The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (46 page)

“the toe-tapping beat of their platters” in this “pretentious” setting. The audience, similarly underwhelmed, gave them what the paper called “a moderate kind of pandemonium [that] didn’t quite match the zealotry of the Beatles fans, but then it was more than Leonard Bernstein gets from his audiences.”

As it happened, the girls had recently crossed paths with the Fab Four, who were in New York to play their Shea Stadium concert during the same month the Supremes were appearing at the Copa. As when the girls were in England the year before, promotional people arranged a meeting, now in the Beatles’ opulent suite at the Warwick Hotel.

When the Supremes arrived there in a limo, it was a pop culture clash. As the car door opened, a tidal wave of teenage girls surged toward them, a frightening moment that receded when the mob saw the Liverpool lads weren’t inside. Upstairs, the Beatles, all four of them this time, sat around in dirty jeans and T-shirts looking rather out of it in a room that, Wilson recalled, “reeked of marijuana.” The girls, decked out in elegant day dresses, hats, and jewelry, and each wrapped in fur—

Diana in mink, Mary in red fox, Flo in chinchilla—couldn’t engage them even in small talk. While John sat in a corner staring into space, Paul, George, and Ringo mumbled a few questions about the technical-ities of the Motown sound that the women didn’t know how to answer.

After a few long, surreal moments, said Mary, “we wanted out” and bid a hasty adieu, leaving the world’s two biggest rock music acts not thinking much about each other.

Many years later, Wilson would visit Harrison in his home in England. Remembering the brief meeting, and the stereotype bred during the Supremes and Motown Revue tours of England that American

“Negresses” were ghetto-bound musical geniuses, he told her, “We 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 232

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expected soulful, hip girls. We couldn’t believe that three black girls from Detroit could be so square.”

Their squareness angle worked just fine for Gordy, who wanted to limit their racial identity—outside of Motown’s black buyers—to the rags-to-riches tales cranked out by the promotions people. To be sure, the Supremes
were
square as the new rock and roll class went. At the same time, though, being black had its advantages in the more politically informed rock music culture, and so he needn’t have lifted a finger to keep his black bona fides in order. Stevie Wonder, for instance, exploded from near obscurity in 1965 as a social symbol, the empty-pocketed “poor man’s son.” This, even as other Motown acts followed the Supremes’ path into white-oriented bastions like the Copa—to the great displeasure of Marvin Gaye, who only under protest had cut albums of Nat King Cole standards and another of show tunes called
Hello Broadway
, and of Smokey Robinson.

To the record-buying public in general, Motown acts were relevant by habit and by simply being black. While the Supremes’ main demographic now was young white women growing out of their teen years—

and definitely not turned on by the electric guitars in a Byrds’ cover of a Bob Dylan song or by the apocalyptic prophecies of Barry McGuire’s

“Eve of Destruction”—they were still held in esteem in the black community, accounting for continued high rankings on the R&B charts.

This, helpfully, not only allowed Gordy a ready comeback to his critics’

“purity” arguments; it also let white record buyers pretend they were cool and clued in to “race music” by buying Supremes records.

As Mary Wilson pointed out, Gordy “saw us as the golden key to any door he wanted to open. We were now BLAPs—black American princesses,” but in a way that Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, and Diahann Carroll hadn’t had the luxury of: tapped into a white market.

The downside for Gordy was that, having pushed them into the deepest mainstream waters, his own race consciousness had diminished.

Before the Supremes changed his stratagems, he considered Motown an algorithm of the cause. In 1963, for example, he signed the great black poet Langston Hughes and recorded him reading works such as “Of Freedom’s Plow” in an album called
Poets of the Revolution.
The same year, Motown released
Great March to Freedom
, an album of speeches from Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, as well as a single of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 233

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the “I Have a Dream” speech backed with a choral rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” But Gordy dithered over putting out the Hughes work, and killed it as the company’s priorities changed.

In 1965, while Gordy was preoccupied with the Supremes, a good portion of black America was concerned with more pressing matters. In March, the “Bloody Sunday” outrage in Selma, Alabama, when state troopers opened fire on marchers on the Edward Pettis Bridge, was followed a day later by the murder of civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb. The bloodbath led President Lyndon Johnson to go before Congress demanding passage of the long-stalled Voting Rights Act, which finally was enacted on August 6 but changed little overnight. Just two days after, the arrest of a black man for driving drunk in L.A.

erupted into a ten-day rampage in the Watts ghetto in which 34 people died and over 1,000 were injured.

The fires of the Watts “disturbance” were doused on August 21—

eight days before the Supremes went on at the Copa, 3,000 miles and at least as many light-years from Watts and the seething within the black community that placed a half-dozen other big cities on the edge of going up in smoke next—including, of course, Detroit, the martyred Viola Liuzzo’s hometown. By then, Gordy’s ties to the movement were more an obligation than a moral imperative, to be satisfied with not much more than contributions to the NAACP. Accordingly, some students of the black social evolution, understandably, would not take kindly to his having gone missing in action when the ghettos became tinderboxes, not that there was much he could have done about it in any case. However, Gordy—as ever—would catch a break even on this count, when something strange happened beyond his control, or even his ability to comprehend.

As Suzanne E. Smith wrote in her 1996 book
Dancing in the Street:
Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
, even though Gordy’s “basic business principles” caused “ambivalence about his role [in] the ‘Negro revolt,’” the music coming out of his shop, no matter how off-white it got, fit a need for the proliferation of all black cultural forms—in effect, being accorded protection from the community.

“[A]s [Gordy] continued to pursue white crossover audiences,” Smith noted, “the civil rights movement continued to look to ‘market’

black culture as a tool of the struggle. . . . [And] as its ‘popular’ music began to resonate with the racial and political upheavals of its time, declarations of black consciousness . . . were often read into the lyrics of a Motown song.”

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Just such an unwitting declaration had been read into the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” in 1964. Now, racially deep meaning would be projected into Motown’s grooves and embraced in the almost exclusively nonpolitical love-gained-and-lost themes of the Four Tops, Temptations, Marvin Gaye—and, yes, the Supremes. Of the latter Smith writes, “[They] always negotiated, rather than transcended, their racial identity.” Yet, even as they “conquered different musical genres and appealed to new audiences, they always contended with larger cultural assumptions about race and music.”

Gordy may have been too busy blending the Supremes’ brand into the corporate landscape to grasp this concept of passive racial identity, such was his success in getting them those Coca-Cola commercials.

And he must have been far gone indeed if he didn’t find the time for a private wince, or a hysterical laugh, at another of the girls’ commercial promotions—when their faces were screened onto wrappers of Wonder Bread. Wonder white bread.

Still, he knew enough to leap at the chance to pimp the role that Motown soul played in pop music for an ABC documentary on February 15, 1966,
Anatomy of Pop
. This, a high-minded dissection of pop’s debt to blues, jazz, and soul, had cameos by Duke Ellington, Tony Bennett, drummer Gene Krupa, bluesman Jellyroll Morton, blues singer Billie Pierce, and famed songwriter Richard Rodgers (kvetching about rock’s “repetitiveness”). But a major theme was “the Detroit Sound,” featuring some of the only film clips ever seen of the Supremes (and the Temptations) in the studio; in chic leisure wear, the girls mouth a song amidst the Funk Brothers, with Eddie Holland lurking in the background and Brian Holland in the shadows of the booth as the narrator says, “The formula: a strong gospel and blues feeling with a rocking beat.” Gordy, put on camera to analyze his “sound,” leaves it at “Soul is something that comes from within.”

The girls’ success was certainly a useful tool to Gordy in maintaining his street “cred.” Late in ’65, he was more than willing to “loan out” the Supremes when the Advertising Council in conjunction with the government’s Equal Opportunity Employment Commission solicited Phil Spector to produce a promotional single to be heard on radio stations. The result was a song called “Things Are Changing” (actually an aborted track Spector had cut with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson called

“Don’t Hurt My Little Sister”) that was recorded in three versions, by the Blossoms, Jay and the Americans, and the Supremes, who flew to L.A. to lay down the vocals. (However, while it’s great fun hearing them 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 235

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sing Ronettes-style in front of the “Wall of Sound,” Spector was never in the studio with them; the single—which appears as a curio on the Supremes’ 1996
Anthology
album—was produced by Spector associate Jerry Riopell.) To push the campaign, the Ad Council executives posed with the Supremes for a
Billboard
cover shot.

But not everybody was buying the notion that Motown truly had a racial and social agenda. The criticism Gordy took for “selling out” would not abate and, indeed, became more barbed as “purer” forms of soul caught a groove in places like Memphis and Muscle Shoals. But, for now, Gordy could have it both ways, black and white, and as Mary Wilson could personally attest, open any door he wanted. It was a drunkard’s dream, seemingly without end.

The Supremes had come farther than Milt Jenkins ever could have foreseen or imagined back in 1961. In fact, a measure of this distance was the diametrically opposite direction of Jenkins’s life in the years since.

After both the Primes and Primettes had left him for dead, Milt lived as modestly as he had once lived large and loud. The bling went from his fingers to the pawn shops on John R Street; his snazzy threads were replaced by the overalls he wore to his job working for Detroit’s Parks Department cutting grass at the public parks around town. The shiny Cadillac that was parked at the curb outside the Flame Show Bar was traded in for a Buick Skylark now parked in the driveway of the small home on Richton Street where he lived with Maxine Ballard Jenkins and their two children.

Milt still hung around the periphery of the music scene, promoting talent shows at the Twenty Grand bowling alley and managing Maxine’s attempt at a singing career, writing for her a song she recorded called

“Black of Face.” But he was resigned to the reality that his big dreams were gone. Motown had changed the lay of the land for the old hustlers, all of whom would have given their spleens to be a part of it—all except Milt Jenkins, whose pride refused to let him use the old Pri -

mettes card to curry favor with Berry Gordy and land some sort of job with him.

Conceivably, he could have sued Motown on the grounds that his contracts with Ross, Wilson, and Ballard—as well as with Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams—had been legally binding, which likely wouldn’t have gone far in the courts considering how he’d abandoned 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 236

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them when he took ill, though he might have squeezed a few bucks from Gordy in settlement. Often, Maxine urged him to do just that. Instead, he let it go—out of family loyalty. “Baby, I can’t do that,” Maxine remembers him telling her. “You’re my wife and Flo is your sister,” the implication being that Motown might hold it against Flo, by association.

Of the Supremes, only Flo, because of her sister, maintained any contact with him, and out of pity she offered to kick in some money to help him out when things got tough. Milton wouldn’t hear of accepting charity. Taking his pride into account, Flo then suggested that she pay him to come over to her place and mow and tend to her lawn. As degrading as it still may have been to him, he could live with himself doing this and took the job, at a hundred bucks a week for cutting the grass on Monday and Thursday. Maxine would pick up a check for him every Friday at Motown. Not once did Milton himself go to 2648 West Grand Boulevard. A “matter of principle,” he told Maxine. But it was probably more the case that the man who had created the Supremes couldn’t bear walking into Berry Gordy’s office asking for what amounted to a handout.

To the credit of Gordy and HDH, they didn’t stand still with the Supremes product. The so-so showing of “Nothing But Heartaches” was a danger sign of possible Supremes fatigue, and it led Gordy to issue one of the sillier memorandums ever to make the Motown rounds.

Written in Gordy’s semi-literate hand in the autumn of 1965 to the entire creative staff, but really intended for HDH’s eyes, it read: We will release nothing less than Top Ten product on any artist; and because the Supremes’ world-wide acceptance is greater than the other artists, on them we will only release number-one records.

Gordy never said whether he was referring to the tepid “Nothing But Heartaches” here, or whether he believed any previous Supremes records had somehow been made with any less care, commitment, and expectation of success. But it was clear how much he had riding on the girls now. After dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars during the three-week Copa adventure, he needed to put everyone in the shop on notice that there would be no coasting with the Supremes.