The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (34 page)

Atkins and arranger Johnnie Allen wrote strict musical arrangements for the Motown acts to take on the road with them, so that the local house bands could keep the performances roughly consistent.

The most obvious beneficiaries were the Temptations, whose relentlessly practiced “white glove” dance moves were right up Atkins’s alley. With his input, the routines now became buttery, visually and ki-netically playing off their songs’ narratives with clever pantomime.

Their first hit, “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” became a feast of literal embellishment: The line “The way you smell so sweet, you know you could’ve been some perfume” came with a dabbing of their fingers behind their ears, and in “My Girl” Ruffin would sing “What can make me feel this way” and suddenly grab a fistful of air before giving the answer.

For the Supremes, delicate femininity was preserved; if an arm rose into the air, it would be brought down with a flutter of the wrist—no better example being in “Come See About Me,” on the line “Sometimes up, sometimes down.” Flourishes matched to visually active lyrics would branch from their steady measures of hip-swaying and finger-popping. Most of the time, TV directors would place Diana in the middle. More and more, though, Motown passed the word that directors 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 181

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should feel free to place her off to the side—the right, only, because she photographed better turned slightly rightward; by this, the subliminal point would be made that she was separate and unequal.

One of the first fruits of the Powell-Atkins axis was the
Shindig
appearance in November. The “youth-oriented” TV shows only tangentially dabbled in soul music; their sensibilities were clean, wholesome, county-fair vanilla, with acts introduced between pimple-cream commercials usually by moonlighting disc jockeys in serge suits and skinny ties. The other acts on that
Shindig
episode included the Righteous Brothers, Donna Loren, a remarkably baby-faced Leon Russell, and
The Donna Reed Show
’s Paul Petersen, who had a hit song out at the time, a misdemeanor called “She Can’t Find Her Keys,” and who killed any good vibes in the audience by singing a morbid tear-jerker, “My Dad,” just before the Supremes went on.

They came into the eye of the black-and-white camera looking like they’d just left high tea; wrapped in elegant tunic tops and ankle-length silk skirts, they stood feline-like, Ross between and raised slightly above Wilson and Ballard, arms bent identically at the elbow. As Diana trilled the “Baby Love” lead, Mary and Flo echoed her while they all executed perfectly timed foot shuffles that ended with their toes pointed outward, biding time until the next move. On the chorus “Don’t throw our love away,” they did a jump and pivot, to the back, then to the front. In a later segment, doing “Come See About Me,” they wore knee-length fringe shimmies and mid-cut tank tops, infusing similar mini-moves without flaw.

Even now, before Maurice King developed their stage act for the supper clubs, they were
there
. Their smiles were fixed and genuine, their voices strong, their bearing commanding and causal. Most of all, they were
women
, not girls, surely young but with a sniff of mature detachment.

In truth, there were
two
Motowns now: the recorded tracks of Motown for mass youthful and biracial consumption, and for a much more select gene pool, the “sophisticated,” grown-up, crossover Motown. With near-theurgic acts like the Supremes and Temptations, little adjustment was necessary to suit either target, beyond the injection of the odd Broadway show tune or evergreen pop standard. But possibly because Gordy believed he might lose the former when the latter became the more familiar identity, as a sop and reminder to record buyers he began appending to Motown record labels and album jackets the presumptuous codifying phrase “The Sound of Young America.” By 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 182

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this, Gordy surely meant young black and white America—though that linkage would soon, and often, be questioned. Indeed, even as the in-scriptions were being printed, his own focus was mainly the Supremes and how much they could make the “second” Motown
the
Motown.

While hit records were still the company’s plasma, without which there’d be no Motown at all, chartings and the general bottom line seemed to pale before the vision of the Supremes mounting the stage at the Copacabana and in Vegas, and of Ross as Motown’s “first lady,” and the trail where
that
could lead. In fact, Maxine Powell and Cholly Atkins were repeating the word “Copa” to the Supremes as if it were a post-hypnotic suggestion. And, already, Atkins was putting them through their paces on routines appropriate for that venue, including never-ending drills with top hats and canes and singing the old Al Jol-son chestnut “Rock-a-Bye-Your-Baby with a Dixie Melody”—hardly the sort of tune any self-respecting black performer would touch, unless of course being black didn’t matter quite as much as it used to.

Powell, to be sure, set her sights even further down the road from Motown’s original mission statement. Of the Supremes, she told someone, “We’re training them for Buckingham Palace and the White House.”

Ed Sullivan, whose long-running show was on the level of Buckingham Palace and the White House in showbiz terms, had never seen the Supremes perform, but contrary to appearance, the much-parodied, Gargoyle-faced newspaperman was a devotee of rhythm and blues and a frequent visitor to the Apollo Theater. He was also rightly proud of his star-making power, given the frenzy that surrounded the breakout appearances of Elvis and the Beatles on his stage. Oddly, though, he had not yet invited onto that stage a Motown act. The Supremes’ hits and mainstream appeal made it an easy call.

During Christmas week, the girls flew to New York and checked into the posh Warwick Hotel. Following two days of rehearsals at Sullivan’s Broadway studio, they came in on the Sunday of the show and sat in the makeup room, whereupon no one on the staff seemed to know how to apply makeup to these young black women, despite having no such confusion in tending to older black stars like Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll in the past. The makeup artists began slathering layers of mascara, eyeliner, and the darkest pancake powder they had, leaving the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 183

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Supremes looking like, as Wilson recalled, “black-faced singers in a minstrel show.”

“Honey, I’m not going out looking like this!” Flo declared, and soon the three of them repaired to their dressing room where they washed the gunk off their faces and, as usual, applied their own makeup.

Little has been written of the Supremes’ unveiling on the
Sullivan
show—when they were no more anticipated than the other main guests that night, Frank Gorshin, Leslie Uggams, the Serendipity Singers, and Rip Taylor—yet for them and Gordy it was no less critical a moment. This was the first time most of America laid eyes on these three talented black women barely in their 20s, and the first impression formed of them rested solely on their performance. Silly as it seemed to them, Gordy had been dead-on, grooming them according to his
Pygmalion
scenario just for moments like these as opposed to, say, singing in
Bikini Party
. Now, singing great soul music wouldn’t be enough; it had to be sung with
panache
, fast becoming the new Motown paradigm.

In the end, though, Ross was right that neither Gordy nor any of his rented style- or stage-crafters made it work when the red light or the spotlight went on. That was the Supremes’ doing. Embellished, yes, but at its heart an unscripted, unpiqued alchemy. It happened deep down somewhere when they joined voices on a great song; and for some reason, always had, as disparate and obviously unmatched as they were on a personal level.

Whatever it was, they grabbed millions of Americans on that December 26. Upon Sullivan’s introduction, they were mid-stage, swinging and swaying in blue sleeveless dresses (that looked faded gray in black and white) against a geometric paneled backdrop, oozing “Come See About Me” and doing their twirls and pivots. Their smiles were so spacious that one could see Diana was missing a back upper molar in an otherwise perfect set of teeth, a curious, unwitting trace of humanizing usually purged from their act. The first impressions were of Ross as an ambitious chanteuse, shy, sweet, and ball-busting all in one; Wilson was eye candy, the inviting ingénue; Ballard was stately and striking, but a bit gawky, as if unwilling to commit all the way to the
shtick
and then doing it with a unseen wink.

By Wilson’s reckoning, they were “perfect,” and the “young people” in the audience, as Sullivan liked to say, clapped in time to the song and applauded loudly. When Sullivan waved for them to join him stage left, they expected he would swoon over them and perhaps engage in some 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 184

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light banter the way he had with the Beatles nearly eleven months before. Instead, he perfunctorily thanked them, though not by name, and shooed them off. Mary and Flo, walking on air, went right on beaming as they left the stage. Diana, however, looked peeved. Backstage, she kept muttering that Sullivan had “insulted” her, leading Don Foster, a Motown hand who’d been named their road manager, to tell her to hush up, that if Sullivan found out he’d never have them back.

Ross calmed down but would not let this perceived slight go; years later, she would recall—likely far more dramatically than it actually went down—that afterward “I just cried because I thought we had done something wrong” and that for a time in interviews she “really put down Sullivan because I was hurt.” Yet someone who was backstage that night remembered not tears but a far more stringent Ross hissing that “We’ll be back!” It was a promise, but it sounded more like a threat.

The Supremes’ blitz continued apace into the new year, with appearances lined up as much as twelve months in advance. And, not by coincidence, Motown was getting fat as a whole, its “sound”—which by now, in no small part owing to the Supremes’ run of hits, had weeded out the granular R&B of the early days—having made deep inroads into the mainstream. HDH had created yet another hit train with the Four Tops, a veteran quartet that had begun in the mid-’50s, led by the raw emotional tenor of Levi Stubbs (younger brother of the Falcons’ lead man, Joe Stubbs). They’d had their first smash, “Baby I Need Your Loving” in the fall of 1964 and would crank out, machine-like, fifteen more Top Forty hits through the decade.

During this period, as well, Martha and the Vandellas enjoyed their biggest hit, “Dancing in the Street,” cowritten by Marvin Gaye and Mickey Stevenson and produced by HDH, which went to No. 2 and was so molten that many—incorrectly—construed its call to take to the streets as an incitement to march, not dance. The dormant Marvelettes resurfaced to score a hit with “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” co-written by Eddie Holland and Norman Whitfield and produced by Whitfield.

Marvin Gaye delivered his first Top Ten hit, the HDH “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You.” The Temptations had three more Top Twenty hits. The no longer “Little” Stevie Wonder was moving toward breaking out as a major act.

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For now, despite the delirium surrounding the Supremes, the roster’s collegial ambiance was still intact. Everyone, it seemed, was moving on up together, as Gordy always vowed they would. When Gordy extended the expiring Supremes contract in 1965 at a royalty rate 100

percent greater than before, he did the same with every expiring contract. Of course, Gordy knew exactly what he was doing. A look at the minutiae of the contract agate, which few if any artists ever did, would have shown that the “increase” was from half a cent per record sold to a whole penny—although this calculation was only theoretical because it was still subject to all those unspecified “expenses.” Even with three straight No. 1 hits, Ross, Wilson, and Ballard had not yet seen a royalty check, and it wouldn’t be until 1967 that Gordy would boost their weekly salary from $50 per week—apiece—to $225 apiece.

All the while that they were making many times that amount for the company, the Supremes had no clue about what they were officially making themselves from year to year, such information still deemed none of their business. Gordy continued to operate under the assumption that the acts were too star-struck to care—a justifiable assumption since, as Wilson recalled their thoughts at the time, “it really was like we were living a fairy tale. While most of our friends had gotten married, gone to college, or were working at boring jobs, we were in show business and having the time of our lives. It seemed like we were living under a spell.” Under that spell, they didn’t have to worry about things like buying clothes or paying taxes; ITMI did all that mundane stuff for them, unaudited.

Wilson would recall how she used to look out that big bay window at Motown and see Cadillacs parked up and down West Grand Boulevard, all belonging to Gordy and his executives. It would certainly have been enlightening to know how much of the Supremes’ royalties had bought all that chrome—that is, if she’d ever thought about it.

Among the Motown shipmates, then, the Supremes may have been the wave runners, but they were still in the same dinghy with them, trailing behind Gordy’s yacht. Not that Diana Ross wasn’t even more insufferable than Diane Ross had been. Mary and Flo, in fact, pointedly kept calling her Diane, partly out of habit but also as a conscious slap at her flowering ego, sharing a silent giggle at her ruffled reaction.

Nor did the rest of the company shrink into the Supremes’ shadow. The day before they flew to New York for the
Sullivan
show, they appeared in a weeklong series of Motown holiday shows at the Fox Theater. In 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 186