The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (42 page)

It was only beneficial to Motown to be able to cast this propinquity as continued proof of the Supremes’ “sisterly” nature, which in fact had only fleetingly existed. Indeed, their inter-relationships while in their new $30,000 homes remained much the same as they had been back in 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 209

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the projects. Each of the Supremes lived with her family, taking them along in a kind of mass liberation. And most of the broods lived there in style for years, with Motown accountants paying off the mortgages—

and the Cadillacs chosen by the girls dressing up their driveways. Not that any of these appurtenances were endowments from a big-hearted Gordy; every cent doled out for their lavish lifestyle was deducted from their still unspecified “expenses,” including the thousands of dollars charged to sessions for and master tapes of unreleased records. (Although that suggests they owned those tapes, in truth they did not; only Gordy did.)

Amazingly, Diana’s house was the
least
pretentious, quite likely because it was set up by Fred and Ernestine who, with her brother and sister, were given the ground floor to live in and decorate as they wished.

Diana took the upstairs, which she basically turned into a massive storage bin for her gowns, dresses, shoes, and jewelry. One bedroom was used entirely as a closet, with mirror-lined walls so that she could see herself from all angles when deciding what to wear. When she was home, she usually hunkered down in the master bedroom and rarely came out.

Flo, across the street, would refer to her as “Greta Garbo” when people came to visit her. One frequent guest, Flo’s cousin Ray Gibson, can recall with a giggle that while Diana wouldn’t deign to come out of the house, as did Flo and Mary, when their fans would gather outside and wait for autographs, she would gayly talk about the dozens of gift packages that would be left on her doorstep.

“Flo would tell me, ‘Honey, I see that door every day. And I’ve never seen even one package out there.’ She’d also be in hysterics because when Diana would have to come out and the fans would be in the street, she’d run up to the ones in front of Flo’s house and make a big show of her appreciation. She’d say, ‘Oh, are you here to see
me
?’

One time Flo said there
was
a big package by Diana’s house—and it was left out there for a week, so everyone could see it.” That Flo had become offended by just about anything, small or large, what Diana was doing was becoming all too obvious. “Oh, definitely,” says Gibson. “You could feel it. And you just knew it was going to get worse, a lot worse.”

Flo, aptly, had laid out her house exactly opposite from the way Diana did. She put her huge clan upstairs and ruled the roost downstairs, where she created a cross between country calico and urban chic.

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carpets, Oriental vases, crystal chandeliers, and in the basement a

“nightclub” with cocktail tables and jazz bric-a-brac.

The shock was that meek Mary Wilson turned her digs into a playpen that Hugh Hefner could have decorated. Not incidentally, she moved her family—her mother and two cousins—to a separate, smaller house on the block. Living on her own, she went a bit wild. The decor was contemporary swing-club, with inviting sectional sofas, gaudy yellow and orange walls and matching drapes, open bars, and in her bedroom a huge round bed fitted with a remote button that, when pushed, activated the encirclement of sheer curtains for additional privacy. Even Caligula himself, Berry Gordy, blushed when he heard that Mary wanted to mirror the ceiling over the bed.

Aghast at what such a revelation would do to the girls’, and Motown’s, image if it ever got out, he told her firmly, “Mary, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. It’s not going to sound right.” She obeyed, but overhead mirrors or not, hers was the place to be for the Motown “in crowd.” After billing the company for building a dance studio in the basement where Mary and Flo would rehearse their moves—Diana usually passed it up—she rented the basement to Cholly Atkins and his wife, Mae, who also had a home on the street. Consequently, other acts would come over to rehearse, as well, and if Wilson was at home she’d throw a party; soon, the house would be teeming with more guests and crashers. Frequently the Four Tops were among the revelers, upon which Mary started a fling with Duke Fakir, a married member of the group.

As she wistfully recounted in her autobiography, “Duke was a man’s man, and many times when we were home he’d call and say, ‘Sweetpea, I’m bringing some of the guys over for dinner.’ . . . Duke was known for making a knockout punch, and we’d have what we called ‘sloopy parties.’ I can’t count the mornings I woke up to find a guest lying face down on the black bear rug in the den.”

Flo would normally join in on the festivities—Diana almost never—

as well as throwing her own bashes, at which she’d make a grand entrance,
a la
Loretta Young at the beginning of her TV show, in a billowy gown, at times carrying a silver tray of goodies she herself had cooked up. Still, Mary’s was the party center, and she herself wasn’t lonely for long in that circular, curtained bed. She was the “love ’em and leave ’em Supreme,” taking up with a string of paramours as if making up in quantity what Diana had in quality; for a time, and periodically over 1965 and ’66, Duke Fakir moved in with her during his regular separa-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 211

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tions from his wife. That meant all three Supremes were involved on and off with nonsingle men in the Motown “family,” Diana of course with the “big man” and Flo with Otis Williams.

OTIS WILLIAMS: My marriage was on the rocks anyway, but it was not just a fling or whatever with Flo. She may have been the only woman I really, truly loved. We always made time to see each other on the rare occasions we were both home at the same time. Flo didn’t have many people she could talk to about her problems. She couldn’t do it with her family. In fact, she would come over to my place just to get away, be in a quiet surrounding.

Flo was a passionate woman, I won’t kid you. She had a lot of, let’s say,
energy
, because she kept so much pent up inside.

She took me on some wild rides. I’d love her openness about it.

She had these great expressions for doing it, like she’d say we were gonna “shoot the habit to the rabbit.” I’d never heard that one before, and I’d been around, man. She’d give me that big sexy smile and call me, “Big Daddy,” and that was all I needed.

But it was more than sex. I knew Flo was depressed and I feel that when she came over she wanted to just get away from all her problems. So we wouldn’t talk about any of the shit she was going through. That time was just for us, to share some beautiful moments. We just didn’t have enough time with our schedules. And there wasn’t enough time for Flo to get away from those problems.

The PR campaign that would carry the Supremes into the three-week Copacabana engagement was under way by now. One goal was to take them further into the mainstream media than any Motown act had gone, and Gordy came up aces when reporters from the devoutly establishment
Time
magazine sent reporters to Hitsville to interview him and the girls—a huge breakthrough given that only within the last year or so had Motown drawn just modest attention in the press, even in the Detroit press. Granted, part of that neglect was due to the nearly annual labor vs. management warfare that led to strikes at the city’s two biggest newspapers, the
News
and the
Free Press
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1964. But even the black press had little to do with Motown, save for some passing mention of a hit song here and there in the pocket-sized
Jet.
The black
Michigan Chronicle
, its offices on nearby St. Antoine Street, virtually ignored one of the most significant exemplars of black capitalism right down the street on West Grand Boulevard.

Motown PR man Al Abrams remembered that even when the Supremes were to do the
Sullivan
show and he believed it would be a snap to get them on the cover of the
News
’s Sunday “TV Week” insert, the editor told him, “We can’t put black people on the cover of a TV

magazine.” That kind of neglect could be measured nationwide, with very few papers’ TV listings bothering to include the Supremes as one of the acts on that
Sullivan
episode (most, however, found room for the Czechoslovakian Folk Dance troupe). By mid-’65, it still was not a sure thing. Abrams was finally able to get that “TV Week” cover for the Su -

premes, an important step since regional editions of the section were published by the
New York Journal-American, the Houston Chronicle,
and the
Washington Evening Star.

“I believe when that happened, the Supremes became the first African-Americans to be on the cover of a TV magazine,” Abrams said.

At about that time, the same
News
editor was doing a big story on Motown and wanted to meet Berry Gordy. When Abrams introduced them, the guy gushed, “I’ve wanted to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.” Gordy replied, “You have?” “Yeah,” he said, “my maid listens to your music all the time.”

And then, suddenly, there were the Supremes on the cover of the May 21, 1965, issue of
Time
, in pictures and words and quoted along with Gordy in the accompanying article. The article hardly reversed the tide of racism in the mid-’60s—and in fact the faux-hip prose indulged in some typical passively racist prose itself—but it did put black faces into the center lane of American pop culture. On that milestone cover the Supremes broke into a collage of the (white) rock elite, side by side with the Beach Boys, Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark, and the Righteous Brothers. The article, titled “The Sound of the Sixties,” read in part: “[T]he best brown sound is, of course, that sung by Negroes. . . .

Next to the Mersey Sound, the ‘Motown Sound’ currently dominates the rock ’n’ roll market. It is a swing, city blues sound, propelled by a driving beat.” The Supremes, it went on, were “the prize fillies in Gordy’s stable,” and Ross “[is] envied for the torchy, come-hither purr in her voice.”

Of course, much of this come-lately revelation was already dated by Gordy’s fine-tuning of the Supremes. But now, the seal was broken on 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 213

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all fronts of the mainstream media. For Gordy, it couldn’t have gotten any better. In fact, with his mind freed of the obsession of getting Diana into bed, he returned to his original obsession, the business one.

Almost as soon as he got out of bed the morning after in Paris, he was different, his sights elsewhere; while the affair would continue back home, he became progressively more distant toward her. Falling back into the paternal Berry, he was frequently domineering, insensitive, even nasty, as if consciously reestablishing his credentials as the master of all who breathed in Motown, including the woman he’d lost his breath and nearly his mind wooing so arduously.

Superseding Cholly Atkins, Maurice King, and Gil Askey, Gordy took to handing down the last word on the Supremes’ choreography and stagecraft. Often he could be found at rehearsals or at local gigs the girls did at the clubs, furiously scribbling notes on a thick legal pad as they performed. He’d then go backstage and, with not a word of lauda-tion, start in on his critiques—mostly of Diana—which could be brutal. As Ross would recall, his litany seemed intentionally harsh but rarely constructive, along the lines of “Tighten up the act,” “You’re singing wrong,” “You’re not moving together,” or “You’re not smiling.” Soon, Diana could take no more.

“Leave me alone! I know what the fuck I’m doing!” she screamed,
really
torchy, after one such chew-out session.

Although she was the only one at Motown who could come at him like that and get away with it, usually such bravado would recede into contrition. Not now. Regularly, the two of them would be seen bickering and sniping at each other, temporarily resolving the flare-ups in bed but solving nothing in the long term.

“It was just like they were an old married couple,” laughed Otis Williams, who saw the same scene carry out at Motown picnics, parties, recording sessions, photo shoots, anywhere Berry and Diana found themselves. “It’s a good thing the girls were on the road so much, ’cause if not, those two woulda
killed
each other.” The “marriage” would endure for over two decades, with varying degrees of dysfunction, at times with and without the “under the sheet” music, and the relationship mutated into something more like an addiction to mutually assured torture than anything resembling love.

Which might account for why the passages about Gordy in her otherwise saccharine
Secrets of a Sparrow
read like an exercise in self-therapy, as if Ross was trying to ease Gordy withdrawal by striking a balance between mandatory declarations of love and fealty and shooting daggers into his hide.

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There was the Berry who “related to me” and who “could see himself in me,” a man who inspired her to such inane cosmic jive as “the greatest connection between Berry and me was our powerful life energy.” And there was the Berry who “behaved like a tyrant . . . heavily judgmental . . . discouraging,” who was “very hard on us.” She also had no problem granting herself absolution for her pariah status—by pinning the blame for it on Gordy. “He played favorites,” she wrote, “and

[that] set up an unhealthy internal climate.” She remembered hearing him harpooning other Motown artists by using her as the poison tip, going into tirades like “Why can’t you be more like Diana? She makes her plans, she works really hard, she rehearses all day long, she records all night. Why can’t you be like her?”