The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (15 page)

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intercom: “One more time, girls.” During the encore, he murmured to Bateman, “That girl sings through her nose, but there’s something about her.”

Not enough “something,” however, to overrule his instincts, which told him they weren’t ready for his shop. Janie Bradford, who stood next to him in the control booth because Gordy frequently asked her opinion of prospective new acts, was even less impressed.

“They were all cute and clean-cut and all, but they sounded just so-so,” she says. “They were just another teenage group to me, nothing spectacular the way the Temptations were when they came in.

They had a cute little sound. I thought that Flo was the one who stood out. She had a very strong, very good voice, but it was nothing unusual in the commercial sense. I’ll just say there was no Aretha Franklin among them.”

Gordy, too, was cautious about girl-group acts, not having signed a single one yet. In fact, the only females on the Motown roster were Mable John (who doubled as his driver) and a new girl, 17-year-old Mary Wells, whom Bateman had found and Gordy signed up because she could also write songs, and who came in with one she’d originally intended for Jackie Wilson called “Bye Bye Baby.” So while he had no reason to make the Primettes the third such act, he definitely saw them in terms of the future.

“I could tell what he was thinking,” Bradford believes. “He liked them but he’d dealt with parents of young girls before, all the crap with the contracts, stage mothers, all that. He just wanted to put them on hold and wait for them to grow up a little and then come back when they were better.”

Wanting to let them down easily, he first announced himself “very impressed” with their performance—making their hearts flutter and leading an exuberant Ross to ask, “Are you going to sign us now?” Stifling a laugh, he pointedly asked them their ages, not really caring what the specific numbers were, and then quickly told them, “I want you to come back when you finish school,” barely finishing the sentence before he was halfway out the door.

The Primettes believed, correctly, that it was nothing but an excuse to be rid of them—no more than what Wilson later called a purely

“business decision.” And while they all felt as if they’d fallen through those loose floorboards, all of them “heartbroken,” as Ross has recalled, here is where some truth must be sorted out. According to the un authorized 1989 Diana Ross biography
Call Her Miss Ross
by J. Randy 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 69

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Taraborrelli, Flo was so offended by Gordy’s kiss-off that she finally revealed the conversation she’d had with Bateman at the Detroit/Windsor International Freedom Festival; angrily pointing a finger at him, she snapped, “But, hey! We won the contest. That guy there, he said to come down here [and] now you’re telling us you don’t want us? What kind of stuff is that?”

At that, Gordy was said to have strode over to Ballard and growled at her, “Get lost.” Then, after the girls were shooed out, a livid Ross up-braided Ballard for keeping the secret, which Flo justified with an icy, condescending, “
I
decide for the Primettes.” The problem with this melodramatic account is that no part of it appears in the writings of Ross, Wilson, Gordy, or anyone else (Wilson, again, claims that no one from Motown approached any of the Pri -

mettes at the festival), nor in Bateman’s memory pan. And while a
Miss
Ross
endnote cites supporting, but unquoted, interviews with Ross and Ballard in the ’70s, and with Janie Bradford, the latter becomes nearly apoplectic in smacking down all of it.

“Hell no! Nothing like that ever happened! They were just
teen -

agers
! Why would a grown man talk to a girl like that, tell her to get lost? People come up with bullshit stories like that all the time, ’cause it sounds good. But, come on, why would Flo get in anyone’s face like that? Shit, Motown was the first recording company in Detroit. Kids would have done anything to get into Motown. And the fact that Berry invited them back, that speaks for itself. That was worth everything to those girls. Of course they were disappointed, but they knew they’d be welcomed back.”

Indeed, it’s improbable that following such histrionics they would have stuck around Motown—as they did, drinking in the vibes, making themselves known to the crew, and trying to fit in. As Bradford suggests, they construed Gordy’s future invitation as proof that they’d someday soon be in.

For Ross, the emerging dynamic went a little further. Berry Gordy, she recalled coyly years after—using, tellingly, the first person—“had definitely not seen the last of me. In fact, it was quite clear to me that the relationship had only just begun.”

Unlike Gordy, Robert Bateman and Richard Morris weren’t prepared to wait on the Primettes. Scotching the “graduate first” hooey, they offered 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 70

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their services at once, angling for their own purposes to get the group.

At the time, Gordy had not yet established the unwritten but implicit Motown code that enjoined anyone in the Motown “family” to spread their work around to other record companies in town—at least openly enough that Gordy could find out about it, in which case he might cut the offender out of the loop. In 1960, any of his underlings were free to make a few bucks outside the walls on West Grand Boulevard, and Bateman and Morris did so with the Primettes, shopping them around.

Morris also displaced Jesse Greer as their manager, using his connections with the club owners to put the group into shows at the Graystone Ballroom and the Twenty Grand.

These were fairly big shows, too. The latter, for example, had them on a bill with the Falcons—whose song “You’re So Fine,” released on the local Flick label and subsequently picked up by United Artists, went Top Twenty in 1959—and a young rasp-throated, gospel-R&B singer, Wilson Pickett, soon to join the Falcons himself. Both the Falcons and Pickett recorded for and were managed by Bob West, a real mover who cut deals like it was second nature—many with Gordy, who had recently hired West’s national record distribution company, B&H Music, to move Motown product to markets outside of Detroit. West also sold two Falcons sides to Anna Records. West is an overlooked but important R&B figure, having elevated to immortality not only Pickett but Falcons member Eddie Floyd—who happened to be West’s nephew. (West himself had a cursed future; a few years later, he got into a tiff with Herman Griffin, the husband of Mary Wells, Motown’s first female star, at which point Griffin pulled out a gun and shot West in the face, taking out one of his eyes. West recovered but quit the music business and moved to Las Vegas, where he lived until his death in 1983.) And, of course, West was a way station for the immortal Supremes, who as the Primettes were pitched to him by Morris in the late summer of 1960. By then they had acquired some tentative studio recording experience, when Bateman began a small label with fellow Satintone Sonny Sanders called Son-Bert Records and put them to work doing background vocals on several songs by Gino Washington. West then signed them to his new LuPine Records label, which he created for the Falcons (not, as Mary Wilson has claimed, for the Primettes). West’s interest, too, was to use them for background flavor, and he hired them for what would be a profusion of flop records, including a few that Pickett and Floyd would have preferred not to remember a decade later—

Pickett’s “Let Me Be Your Boy” and Floyd’s “I’m Your Yo Yo Man,” and 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 71

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other historical obscurities such as Gene Martin’s “Lonely Nights,” James Velvet’s “Bouquet of Flowers,” Al Garner’s “All I Need Is You,” James Dee’s “My Pride,” and Don Revel’s “The Return of Stagger Lee.” West also allowed Morris to cut some Primettes sides, which turned out to be two songs Morris had written, “Tears of Sorrow” and “Pretty Baby.” Morris had already produced the instrumental track for the first of these at Motown, and for the vocals and the “Pretty Baby” track he brought the girls, two more female backup singers, and a band of seven musicians—including Benny Benjamin on drums and Marvin Tarplin on guitar—to West’s Flick-Contour Studio on Forest Street in early September. The result was primitive pop fare, “Pretty Baby” with a fairly flat lead vocal by Wilson buoyed by Ballard’s high-pitched hic-cupping, and “Tears” with a tepid Ross lead nearly buried by “bop shoo bop” choruses—something that may not have been accidental. Because Diane kept harping on how she wanted to sing the lead, picking arguments with Morris about it, Richie may have made her pay for it, in vanity, by mixing her vocals so low that it seemed as if Flo was actually singing lead.

West put both tracks out on the same record, LuPine 120, with

“Tears of Sorrow” on the A-side and “Pretty Baby” on the flip. But it never moved and Wilson has her own theory why, mentioning in her memoir that just as Bob West’s B&H Music had begun to distribute it the company became implicated in a local payola scandal. As a result, the record was stillborn. That may have been the case, but the primary reason is likely that the songs bit it. Wilson can’t disagree, passing them off as “typical girl-group pop records” with “self-pitying lyrics about the boy who got away.” But even with their quick death, having a record out—and, for a short time, hearing it played on the radio—was exhilarating.

It also, easily, might have ended right then and there. Not only because West’s influence was suddenly undercut, meaning that future LuPine records would be problematic, but also because reality began to slap down the reveries of fame.

First, only days later, Betty broke the news that she was getting married, a shocker given that she’d only recently broken up with Paul Williams. A bigger shock was that she said she was quitting the group.

If this seemed to be cause and effect, the actual cause may instead have been that Betty simply had had enough of Diane Ross.

In the last hectic year, Ross had only become thornier toward all involved. Richard Morris, the newcomer, had already gotten embroiled 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 72

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with her, not just with her vocals. At the clubs where he’d book the Primettes, he took pains to keep them (and the owners) out of trouble, constantly reminding them not to mingle with the audience of mainly adult men. But Diane would defy him. At a Graystone Ballroom gig, she bounded from the stage in mid-song and began dancing with a man who had attracted her gaze. When Morris tried to pry them apart, she sneeringly told him, “Go fuck yourself, Richie.” Helpless, he had no choice but to turn to Betty, the only one in or around the group whom Diane feared. Seeing his hand signal, Betty came down from the stage, heatedly scolded Ross, and got her back on the stage. Often, McGlown had to set her straight when Ross wouldn’t accept Morris’s judgments on those vocals and demanded to sing lead.

There were Ross moments no one could control, however, more so after she used her earnings from her job at Hudson’s to attend modeling school classes on Saturday mornings. She not only began strutting around like Coco Chanel but seemingly derived pleasure from making the group an adjunct to her fashionable self. For example, she’d agree that they would all wear matching outfits to a gig, then show up for it in a different, more chic outfit. She’d half-heartedly make the excuse that she’d “forgotten,” but didn’t seem to mind a bit that she had hung the other three out to dry—and that as the “standout” she’d naturally have to take most of the leads while they’d have to be the backing group. Several times, as well, she called in sick just before a rehearsal, angering Morris.

Wilson has opined that Ross’s “stubbornness about certain things was almost childlike,” but on further review her antics seem to have been measured for size, each a premeditated control game meant to send a message—and, at its core, a means to an end. And this was not something she made any great effort to disguise, as the observations of the formative Miss Ross by Claudette Rogers and Janie Bradford attest.

Already, the difference between Ross and the rest was palpable: If Flo wasn’t happy sharing leads and trading zingers with Diane, she was able to put the group first and smile—a code of conduct that for Mary Wilson was of course
de rigueur
, which is why she can freely admit that she’d always been content to merely “play on the team.” Not so Ross.

“With hindsight,” Wilson would say after decades of Ross tumult,

“one can see that Diane had a plan.”

For her part, McGlown had been counting the minutes until she could leave, neither desiring nor expecting a fairy-tale life beyond a husband and family. Indeed, seeing that Betty really didn’t give a whit about the whole thing led Diane to her obeisance, not wanting to be 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 73

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the cause of her leaving, though in the end that may have been exactly the case. And even if it wasn’t, even if Betty had simply decided it was time to live in the world of reality, she undoubtedly was relieved that she’d no longer have to play nanny to a brat.

And so, just like that, McGlown was gone, never to look back at or have a pang of regret about it. But this was only one concussion that buffeted the Primettes that fall. A more potentially devastating—and portentous—one remained, which would make McGlown’s departure all but trivial.

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SUPREME

BEINGS

In November 1960, a whiff of optimism and epochal change was in the air, even the air around Paradise Valley. A young, new president had just been elected by a slim margin, with Detroit’s heavily black and labor vote pushing Michigan’s twenty electoral votes into John F.

Kennedy’s column. Over on West Grand Boulevard, meanwhile, another new-wave president, Berry Gordy Jr., had found his breakout song. Written by Smokey Robinson, it was the bridge between R&B