The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (41 page)

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” she raged at him during one intermission, “but I’m not gonna let you ruin my career!” Gordy, always thrown by her hellfire tantrums—something only she could get away with—meekly tried explaining that the song “could open the door to everything we’ve wanted.” When she continued balk-ing, he gulped hard and gave her a “do it or else” ultimatum before the Manchester show. While that normally brought her into line, this time he wasn’t so sure it would, worrying even as he spoke the words that he may have lost the group right there. They were, after all, big enough now to conceivably go out and fish for offers from other labels, contract or not; indeed, if Mary Wells could walk out the Motown door under the same circumstances and legal risks and get a big deal, what sort of ungodly deal could the Supremes score?

In truth, Gordy had nothing to worry about on that score. Ross, Wilson, and Ballard were in his thrall, too; they were, in their minds, every bit his product, his delegates, his children (something that, of course, only added to his angst about ever getting it on with Diana).

Then, too, Diana’s ballsy demeanor in standing up to him made him want her more than ever. What to do, indeed? His head spinning with contradictory feelings and directives, he sat down for the show and—to his infinite relief—the band struck up the intro to “You’re Nobody,” meaning that the girls had cued the song to be played. When Diana 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 203

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then began to sing, he would say, “It almost brought tears to my eyes.” Little wonder, since it meant his “master plan”—making them, as he said, “the biggest female singing group in the history of the word”—

was again ensured.

Even better was Ross’s final word after the show.

“I still don’t like it,” she said of the song. “I did it for you.” She said it without emotion, as if it were her wifely duty, but to Gordy it was the ultimate turn-on.

Thereafter, throughout the rest of the fortnight, he looked for the courage and the right time to make a move on her. One natural opening was the night he threw a lavish party in honor of her 22nd birthday, March 26, after a show in Kingston’s ABC Theater, but he held off—

and kept doing so until time was running out. With only two days left to the tour and the Revue in the world’s romance capital, he couldn’t think of a better time and place.

The April 15 show at Paris’s Olympia Music Hall, the tour’s sign-off, was given before a full house that included screen legend Marlene Dietrich and soul singer extraordinaire Sarah Vaughan and was filmed for French TV. During the afternoon, cameras followed the Supremes as they pranced down the Champs Elysees while lip-synching a song, snarling traffic and leading the gendarmes to roust the whole crew from the street. For a few tense minutes, the cops held the Supremes, whom they hadn’t heard of, while they debated whether to arrest them for causing a disturbance. Flo, who seemed to be enjoying the incident, wondered aloud whether their image would be damaged by any bad publicity. Esther Gordy Edwards, who was with them at the time, thought just the opposite.

“As long as they spell your name right,” she said, citing the first rule of show business—one that her brother might not have agreed with in this case.

Fortunately, after a few calls, the decision was made that no action would be taken, and the tour’s last show went into the books. It couldn’t have ended fast enough for most of the troupe, but Diana wasn’t quite ready to go home. No doubt sensing Gordy’s amorous affections, she coyly suggested that they stay in Paris, just the two of them, after the Revue flew back. “I was,” he would say, “rocketed off my feet. April in Paris. Alone? Phenomenal!”—knowing that this could only lead to him literally being off his feet with her.

In such an “excited state” that he could barely remember his name, he found himself alone with her in her hotel room that night, exchanging champagne toasts with each other. That’s when he went for it, initiating 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 204

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a round of kissing that culminated in an overheated ripping of clothes and clutching of flesh, at which Gordy recalled thinking, “This is it!” However, standing there in the altogether was altogether too much for him to handle. With performance anxiety the only thing rising, he admitted, “Everything stopped working,” mortified that the ‘‘big man” was anything but behind that closed door.

“I think it would be better if we just stayed friends,” she intoned, almost pityingly, given the role reversal.

He nodded timidly and fled in shame to his room. But she was not about to follow her own advice; she had come to believe they really did love each other, at least as much as they loved the notion that they’d boost each other to the heights of success. Besides, she was absolutely intoxicated playing Lady Gordy, and
that
depended on being more than friends. Much more.

The next day, their last before going back, they said not a word about the embarrassment of the night before and “did Paris.” In the afternoon, he rented a speedboat and they ran the waves up and down the Seine. At night, with her on his arm, they went club-hopping, listening to jazz bands. Back at the hotel, she serenaded him as they got high on expensive Cabernet Franc.

Evidently, that was the ticket.What didn’t work the night before worked just fine now.

And so on April 15—appropriately, income tax day—the two biggest assets in American popular music became lovers. Gordy remembered the moment decades later with poetic license, obviously still feeling the tremors.

“We fit perfectly, like a carefully choreographed dance,” he said, calling it “ecstasy to the tenth power!” He added: “And after that it only got better,” not specifying if he meant Motown, the master plan, the music, the sex—or all of the above.

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fourteen

“BABY,

JUST

POUR”

Gordy’s true confessions about the making of Diana Ross—in the biblical sense—revealed details no one seemed to know, or were willing to talk about, either back then or for years afterward.

Even Ross, breaking form, didn’t brag around the shop about it, biting her tongue at the time and keeping quiet to this day. Of course, everyone had known something happened between them when they were on their own in Paris—a liaison that would eventually produce an out-of-wedlock daughter—but it was too touchy a subject for them to want to indulge it, usually to protect Gordy, in deference to his power and his wish to keep it from the public. Indeed, even in Mary Wilson’s “tell-all” memoirs, she told almost nothing of this monumental shack-up beyond the hazy euphemistic recollection that Diana and Berry “began dating” sometime around early ’65, making their convulsive affair seem more like a prom date.

In truth, what Diana was doing was sleeping with the boss, and because the company was aware of this, it’s a stretch to believe that Gordy was somehow able to keep it from Margaret for more than five minutes: How, for instance, could he possibly have explained his unexpected

“layover” in Paris with Diana? Provided she didn’t live with her hands over her ears, it’s only logical to assume Margaret, unlike Claudette Robinson and Sharon Holland, accepted being cuckolded as a consequence of owning Gordy’s part-time attention. As far as is known, she never staged any confrontations or psychotic scenes or let fly with any

“it’s either her or me” ultimatums.

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For the rest of the Motown family, the Gordy-Ross union was as much a part of the environment as the “Hitsville, U.S.A.” sign. There is one story in the Motown literature that Diana, dying to blab about it lest she implode, told Flo, “I got him!” Barely stirring, Flo asked,

“Who?” Exasperated, Diana gushed, “Berry! I got him!” Flo’s yawning response was, “So?” If this dialogue really happened, Flo’s diffidence could have been a false front, hiding her own envy. Or, just as likely, it could have been that Flo had grown up and wasn’t capable of squealing in excitement like a pig-tailed teenager at the idea of a grown woman spreading her legs for her employer, no matter how far it got her.

If it was the latter, Flo was not alone. For most of the entrenched crowd at Motown, all of them older and wiser, affairs were a fact of life; but this one so violated Gordy’s little-followed rules of propriety that it reduced him in their eyes from benevolent despot to moral reprobate. The proof wasn’t so much that he couldn’t keep a professional distance from one of his stars but, rather, that he couldn’t see what effect his Supremes obsession was causing. The thud that Martha Reeves had felt on the England tour had been felt even earlier by Marvin Gaye, who would recount for author David Ritz shortly before Gaye’s 1984 death during a violent dispute with his father: “No one was prepared for the Supremes’ [success]. It flipped Berry out, like he was playing the slot machines in Vegas and three cherries came up ten times in a row. He was gone [and] the rest of us felt his interest turn.

Professionally he turned toward the Supremes and romantically he hooked up with Diana.”

Accordingly, he went on, “[e]veryone saw it coming.” And when it did, all of Motown became consumed with jealousy toward Ross, with Gaye—no less than Gordy’s brother-in-law and delivering hit after hit himself—feeling as if he were on the outside looking in. Incredibly, he had been left home when the Revue flew to London, told that he’d sold too few records over there and that solo acts were lagging behind the group acts (Stevie Wonder apparently being an exception). That ruling, he said, “hurt me” and led him to forgo single work for the next two years, nearly exclusively racking up monster hits singing duets, first with Kim Weston, then Tammi Terrell.

Ross, he said, “had a power I lacked. I had Anna to talk to Berry, but Diana had Berry himself.” In a sense, Gaye, like all the increasingly forsaken Motown artists, became as caught up with Ross as was Gordy, admitting, “I became obsessed with Diana’s stardom. I resented the attention [Gordy] lavished on her.”

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But was Gordy so wrong? Even if he could have summoned the courage to keep his pants on when with her, did he even have an option in giving Ross the keys to the kingdom? Marvin Gaye wondered about that himself. “[H]ow could I blame him?” he concluded. “The Su -

premes were making him a fortune. Besides, with Diana’s drive and class, he knew this was only the beginning.” And the consequences be damned. Raynoma Liles, with whom Gordy had made peace and financed a small record label for her to run, remembered coming back to Detroit and being startled by the devolu-tion of the company she helped get off the ground into quite nearly a one-woman band. “So many talented people were discarded” during the interval when Gordy became fixated with Diana’s “hungering, driving ambition to be famous,” she recalled. That detour would be a money trough in the short term; in the long run, she said sadly, “it would cause irreparable damage to Motown.”

In catering to Diana Ross, Liles believed, “Berry was shaping a monster.”

The way the Supremes’ TV rounds were rigged now, they were to provide context for major upcoming events. In late February, a few weeks before the England tour, the group made a return engagement on
Shindig
, but only with the proviso that it could promote
A Bit of Liverpool
by performing “Eight Days a Week” and “You Can’t Do That” sandwiched around the mandatory “Stop! In the Name of Love”—not that the girls seemed any more excited to sing those songs, turning in rather listless renditions of the Beatles songs, though they would never look hotter than they did in the skin-tight pants suits they wore for

“Eight Days a Week.” It was possibly their sexiest TV appearance ever, even if it was musically forgettable.

Positioning them for their summer Copa run, and beyond, Gordy began prepping them by having them perform standard pop fare along with their hits; for their second
Hullabaloo
appearance on May 11, 1965, Gordy insisted that the producers allow the girls to sing the reviled “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You” along with their hits—if not, no Supremes, period. Rare indeed was a TV show they performed on that didn’t contain this hybrid approach; in the fall, after the Copa gig, they would do a
Hullabaloo
redux, including a top-hat, soft-shoe rendition of “Toot Toot Tootsie.” The following year they’d 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 208

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be seen on
The Dean Martin Show
crooning a medley of elevator-music standards (“If This Is Love,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” “Let There Be Love”) with geriatrics Dino, Jayne Morgan, and Imogene Coca, and on
The Sammy Davis Jr. Show,
sharing the stage at one point with the aging Andrews Sisters—who had sold no fewer than 5 million records in their day—with each group performing some of each other’s hits.

Those who could remember the Supremes singing “Let Me Go the Right Way” might have winced watching them camp it up on “Roll Out the Barrel,” “Apple Blossom Time,” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” Other bookings in ’65 included the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, the Miami Orange Bowl Parade, and the opening of the Houston Astrodome.

For anyone at Motown who was more than a little uncomfortable about the racial bastardization of his preeminent act, Gordy had only one answer: Get used to it. Motown, he knew, would always have its black market. But not until the Supremes went “broad” did the company clear $40 million a year in sales, as it would in 1965. The days of R&B purity in the Motown Sound was over. Gordy never regretted it, not as filthy rich as he would become. But for others, it would be something like a tragedy.

In the spring of ’65, too, the Supremes could finally put Brewster-Douglass into the past tense. Though they’d been on the road so much that hotel rooms and not the rusting tenement had been their homes for the past year, the move was clearly past due given their diamonds-and-pearls lifestyle. After Esther Edwards had scouted appropriately tony neighborhoods, Motown put down payments on a number of homes along the well-heeled, lightly integrated Buena Vista Drive (which in the local idiom is pronounced “Byoona Vista”). The mainline of the neighborhood ran roughly twenty blocks, with the homes mainly two-story brick Tudor estates lined with leafy trees and immense lawns and yards. Given a choice of which ones they wanted, the girls, in the manner of all four Beatles living on the same street in Liverpool, wound up within steps of each other; Diane was across the street from Flo, and Mary a block and a half away.