infested ghetto.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 177

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Gordy, not bothered by that stereotypical spin—after all, he had created it, and watched it being played out in his own country—spared no expense in extending it in the light of how far these “ghetto girls” had come. The Supremes’ rooms in London’s swankiest hotels were lined with bouquets of flowers and buckets of champagne and caviar.

Their gigs, held at mod clubs on Fleet and Carnaby Streets, were well attended—if ticket sales lagged at a particular performance, TMAS

moved in with Gordy’s money and made it a sellout—and reviewed more as social “happenings” than as concerts. They appeared on the TV

show “Tops of the Pops” on October 15, warbling “Baby Love.” A day before, there was also a side-trip to the Carre Amsterdam Club, where they ran through “Baby Love,” “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” and “Let Me Go the Right Way.” (A live recording of that performance would surface over four decades later on the Dutch import album
The Supremes’ Greatest Hits.
) The climax, according to the script, was a meeting with the Beatles at the Ad Lib Club. However, only Paul and Ringo showed up for the event, pleasantly smiling for the cameras and exchanging a few words with the girls before splitting. For the pricey fortnight Gordy had lavishly footed, he got more than he imagined. By the time the girls boarded the plane to return home, “Where Did Our Love Go” had hit No. 2 on the British pop chart; and in late November “Baby Love” would hit No. 1—one of the very few American records to land in that spot in recent years, the most recent being Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” in July 1964.

Now that Motown had conquered two countries, and Supremes records were flying off the shelves all around Europe, Gordy wanted even more. Plans were made to restart the Motortown Revue and fly it across the pond in March 1965. By then, the Supremes weren’t merely Motown’s hottest act; they would virtually
own
Motown, and Ross would own Berry Gordy, in all respects. And Gordy’s allegiance to them—to
her
—would be indisputable, with their path superseding anyone else’s.

The march toward that end could be seen when they got back to Detroit and were thrown right into the raging rapids of Gordy’s crossover reveries. Over the span of the coming months, the Supremes would be practically the only Motown act regularly visible to the vast mainstream of the American public, this because they were about the only one with whom the network TV producers seemed comfortable enough to invite onto their shows. Again, this was a situation Gordy had no problem accepting.

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Their first national TV appearance was at
The Steve Allen Show
on September 24, 1964, when they sang a breezy rendition of “Where Did Our Love Go.” Next came an engagement that
did
include a couple of their Motown cohorts, preserving for now the soon-to-disintegrate Motown “family” ties in the historical freeze-frame of mid-’60s pop culture. This was at
The TAMI Show
, the short-form name for a concert put together by a sodality known as the Teenage Awards Music, Inc.

The concert, showcasing a mélange of contemporary and past rock and soul acts, would be held at the Santa Monica Auditorium on October 26, and when it grew into a major convocation with a surreal cast that included the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, Jan and Dean, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dako-tas, Lesley Gore, the Barbarians—and the Supremes, the Miracles, and Marvin Gaye—the producers added a second day to the show and got backing to shoot both of them for theatrical release
a la
Gordy’s movies of the Revue’s Apollo shows, not on film but rather on the newly invented medium of videotape, which was then “kinescoped” to film.

The crude, transfixing black-and-white images of
The TAMI Show
would transmit every ounce of energy from the shrieking teenage audience, but one of the most striking aspects of the film today is that the two
nouveau chic
acts, the Stones and the Supremes, look somewhat lost, buried in ennui compared with the reaction given most everyone else, particularly the two soul warhorses Brown and Berry. The Stones, pre-“Satisfaction,” swagger and pout, the latter emotion perhaps caused by their having to follow Brown onstage, a decision they nearly came to blows over with the producers. The Supremes, who like the Stones were undeniably riveting, sang their three big hits somewhat mechanically, leaving a trace but not much excitement; reviews had little to say about them. Still, that they more than belonged in that company was confirmed empirically when “Come See About Me” became their third No. 1 hit—one more than the aggregate No. 1 hits by the rest of the cast at the time. (The other two were Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” and Gore’s “It’s My Party.”)

And so the invitations kept pouring into Hitsville. The most coveted of these, just as Diana had boasted, was
The Ed Sullivan Show
; the girls were booked to appear there on the day after Christmas. But if that was the penultimate mainstream milestone in Gordy’s Supremes blueprint (behind only the Copa), the teenage market could not be ignored, not with the tons of record sales it generated. And so he took bookings on the new youth-oriented prime-time network shows, ABC’s
Shindig
on November 18 and NBC’s
Hullabaloo
on January 26.

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In January, too, the Supremes flew back to California to film their prospective movie debut, at least technically, singing as themselves in what was intended as the fourth in the lightweight strain of Frankie Avalon–Annette Funicello “beach” movies with titles such as
Beach
Blanket Bingo
,
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
, and
Bikini Beach
, which while suggestive of sex-crazed teenagers cavorting on sandy beaches were classic teases and copouts, with no one going anywhere near all the way. These dim-witted affairs, produced on the cheap by B-film meister James H. Nicholson, raked in huge coin and in retrospect contributed some great rock videos in the Technicolor performances of James Brown and the Fabulous Flames, Lesley Gore, and, later, Stevie Wonder; the Beach Boys also did two knockoffs of the Frankie and Annette genre,
The Girls on the Beach
and
The Monkey’s Uncle
, scoring a hit with the title track of the first. The Supremes were to appear in
Bikini Beach
, but it wound up on the shelf, never released. They would, however, be back; a year later they recorded the title track for
Dr. Goldfoot and
the Bikini Machine
, and got their close-up—not in bikinis but in white cocktail dresses (and the wig on Diana’s head perilously close to falling off )—in
Beach Ball
, along with the Righteous Brothers, Four Seasons, Walker Brothers, and Nashville Teens. When the movies would call again, it would be a much bigger deal.

Gordy, taking no chances that Motown would fall flat in these ventures, had put them through weeks of drills with his new hires, choreographer Cholly Atkins and—reaching back to the memories of his many nights at the Flame Show Bar—none other than Maurice King, the bandleader who’d mentored many a dud of a personality into a live wire on stage with a few well-chosen quips, some transitional storytelling between songs, and grand entrances and exits.

Atkins’s days as a hoofer stretched back to the ’30s when he danced with the Rhythm Pals and, then, as a team with Honi Coles weaving some tap magic performing with the Ellington and Basie big bands.

Based now in New York, he had been tutoring acts such as the pre-Motown Gladys Knight and the Pips. Motown had met up with him when its acts played the Apollo and needed some big-time moves. After the Miracles bombed in their Apollo debut, he fancied up their footwork the next time they came in. Having also worked with Harvey Fuqua’s Moonglows in the ’50s, Atkins was receptive when Gordy sent Harvey to make him an offer for a salaried position at Motown.

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Cholly had a rather high opinion of himself and a low opinion of most others, including Gordy—whom he considered a boor and a grifter living off the sweat of his young apprentices. He criticized the young performers themselves for their lack of training and discipline, and even for the accident of where they were born. “Kids from ghetto-like environments,” he called them, and not sympathetically. Nearly everyone at Motown, in turn, detested him and derided Atkins as a

“snob.” But, given wide latitude to create dance routines at his whims, he did so with amazing variety, tailoring each group—each
song
—to a specific series of moves that advanced the mood. His was a classical,

’30s pomp, meant to look effortless and light-footed, though the work involved was back-breaking.

If that style seemed very
un-
Motown, and anachronistic for the beat of the mid-’60s, it perfectly matched Maxine Powell’s predilections—

and thus, in the end, Gordy’s. It was encouraged, and it worked. Lord, did it work. The difference was instantly apparent. Where before performers and house bands were at a loss trying to find the right tempo for a live audience—which almost always was different from the tempo at which the songs had been recorded—Atkins sent them out on the road, having rehearsed them to near-death on pacing and matching moves.