The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (61 page)

After listening to the twenty-minute rap, Eddie stood up. “So I guess that’s a no, then?” he said drily.

Weeks later, HDH were gone, even though they all had contracts through the end of the decade with Motown. Although Gordy contin-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 319

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ued to hope they would come to their senses and get to work, news soon broke that Capitol had announced the formation of Invictus Records, to be operated in Detroit with full autonomy by Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Gordy, so out of touch with his own company as to be stunned that his

“three sons” would leave him, was close to full panic mode. Bristling about HDH’s departure and the flop of “Forever Came Today,” he fished for a quick Supremes song to put out as soon as possible. The HDH shelves were so depleted that he had the girls’ cover of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” from
Reflections
readied as a single, but thought the better of it and instead went to Motown’s newest writing-producing team—Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, a young black duo who had met in a Harlem church choir, sang briefly as an act, then wrote for, among others, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and the Shirelles before being signed by Gordy. With the first of their five Top Ten Marvin Gaye–Tammi Terrell hits, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” just hitting the charts, they were handed the world’s top female act.

The hip young team’s stock in trade was funky, soulful wailing, but Gordy told them he wanted a song with an “HDH feel.” The result was

“Some Things You Never Get Used To,” which came out as strained big-band pop with an even more quirky intro of castanets chattering—

very much like the intro of the surf-rock “Wipe Out”—and HDH-style lyrics about love that is never found. On the upside, it had a wonderfully wild James Jamerson bass line. But what it didn’t have was the signature HDH kick to the solar plexus. And its release on May 21, with

“You’ve Been So Wonderful to Me” on the flip, was an instant misfire.

If Gordy felt personally tarred by “Forever Came Today,” “Some Things” was even worse—such a titanic failure that, after just three weeks on the chart and a late-July peak at No. 30, a good many people never heard it or knew it had ever existed. For
that
, at least, he could be thankful.

But what now? The Supremes had flourished as a two-headed monster—the “rock group” hit-makers and the regal, show-tune-crooning night club act. For the time being, at least, their club and hotel gigs were not imperiled by a couple of lackluster singles, nor were their whitebread TV gigs—the latest being a January 1968 shot on the campy
Tarzan
, playing, of all things, three nuns and singing

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Help Themselves.” (The episode was the most-watched of the season for the popular series—another “mainstream” notch for Gordy, who threw his weight around on the set, barking orders to the crew and actors.)

However, if the downward trend on the charts continued, it would be ever harder to sustain the heat that came with the status of being one of the world’s top acts, who as late as 1967 were voted “most popular music group” in the annual
Playboy
readers’ poll—as representative a measure of upscale white tastes as there was—ahead of the Beatles and Peter, Paul & Mary. A lower flame would mean less status, lower appearance fees, and fewer prestige invitations.

And if that happened, could doomsday be far behind?

Flo Ballard Chapman was hardly unhappy at that prospect, mainly because it might make Gordy suicidal. When HDH walked and Motown people were frantic, she was beaming about poetic justice.

According to Tony Tucker, “Flo said it served those bitches right,” and that Diana Ross and the Supremes—five words she could not say without a scoffing sneer—“couldn’t make it without HDH songs behind them.” Flo, herself, might help fulfill such a prophecy, if she could make her own hits.

How delicious would
that
be, if Flo Ballard had the last laugh, after all?

With the ABC Records deal done, Flo became transformed from outcast to in-crowd hostess. Her period of “rest” had given way to a fresh round of parties, hosting many in the Motown crowd who came by her home to congratulate her on the deal and wish her well. Some would confide that she had stuck it to Gordy the way they wished they had the balls to do. Indeed, a common refrain was anger about “what they did to you” and that it had been right for her to “quit” as she did.

In these ego-massaging commiserations, the Supremes were villains, having “stuck a knife in her back.” They, went the theme, would “go down the tubes” without her.

Having rarely heard that sort of encouragement before, Flo would bask in it, and then invariably say the same thing: “You got that right, honey,” flouncing about like Auntie Mame in her mink stole, hors d’oeuvres tray in her hands, or filling up everyone’s glass, including her own, with fire water.

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Not the least reason for the late-coming solidarity from the Motown crowd of performers was that her firing exploded false assumptions that the same could not happen to any one of them. Indeed, it
had
happened, to more than a few others.

ANNETTE BEARD: I knew exactly what Flo was going through, why she was so bitter about the Supremes. I didn’t blame her a bit—because I was fired by the Vandellas in 1964 for my “behavior” [she had become pregnant by her boyfriend], which was all bull. And that was devastating to me. I did not leave by choice; I came to the studio one day and was told, “Martha doesn’t want you to sing with her anymore.” I mean, here you are, doing something you love and enjoy and then poof, it’s gone. And for me it was like Flo having started the Supremes. I was with our group before Martha was.

We already had a group. We took
her
in and then she was calling all the shots. And today Martha takes all the credit for the group, it’s all her and no one else.

It was pretty much the same with Flo and Diana, but worse.

When we first met the Supremes, Flo was the lead singer, and a damn good one. Then she was nothing. Just imagine how much that hurt her. With me, at least, there was some closure because Martha called me out of the blue fifteen years later and asked me to sing with her at a reunion engagement. I was really shocked because I hadn’t spoken to Martha in all that time, and it helped ease things. But Flo never got that same kind of call, and then it was too late.

Among the regulars at Flo’s soirees were the Temptations, who were so pissed off at Flo’s sacking that they fired off a telegram to Mary Wilson, which read:
“Mary, stick with Flo, you might be next—the Tempts.”
(Though in the harsh glare of reality, they did not stick with one of their own, David Ruffin, who was dealt with as had been Flo—with a pink slip, delivered to him in mid-’68 when the group got fed up with his cocaine-fueled absences and egomania. Ruffin proceeded to do what Flo would have loved to—first forcing his way onto the stage at Temptations gigs and then, when he was physically obstructed from doing that, battling Motown in court and coming away with a settlement that allowed him to finish out his contract as a solo act. But while the parallels between Ballard and Ruffin are obvious, he was at least as narcissistic as 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 322

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Diana Ross, feeding off her elevation to demand that his group be billed “David Ruffin and the Temptations”—yet another inevitable upshot of Gordy’s fixation on Ross. Neither did the Tempts stick with Paul Williams, who was cashiered in the early ’70s for his alcoholism; less resourceful and quick-witted than Ruffin, he fell into a depression and in 1973 killed himself with a gunshot to the head, just steps from Motown.)

Definitely
not
on Flo’s guest list were Diana and Mary. As close to each other as they lived, the strip of Buena Vista between them was a kind of “no-man’s land,” none of the three ever taking a stroll down the road lest they risk bumping into one another. Even on short runs to nearby stores, they would make the trip in their Cadillacs. Flo, however, couldn’t seem to ignore her nemeses across the street and down the block. Tony Tucker tells of Lurlee Ballard and other family members acting as sentries, peering through the curtains for any goings-on involving Ross or Wilson, reporting to Flo things such as “There’s a car in that bitch’s driveway,” or “I just saw that bitch Mary Wilson driving down the street.”

Wilson received the Temptations’ telegram while the Supremes were in New York for a concert at the Forest Hills tennis stadium—

though whether she felt shamed by her lack of support for Flo was left unclear; she noted it in
Dreamgirl
without comment. But she did confess that, with Flo gone, she felt “alone.” There was also the unending irony that while she kept her distance from the exiled Ballard, she grew peeved at Cindy Birdsong for being too subservient to Diana as the latter further levitated higher above the Supremes. Birdsong, who after all was getting the free ride of her life, just wanted to quietly fit in. Yet Mary was suddenly demanding that she be a personal courtier to
her
.

This, of course, was a suggestion that could have led anyone in the Supremes’ entourage to say, “Pot, meet kettle.” Wilson would recall Cindy, with faint praise, as “a great singer, a good buddy—but no ally when it came to standing up to Diana and Berry. . . . [S]he believed that just because Diana was the lead singer she called all the shots in the group.”

“She’s
not
the boss,” Mary would tell her.

“Okay,” would come the blank reply.

“Don’t just go along with everything she wants.”

“Okay.”

“There won’t be any group if you and I don’t stick together.”

“Okay.”

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In the end, though, Cindy would always give in to “Miss Ross”—as timorously as Mary had when she forgot to stick with Flo, and still did in matters of stage dress and song selection; everything, really. At least outwardly, however, she wasn’t the classic doormat she once had been.

As little more now than a piece of stage furniture, she saw Flo getting a solo contract and had to wonder just
who
had been the “third Supreme.”

“I’d like to do something like that,” she would tell people.

Accordingly, her old gung-ho zeal at being seen if not always heard began to flag, along with her obedience to the Supremes’ “image.” When the girls filmed the
Tarzan
episode on location in Mexico, Mary allowed herself to be photographed by a
paparazzo
during a break, the nun’s habit rolled up on her thighs, cigarette in one hand, beer can in the other. Recently, she had found a “gal pal” to hang around with, a brassy woman from New York, Margie Haber, if for no good reason other than that Haber’s loud, supercilious manner got under Diana’s skin. That, of course, used to be Flo’s only source of pleasure; now, it seemed to be Mary’s.

Other, that is, than the leather-lunged British singer Tom Jones, with whom she had begun to carry on after her revolving door of men had brought her flings with Berry’s brother Fuller Gordy, British producer David Puttnam, and none other than Brian Holland. Mary went gaga over the wild Welshman with the Brillo hair, her ardor replicating that of Jones’s typical audience of “mums,” who became famous for chucking their panties onstage at his concerts. Soon Mary had taken to lining her dressing rooms with eight-by-ten glossies of herself and Tom in various romantic embraces—or at least, as Tony Tucker noted, “the ones she could show.”

Shelly Berger found himself playing travel agent, arranging for her to sneak off for one-night rendezvous with Jones in London; when the Supremes were on a tour of Europe, she took an overnight side trip to shack up with him in Munich. They were inseparable when the girls toured England in February ’68, except when he had to go home to Mrs. Jones. Wilson was a sucker for his “man’s man” ways, understating his prowess in
Dreamgirl
with the euphemism that he was “a fine lover.” Yet as intimate as they were, she insisted—improbably—that she didn’t know until after they’d started up that he was married, because he didn’t wear a ring, and that once she became aware she “felt like a fool . . . betrayed, as if I had been the one cheated on.” But when she intended to break it off, “I realized I couldn’t. It was too late.” Instead, they carried on into the ’70s, another long-term “secret” liaison within 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 324

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the glittery world of “America’s sweethearts” that no one was supposed to know about, but which nearly everyone did.

By contrast, in the late winter of 1968, the Supreme who had been dumped for conduct unbecoming was married, pregnant, and seemingly on the way to that last laugh.

Flo and Tommy drove back to New York in late March, with Flo tingling with excitement and apprehension. As she would admit later, “the idea of singing solo was “kind of scary. I’ve never sung solo except in school,” or sung lead in three years, since “Silent Night” from the Christmas album and “Ain’t That Good News” from the Sam Cooke tribute album. Neither had she spent any real time working on her voice before she would have to leap into rehearsals for the ABC songs.

Anticipating months of recording, after they checked into the Pierre Hotel they began looking for an apartment to sublet. And not just any apartment. She wasn’t playing the role of Flo now—she was playing
Diana
. She and Tommy would ride in a limo, Flo decked out in a mink jacket, and go from one building to another, sniffing at all the apartments realtors showed them as inadequate, until they took one on ultra-chic Sutton Place in the East 50s—a penthouse, no less, with a baby-grand piano, antique furniture, three maids’ rooms, and landscaped terraces high above the East River. She then sent for the rest of her furs and jewelry from Detroit. On the table were bottles of Dom Perignon and tins of Beluga caviar.