The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (72 page)

By way of balance, Jim Brown has a completely opposite take: that when Gordy found out about the marriage he reacted like he’d been

“punched in the gut.” Said Brown: “Berry Gordy’s deepest sense of loss did not come from losing Motown. It came from losing Diana Ross.” Gordy, either putting up a brave front to hide his pain or too happy to feel any, told the media Diana’s marriage was for the best because he could now concentrate on her career without the added personal complications. Decades later, in a 1994 TV interview with Barbara Walters, he had refined his take on the situation even more: “Diana and I are the same kind of people. She wanted what I wanted. And we saw it up there, we set out to get it and we vowed never to let our personal relationship affect it. I loved her but wasn’t selfish enough to want to marry her and take her out of what I knew she had to have. She had to have that stardom up there.” Diana, for her part, played it as a semi-declaration of personal independence, saying Gordy was “in charge of my career, but not the director of my life.”

Whatever the motivations and ensuing feelings, however, little actually changed between them except that they no longer shared a mattress. He still would attend many of her big appearances, and for Diana his being there always unleashed old emotions. Brown recalled that whenever Gordy was in the audience and Diana sung “Someday We’ll Be Together,” she would tear up, and “I knew she was crying for Berry.” Once, seeing them in the quiet of Diana’s dressing room, “I could see the deepness of their love. So I left.”

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ble way. In the spring of ’71 Ross announced she was pregnant, and in the summer she gave birth to a daughter, Rhonda Ross Silberstein, the first of three children she had by Silberstein, or so it was believed.

The truth was that Gordy was the real father, the account payable from a night of passion at Christmastime before Ross decided to marry Silberstein several weeks later—and obviously the reason why Diana had put the marry-me-or-else gun to his head, having found out she was pregnant, the product of “one for the road,” as Gordy called the night.

Whether she told him that he was the father then or after Rhonda was born is unclear, but for years when he would visit Diana’s house he consciously pretended to be the girl’s “Uncle BB.” Rhonda, who had Diana’s big round eyes and a wide, thick nose like his, was also light-skinned, making it plausible that her father was white, though hardly prevent-ing rumors from flying through the years about why she had Berry Gordy’s nose.

Judging by Gordy’s chilled, conscienceless account of the episode, he apparently saw nothing amiss about Diana and him lying to their

“love child” about who her real dad was for purely appearances’ sake, so that she would have a father around and Diana could go on hushing up a romance that everyone under the sun now knew about. But at least he said something about it. Ross, by contrast, has kept the subject at a great remove, saying that such an intensely private matter is no one’s concern but her family’s; she even refuses to admit that Rhonda
is
Gordy’s child—in
Secrets of a Sparrow
, the only reference to Rhonda is brief and noncommittal, as simply one of her three children with Silberstein.

It was left to Raynoma Liles to confirm the long years of rumors, revealing in her 1990 tell-all
Berry, Me and Motown: The Untold Story
that Diana told Rhonda the truth when she was 17. Gordy then copped to it four years afterward in
To Be Loved
, though he said the revelatory moment came when Rhonda was 12. At the time Rhonda was beginning a career in acting, and Gordy let her have a bit part in one of the later movies he produced, sans Diana, the 1985 martial arts potboiler
The Last Dragon.
One day, Diana came onto the set with Rhonda, pulled him aside, and whispered in his ear, “She knows.”

“What did she say?” he wanted to know.

Diana said Rhonda had been “shocked” but that “she handled it like the champion she is,” while admitting that the girl’s reaction was so neutral she didn’t know if Rhonda “was sad or happy” about finding out. As Liles pointed out, “Rhonda had grown up the daughter of a 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 384

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white man—and had to rethink her identity upon finding out her father was a black man, and one with whom she’d casually shaken hands over a hundred times.” And yet Gordy had little more to say of the gut-wrenching experience himself beyond semi-perfunctorily noting that Rhonda was “watching me as I had watched her for years, looking for similarities. Every now and then I saw what I thought was a smile of her recognition of some of me in her. We didn’t talk about it as such, but I believe that day resolved some questions she may have asked herself over the years.”

In fact, Rhonda came to master the art of spinning the drama in an innocuous feel-good manner. In 1994, she would tell the
New York
Post
of Gordy, “I’ve known him forever as a friend of the family. But we always did have a special relationship—even before I knew he was my dad.”

The long years of lies about Ross and Gordy’s “love child” were only one myth perpetuated by Diana. Everyone who knew her became convinced early on that her marriage to Robert Silberstein was nothing more than a business arrangement with fringe benefits that would protect her from the scandal of living as an unwed mother. In fact, Silberstein was actually put on her payroll, for reasons never explained. But one possible reason may be that the handsome manager looked good on her arm. Says Liles: “I found Bob to be a warm, soft-spoken guy, and it was sad later on to hear Diana say that the only way she could tolerate him was as an escort.”

Most telling was that Gordy didn’t recede in her life; rather, he was, Liles recalled, “sort of a third party to the marriage, accompanying the two of them everywhere.” If the marriage was a sham, it was no more so than the notion that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy were no longer dependent on each other. The truth was, they may have been more so.

The Ross public façade as an ambassador of conventional morality and family-values entertainment wasn’t damaged, though, and it kept delivering. But she and Gordy had to be patient, as it seemed she had to trade several records that stiffed for one that didn’t, like her ’73 No. 1

smash “Touch Me in the Morning”—written and produced by a new 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 385

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Motown recruit, Michael Masser, who had to put up with Ross denigrating the song as not good enough for her—and its Oscar-nominated LP of the same name. When Gordy then tried pairing her with the red-hot but difficult Marvin Gaye, it nearly died aborning after Gaye refused to stop smoking pot around the again-pregnant Ross.

“Man, don’t smoke no weed,” Gordy told him. “Diana’s gonna have a baby. You don’t want drugs around the baby.”

“Fuck Diana Ross,” he said, saying stoned what so many around Motown had wanted to say for so long. “I’m gonna smoke this weed or I don’t sing.”

As a result of the discord, it was decided that the only way to get the project done was for them to cut their vocals separately, at separate studios, never seeing each other. Thus, all those dreamy love songs on their two ensuing Top Ten singles and Top Thirty album were sung by two people who detested each other—something that seemed to be the overarching rule now at Motown.

It took until 1976 to hit the top again with the Oscar-nominated theme from Gordy’s second vanity movie project for her, “Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)”—the only saving grace from what was a $3.75 million bomb when Gordy fired the original director and took over the job himself, ensuring a classic of unwitting comedy that the Ross–Billy Dee Williams chemistry couldn’t bail out. It was Gordy, though, who took most of the hits, with
Time
’s review skewering him for “squandering one of America’s most natural resources: Diana Ross.”

That year would bring Ross a Tony Award for a one-woman Broadway musical that was taped for a TV special. It also brought another No. 1 single—a cover of the Sylvester disco hit “Love Hangover,” produced by Hal Davis—and the Top Five “I’m Coming Out,” a sly wink at the drag-queen life written and produced by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards after seeing drag queens dressed like Diana, who was increasingly being embraced by gay fans. But now that she and Gordy were psychologically worn out by each other and barely able to speak without acrimony, Ross did something she never thought she would: entertain offers from other record companies.

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after the turn of the decade. Following early success with Honey Cone, their sessions in the old converted theater on Grand River Avenue helped maintain the pulse of the Detroit music scene that had grown faint when Motown transplanted itself to the coast. Many of the town’s musicians, including sundry Funk Brothers who had to go scrounging up work for the first time in years, were down with Holland, Dozier, and Holland when they hit their first stride of the decade with a foursome that—what were the odds?—sounded remarkably like the Four Tops: namely, the Chairmen of the Board, whose lead singer Norman

“General” Johnson was a near-replicate of Levi Stubbs. Their debut Invictus release, “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” stormed to No. 3 in 1970. The same year, HDH would deliver Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” also a No. 3, and hit the top with Honey Cone’s “Want Ads.” For a while, it seemed as if their magic touch just might make Invictus/

Hot Wax another Motown.

The problem for HDH was that Gordy was in a far better position to wait out the lawsuit battle, his lawyer fees absorbed into the Motown fiduciary structure. For HDH, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in an endless and fruitless court war bled their resources dry, threatening not just their new company but the trio’s excessively lavish lifestyle. In 1972, with everyone fatigued by the constant hearings and depositions, HDH approached Gordy with an offer to settle, on terms favorable to him. After all the overheated rhetoric and invective about servitude on one side and a vendetta on the other, in the end the whole
meshugas
was reduced to exactly what Eddie Holland had sworn it wouldn’t be about: mere dollars. The terms of the settlement were sealed by mutual consent; reportedly something like $200,000 went to Motown for the breach of contract—which by the time it was paid wasn’t even a symbolic victory for Gordy, who had ultimately proven he could get along quite well without his old mates and had moved far beyond the grind of Supremes and Four Tops ditties. “The only financial winners,” Gordy would say, “were the lawyers.” For HDH, the early glow of Invictus/Hot Wax began to flicker as musical tastes changed, execrably, from the stripped-down soul and pop-funk of the early ’70s to the syncopated miasma of disco, leaving HDH to have to keep up with the work of younger, lesser producers.

As with other restless writers like the McFadden-Whitehead team at Gamble and Huff ’s Philadelphia International Records, Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier wanted some spotlight time, teaming as an act to record middling records like “Why Can’t We Be Lovers,” “Don’t Leave 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 387

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Me Starvin’ for Your Love,” and “Slippin’ Away.” Dozier then quit to record solo for ABC and, later, had a couple of mild hits like “Fish Ain’t Biting” and “Let Me Start Tonight” before moving on to Warner Brothers and Columbia. Between long periods of seclusion and living in Europe, he produced Aretha Franklin’s 1977 LP
Sweet Passion
and wrote songs for Eric Clapton, Simply Red, Alison Moyet, and Phil Collins (including the No. 1 hit “Two Hearts” from the 1988 movie
Buster
), and recorded again in the ’90s for Atlantic.

Having left Invictus/Hot Wax to wither, Dozier and the Holland brothers were kept estranged by the bitterness between them until the onset of
The First Wives Club
Broadway musical score in 2008. On their own, meanwhile, the Hollands tried to make a go of it, replacing Dozier with writer-producer Harold Beaty, but in 1975 they folded the shop. They then formed HDH Records and Productions (Dozier played no part; the acronym had been copyrighted as an intellectual property) and began producing on a freelance basis, with one of their clients none other than Motown Records, a development explained by Berry Gordy this way: “Disagreement or not, the fact was that these guys helped me make history. I did not want war to be our legacy.” Not that their legacy wasn’t already preserved. In 2000,
Time
defined it thusly: “You can . . . marvel at the ways in which [HDH] managed to make the boundaries of their two commercially dictated themes—(a) I don’t deserve you, please come back; and (b) you don’t deserve me, I’m not coming back—seem limitless.” The Hollands worked with Michael Jackson on some of his early singles; then, with a perfect symmetry, Gordy would assign them to a group they knew a little about, albeit in a previous lifetime for them and the group—the Supremes.

Their return to Motown, however, was not a return to old formu-lae. In fact, little about it seemed like a homecoming to them. Working in L.A. under less stringent standards and with Gordy nowhere in sight, says Eddie Holland, “[i]t was a different crowd, a different vibe. There was no family feel to it anymore. It was nice getting back with Mary but it was really just a job. They were doing their material and we tried to mold it. But we’d all moved beyond where we were in the ’60s. All that was over, man.”

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