The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (64 page)

The wonder is that all this didn’t dissolve into mawk and mire. The song seemed almost tempered with strings and vibes swelling only to fall away for the darker lines, holding something back as if with the numbed emotion in Diana’s brilliantly haunted lead vocal, then letting loose at the end as she affirms that, no matter, what, “I’ll always love
you-ooo-ooo
,
you-ooo-ooo . . .
,” over fevered backing choruses of “Hold on, just a little bit longer, hold on.”

Sadly for Mary and Cindy, Gordy had wanted them to sing backup on the song, as it was created for the Supremes. By now, though, Wilson was nearly as inclined to spite Gordy as Ballard had been, such was her resentment at being downgraded, and informed him she needed a vacation after months of nonstop touring. “Things were changing,” she wrote in
Dreamgirl
, “and I felt like I was in limbo. I had no real home and felt that I needed to get away.”

The truth was that Wilson, seeing what was coming, was buying a home in L.A. and wanted to keep it from Gordy, who hadn’t made his own move yet. Neither was he okay with the vacation idea.

“Mary, you’d better work while you can,” he told her, as nasty as ever.

Disappointed in her, but not really needing her, he gave her a last chance, boasting about the new song and how “hot” it was. The suddenly strong-willed Mary wouldn’t relent, and off she went to the coast 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 337

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with a side trip to Mexico. Still playing romantic musical chairs, she went with old flame Duke Fakir. That meant Gordy would have to keep Cindy off the record, too, since he needed tightly knitted, practiced harmonies. And so, on what would be the biggest Supremes record in history, Diana Ross would be backed by the anonymous voices of the ubiquitous Andantes: Marlene Barrow, Jackie Hicks, and Gordy’s first client at Motown, Louvain Demps.

As always, they would nail the assignment, superbly complement-ing moods both dark and bright, as Wilson partied in Acapulco and Birdsong sat at home, her one shot to matter as a Supreme dashed, not by Berry Gordy or Diana Ross but by Mary Wilson. Later, perhaps feeling the heat, Wilson would try to pin all the blame on Gordy, saying he had assured her “Love Child” was still being written, fooling her into believing she would do the vocal when she returned; staying on that script, she said that by being cut out of the song, Gordy had “sen[t]

Cindy and me a message, namely, that Diana Ross was all they wanted.” When they would hear an early pressing of “Love Child,” HDH did an aural double-take. “I said, ‘Is that one of
ours
?’” Eddie Holland recalls.

“I give Berry all the credit in the world. That was a
great
record. That’s why Berry Gordy is a genius, man. We never thought of him as anything less. He got it all perfect: the melody, the lyrics, everything. He said, ‘I’m gonna make a big hit record for the Supremes,’ and that’s what he did. I’ll tell you what, we
wished
we could have made that one.

The only question was if he could repeat it, keep it going, the way we did.”

That The Clan wouldn’t was perhaps unwittingly explained by Ross, who was not so knocked out by “Love Child.” Telling why in
Secrets of a Sparrow
, she wrote of a disconnect she had for the post-HDH

songs given the Supremes. “[T]hey weren’t as wonderful as . . . ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ [which] had been written especially for us [rather than for] somebody else’s life.” For all the acting involved in singing “Love Child,” she said, it “was like doing an audio movie.” No matter how good on so many levels “Love Child” was, that quality Ross wrote of, the ligature that organically ties song to artist, was not there, though Lord knows Motown tried to create one.

The upshot was that it was Diana herself who asked for—and obediently granted—a change in the group’s image to fit the new 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 338

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“self-awareness” motif. The results were on full view—the fullest ever, actually—when they went on the September 29
Ed Sullivan Show
to break the song and, before millions of viewers, were seen in repose on the “stoop” of a painted facsimile of a ghetto street, Mary dangling a bare and quite nice leg from under a chocolate-brown shorts-suit, Cindy in a brown and white pantsuit, both barefooted, and—most shockingly—Diana looking every bit the street urchin, wearing a close-cropped Afro wig, a baggy yellow sweatshirt, tattered cut-offs, her legs like matchsticks, her feet also bare. Originally, all three Supremes were to appear like this and had rehearsed in matching yellow sweatshirts and cutoffs before it was decided that doing so would make Diana stand out less. If this was her idea of “ghetto chic” she was more than up to playing the part, etching pain in her eyes as she and the girls slowly, desultorily, shuffled their way across the set while lip-synching.

The very un-Supremely image, especially Diana’s scrawny, scraggly appearance, was the talk of the pop world the next day—some were shocked, some merely amused by the preciousness of the high-fashion Supremes in their Halloween “ghetto chic” costumes a month early—

and the reaction no doubt helped to light a bigger fire under the record, as Diana had cannily foreseen. Released a day later, backed by “Will This Be the Day,” within three weeks “Love Child” was all over the radio. Distributors and station managers who might have had reservations about the rawness of the subject matter were swept up in a whirlpool that did the seemingly undoable—during the week of November 30 somehow dislodging the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” from the top of the chart after nine weeks, for a two-week run of its own (as well as on the R&B chart), before bowing to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” It didn’t fall out of the Top Forty for fifteen weeks, the longest run by any Supremes record.

Not one to let a good thing pass without milking it dry, Gordy whipped up an obligatory album titled
Love Child
for a December release. Except for the title track and the Ashford-Simpson “Some Things You Never Get Used To,” it was mainly a surfeit of filler from the Motown vault, including two more A&S songs, “Keep an Eye” and “You Ain’t Livin’ Till You’re Lovin’,” though by far the most memorable today is “Can’t Shake It Loose,” co-written by George Clinton, making for a one-off marriage made in funk heaven—James Jamerson and the future “Dr. Funkenstein.” (A decade later, Clinton would re-cut the song as “Field Maneuvers” with the ultimate funk brothers, Funk -

adelic.) For the cover of the album, the Supremes re-created the
Sulli-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 339

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van
milieu—Diana gazing out of a doorway of a “tenement slum,” in the same yellow sweatshirt, while Wilson and Birdsong loitered in an alley, Mary leaning against a brick wall in a leather fringe halter and black pants, a barefooted Cindy in a black shirt, vest, and jeans.

Somehow, the cause survived the radical chic promulgated by people who would never have actually set foot in a ghetto doorway, and so did the Supremes, who, by the time they returned to the Sullivan stage on January 5, 1969, to again sing “Love Child,” had removed the ghetto from the chic. Only Diana still had the Afro, with Mary and Cindy back to the usual high-fashion wigs. They all wore tight hot-pink pantsuits and smart high heels and belted out a live, up-tempo version on a mod, criss-crossed ladder set, Mary and Cindy doing a hip-grinding frug, with Mary seeming almost giddy singing the song she’d never recorded.

Even before then, the ghetto shtick was tabled; clearly having been meant for a very short run, it was anathema to the Supremes’ cause, the coiffed and manicured one—and to their itinerary. In mid-November they went off on a major European tour, with stops in Scandinavia, Belgium, Ireland, Germany, and England, including two command performances at the London Palladium for the Royal Family—the sweatshirt, fringe, and jeans not part of their wardrobe. Of that jaunt, Wilson would fondly remember playing Stockholm’s Bern’s Café and seeing Sweden’s Princess Christina and her upper-class mates get piss-faced and dance on table tops—along with more intimate moments with Tom Jones in Munich, their favorite tryst rendezvous spot. On this jet-set carousel ride, the “hood” seemed much further than halfway around the planet.

Not that the always contentious British press would let them get away with their quick-change artistry from upper crust to ghetto and back again. As if expecting them to come out wearing dashikis and raising Black Power salutes, several blowhard Brits blistered them with the old “sellout” charge—“Go to Church, Baby!” one of the papers headlined, as if all the “Love Child” imagery couldn’t do as much to “sanc-tify” the Supremes as a good turn in a gospel choir.

However, the Brits were no slouches when it came to rank hypocrisy.

Some of the same writers who were offended by the girls’ lack of sincerity took to slamming Ross for getting too “political” at the second Palladium 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 340

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show, when, before the assembled likes of Prince Charles, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden, and the Queen Mother, she did her Martin Luther King soliloquy during the performance of “Somewhere,” far more comfortably and vigorously than she had that terrifying night on
The Tonight Show
hours after King’s murder. Practically squealing, she cried out, “Free at last! Great God almighty, free at last!” Despite the journalists’ claim that such behavior was somehow improper, the Royals had actually gotten to their feet and joined a standing ovation that didn’t die down for two minutes.

Still, one defender of the realm mystifyingly wrote in
The Daily
Mirror
the next day that the moment was “not the high drama it was intended to be” and drew “the coolest reception of the evening.” Another stooge, in
The Guardian
, wrote of the “rather mawkish tribute that seemed inappropriate for the occasion.” Indeed, the Ross who braved the stuffed shirts was at her peak as a crusader on this trip, spouting some highly charged rhetoric. For a time, too, she threatened not to go out on stage at the Palladium at all because the opening act was a thirty-member troupe called The Black and White Minstrels who, incredibly, performed in blackface and white gloves! That this effrontery could have been placed by the promoters on the bill of a Supremes show was yet another example of how little the British really understood of the cause they so wanted to champion.

Ross, barely believing what she saw when the troupe went through its Jim Crow–style paces in dress rehearsal, asked, “They’re making fun of Negroes, aren’t they?”

She was persuaded to bite her tongue and go on, but before leaving jolly old England she was in a snit, tearing into the Minstrels as “dis-respectful.” Now stoked and uncontainable, when she was asked about where she fit into the “black movement,” she quickly corrected, “It’s a
people’s
movement,” and, as she went on, approvingly name-dropped no less than a Black Panther, saying airily that “[w]e should listen to Stokely Carmichael. He has a good philosophy,” not filling in exactly what that might be. Then, an encore: “James Brown says something and I agree with it—I’m black and I am
proud
of it!” But such noble, or naive, babble, like the sartorial and thematic symbolism of “Love Child,” was not to become a habit. The last gasp of the Supremes’ ghetto fable was, by necessity, the follow-up to “Child,” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 341

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from which every last ounce of profit needed to be wrung. The song,

“I’m Livin’ in Shame,” was really “Love Child: The Sequel,” set in a

“college town” where she found a “new identity”—of being “born elite, with maids and servants at my feet.” Having “married a guy” and “living high,” she lied that her mother “died on a weekend trip to Spain” rather than letting “my uptown friends see her” in her “dirty raggedy scarf ” and “stockings rolled to her feet”—before word came that “Momma” died, never having seen her grandson and begging to “see me by her side.” In her guilt she could only wail, “Momma, I miss you. Won’t you forgive me mom for all the wrong I have done.” Apparently out of new ideas, The Clan lifted these suds from the 1959 Lana Turner tear-jerker
Imitation of Life
, even appropriating from the flick the hook “Momma, momma, momma can you hear me?” and fitting the song with another grand-scale production, again with the Andantes as the choir backing up Diana. But cutting it was no easy chore. Wrestling with how to make it believable, Gordy and his underlings needed six sessions over late November and December, constantly re-doing tracks. When it was released on January 6, 1969, with “I’m So Glad I Got Somebody” on the B-side, many wouldn’t be able to stifle a chuckle, the biggest from Diana’s classic line, “Came a telegram /

Momma passed away while making homemade jam.” The Supremes’

éclat
nevertheless lifted it to No. 10 in March; but, by then, the ghetto pandering was already history.

In fact, Gordy had veered away from inner-city blues to Hollywood spit ’n’ polish. Months before, Shelly Berger’s connections to George Schlatter and Ed Friendly came through in a huge way, yielding a critical milestone for his “MoWest” strategy. The two producers, then riding high on the hip slapstick of
Laugh-In
, were able to leverage backing from NBC to produce an hour-long special to air in early December featuring Motown’s two big-gun acts, the Supremes and the Temptations. The genesis of the special, as well as the virtual audition for it, had come about when the two groups performed several show-tune duets on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in mid-’68, forging a palpable chemistry between them (though not with David Ruffin, who, because Diana was so worried that he’d outshine her in the battle of lead singers, ordered all the vocals to be done in her key, forcing Ruffin to strain to hit the higher notes).