The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (71 page)

He never would offer Motown shares to the public, causing some executives, who expected to be able to purchase stock, to quit in dis-376

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gust. Gordy, said Benjaminson, “wanted his wealth nearby and touchable [and] wanted it as soon as it was earned, not at the end of the fiscal year. [That’s why] he invested a lot of money in houses.” Accountants told him they could lower the company’s tax bill but it would take time to know what deductions were accepted; he always said no, telling them to pay at the maximum rate, just so “he could be sure what remained was his.” Accordingly, distributors and bookers always knew his money was good, and plentiful. And so even if his resources weren’t shared generously, or even fairly, with his stars, they had a cachet, too.

For example, Version 2.0 of the Supremes. By rights, the act had no real claim to mass acceptance. Anything that the Supremes had done was as a unit led by Diana Ross. At least as far as the public cared, they had the same lineup until Ross left—more casual fans wouldn’t know that Flo Ballard wasn’t still there, or alive for that matter, until years later. But now, very noticeably, Ross was the missing one. Worse, Gordy had left a bitter postscript on that triumphant night at the Frontier.

Hours after the show, he couldn’t stop fretting about Jean Terrell. It could have been the insults lobbed at her from the house, her appearance, the fact that she was as headstrong at times as Diana, refusing to follow his advice. But where Diana was
Diana
, Jean was just plain Jean.

Unable to sleep, he called Mary’s room, waking her up.

“I don’t like Jean,” he barked when she picked up. “I want to replace her with Syreeta.”

Mary wasn’t so groggy that she didn’t think he was completely crazy. The first post-Ross single, “Up the Ladder to the Roof,” was only days away from release. The PR campaign was about to gear up.

“You can’t do that!” she protested. “We just made the announcement, for Christ’s sake.”

He insisted that Wright was a better singer, more electric, more seductive—more like Diana.

That alone must have jolted Wilson fully awake. “No way,” she said.

“Cindy and I want Jean in the group so you can just forget it, Berry.” Even in his crowning moment, Gordy could not leave well enough alone. But while he could have gotten his way with a simple directive, he could tell this wasn’t the old Wilson, the footstool he’d tromped on for years. Now the mouse that roared, she might have quit in retort, and then what? Gordy had never respected Mary; recently he’d had a run-in with her and told people, “That’s a stupid woman. A
stupid woman.
” But now she had him beat. Frustrated, he acted like a 10-year-old.

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“Fine, then I wash my hands of the whole goddamn group!” he sputtered, then scowled about how ungrateful “these women are,” meaning either the two holdover Supremes who now had the nerve to buck him or the entire gender.

The second-edition (third, technically) Supremes felt his wrath, too. Working on a shoestring budget, at least by Supremes norms, Terrell, Wilson, and Birdsong had to recycle their old gowns, with Mary the only one who could squeeze into Diana’s and Jean wearing Mary’s.

VIP suites were now regular guest rooms. Those teeming retinues of hangers-on were whittled down to one assistant per Supreme, with no traveling hair and makeup stylists, no valets, and no Berry Gordy.

And yet the Motown machine saved Gordy from his own pettiness.

Having appointed Frank Wilson to write and produce their first series of recordings, “Up the Ladder to the Roof ” came out of the trough as a quite serviceable pop-soul ballad with cool funky guitar licks and dreamy vocals—and, in a roundabout irony, a lyric that was actually about love in the hereafter but heard simply as love on a rooftop.

When it hit No. 10 on the pop charts and 5 on the R&B charts in March 1970, Gordy could pretend to be ecstatic—as in
To Be
Loved
, when he shamelessly told of the Supremes’ seamless chain of successes—while putting next to nothing behind them. Fortunately, they still had a reservoir of important venues to play, like the Copa and the hotels in Miami Beach and Vegas casinos, and could count on the occasional
Ed Sullivan Show
invitation. And for two years they continued to produce hits, one more in the Top Ten, “Stoned Love” (No. 3) and five in the Top Twenty—“Everybody’s Got the Right to Love”; the duet with the Four Tops, “River Deep-Mountain High”; “Nathan Jones” (the previous two also going Top Ten R&B); “Happy (Is a Bumpy Road)”; and “Floy Joy”—plus a Top Forty entry, “Precious Little Things,” with Terrell and Wilson as co-leads. There was also a pro fusion of albums—eight in the first two years—and though only their debut LP,
Right On
, reached as high as No. 25, all charted well on the R&B chart.

In fact, critics registered a fair amount of shock that the Supremes weren’t merely a crass commercial confection of mannequins attempting to approximate the same old formula but, rather, an admirably adapted one; reviews called their sound a satisfying return to Motown’s R&B roots—“blacker” and truer to the soul genre than the Ross band, though no one was silly enough to say they were better. Overall, the verdict on the “new Supremes” was that they were distinct, pleasant, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 379

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soulful, sometimes sharply honed, sometimes a bit bland. These sorts of restrained raves were personally gratifying for Wilson after standing up to Gordy. Late in the Supremes’ original run, she’d come to believe the material had grown too predictable, too “plastic.” Years later, she would say she always thought the Supremes could have “done more” than they were permitted to; now, she was proving it. And even if Gordy had washed his hands of the group, he had no intention of keeping his hands off the money they were making for him.

Diana Ross, meanwhile, should have been doing it all, considering the eddies of money appropriated to her solo act—which cost around $100,000 to stage with all the costume and scenery changes—and the $70,000-a-week price tag she commanded for her top appearances. Yet for a time Gordy was mortified that the Supremes were more bankable than his queen. Almost as if there was a backlash against Ross turning her back on the Supremes, the fans were cool to her. When ticket sales lagged for her Las Vegas debut at the Frontier in May 1970, Gordy filled the house only after a promotion handing out fifty-dollar bills torn in half to passersby on the Strip, with the promise that they could collect the other half by attending the show.

By the summer, however, her shows were reliably sold out and she had arrived as a diva to be contended with. In the August 1
Time
, a piece called “Baby, Baby, Where Did Diana Go?” fawned, “Diana . . . is still all static electricity. She leaps in and out of an assortment of costumes, dances from time to time with two smiling male partners, and makes her way through a repertory of tunes borrowed from the likes of the Beatles, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee. She even sings a medley of old Supremes hits, but she seems to get through them very quickly.” Mandatorily, it went on, “She owns a Rolls-Royce (a gift from the thrice-wed Gordy) and a new home in Beverly Hills. ‘I have clothes for every mood,’ she boasts. Her collection ranges from dungarees and bathing suits to ‘very classy suits for traveling or teas.’ Her aim, naturally, is to be an actress. Doris Day advised her that it was not necessary to study acting, and Diana says, ‘If Jim Brown can do it, I can do it—

whatever he’s doing.’” Noting that Diana wanted to put bitter life experiences into her acting, the article slyly noted that “[h]er biggest trauma so far came last year in New Jersey, when someone poisoned her pet dogs.”

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Her early records—written and produced, for the most part, by Ashford and Simpson as lushly orchestrated sugary-coated pop—were literally hit and miss. The first single, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” got to only No. 20, while the second, a cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” was an enormous No. 1 pop and R&B

smash. The next, “Remember Me,” hit No. 16, but five more tanked until 1973 when “Touch Me in the Morning” went to the top, the last big hit she’d have for another two years. So, too, with her albums, the first real winner among the first four being the 1972 soundtrack from her movie debut as the ill-fated Billie Holiday in the wildly profitable
Lady Sings the Blues
, which went No. 1 pop, 2 R&B.

That film, instantly creating the new star team of Ross and Billy Dee Williams, cost Gordy $3.5 million to produce and made ten times as much. Diana, who hadn’t heard of Billie Holiday, got so into the part that she won raves for a brilliantly harrowing portrayal—and one that has worn so well that it prompted a remarkable flip-flop in
Time
: Back then it brutally panned her, saying, “It is eerie to watch and listen to Miss Ross, the princess of plastic soul, work her way through such songs as Strange Fruit and God Bless the Child. She has the phrasing, and the Holiday intonation. What she doesn’t have is the passion.

Her Billie Holiday is like one of those Audio-Animatronic robots at Disneyland—a perfect facsimile of life until you get close and hear the gears whirling,” yet in 2000, in naming the movie one of the twenty-five best films on race, lauded her for “bring[ing] a burnished sexiness” to the role.

Clearly, Diana was now almost exclusively Gordy’s meal ticket.

Warming up for the movie, in ’71 he had produced a Ross ABC-TV special. He not only financed
Lady Sings the Blues
; as its executive producer he ruled by fiat and by nepotism: Suzanne DePasse and, bizarrely, his one-and-off bedmate Chris Clark co-write the script, and Gil Askey composed the score, each one winning Oscar nominations with Ross as vocalist. By now his half-million-dollar home just seemed so common, and so he sold it and bought Red Skelton’s palatial Bel-Air estate called the Vistas, near Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. Foreshadowing Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, Gordy’s playground included a menagerie with peacocks, rheas, llamas, and rare birds and fish, as well as several tennis courts.

Rarely, if ever, now did Gordy even pass a thought of his hometown.

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Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson 5 living in L.A., he closed down the hoary shop at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, leaving many of the Funk Brothers to either come out to L.A. on their own dime or wither with the rest of Detroit. Some came, like James Jamerson, but they were no longer indispensable to Gordy’s less stringent musical purposes and even Jamerson would be cast aside for younger, cheaper, and less weathered musicians.

The remaining Detroit-bound artists generally didn’t receive invitations to relocate. One, Martha Reeves, bitterly recounts that “[t]hey didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me [of the closing]. . . . I had recorded million-selling records, had headlined prestigious nightclubs, and became an international star [yet] Motown treated me like a poor stepchild. Free-floating without a direction or a safety net, I felt lost in the shuffle.” Yet Motown still would not let Reeves out of her contract until she had repaid $200,000 in “advances.” In L.A., meanwhile, the center of Gordy’s universe began to feel adrift, too. Approaching 30 and needing stability, Diana Ross grew tired of Gordy stringing her along, paying no mind to her desire for marriage and children and displaying ugly fits of jealousy—such as when she had a brief, fiery fling with football-player-turned-actor Tim Brown—while never curtailing his endless philandering with Chris Clark and God knows who else. Finally, she gave him a marry-me-or-else ultimatum.

When he brushed her aside, the “else” turned out to be a shocking, out-of-left-field marriage when she ran off to Las Vegas on January 10, 1971, to wed 45-year-old Robert Silberstein, a Hollywood music manager whose main client was Chaka Khan, only days after she’d met him, or so she said, in a clothing store while shopping for Berry.

In very un-Ross-like fashion, there was no high-society wedding, no Easter parade of ritzy gowns, no orgy of photographers’ flashbulbs; only one guest was present, Suzanne DePasse, as a witness, and she was sworn not to tell Gordy. He found out, after the fact, from his ex-wife and business partner from the early days of Motown, Raynoma Liles.

The tensions having eased between the two, with Liles’s bootlegging ways in New York now nearly forgotten, he had recently gotten Ray -

noma to accompany Ross on road trips he couldn’t make, as a personal assistant. Though she detested Ross, she agreed, and two days after marrying Silberstein, Diana asked her to break the news to Gordy.

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Knowing Gordy as she did, and Diana, she thought it would be the best news he had ever heard.

“Congratulations, Berry,” she said.

When she told him, she recalled him saying, “Great, that’s absolutely great!” Said Liles: “He sounded as if he was throwing streamers around his office.” As Liles tells it, “For a long while, the public sentiment was, ‘poor Berry Gordy—getting the shaft by hard-hearted Diana.’ [But] Berry told me later that Diana’s wedding day was the happiest day of his life. He said that she’d almost forced his hand, until at the last minute he’d realized, ‘I can’t marry this woman. This woman is as selfish as I am. I’m going to have to be kissing her ass all the time. I need somebody to kiss
my
ass.’” She concluded: “Berry revered the star but basically didn’t like the woman,” which seems a drastic oversimpli-fication of their complex relationship.