The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (44 page)

“weird look in her eyes,” Mae Atkins, who’d been responsible for picking up the dresses from the designer, ran in at the last minute holding the boxes under her arm. Powell practically pushed her aside, grabbing the boxes and tearing them open so the girls could hastily shimmy 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 220

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into their clothes. Then, with Gil Askey giving the downbeat to the orchestra, the Supremes smoothly sauntered onto the floor singing the Cole Porter chestnut “From This Moment On,” a message-sending song if ever there was one for the group at that particular fork in the road.

Indeed, the next order of business was a perfunctory, distilled medley of “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” and “Stop! In the Name of Love”—the only hits of theirs that would be heard that night. Following that came “The Girl from Ipanema” and the show tune “Make Someone Happy,” which Askey had arranged to be a showcase for Diana, with some of the stage patter written for her by Maurice King. Introducing her mates while standing to their right, she began: “I know if there were teenagers in the house they’d know our names. [Audience laughter.] But if you don’t know us, on the end is Florence Ballard.

She’s the quiet one.” [Sardonic grin from Ballard.]

“In the middle is Mary Wilson. She’s the sexy one.” [Wide grin and a wiggle from Wilson.]

“My name is Diana Ross.” [Extended pause as audience grows ex-pectant.] “I’m the intelligent one.” [Laughter and applause as Wilson and Ballard look at each other and roll their eyes.]

That, however, was a mere warm-up for her. During a seemingly endless break between verses of “Somewhere,” the
West Side Story
tear-jerker, she delivered an excruciating soliloquy about there being “a place for each of us, a place of peace and quiet . . . where love is like a passion that burns like a fire,” going on in that vein for a full two minutes as Mary and Flo hummed the melody in a whisper behind her spotlight-illuminated visage. It was all very cheesy and scripted right down to the last comma. In fact, the only moment of spontaneity was when Flo—

contradicting Gordy’s prescribed rules on conduct for the show—took it upon herself to ad-lib during the closing number, the ever-present

“You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You.” When Diana hit the line

“But gold won’t bring you happiness,” Flo broke in with “Now wait a minute, honey. I don’t know about all that.” It was classic Flo sass, executed with perfect timing, the kind of one-liner she’d done a thousand times before, and it prompted the bucolic Sammy Davis Jr. to chime in from his seat, “All right, girl! You tell it like it is!” as the audience hooted and clapped. Diana, momentarily thrown by Flo’s deviation from the script, also broke up and, ad-libbing too, remarked affably, “She’s always been like that.” As delightfully genuine as the interlude was in a sea of staged hokum, Gordy, so wound up that he’d forgotten how to enjoy a good line that wasn’t prefabricated, sat stonily, mortified that Ballard had upstaged his diva.

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The balance of the show was filled out with detritus: the hat-and-cane-twirling softshoe of “Rockabye Your Baby” that Flo detested so much, the Barbra Streisand tune “People” (featuring Flo on lead),

“Queen of the House” (a reworking of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”), and a couple of songs from the Sam Cooke tribute album. After three encores, the Supremes took their final curtain call to a sustained standing ovation. For the Motown entourage in the electrified room, there was nothing but exhilaration. Gordy, for the first time in months, could finally exhale. Backstage, having traded their soggy dresses for terry-cloth robes, Mary and Flo were ecstatic, crying and exchanging hugs with the Hitsville VIPs. Diana, jubilant, kept excitedly asking people how she did. When Gordy came in, he cut through the mob and kissed Diana on the cheek. That was when she knew she’d done well, very well.

The next day, the reviews certified it. Earl Wilson’s
New York Post
column—randomly identifying Ballard first, Wilson second, and Ross third, to Gordy’s consternation—reported that the “rhythm and blues singers from Detroit” had won an ovation from a star-studded crowd.

In the
Daily News
Ed Sullivan said the Supremes were “the greatest of the new singing trios,” a typical half-aware Sullivan rave—in actuality, there were few rock trios around—but one the Motown PR people would eagerly attach to their press releases. Leonard Harris’s
New York
World-Telegram and Sun
notice read: “The girls are good musicians

[
sic
], good performers and good looking” and called Ross “a devastating vocalist with a hypnotic presence.”

When
Billboard
’s August 7 issue hit the stands, there were
two
reviews on the same page, one by no less than the publisher Hal B.

Cook titled “SUPREME SUPREMES,” stating that “[t]he lovely Supremes shook up the entire block with their fantastic performance. . . . This group has had fabulous success on records. We had heard of their great ‘in person’ ability. Now we have seen it. If you get the chance, catch the Supremes in person.” In the other, titled “COPA PROVING GROUND: AS AN ACT FOR ALL AGES SUPREMES

BLOOM OUT,” Aaron Sternfield foamed that they’d “put on a performance the likes of which the famed bistro has seldom experienced.” Noting that “the Motown beat was polished, refined and arranged to a fare-thee-well”—an observation that might have made the company’s nonelitist fans want to cringe—he went on to say that the Supremes

“have all the equipment—poise, polish and a comic sense—and that equipment was working flawlessly.” Most gratifying for Gordy, though, was Sternfield’s emphasis on Ross, saying she had “emerged as a solo 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 222

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talent to be reckoned with. . . . Her distinctive phrasing and amazing vocal range stamps her as one of the best in the business.” And there was this: “While the Supremes will probably keep their teen-age following for some time, there appears little question that the act will last a lot longer as staple adult fare, not too dependent on the chart position of their latest single.”

Except for the irrelevance of hits—a premise that violated every instinct he had—Gordy couldn’t have said it any better himself. Nor could he have played the mutual scratch-my-back game with
Billboard
more successfully.

The Supremes continued to shake up the block for three weeks, with every show a sellout and bolstered by growing word of mouth. It seemed everyone who was anyone in New York knew they were there and were the talk of the town. During the run they were asked to be on the popular CBS Sunday-night quiz show
What’s My Line
as the collective mystery guest, and were guessed quickly, though panelist Arlene Francis asked, “Are you Twiggy?” Diana, proof of the new axiom that

“thin is in,” coyly replied, “I’m shorter.” However, not even in the blissful atmospherics of this triumph did Gordy behave with any tact in singularly promoting Diana Ross—and slighting Florence Ballard. The two were surely on a collision course for some time, with Flo of the mind that even in her diminished role she was integral to the chemistry and personality of the group, as shown on opening night. And she was right, far more so than Gordy knew, or wanted to. It may well even have been that the Supremes’ unfathomable winning streak had kept him from seriously considering a radical move, such as a solo Diana Ross project—something all of Motown believed was an inevitability and never dismissed by Gordy.

The streak was also a palliative for Ballard. She had done all she could to get on with Diana; she’d stepped aside as the leader for her, and sought to keep the old, albeit never strong, “sister” vibe going by trying to include Diana in the parties on Buena Vista. Now, she worked extra hard mastering routines that clashed with her style and music sensibilities, rehearsing herself right into a sick bed, just as Diana had. The difference was, when the latter had taken ill, Gordy did everything but act as her wet nurse. For Flo, perhaps looking for a reason to question her commitment to the Supremes, he couldn’t spare even a phone call.

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Neither did it seem a coincidence when Diana began openly questioning whether Flo was even very sick at all. When Flo had to delay going to New York, Diana cattily spent the couple of days that Flo wasn’t there with her and Mary telling people that if it were
her
, she would “collapse on stage” at the Copa rather than be felled by a “head cold”—though there was never any doubt that Flo would not have missed the opening. That was the sort of nasty accusation that Flo never would have made about Diana, and was so personally cruel that Flo had to assume that Diana took a cue from Berry.

“The one thing about Florence was, she was very, very sharp; she had antennae, she could read people’s intentions,” her cousin Ray Gibson believes. “When she was sick before the Copa thing—that was the first of many times she’d get sick—she could sense things that were happening. It was like they wanted to use it to insult her, to make her seem like an outcast so they could use it against her later. Hell, they knew she wouldn’t miss the Copa. They would have had to kill her for her not to be there. She was incredibly excited about it. She’d tell me, ‘Imagine that, Raymond—I’m gonna be singing at the Copa!’

“So all that bullshit made her stronger. She wasn’t going to let them stop her from having her moment, any of the great moments the Supremes had. I think the objective with Florence was that Berry wanted to make it look like she didn’t care about the Supremes, and that was the furthest thing from the truth. That was her group, her dream. And here it was like they were trying to take it away from her, and she just never knew why. If they had to do that, tear her down, never say a good word about Florence, because they wanted to make Diana stand out more, that’s the height of cruelty. Thinking about it all these years later, it still turns my stomach.” Otis Williams believes that “Flo never could reconcile having all that success, being one-third of something so special, yet not being able to sit back and enjoy. She couldn’t figure out why it had to be so hard.

She understood about Diana being the lead singer because she had a voice that sold records. But she couldn’t understand why she was so unappreciated by the Motown establishment.”

It was surely a weird dynamic. Onstage, fans seemed to have more affection for her than they did for Diana and Mary; regularly, shouts of

“We love you, Flo!” or “Sing it, Flo!” would resound in the hall. But then she’d get back to Motown and be ignored as the “establishment” fell all over Diana, and even Mary, whose low-pitched voice was almost always recessed and was really now no more than that of a good-looking 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 224

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mannequin—whereas Flo’s human qualities were both vocal, in the high, ringing notes she could let fly, and visual with her slightly against-the-grain ingenuousness. This certainly explained why club owners out on the road also loved her, far more than Gordy did while seeing her re-fracted by his obsessions with Ross. Indeed, those shouts of “We love you, Flo” may have had something to do with Gordy’s waspish attitude toward Ballard, given that Ross rarely, and Wilson never, were the recipient of such hosannas from Supremes fans. Gordy’s plans meant he had to get that kind of reaction for Ross, even if he would have to man-ufacture it.

It wasn’t just paradoxical that he could have regarded any form of adulation for the Supremes as a threat to his blueprint; it was beyond absurd. But the fate of Florence Ballard seemed to show that it was standard operating procedure around Motown, as Ballard became known as a “problem.”

The more adrift Flo became, the more she found the means to gauze the hurt—with a glass in her hand. For most in the Supremes’ entourage, Ballard’s increased consumption of alcohol meant nothing other than that she was a good-time girl who liked to get the juice flow-ing for everyone. At the Plaza, she set up a wet bar in her room, making Suite 811 the place to be. Here, every day, room service was instructed to roll in her standing order, which was described by one reveler as “a bottle of everything, one Scotch, one vodka, one gin, one rum, one rye, and several dozen canapés”—along with a dozen each of champagne glasses, water glasses, highball glasses, and shot glasses, and three ice buckets.

Everyone just took it as a road-show version of the basement bar she had at home, with the same intent—to provide spirits for people streaming into the room at all hours. As always, she meticulously set up the bar, pouring all the booze from their bottles into the decanters and serving the drinks herself, every inch a lady who could keep waves of guests entertained for hours. Flo would imbibe freely, but while she could drink them all under the table she seemed to be able to hold her booze, too, and almost never appeared to be drunk.

But being around all that alcohol was a comfort, too, and during the Copa run Flo Ballard needed comfort as her grand dream turned sour. Even in the opening-night afterglow, before the orchestra had 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 225

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stopped playing, Gordy was messing with her about her amusing ad lib during the final number.

“About that one-liner you dropped in,” he began, uneasily. “Real funny stuff.”

But he didn’t say it as if he really thought it was funny; to Flo, it sounded sarcastic, meant to cushion what he wanted to say, and her suspicion was well founded when he added, “Diane loved it,” something Flo couldn’t have cared less about.

“Oh, she did, did she?” she said.

He then told her it was a good idea to keep the one-liners in the act, but that “maybe we’ll give Mary a line, too.” Pause. “And, next time, I want you to say—”