The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (49 page)

which, rather than being a “smash,” was regarded at Motown as a semi-failure. Such was the lofty footing of the Supremes, and the irrationality of Gordy’s “No. 1’s only” fiat, that two Top Ten records could be a let-down. Years later, that “distorted reality,” to cadge a phrase from a future Supremes hit, still leads HDH to defend those “underperforming” hits: EDDIE HOLLAND: Listen, we didn’t need no orders to write No. 1 songs. We wanted every song we ever wrote to be No. 1.

Like I say, we didn’t write songs; we wrote
hits
. But I’ll say this: Making a hit is a collaborative process. And by that time the Supremes were hardly ever there. They were always out on the road, doing this club, that TV show, this hotel. The only time they saw Detroit was when they flew over it. We’d have to grab them for a few hours at a time every two, three months. And they’d be tired and really didn’t want to come in.

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It wasn’t just the Supremes. It was happening with the Tops, too. I mean, those guys were never around. You had to catch lightning in a bottle with them, all of them. I’d have, like, an hour to rehearse with Levi and then go right in and have him lay down the vocal. Thank God he could get it right on the first take. Diana needed more work, but she got it, too. Me, I personally didn’t think any of those records suffered. But, shit, you can always make a record better, if you had time.

Since we never had that, we had to get it right the first time, every time.

Perhaps the most amazing achievement of HDH was that under these circumstances, and with the crushing pressure on them, they would get a second wind with Supremes songs that kept the group on top of the heap—and, ironically, further delay the inevitability of Gordy taking Ross solo. For Brian Holland, it was hardly a shock. “We always rose to the challenge,” he notes—a contention met with no objection. But there would be a price to pay for it. For HDH, redoubling their efforts with the Supremes meant they would have to cut bait with the Four Tops in 1967—ending, with “Bernadette,” their run of five Top Ten hits as they turned to recording cover songs without success.

A similar fate awaited other once-proud Motown acts like the Marvelettes, who had given the company its first No. 1 hit; after being “put on the back burner because of the Supremes,” as Katherine Anderson puts it, they would hang around, racking up a couple of mid-level hits written and produced by Smokey Robinson before disbanding in obscurity in 1969.

Motown was in an odd state during these years. There were, as of 1966, around 200 acts signed to the company, a good number of them white, most unknown (rock bands like the Underdogs and the Messen-gers), some known but otherwise baffling (TV mediocrities Paul Petersen, Irene Ryan [“Granny” on
The Beverly Hillbillies
], and the warped kiddie-show host Soupy Sales, now working out of New York), and un-Motown-like black club singers like Diahann Carroll, Barbara McNair, and Leslie Uggams. Rounding out this cast of odds, ends, and factory seconds were comic actors Scatman Crothers and Jack Soo.

Yet only four acts meant anything, and they monopolized the top songwriting/producing teams: the Supremes with HDH, the Temptations with Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, Stevie Wonder with Henry Cosby and Sylvia Moy, and Marvin Gaye with Harvey Fuqua 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 250

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and Johnny Bristol. And even in this rarefied chamber, the Supremes drained almost all the oxygen in the room; there were times even the bigger acts weren’t given more than half-hearted promotion—not even Motown Vice-President Smokey Robinson. He and his Miracles, after

“Going to a Go-Go” late in ’65, would release ten singles over the rest of the decade, only one of which, “I Second That Emotion,” became a hit. Martha and the Vandellas, after “Nowhere to Run” in early ’65, would release thirteen, with only two hits (“Jimmy Mack” and “Honey Chile”).

Martha Reeves didn’t need to do the math to know what was happening.

It all changed, she said, “when Berry finally got somebody who he could depend on and wouldn’t turn on him and say, ‘I don’t want to go there’ when he tried to push them.” Reeves added, “He found [Diana Ross], and she would go where he wanted to put her, and sleep with her, too.”

She went on: “First it was the learning group [the Marvelettes]; the second group was a commercial asset [the Vandellas]; and the third group was the prize that he showed off like you would a German Shepherd—purebred, of course.” For Reeves, the fall from star to has-been was more than she could handle; in the late ’60s, she had a series of nervous breakdowns and, reportedly, was put in a strait-jacket for a time.

Motown, essentially, had evolved into a two-headed creature—the Supremes and everyone else. But even as HDH were digging deeper into their creative well for a last few rounds of immortal genius, the darker view of life that they had begun to mine and brand into the Supremes’ sonic dreamscape—an ingenious and even necessary commercial segue, to be sure—was in itself an ominous signpost, and one tied to their progressive enmity for Gordy.

At the same time, there were strains building between Gordy and Mickey Stevenson and Harvey Fuqua. Which is why, even if Gordy didn’t sense it, there was a crisis on the way at Motown, with the Supremes—and by extension, the entire Motown realm—squarely in the cross-hairs.

The hiring of Shelly Berger would shift the center of Motown’s axis.

Berger, at 27, was a short, brash, and hyperbolic former actor who had talked his way into managing acts either not-yet-famous like insult 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 251

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comic Don Rickles or erstwhile-famous like the Kingsmen and Dick and Dee Dee. Good fortune smiled on him early in 1966 when he walked into a big L.A. talent agent’s office one day just as the agent was on the phone with Ralph Seltzer, Motown’s chief accountant and lawyer and overseer of its bare-boned L.A. operation.

Berger recalls, “He was saying, ‘No, I’m not interested,’ then, spotting me, continued, ‘but you know who would be great for the job?

Shelly Berger.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ When he hung up, I said, ‘Oh, by the way, what job am I perfect for?’”

It was, it turned out, with Motown, trying to line up work for the company’s performers on TV shows and in movies—still not the easiest of tasks in the real world outside of the Supremes, which was no doubt why the big agent declined. Berger, up for any challenge, didn’t. When Seltzer took the advice and called him with the offer, he quit Rickles and the has-been rockers and began talking up Motown acts all over Hollywood. He didn’t meet Berry Gordy until he came to Detroit to drop in, uninvited, at the July 4th Motown picnic. Gordy was shocked to see the elfin white stranger arrive in the back seat of Gordy’s ex-wife Thelma’s car, having waylaid her on the way by claiming he “ran Motown’s West Coast office.” When Berger introduced himself, Gordy kept his distance, wondering why Seltzer had hired this loon.

SHELLY BERGER: At the beginning, Mr. Gordy and I thought each other were crazy. I thought his memo that the Supremes could only record No. 1 records was the most insane thing I’d ever heard of. When we sat down, he asked me, “Can you get our acts on TV?” I said, “Not only will I do that, but we’re going to produce our own TV specials and movies.” At which point he excused himself, called Ralph Seltzer, and told him to fire me. I was informed that his exact words were “Either he’s on drugs or he’s an idiot.”

Because it was so far-fetched. But it was something I truly believed. I knew what Motown was capable of. It had giant potential. It just didn’t have anyone who could work full-time on it. Mr. Gordy tried to do it himself, but he had a record company to run. Left to his devices alone, it never would have gotten done. For many reasons. Look, there’s no need to sugar-coat it. There was resistance to black acts. We live in a racist country, back then much more so. We were up against Sammy Davis, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, all the “standard” black 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 252

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performers who got all the work there was for black acts. We were the rock and roll kids.

Mr. Gordy realized all that; and that he had nothing to lose with me. And I think we both learned to believe that each of us was at least partly sane.

Gordy became convinced Berger was onto something when, within weeks, he’d gotten Dick Clark to do an entire “Where the Action Is” show from the Roostertail Club featuring no one but Motown acts.

The Motown operation in L.A. was a cramped room in a small office building at 6290 Sunset Boulevard. “Actually,” says Berger, “the West Coast office was basically Brenda Holloway,” the only act of consequence to record out of L.A. The staff there consisted mainly of producers Hal Davis and Marc Gordon and songwriter Frank Wilson, their work confined to cutting Holloway records and Motown album filler. Now, it became a hub of outgoing and incoming calls, with Berger, a phone in each ear, carrying on several conversations at once with TV producers. Leaning on Ed Sullivan’s head man Bob Precht, he was able to secure a deal for the Supremes to appear on the
Sullivan
show four times a year; in time, every other big-name Motown act would make it onto Sullivan’s stage, too.

Berger’s old friendship with Jules Podell also paid dividends; the original Copa contract with the Supremes was torn up, replaced by one that broke the “glass ceiling” of Podell’s pay scale. “I gave Jules an additional year on the Supremes,” Berger explains, “and an added year on the Temptations, and I broke the top, which was $10,000. I believe we got $17,500 for the Supremes’ last engagement there. Nobody, not even Sinatra, had ever gotten near that, even near $15,000. It happened because I was one of the few people Jules Podell would talk to. He didn’t do me any favors, he just listened to me. He didn’t ever really listen to Mr. Gordy. He didn’t really even know who Berry Gordy was.

Jules spoke to me, Lee Solomon at William Morris, and Buddy Howell at GAC. So that was the bonus that Motown got when they hired me.” With barely a breath in between negotiations, Berger enlisted the independent TV production team of George Schlatter and Ed Friendly (who would bring
Laugh-In
to the small screen in 1968) to package a Supremes-Temptations special and present it to the networks, and began dickering with ABC’s Saturday night stalwart
The Hollywood Palace
for the Supremes not just to perform on the show, as they had already, but to host the glitter-filled show several times a year.

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By 1967, L.A. would be more than a nominal piece of lint in the Motown back drawer. Its weight, reflecting that of the West Coast itself as the show-business capital of the world, was pulling Gordy toward a new vital center. That would mean a recasting of the Motown brand, from a community-based enterprise to a multi-market, multi-media combine, from brown-bag lunches to power lunches at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It would be a long, long way from John R Street to Hollywood and Vine.

Just as with the ultimate design for Diana Ross, however, Gordy would need to go slow, since eventually these transitions would mean that the palm tree–shaded, avocado-flavored Motown would have no use for the rapidly rusting Motor Town itself—nor for most of the Motown acts. Still, Gordy would drop plenty of hints as to what was coming. As early as June of ’66,
Billboard
crackled with a page-one story headlined “MOTOWN EXPANSION IN HIGH GEAR WITH

B’WAY, TV, MOVIES”; not incidentally, the paper noted that the “first step in the grand plan is the hiring of Shelly Berger.” Gordy found other ways to keep Berger busy and away from the phones. Needing a proxy high-roller to fete industry executives and assorted showbiz VIPs at high-visibility Supremes concerts—not to mention a human shield to keep the Supremes separated from the press—he began sending Berger on the road with the girls. By the autumn of 1966, when the Supremes embarked on a tour of the Far East, Gordy had made him manager of the group, handing over the affairs of the second-biggest act in the world, just as Florence Ballard was fast becoming Motown’s biggest headache.

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seventeen

“PUT

THE MONEY ON

DIANA”

Key to all of Gordy’s plans for the Supremes, and Diana Ross, was the unending production of hits—not just big hits but
No. 1
hits.

HDH did their part by ushering the group back to the seat of power on the charts. When Berger came to Detroit on that July 4th, the girls were putting the finishing touches on two new songs, then titled “This Is Where I Came In” and “Pay Back,” after spending months of tracking and overdubbing.

Clearly, no Supremes song would go out now with any hedges or shortcomings; those unmatching bass lines on “Itching in My Heart,” as well as they were integrated into the overall mix, were now the kind of thing that was
verboten
. Hours, then supplemental sessions, were eaten up getting every note right. And because the two songs were nothing alike, each required a different sort of tinkering.

The former—renamed “You Can’t Hurry Love”—backtracked to a more soulful, gospel feel and engendered a less decorous arrangement, one that Alan Slutsky pairs with no less than Ravel’s “Bolero” as “a simple rhythm that had a dramatic influence in the music world.” If Motown grooves were normally meant to mesh like the workings of an automobile engine, with small parts playing off each other, each instrument in “Hurry” was melted into a giant slab of rhythm, the syncopa-tion provided only by the
chank
of a guitar and the clanging vibes on the backbeat; as always, the anchor was James Jamerson’s fat, sassy bass licks—including arguably the second most famous bass intro in history (behind only Jamerson’s three-beat preamble on “My Girl”), a 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4 figure (cribbed years later on Hall and Oates’s “Maneater”).