The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (65 page)

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While the special was being cemented with the NBC brass, Motown went to work, using it as a fulcrum for a wider Supremes-Temptations strategy. As early as May 1968, in fact, sessions had begun for a joint album targeted to precede the airing of the TV show. These sessions—

with most of the Temptations’ leads now taken by ex-Contour Dennis Edwards, whose gruff, pleading voice was similar to Ruffin’s, if not as palatable—continued through the summer. Completed after the TV

show had already been recorded, it was released on November 8 as
Diana
Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations,
to an enthusiastic reception.

Tuning up for the TV show, the Supremes and Temptations had played a week together at the Carousel Theater in Framingham, Massachusetts. Then they came to L.A., taping the show on August 23 at the NBC Burbank studios. It was called “TCB”—shorthand for the in-vogue neologism “takin’ care of business,” forever burned into the pop cultural vernacular by Aretha Franklin in her ’67 mega-hit “Respect,” when she managed to use both forms, singing, “Take Care of TCB!” Marking Gordy’s entree into the Hollywood inner sanctum, the project was produced by Schlatter-Friendly in conjunction with the newly minted Motown Productions, which Gordy put under the supervision of Suzanne DePasse, a stunning 21-year-old from Harlem with long, sweeping brown hair whose only experience in the business was as a promoter for the hip New York disco Cheetah—yet another Gordy

“hunch” that many, including Diana, assumed was more about pulchri-tude than proficiency. (An assumption proven wrong: DePasse is still with the company, in the same job, to this day.) To the other entertainers, it should have been called “TCMR”—

“Takin’ Care of Miss Ross.” Just those two imperious words—“Miss Ross”—became embedded in most everyone’s craw, as they had already for Mary and Cindy. Per Gordy’s order, production people could address her only in that way; no such directive was ever applied to the other Supremes or to the Temptations. For the guys, it was all the proof they needed that while they shared the billing, they were not equals. Indeed, though the show was certainly a boon to them, allowing them to break out to a wider audience (especially now that Gordy had shunted them into the same class-act venues as the Supremes), their primary value was to balance off the girls’ appeal and keep them “real” for black record-buyers.

Indeed, it struck the Tempts that quality had rubbed off the Supremes in the years since both groups had ridden those rickety buses on the Motortown Revues.

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OTIS WILLIAMS: Well, the first thing was that Florence wasn’t there, and for me particularly, being so close to Florence and knowing how far she’d fallen and how upset she was by it, it was hard for me to look at them the same. This is nothing against Mary and Cindy, everybody loved them, they were always sweethearts. But to be truthful, to me it wasn’t the Supremes without Flo.

Then there was that “Miss Ross” shit. We had a hard time with that. I remember Melvin, who knew Diana from way back. I mean, she used to call
him
“Mr. Franklin”!

And Melvin, he told us, “From now on, call me Mr. Frank -

lin.” There was a movie out about that time,
In the Heat of the
Night
, with Sidney Poitier. He played Detective [Virgil] Tibbs and his tag line in that was “Call me Mr. Tibbs!” So when someone would say, “Hey, Otis,” I’d say, “Call me Mr. Wil -

liams.” Eddie would say, “Call me Mr. Kendricks.” See, that was the only way we could deal with it, because it was bullshit. We’d known Diana since she was a scared little girl. She’d been our “little sis.” We’d stopped her from quittin’

the business! Paul and Eddie, man, without them there wouldn’t never have been no Supremes! And now even
we
were told to call her Miss Ross! Our reaction would be like, you know, we got your Miss Ross right here. [Laughter]

I think she was still the Diana we knew and loved, still a scared little girl. But she didn’t want to
feel
that when she went on stage. She had to believe, for herself, that she was a star, that she could do anything. So that’s when she
became
Miss Ross. And, hey, I didn’t begrudge her that. Look how far she’d come—she
was
a star, one of the biggest in the world, she did that all by herself. The rest of us, we were just singers. We could live with that, but Diana couldn’t. And so when she was in that head, she was like a cat marking all the walls, you know, her territory.

Her “territory” during “TCB” were the sets, the main one being a multi-level, circular Plexiglas platform that looked like a flying saucer in a Truffaut movie, towering above the orchestra on seemingly nothing but air. She also wanted to exclude from her realm Suzanne DePasse, whom she suspected of either having or wanting to have an affair with Gordy, and thus saved her most noxious behavior for her, ordering her 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 344

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around like a go-fer or showily dismissing her from sight. Once, when DePasse approached with something important she said she needed to discuss, Diana barked at her, “Can’t you see I’m busy? Come back later!”

“Sorry, Miss Ross,” DePasse humbly acquiesced, to Diana’s great enjoyment, given that when Berry was around she acted like DePasse’s closest chum.

On her part, Mary Wilson felt lower on the stepladder than DePasse, in Diana and Berry’s eyes. In fact, Suzanne’s arrival confused her, too. “It was hard enough,” she recalled, “that none of us had any input

[on] the show.” That DePasse did, even if no one knew what it was,

“indicated how drastically things at Motown were changing. [She]

didn’t mind telling us what to do, but she didn’t dare cross Diane.” As for who was really running the show, however, Wilson said that “seven of us were extras.”

The confirmation of that seemed to come when an elaborate song-and-dance number around the bossa nova tune “Mas Que Nada” featuring Wilson, Birdsong, Kendricks, and Otis and Paul Williams was performed live for the audience—but was then cut. “This must be the Diana Ross Show!” a disgusted Paul Williams thundered when he was told, taking for granted that Ross simply wouldn’t permit Mary and Cindy to show their stuff independently of her. With bitterness billow-ing everywhere, Wilson said, the “whole situation was a mess [that]

seemed to get worse every day.”

Even when Diana tried to act collegial it went wrong. During one break, noticing that someone had brought Kendricks some fast food, she mewed in mock indignation, “How’d
you
rate that?” and gave him, according to Otis Williams, a light, playful slap on the cheek. All around, people stood and stared, thinking it was for real.

But while Kendricks, who’d once had a fling with Ross himself, didn’t take it for what it wasn’t, and never in his life would have a bad word to say about Ross, Wilson still insists that Diana had “gone too far,” providing Mary with one more reason why “[i]t was getting harder and harder for me even to want to be around her”—the same sort of overreaction that seems to be common in much of the Motown literature; J. Randy Taraborrelli, for instance, darkly projects in
Call Her
Miss Ross
that Kendricks, who died in 1992, “has never said what happened between the two of them to anger her so,” perhaps because nothing did
.

For all the static, real and imagined, of the ten days of rehearsing and shooting, “TCB” was a tour de force for both groups, Berry Gordy, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 345

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and particularly Diana Ross—who was unseen in only a half-dozen of the fifteen numbers crammed into forty-one minutes of airtime, and had her own separate “introduction” in addition to that given the Supremes. There were seven Supremes songs either alone or in medleys; a Supremes medley of contemporary pop songs; a Ross solo on a pain -

ful “African Vogue” number in which she wore tribal garb and undulated some kind of native dance; the Ross soliloquy on “Somewhere”; and group duets on several Temptations hits (but not on Supremes’

hits), and on “Respect” and “The Impossible Dream.” The only time Diana receded, sort of, was to share the lead with Mary on a medley of

“Mrs. Robinson” and other pop tunes.

Gordy of course was ecstatic about the results, with good reason; but the legendary Gordy reward system was most selective. Weeks later, Otis Williams would find out that “Berry gave them special gifts for doing such a great job on the show, while we didn’t even rate a simple thank-you. We just did our job and picked up the check and that was it.” Still, in the run-up to the broadcast of “TCB,” the Tempts profited more handsomely when Motown released a single from the
Join
album,

“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” a cover of a modest 1967 hit by Dee Dee Warwick written and produced by Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Jerry Ross, the first two of whom would shortly establish a sort of “Motown East” with Philadelphia International Records. The song had already been covered in ’68 by Madeline Ball, but Frank Wilson and Nick Ashford buffed and fluffed it with an arching string and horn arrangement, an intro lifted from Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted,” traded leads by Ross and Kendricks, and solemnly spoken love affirmations by Ross and Otis Williams.

Released on November 21, just as “Love Child” was taking off, it soared to No. 2 pop and R&B in mid-December, coinciding with the buzz generated by “TCB” as one of the most-watched television shows of the year and spawning
another
Supremes-Temptations work, the soundtrack of the TV show. The latter, released the day after the show was aired (with all the numbers minus “Afro Vogue”), one-upped the previous LP by going to the top of the pop and R&B album charts early in 1969.

Gordy wasn’t through squeezing every drop out of the two groups yet, but he could sit back for a delirious moment during the Christmas 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 346

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holiday and savor that he had a Beatle-impressive
five
records in the Top Ten—“I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life,” “Love Child,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” and

“Cloud Nine”—with “I’m Livin’ in Shame” in the hopper for January and the “TCB” album nearing the roof. And with “Love Child” the fifth-biggest-selling record of the year, behind “Hey Jude,” “Green Tambourine,” “Love in Blue,” and “Mrs. Robinson” (and ahead of, to name two, “Lady Madonna” and “Hello I Love You”).

Gordy as well as the Supremes were on a roll no one could have expected only six months after “Some Things You Never Get Used To.” The girls weren’t just back on top—they were hotter than ever, their appeal cutting across the demographic spectrum. With their Hollywood trappings, it was as if they’d replaced Joey Heatherton as the first-call whenever a wheezing warhorse needed a “happening” female act. Not counting
Ed Sullivan
, from late ’68 to mid-’69 they made guest shots on Bing Crosby and Bob Hope TV specials, and hosted
The Hollywood
Palace
(or rather, Ross hosted, with Wilson and Birdsong allowed to say exactly nothing). As well, Diana guest-starred with Rowan and Martin and no less than Lucille Ball on a Dinah Shore NBC special produced by Schlatter-Friendly called “Like Hep!”—during which she was treated poorly by the aging, choleric Ball, who ordered a servile Diana around like a servant.

To the survivors of “TCB,” that could only have been considered turnabout being fair play.

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twenty-two

THE

LAST

MILE

Mary Wilson had become so disenchanted with Gordy and Ross that early in 1968 she broke protocol and began calling Flo every now and then, just to say hello. In the early spring, when Flo had come home to promote her first ABC record, Mary got the idea to bury the lingering bitterness between Flo and her two arch-enemies. Gordy was about to hold a big pool party at Gordy Manor and Mary, wanting to play good guy, suggested that Flo come with her. “It’ll be great,” she burbled. Flo, who had a hard enough time swallowing her issues with Mary, reeled at the thought.

“Mary,” she said, “you know that’s a bad idea. Forget it, will you?”

“C’mon, let’s do it. Don’t worry about Berry and Diane. All your friends will be there. We’ll be with you.”

It went against every one of her instincts, but Flo did want to heal old wounds—she had confessed to Tommy that she found it difficult to feel hatred for Diana, that she still “cared for her”—and so she went.

Later she told Tony Tucker with relish that when she waltzed into the party, “You could have heard a pin drop in a bunch of goose feathers,” such was the shock among the Motown crowd, many of whom had urged her to stick it to Gordy when they partied at her house, but who on Gordy’s turf could only stare at her—too scared of Gordy, as Flo would put it, to say word one.

Gordy and Ross must have been more than a bit shocked, too, but neither raised an objection as she walked around in her flower-print summer dress. But they kept a wary eye glued to her all the while from 347

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across the pool, and, as Wilson recalled, “There was an undercurrent of tension.” Finally, Diana sashayed over and asked how she was.

“Pretty good, you?” Flo answered pleasantly enough.

But then Diana began to act like, well, Diana. Slyly mentioning that she’d heard Flo’s record had failed, she asked how her career was going.

“Fine,” Flo said, her jaw tensing.

Diana continued making small talk but began walking from Flo to Berry and back again, as if relaying some sort of top-secret information to him, which made Flo’s insides grind. Settling onto a stool at the cabana bar, Flo began to tipple more heavily to calm herself, and was fairly loaded when Diana again floated over and said, “Oh, isn’t that the same dress you wore five years ago? It’s amazing it still fits”—a classic Ross-ism. From anyone else, the comment could conceivably have been complimentary, if meant, say, in the sense that it was “amazing” the then-pregnant-and-showing Flo could fit into one of her dresses from the old days. But because it was said by Diana, it was heard only as a slight about Flo’s weight—which, if so, was a truly dim-witted thing to say about a pregnant woman.