The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (24 page)

Uneasy and tense as they eased down Tobacco Road, making stops for shows in Raleigh, Charleston, Augusta, and Savannah, there were the requisite obstacles Gordy had told them to expect, the crude “nigger” remarks, the restaurants that refused them service, the locked doors of the “white” service-station bathrooms. Such moments, however, could have an uplifting ending; in South Carolina, decamping at a motel on a brutally hot day, Diane, an accomplished swimmer and diver, got the idea to put on shorts and take a dip in the pool, wig and all.

Following her lead, about a dozen Motown performers jumped in with her. They were happily splashing around, unaware that the all-white 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 122

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guests had clambered out of the pool rather than share it with “those niggers.” Upon hearing that the savages were actually Motown stars, several actually returned and asked for autographs.

Things turned darker when on November 9 the tour hit the Deep South. In Birmingham, Martha Reeves, thinking she heard gunshots outside the bus, dove for cover between two seats. Others twitted her, insisting the noise must have been firecrackers. Then, when the bus parked at the National Guard Armory for the show—a landmark event, as it would be played to the first integrated audience in the city’s history—the driver got out and noticed two holes in the “Motor Town Tour” sign on the side. Looking closely, he dug out two bullets.

There are several versions of this incident, which has become etched into Motown’s legend, usually with a dollop of theatrical license.

Some recall it happening as the troupe was leaving the bus, causing a stampede off. In Mary Wilson’s take, it was during the time they were boarding after the show; when people heard what they thought was the sound of rocks hitting the side of the bus, Choker Campbell called out,

“Them’s bullets!”—touching off a mad scramble to get
on
—and Mary Wells, who had fallen on the bus steps, moaned, “I’m shot! I’m shot!” as she was nearly trampled. In any case, once they were all safely inside, Wilson said, “We flew out of Birmingham.”

After one-nighters in Columbus, Atlanta, Mobile, and New Orleans, they rolled into Mississippi. In Jackson, where Medgar Evers lived and would be gunned down on his doorstep, Gordy’s worst nightmare seemed to be playing out when after ten straight hours on the road the bus pulled into a gas station. As the riders piled off and made for the bathroom, the redneck owner of the station got in the way and drawled, “Y’all niggers better get out of here.”

“Who you calling nigger?” barked Miracle Bobby Rogers.

At that, the owner went and got a double-barreled shotgun, sending the group running for their lives back to the bus. Who knows what might have happened next had not two cars carrying state troopers been cruising the highway and its occupants not seen the commotion and turned into the station. Of course, the presence of Mississippi cops didn’t necessarily bode well for interloping blacks involved in disputes with the locals. And, even now, they were hardly ready to intervene on the outsiders’ behalf. Rather, listening to the owner complain that

“these niggers are trying to take over my station” and Rogers explain that they just wanted to use the can, the troopers just stood by, not knowing what to do.

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As the minutes ticked by, Flo Ballard, a natural mediator, took the redneck aside and convinced him to let them at least use a hose and a bucket to relieve themselves, prehistoric style. One by one, according to Ballard in the book
Call Her Miss Ross
, “someone would do his business in the bucket, come back out, empty it behind the gas station in the woods and clean out the bucket for the next person using the hose. [It]

made me wonder if I wanted to be a star after all.” Finally, the cops decided that if they wouldn’t act in the name of justice, they would in the name of peace. They escorted the visitors back onto the bus and the two police cars escorted it out of town, with all on board—and one man in Detroit—relieved in another sense: that they were all in one piece.

These tense moments seemed particularly unnerving for Ross.

About the only ones who didn’t seem frightened were some of the veteran musicians who had been down this road before in years past—

every reason why many of them kept their own pistols close at hand whenever the bus broke down, which was often, and they would have been ready to use them if the shotgun-totin’ pump boy pulled the trigger first. The irony was that, unlike most of the Motown artists, both Diane and Mary had visited the Deep South themselves, Diane on her summer trips to be with relatives in Bessemer, Alabama, while Mary, only months before, had traveled to Greenville, Mississippi, to be with her long-estranged father when John Wilson became gravely ill, then once again for his funeral. While they’d not encountered any problems, both Supremes were under no delusions about the South. Still, Diane, naively, was under the impression that because these black entertainers were a popular attraction in the South, they would somehow be accepted. Certainly, the benign swimming pool episode in South Carolina had reinforced that impression.

Now, frazzled by the bullet holes, white trash with shotguns, and endless “nigger” invective, she grew more withdrawn, even paranoid.

Bobby Rogers recalled that she was “wide-eyed and scared shitless.” All three Supremes, he went on, were “just waiting to see who was gonna get killed first.”

“These damn whites in the South are
crazy
,” Ballard would quote Ross as saying, and with a new sense of outrage. “What makes them think they’re better than us?”

Given the hard slap of reality the tour engendered, it strains credulity that Ross apparently
forgot
the Motortown Revue in her memoirs, or thought it unworthy of mention. She does, briefly, cite the “sniper” incident, but misplaced the location as Macon, Georgia, and the tour as 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 124

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the 1964 Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. All too brief, as well, is her toss-off cerebration about the dark heart of racism, which she confined to all of two sentences: “In some Southern towns, you could just feel the big-otry in the air. You could slice it with a knife like stinking cheese,” adding only the visceral detail that “[w]e had to squat beside the bus and pee in the bushes.”

This omission is especially grievous since the Revue would see the Supremes on the sacred boards of the Apollo Theater during the tour’s penultimate stop, for a week of shows starting December 7. Such a milestone is not unlike a ballplayer brushing off the first game he played at Yankee Stadium as piffling. In fact, that place in the sun was even more emotionally charged than it might normally have been, as it was shrouded by tragedy.

Early on the morning of November 20—Thanksgiving Day—in Greensville, South Carolina, Beans Bowles and a roadie named Eddie McFarland got into one of the cars and drove ahead of the company to do advance work at the next stop, in Tampa. Both men had been drinking at an all-night party at the motel and, soon after leaving, McFarland fell asleep at the wheel and the station wagon plowed head-on into a truck, shearing off the entire front end of the car. McFarland was killed instantly and Bowles, riding in the back seat, was trapped in the wreck-age and when pulled out was barely alive, both of his legs and one of his arms mangled, a flute that he’d been holding pushed through his armpit and jutting from the back of his neck. (Amazingly, a satchel with $12,000 in cash, proceeds from the last show, was recovered in pristine condition.)

When the bus got to Tampa hours later, Esther Edwards was told of the accident and broke the news to the stunned company. Right up until the time of the show as people milled about, crying and shaking their heads, there was serious discussion between Berry and Esther about whether to cancel the remainder of the tour and just come home.

Esther also conducted a brief inquisition about the party and who might have plied the two men with drinks, but let it slide. The tour would go on, with the participants spending a sad Thanksgiving far from home and suddenly little to be thankful for, other than that Bowles was alive and would pull through. (Gordy, in his memoirs, tells of keeping a bedside vigil for Eddie McFarland for days until he died—

though McFarland had been decapitated in the horrific crash.) The determining factor in the continuation of the Revue may well have been the Apollo gig. Indeed, Gordy, who had made plans to record 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 125

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and film one of the shows there for a live album and movie feature, was only days after the accident prepping the troops in Florida for the eleven-day marathon of shows at the Harlem showcase. That would be a real grind—there would be six shows
a day
over that week and a half, the first kicking off at noon each day and the last ending at 1 A.M. Displeased by the reports of partying, drinking, and waning enthusiasm on stage, Gordy minced no words: No more parties, no more clandestine carrying on, at the risk of being sent home. Horrified at seeing one of the Marvelettes chewing gum on stage at a recent show, he warned that there would be no similar sullying of Motown’s “high-class” image.

Snaking back up north with stops in the Carolinas, Louisville, and Richmond, the tour took on a new sense of focus. On stage, the performers were tighter; only time-proven moves and prefabricated banter with the audience were permitted. It would be up to them to stay pro-grammed and still emote a sense of wild, uninhibited glee. For Ross, Wilson, and Ballard, that equation was a tall order. They tried to hone their dance steps, tepid as they were, and to get more folksy and less perfunctory, but it never seemed to work quite right, not with the two minutes they had to do it in.

Not having been to New York before, when they arrived and checked in with the company at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, they seemed a tad overwhelmed. As much as Gordy had warned everyone about how rough Apollo audiences could be, they weren’t ready for the rough treatment they got on the
street
. On opening day, when the bus rolled up to the theater and the troupe began lining up at the stage door, a guard greeted them by asking, “Who the hell are you black motherfuckers?” Annoyed passersby trying to get through the crowd of people on the street saw the “Motor Town” sign on the bus and hissed at the “Detroit niggers.” Once inside, those who hadn’t previously seen the place reeled at the grimy interior of the old theater. Rats scurried around, walls were peeling and covered with filth, the whole place smelled like a bus terminal bathroom. Some of the performers were assigned dressing rooms that required a five-story climb up a narrow staircase. Expecting a Taj Mahal of their heritage, they found a mau-soleum, with few appreciating the romance of grime left behind by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and James Brown.

The first few days of shows, the Supremes were noticeably twitchy.

And while the audience reaction was good, when they heard a few shouted raspberries it disrupted their timing and concentration. Gordy, taking in the shows peering through the curtain from backstage, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 126

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was harsh in his judgment. Rather than words of encouragement, he was waiting for the girls when they came off stage, brow furrowed, putting them on notice: Do better or be pulled from the show.

Years later, Ross may have had those tender moments in mind when she deviated from her normal slavish praise of Gordy to aver that

“Berry wasn’t careful of people’s feelings, and his domineering manner antagonized us.” Gordy, she said, would either coldly ignore them or

“come crashing backstage with a multitude of notes and corrections

[and] we all resented the criticism because he was too hard on us. . . . It was like parents making you study. You might be getting better and smarter, but it was too punishing and you ended up hating them for it.

That was how we all felt toward Berry.”

Ross always took any such criticism hard, and personally. “It was all about Diane,” Katherine Anderson says. “It was like sometimes she didn’t know or care that there were two other girls in the group.” A story has been told that after the Supremes’ opening-night performance at the Apollo, Motown A&R man Mickey Stevenson overheard a conversation between Gordy and Ross. “They didn’t like us—they didn’t like
me
,” Stevenson recalled Diane whining. And yet this take might be a bit shaded, or even contrived, given that the only historical visual record of the group onstage at the Apollo, the grainy images of Gordy’s amateurish, two-camera-angle movie of the Motortown Revue on December 17, present the trio as sexy, calmly confident, and in fine throat.

And also completely forgettable in all ways but historical.

They stepped breezily out, Wilson and Ballard from the left wing, Ross from the right, in matching beige dresses hemmed at the knee and wigs piled high, and they sounded pert and soulful, doing little that could pass for dancing but smoothly slinging their forearms in and out, snapping fingers to the beat. Diane, eyes popping and mouth contorting, was slinky and passably vixenish. When they were done, they bowed and quickly exited stage left, to polite if not quite the delirious applause most of the other acts received, particularly the Miracles and Marvin Gaye.

“It wasn’t that they were bad, not at all,” recalls Vandella Rosalind Ashford. “They just had a different approach, sweet, not tough but kind of understated, sexy elegance. The other girl acts at Motown weren’t subtle like that, we just let it all go. We hit you across the face with our energy.

“The Supremes knew their limitations. They couldn’t do that.

Their energy was in their voices, their harmonies, their personalities.

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