The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (75 page)

Always the operator, Tommy did have one asset left, the “hot” manuscript Flo had been working on about her life, which he now tried pitching to publishers, only to sell it for $10,000 to Motown—

not to publish but to
prevent
it from being published. By the ’80s, however, he was broke and, like Flo near the end, frothing at the mouth, cursing Gordy for conspiring to destroy Flo. “Motown killed my wife,” he was fond of saying, and the funeral and the Ross trust fund were “just publicity.”

In a very weird contention, Tony Tucker in
All That Glittered
claimed that Mary had agreed to interview Chapman in the mid-’80s to get “the whole story” about Flo for
Dreamgirl
, but all Tucker seemed to know was that Tommy had moved “down South” and that just before Wilson was to allegedly have met with him, Chapman was killed. “Somebody shot him in the head in a pool hall” was the story, setting in motion a new offshoot to the conspiracy theories in which Chapman had been

“silenced” after Gordy learned of the meeting.

What really happened, of course, was far more mundane. Chapman was working in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a city bus driver with a route in the area of the LSU campus. Occasionally he’d come back to Detroit to visit his daughters, and once in a while he sent them some money. City police records of the time do not include the violent 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 400

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murder of anyone named Thomas Chapman, and his boss at the bus company said Chapman died of a heart attack. What’s more, the Tucker tale—with its very shaky premise that Wilson, who despised Chapman, would have had anything to do with him for her book—

falls apart in light of the fact that Chapman apparently was still alive when
Dreamgirl
was published.

For the two surviving Supremes, life continued to be good but was by no means untouched by tragedy and personal problems.

Mary, inexorably, moved in the mid-’70s toward folding the faux Supremes, but not before they and two-thirds of HDH could dually execute a symbolic closure with Motown. In 1976, with almost no fanfare or even notice, Brian and Eddie Holland produced the group’s
High
Energy
album
.
Released on April Fool’s Day, just weeks after Florence Ballard’s death, the work yielded the single “I’m Gonna Let My Heart Do the Walking,” a disco number derivative of the Three Degrees; fronted by Payne and Greene, it went to No. 40 on the pop charts and No. 25 on the R&B charts—the girls’ final Top Forty hit—while the album performed respectably (42 on the pop charts, 24 on R&B). Fittingly, the Hollands then produced what would be the Supremes’ final studio album, the soggy
Mary, Scherrie & Susaye
; released in October, it consisted of more disco rhythms and violin-smothered ballads. None of its three singles rose higher than No. 85, while the album failed to chart at all.

Mary soon pulled the plug. Although Payne and Greene wanted to continue with a new member, Motown saw no sustainable upside, and since Gordy owned the name of the Supremes, it was over. With a tiny fraction of the bathos of the Frontier farewell to Ross, the Supremes’ final concert came in June 1977 at London’s Drury Lane Theater. There were no songs sung to Berry Gordy, no toasts, no big cake, and almost no tears.

Wilson was given a farewell gift of her own by Motown, an eponymous solo album, from which came a single, “Red Hot,” that reached No. 95 on the R&B charts and 85 on
Billboard
’s new dance-music charts in late ’79.

Ross’s star, of course, kept shining brightly, even though her overall record of achievement would play out in starts and stops. After hitting No. 1 on the charts for the last time at Motown with her 1981 duet 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 401

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with Lionel Richie, “Endless Love,” and a last movie role done for Gordy, the costly megaton bomb
The Wiz
(an “urban” re-telling of
The
Wizard of Oz
wherein 11-year-old Dorothy becomes a Harlem school-teacher), she jumped for a then-record $20 million contract with RCA.

But the returns were only so-so. None of her twenty singles through

’88 reached higher than the first, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” which hit No. 4, though she did ring up a platinum and two gold albums.

Her last RCA album,
Red Hot Rhythm and Blues
, tanked at No. 73—

sending her back to a dramatically downsized Motown in 1989.

Music had clearly become a secondary concern to Gordy in the mid-1970s, far behind the rush and Hollywood high-society requisite of making movies, despite the diminishing returns that had begun with only his second project,
Mahogany
, and the beating he took with
The
Wiz
, a high crime reviewed by
Time
as a “lyrical lemon.” As for the inspiration that made Motown—music—Gordy’s last serious attention came in the early ’70s when he said to hell with caution and formed the Black Forum label for racially/politically uncompromising, spoken-word albums, including Dr. Martin Luther King’s
Why
I Oppose the War in Vietnam
, Stokely Carmichael’s
Free Huey
, and Amiri Baraka’s
Black Spirits
. He also put out some of the era’s most visceral protest records with Edwin Starr’s raspy imprecation “War” and Marvin Gaye’s trilogy of plaintive social mourning (though Gordy originally resisted releasing “What’s Going On”). Paying Stevie Wonder a then-record $13 million to re-sign with Motown in 1971, he was rewarded with Wonder’s epochal and hugely successful synthesizer-laden pop-funk works like
Songs in the Key of Life
and
Innervisions
. He also created the expressly
white
, rock-oriented Rare Earth label, striking gold with R. Dean Taylor’s “Indiana Wants Me.” However, Motown was clearly atrophying by mid-decade, its roster of 100 acts in the late ’60s pared to half that. Gordy started to lose his biggest artists—first the Jackson 5, who bailed to CBS Records’ Epic label. Gaye would leave for Columbia. And, in the biggest kick to the head, in 1980, Diana Ross’s defection to RCA.

Motown lost more than its soul; with the exception of Stevie Wonder, it lost its family. For the self-congratulatory “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever” TV special on May 16, 1983, Ross, Gaye, and Michael Jackson (who’d electrify the nation by Moonwalking to “Billie 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 402

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Jean”) performed as a favor to Gordy. But the show would go on, not only without some seminal Motown acts, like the Marvelettes and Contours, but with some rather odd choices to perform classic Motown tunes: Linda Ronstadt, who at least had hit covers of “Ooo Baby, Baby” and “Tracks of My Tears,” and—to the astonishment of everyone—

British “new wave” singer Adam Ant, who murdered “Where Did Our Love Go.”

Diana, on her part, would only grudgingly do a turn with the Su -

premes, calling out Wilson and Birdsong from the wings and doing a drive-by rendition of “Someday We’ll Be Together”—or rather half of it before she suddenly shoved Mary out of her way, to an audible gasp from the audience. Evidently Motown people had suspected something like that could happen, because in a flash Smokey Robinson rushed onto the stage, on what Wilson would later call “a rescue mission,” cueing all the acts to get out there pronto and execute a feel-good ending, sung not to “Someday” but to the song Diana neatly switched to, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” Mary, foregoing the shove, got into the mood, yelling into a microphone, “Berry, come on down!” Hearing it, Diana, in pro-wrestling fashion, forced Mary’s hand down, pushing the microphone from her mouth, and yelling into her own the same instruction. When Gordy arrived, Ross waylaid him, letting go of him only momentarily, and giving his ass little pinches.

Upon reaching Wilson, he jested, “You finally learned how to sing, huh?” Ross then closed the show by climbing onto a platform above the rest of the cast before scampering back down to the very center of the stage for media pictures of the group.

It was classic “bad Diana,” and while her abuse of Wilson was carefully excised from the tape when the show ran, it left Wilson feeling

“hurt and angry. What a terrible way to end an evening, a career, a friendship.” Ross had, she wrote in her memoir, “done many things to hurt, humiliate and upset me,” though she hastened to addend,

“strangely enough, I still love her and am proud of her.”

“Motown 25” also provided one of the saddest footnotes to Motown history. None of the Funk Brothers were recognized and James Jamerson, who had virtually created the Motown “sound” with his ungodly bass licks, asked for a ticket and was refused. Dissipated by time and alcohol, he had suffered a mortal blow recently when his Sunburst Fender Precision bass—the only electric bass he’d used on hundreds of Motown sessions—was stolen from his home. He hadn’t played a date in years, and on the rare occasions he spoke of his past he would say 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 403

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only that he’d “done all that Motown shit.” Nearly broke, he bought a ticket to the show and watched from the balcony, unknown, as the songs he made immortal were given tribute. A few weeks later, on August 2, 1983, he died at 45 of cirrhosis of the liver, heart failure, and pneumonia, and was not given his due until 2000, when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“Motown 25” can be thought of as Berry Gordy’s last rites. Only five years later, with Motown in disarray and coughing red ink, he un-loaded it to the L.A. entertainment conglomerate MCA for $61 million, conceding that if he didn’t sell, Motown would fold and he’d be damned if he was going to wind up like his boyhood hero Joe Louis—

“just another nigger who made it to the top and died broke,” crowing in
To Be Loved
about his rise “[f ]rom eight hundred dollars to sixty-one million. I had done it. I had won the poker hand.” For him it was the good life now: days spent mainly at the country clubs of Bel-Air, a glass of Cristal or a nine-iron in his hand, or at the Playboy Mansion with fellow big-shots David Geffen and Quincy Jones. Shortly after the sale he married a third time, to Grace Easton, but typically, the marriage began to disintegrate almost immediately after the nuptials—another propitious bit of timing for the cash-out, as would be his 1993 sale of Jobete Publishing to EMI for $132 million.

For Motown, life wouldn’t be so good. Aside from Suzanne DePasse’s multi-award-winning TV miniseries about the Jackson 5 and the Temptations, MCA was said to treat Motown “like a Third World country.” In 1993, $24 million in the red, Motown was sold to PolyGram, subsequently wending a serpentine path via Seagram to a home in the Universal Music Group. And while things took a turn for the better there, with young acts like Brian McKnight, Erykah Badu, Mya, and Yummy Bingham helping to turn its first profit in a decade, for Motown there will never be a real renaissance, only a higher (or lower) bottom line. With Gordy in his 80s and far removed from any imperative except
la dolce vita
, Motown—like its top-selling act of all time—can only be appreciated in the past tense.

Diana Ross—hailed by MCA executives as “the queen returning home”—was given stock in MCA that carried over to PolyGram and Universal, but has failed to register a single Top Forty pop hit since 1981, compiling only scattered lightweight R&B hits such as “Workin’

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Overtime” in ’89 and her ’91 duet with hip-hop star Al B. Sure, “No Matter What You Do.” Her 2007 “I Love You” world tour was a financial and critical success. But her albums sold more poorly than any she’d recorded in the last twenty years.

Not that Diana Ross needs record sales to keep her diva status intact. Now fabled is her 1983 free concert in New York’s Central Park (on the outskirts of which she has long kept an apartment), when after a downpour rousted her from the stage in mid-show she returned the following day to complete it; today, a playground in the park is named for her. Neither is she hurting for money. In her mid-60s, she has a net worth of an estimated $150 million. The only thing she lacks is a husband.

In 1985, having careened from actor Ryan O’Neal to—comically—

tongue-flicking, blood-gurgling KISS rocker Gene Simmons, she married multimillionaire Norwegian shipping magnate Arne Naess Jr., had two sons, and began living a lifestyle so crazily excessive that even Naess would complain of her profligate spending, which included $25,000

a week on private jets, $20,000 a month to rent private homes, and $50,000 a month on clothing. They separated in 1999 and a year later divorced in the Dominican Republic.

Ross became a running joke in the tabloids. In October 1999, while being searched by a female airport security officer, she slapped her and was arrested and released with a warning. Three years later, she had a hitch in Malibu’s Promises drug and alcohol rehabilitation center

“to clear up some personal issues.” Then a year after, she was busted for “extreme DUI” in Tucson, Arizona. During a breath test, it was reported, she fell down laughing while trying to stand on one leg and count to ten. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.20 percent, more than twice the limit, but drew only a misdemeanor charge and a slap on the wrist.

In 1996, her younger brother Arthur (“T-Boy”) Ross and his wife were found suffocated to death in their Michigan home. Two men were charged with murder, and according to cops the crime was drug-related.

Eight years later, on February 2, 2004, Arne Naess Jr. fell to his death while climbing in the mountains near Cape Town, South Africa.

Mary Wilson kept herself busy through the years, plying her faded fame to keep singing in nightclubs while raising three children by Pedro Ferrer, whom she divorced in 1981 after absorbing numerous beatings that 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 405