The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (23 page)

For the rest of the crowd, it would be strictly potluck as to billing order; if any of them had a breakout hit along the way, they’d get on the marquees, too, and higher placements along with their pictures in newspaper ads and on the theater-lobby placards and cardboard, fight-show-style flyers posted by the promoters. Gordy also instituted the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 116

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“crowd rule,” by which an act pulling the most fevered audience response each night would get billing for the next show—the intention being to make everyone bust a gut on stage trying to top everyone else, but which also turned allies into enemies, sparking horrible arguments about who scored higher. Not that Gordy cared a whit about the personal consequences—in fact, he loved such acrimony, figuring it made the acts more intense on stage.

The historical curiosity of the first Motortown Revue was that when the bus shoved off, some of the company’s biggest acts of all time were mere throw-ins, with little hope of attaining billing. In this bottom drawer were no less than Marvin Gaye and Little Stevie Wonder.

Martha and the Vandellas, with no hit record for another year, went mainly to continue their work as Gaye’s backup singers. At the Apollo gig, there would be a group half-composed of the remnants of Milton Jenkins’s Primes—Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams—who after the Primes’ breakup joined the Distants’ Otis Williams and Melvin Franklin to form the Elgins. Signed to Motown in ’61 and renamed the Temptations, they had spun their wheels ever since; now, the group would be called to the Apollo shows just to back up Mary Wells.

And then there were Ross, Wilson, and Ballard, who, despite Gordy’s attentions and affections—or because of them—had begun hearing that people around Motown were, with great pleasure, ragging them as the “No-Hit Supremes.” Yet, even that insult wasn’t as scalding as the indignities they faced on the tour, when, far from the marquees, the only place they could find the name “the Supremes” was on the flyers, in the smallest type, thrown in with the other nonentities under the collective heading “And Others.” Another marker of also-ran status was that they were regularly chosen to open shows, flitting out on stage amid the clutter of people shuffling to their seats and conversations that didn’t end when they began singing. This was the “graveyard” of slots, its only importance being to warm up the crowd for the “real” acts.

At the first show of the tour, October 26 at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., they may as well not have been there. They nervously ran through a stillborn rendition of the just-released “Let Me Go the Right Way,” with Diane doing her bug-eyed mugging to almost no reaction before exiting—the who-cares acts being permitted no more than one song per show. As it happened, Gordy was in the back of the hall that night, making a surprise drop-in to check out the concert, and pronounced the Supremes a total failure—admittedly, with his song a big reason why.

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Following them, the Vandellas by contrast riveted all in the house, and got everyone up and dancing. Indeed, when stacked up beside nearly every other act, the Supremes suffered, and even looked out of place. The Motortown Revue was a wild affair, a worthy throwback to the frenetic R&B traveling circuses of the ’50s, and the precious, brittle quality and rather faint pulse of the three girls from the projects didn’t seem to belong.

Part of this was Gordy’s fault. On the surface, his selection of material for them was faulty, but the reason why was deeper than merely a matter of picking wrong. It was his unwillingness to let them get down and dirty, or try to. In live-music formats like this, the form and function of music were tethered to sex. It was Gordy who, glowingly, once explained that Smokey Robinson’s immense appeal for swooning girls—and their mothers—had to do with how he figuratively “made love to the women” by singing while falling to his knees or lying on the floor, hips undulating. Of course, at
his
first gig, the disaster at the Apollo, Smokey had been a bust, too. But whereas Berry had approved of injecting Elvis-style sexual gymnastics into his act, he was so guilty about lusting for Diane Ross that such a transformation was unthinkable for the Supremes. The best tack for them, he determined for far too long, was to perform “like ladies.”

Accordingly, since it was he who guided them, and with his investment in them so personal, Gordy was not about to let them wash out.

He and Barney Ales moved the earth to get “Let Me Go the Right Way” played and sold, and though all that their work bought was another fleeting visit to the pop chart—No. 90 around Thanksgiving time—the song did hit No. 26 on the R&B chart. Whether this was the product of Ross’s easy transition from bland to raw and emotive yearning, the mesh of Wilson’s deep resonant wails, and Ballard’s top-end, gospel-style flourishes, or just something as magical as James Jamerson’s frisky bass licks, the showing was an affirmation that a genuine soul breathed beneath the frigid veneer and stiff moves of the Supremes.

They’d get better, too; more at ease at each show. But this was generally overlooked, obscured by the breakout acts. First were the Contours, a bump-and-grind, leather-lunged sextet with an old-school R&B sensibility—and a reputation as incorrigibly lecherous. They had recently cut a deliriously lewd, and loud, song called “Do You Love Me,” which Gordy had written for the Temptations but produced on a whim with the Contours; in October, pimped by the tour, it caught fire and went No. 3 pop, 1 R&B. The rich also got richer, with Mary Wells’s 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 118

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“Two Lovers” and the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” both nestling in the pop Top Ten by the new year. The Marvelettes’

third smash, “Beechwood 4-5789,” co-written by Marvin Gaye, went Top Twenty.

It was Gaye who really was the Revue’s cause célèbre. After an odd, and failed, album of Broadway show covers and jazz fare, his first R&B-flavored song, the autobiographical “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” crashed into the R&B Top Ten, fueled by word of mouth of his electrifying, blatantly lascivious performances, his groaning, cooing, and pelvic thrusts making Smokey’s “lovemaking” seem subdued. Teenage girls, and their mothers, couldn’t help but mob the handsome singer on stage and outside his dressing room—an irony considering that Gaye, unlike his brother-in-law who often thought with his fly, was actually shy about sex and dutifully monogamous to Anna Gordy Gaye.

Watching from the wings as audiences lost control when nearly everyone else performed, the Supremes reacted along the usual lines.

While Mary and Flo were swept up in the shared sense of excitement, dancing in place and clapping to the music, Diane stood without motion or expression, envious of the others and frustrated that her group seemed not to belong on the same stage. And she simply detested their relegation to the “And Others” compartment.

“She was really offended by that,” recalls Marvelette Katherine Anderson, “and she took it out on everyone else—mostly us. She’d give us that same sourpuss look, make little cutting remarks about our clothes—

which were a lot better than theirs—things like that, which she had no right to do because they weren’t exciting anybody on stage. But, to Diane, she wanted to be great so bad she convinced herself she was.” During the tour, Ross apparently believed it was her responsibility to be Gordy’s eyes and ears. “Whatever Diane saw going on on the bus, she reported back to Berry,” Anderson laughed. “If the guys were playing cards for money, or if a guy was making out with a girl, she’d call him from the next stop and blab it. I mean, come on. Who made her the keeper of our morality—this is
Diana Ross
we’re talking about!” Gordy evidently took such tattling from the road seriously. When he flew to greet the flock at periodic stops along the route, he’d sternly repeat the same lecture, particularly about the sexual hijinks, which of course did nothing to cool it. Despite the prying eyes of Ross, Esther 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 119

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Edwards, and two other matrons, the Motortown Revue was a hormonal buffet. According to Mary Wilson, the wanderers “were pairing off before we’d crossed the Michigan state line.” Gordy, she added,

“could have saved his breath. We were too young and too excited to care about the consequences.” Among the hottest pairings were Gladys Horton and Contour Hubert Johnson, and Wanda Young and Miracle Bobby Rogers. It’s possible, too, that Ross snitched on her own groupmates, since Mary got into it with Eddie Kendricks, and Flo rekindled things with Otis Williams, though both men were married.

But Diane had her own impulses, trained on a now-extinguished flame. Throughout the trek, she was, wrote Wilson, “eyeing Smokey,” perhaps seeking a way to circumvent Claudette. Several times, Diane, who always felt trapped with the chaff on the fetid bus, begged the Miracles to let her come with them in their car, complaining about having to ride with the “nobodies.” Smokey, very much aware of his wife’s presence, shooed Diane away.

Continually fretting, she was frequently in tears about the Supremes’

unappreciated performances—and her spirits probably weren’t lifted when Gordy, during one or another of his drop-ins, would board the bus en route to its next stop. Instead of easing into the seat she told people she was saving for him next to her, he’d amble to the back—

“Harlem,” as the grizzled musicians waggishly dubbed their “restricted” turf, as opposed to the front where the performers camped in

“Broadway”—and become lost in the madness of escalating poker jackpots. Once, he dropped five grand to Choker Campbell, without blink-ing an eye. A man who could sneeze at five grand clearly had other things on his mind than sitting with Diane Ernestine Ross.

The Motortown Revue presented a strange yin-yang between discovery and disgust. As the autumn temperatures fell in the Northeast during the first leg of the tour, the bus heater sputtered and died. With the windows jammed shut, the collective stench of nauseating gas and exhaust fumes, junk food, endless cigar (and sometimes reefer) smoke from “Harlem,” and forty-five humans unbathed for days on end became unbearable. And for the girls there was the added discomfort of having to keep on their beehive wigs and makeup, even in the middle of the night, Esther Gordy having decreed that the Motown ladies must always be kempt and “in character” in public.

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The rigors of this cattle-call was too much for the Marvelettes’

Juanita Cowert, who suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after the tour ended and was hospitalized, forcing her to quit the group. Tempers often flared, in one instance precipitating a fistfight between several members of the Temptations and Contours over the divided affections of a woman.

Little Stevie Wonder, who would choose the wee hours to practice his harmonica, had to stop when people trying to sleep unceremoniously threatened to stick the harmonica where the moon don’t shine.

“I don’t think any of us were prepared for the hardships,” says the Vandellas’ Annette Beard. “Every few days we’d stay at some dive motel and get to wash our clothes, shower, and stay in bed all day. Then Beans or Esther would say, ‘It’s time to go,’ and it was back on the treadmill.

You put a lot of people in that situation and things are gonna get edgy.

And Diane, I remember, never enjoyed herself. I think Diane was born edgy. I mean, most of us tried to put aside the hardships. We were away from home, singing every night, seeing different places. It was exciting.

We didn’t need to be brought down by someone sitting there with a long face.”

Mary and Flo apparently felt the same. They kept a distance from Ross, and when she’d get into one of her hissy fits with one of the other girls, they’d slink low into their seats so they wouldn’t have to take her side, though Wilson in her autobiography makes a passive, halfway stab at the notion that she and Ballard “would get caught in the middle” and

“admit—privately—who was right in a spat, and it wasn’t always Diane.

But she was in our group, and solidarity was crucial, right or wrong.” However, solidarity on the tour looked like this: Wilson and Ballard each sitting with other people, and Ross sitting by herself, either staring out the window at the Miracles in their car or staring bullets at her foil Gladys Horton. The latter, a feisty girl of Virgin Island descent, would stare back, leading onlookers to make wagers about how long it would be before Horton pounced on Ross like a linebacker.

The Supremes, as with all but the top few acts, were salaried at $290 a week for the tour, but owing to Gordy’s typical economic tricks they actually were given no more than $10 a week by Beans Bowles. With the Supremes unable to afford glitzy dresses of the kind the Marvelettes and Mary Wells wore, Diane began to get sneaky trying to even the scales.

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ground and counsel the other girls not to wear the dresses she knew they looked the best in.

Other times, it wasn’t their clothing she envied as much as their onstage moves. Devising a devious way to benefit from the Supremes’

opening-act albatross, she would watch all the acts from the wings and take to Mary and Flo the “new” moves she thought of—generally the slickest moves she could cull from the other acts, which the Supremes couldn’t do nearly as well. Gordy, recalling this artifice, bluntly told
Rolling Stone
in 1973 that Ross “stole everybody’s act,” and that the victims of the thievery—as Ross knew—would either look “ridiculous” coming out after them and doing the same moves or cede them altogether to the Supremes, and then need to “change their shows every day” to stay fresh. As a result, he said, “they all hated her guts.” This kind of byplay became more and more trivial as the itinerary moved from the relatively friendly geography of Boston, New Haven, and Buffalo and headed due south, a day later crossing the Rubicon of the Mason-Dixon Line. As halting and bitter as racial progress was throughout most of the South, few believed this phase of the journey would be without incident, or even calamity. Indeed, though no one knew it, not a soul would have been surprised to learn that the worst of last-ditch Jim Crow resistance was yet to come; still down that road, in Mississippi, were the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963 and of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, whose bodies were dragged from the Bogue Chitto swamp a year later. As it was, the traces of real and brutal enough horrors were all around; later, when the bus would pass through Lynchburg, Mississippi, Martha Reeves once recalled, some among them recognized from the history books the infamous “Hanging Tree,” on which hundreds of blacks perished. “There was not a leaf on it,” she said, seeming to buttress the legend that no leaves had grown on it for twenty years.