The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (70 page)

None of them expressed, or even acted like they had, any real emotion.

A small gesture of such, bogus or not—a touching of hands, for example, or a group hug—would have put an unforgettable period on the sentence. Instead, with Mary and Cindy stepping back several feet behind Diana as they finished, they stood basking in the applause, not looking at each other. When Sullivan then called over Diana—and only Diana—for a brief good-luck wish (still not meeting her expectations 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 371

THE LAST MILE

371

for what should be a proper greeting, even after all this time), Mary and Cindy, out of camera range as it left them to follow Diana, cast each other a glance and trailed off stage.

When Diana made her way backstage into the retinue of dozens of Motown hangers-on, the temperature was no warmer.

“They were not all hugging together,” said Tony Tucker. “Nobody was wishing farewell. . . . You could see that Diana could not be bothered with Mary and Cindy. She was concentrating on herself.” Wilson, still unmelted years later, would explain her lack of feeling with a diffident shrug: “I felt like I’d said goodbye already.” The wall of separation between the two factions, which struck Tucker as “tragic,” made a sham of the fantasy of that last record. Indeed, for anyone who was around the Supremes’ crumbling universe, at that moment “someday” could only seem very, very far off.

Florence Ballard had a secret.

Even though she was in dire straits, Flo had begged and borrowed enough money to make sure she would be a part of the Supremes’ re-quiem. As the Frontier engagement approached and it became clear that everyone who was anyone at Motown was expected to be there for the January 14 grand finale, Flo couldn’t think of a reason in the world why she shouldn’t be among them. Of course, that Gordy and Ross could have come up with at least a thousand reasons why she
shouldn’t
only made her more determined to, as she told friends, go there and

“shake ’em up.”

According to Delcina Wilson, another companion of Mary’s who had hung around them as a kind of unofficial photographer and later became a confidante of Ballard’s, after Flo made up her mind to crash the party in Vegas she bought tickets for the January 14 show for her and Tommy through a travel agent as part of a package that included first-class fare and a suite at the Frontier. She had a faux Bill Blass gown made by a local seamstress, bought a new fashionable wig, and was ready to go. She was even talking about holding forth with the press, saying things about Berry and Diana that would let the air out of the phony gaiety of the festivities.

There were people around Motown who would have paid good money just to see Berry’s and Diana’s faces if Flo was there that night.

Might she even pull a David Ruffin and clamber up on the stage to sing 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 372

372

THE SUPREMES

with the Supremes? Would the audience believe it was a planned part of the program—the only appearance ever of all four Supremes—and cheer themselves hoarse? And if any of this happened, would Berry’s and Diana’s heads explode in stereo?

In the end, alas, none of these delectable figments, which no doubt were in Flo’s mind all along—particularly the notion of stealing Diana’s thunder as divine payback for having stolen hers—were not to be, evidently because Tommy Chapman chose the time just before they were to make the trip to confirm the suspicions of many around her. After Flo gave him several thousand dollars to pick up her gown, her wig, her furs from storage, and the plane tickets, he didn’t come back for four days.

Tellingly, Flo had no worries that he had been hurt; it was just another of Tommy’s routine disappearing acts. She seemed far more upset that without the money she had no way to get to Vegas. When she called Delcina to tell her, she said she thought about taking a Greyhound bus all the way there.

“Don’t you dare,” the photographer told her, and offered to wire her $2,000.

“Forget it,” Flo said, her spirits again in the dumps. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

Delcina still held out hope. She’d kept Flo’s secret from Mary, so it would be a “surprise,” but now only Mary could have arranged for Flo to be there so she explained the situation to her.

Thinking Mary would surely help out her old friend and begin making calls to get Flo to Vegas, she instead had little reaction. Having grown tired of playing the good soldier to bring the Supremes together only to see Flo always ruin it, Mary couldn’t be bothered.

“Well, perhaps everything worked out for the best” was all she said.

The final show went on without complications. At the midnight performance in the Music Hall of the Frontier Hotel—making the date of the finale technically January 15—the joint was packed. In a house with 1,000 seats, nearly twice that many were allowed in. And everybody was there: Smokey, Marvin, all the Gordys, the girls’ mothers, other family members. So was the press, en masse, and the photographers were everywhere. Scattered along the linen-covered tables were celebrities: Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Dick Clark, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 373

THE LAST MILE

373

Lou Rawls, Bill Russell. The tension and anticipation made it seem almost as if they were awaiting the bell at a championship fight.

Backstage, Diana felt it the most, her face tight and dour as she stood nervously chain-smoking, flicking the butts to the ground around her expensive high-heel shoes. Mary and Cindy, who were raising toasts to each other with glasses of champagne in the dressing room, felt it as well, though Mary downplayed the whole thing as contrived solely to benefit Diana. Once the house lights dimmed and Gil Askey raised his arm to strike up the band one last time for Diana Ross and the Supremes, there was exactly no doubt about Mary’s assumption.

For Ross and Gordy, this night wasn’t about the Supremes’ finale; it was in every way Diana Ross’s solo debut.

With the band playing, Gordy approached Diana and kissed her for luck, telling her, “This is your night. You’re a star, baby.” Just before going on, Wilson would recall, “Diane and I just looked at each other in silence. There were no ‘good-byes’ or ‘good-lucks,’ not even a hug. We could have done those things, but we both knew it would have been a farce.”

All three of them were radiant in their floor-length Bob Mackie gowns made of black velvet and gold braided inlays, pearls laid around their necks, and Gibson girl–style wigs with attached falls, Diana’s with her now-trademark peek-a-boo spit-curl dangling over her right eye.

But this was Diana Ross’s spotlight, and no one else would be permitted within it unless at her whim.

The atmosphere was crackling when they took their positions, and they fed off it with an electric performance. They began with the “TCB” theme and went into medleys of four of their older hits and then two show tunes, an “I am so blessed” Ross monologue, “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” an “I am so blessed” Mary Wilson monologue and her solo on “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” a bit of banter between Ross and Wilson, and “Reflections.” That first third of the show pretty much took care of the Supremes.

The rest was a self-indulgent exercise by “Miss Ross,” except for when she was metaphorically on her knees for Berry Gordy—her solos on

“May Man” and “Didn’t We,” chosen as her personal “thank you’s,” no doubt once and for all put to bed the “just good friends” story as she sang to him in the aisle a few feet from where he sat at the head Motown table, her face streaked in tears. Some in the house dabbed at their own tears, although at least a few stifled a derisive giggle at the over-baked mawk, which continued with two more songs dedicated to him, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 374

374

THE SUPREMES

“Big Spender”—which some past, forsaken Motown acts might have enjoyed a good chuckle at—and “Falling in Love with Love.” With all the emotion spent, the night had already become exhausting. But Diana was only getting warmed up for more extended bathos.

When the girls broke into “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” few knew what they were in for. After the “Aquarius” part was done and the repetitive choruses had begun, Ross was again bounding off the stage into the aisles, clapping and grooving as Mary and Cindy remained fixed on the stage cooing “Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in” over and over.

Looking for familiar faces, Diana began to stick her microphone under their noses so that they could chime in; if they hesitated, she implored,

“Come on, ya gotta sing!”

Among her victims were Smokey and Claudette Robinson (with the latter thinking it was just a little late for Diana to show her a little love, eight years after showing her husband a lot of it), Marvin and Anna Gaye, and Esther and Gwen Gordy—Diana squealing that she, too, was “a part of the Gordy family. I’m a sister!” Judging from their restrained look, none of the Gordy sisters seemed overly comfortable with that notion. By the time the likes of Steve Allen and Dick Clark got to sing off-key, Wilson recalled, “[w]e had sung the chorus about fifty times,” and now more than a few were so numbed that they just wanted to make it stop.

“One more time!” Diana shouted, bringing the sun out and shining for another few choruses.

Most in the house absolutely loved it, all of it. If some were exhausted, far more were exhilarated by this Motown hootenanny. The mood then, on a dime, became subdued and somber when the Su -

premes trilled “The Impossible Dream,” followed by the big cathartic wrecking ball of a closing number, what else but “Someday We’ll Be Together.” With not a dry eye in the joint, on stage or in the hall, the girls aced it, leaving 2,000 people limp and drained. Even jaded, battle-fatigued Supremes’ insiders could not fail to be moved, and emotionally stripped to the bone.

Not so, however, for the most jaded; as Mary and Cindy remembered it, they had just pulled off the world’s most lavish con.

“It was all acting,” Birdsong once was quoted, “the smiles, the tears, all of it. Just acting.”

As for Wilson, she would write in
Dreamgirl
that there was just no place for reality on that night of fables: “[T]he reporters [later] wrote about how I clowned around and ‘teased Diana Ross, much like a sister 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 375

THE LAST MILE

375

would, toying with the spotlight—a demonstration of the girls’ closeness.’ That the world still believed we were the best of friends seemed the perfect ending.”

Then there was the “Supreme Supreme” herself, who, even while spouting self-deluded rot about who did dirt to whom during the life span of the group, told some essential truths.

“A quiet sadness filled me as I realized that I was leaving,” she would say, “not only because I wanted to but because I had to. They had hurt me very badly, beyond repair. We weren’t a group anymore.” At the conclusion of the show, Diana called to the stage Jean Terrell, acting like doing so was her decision. “I think she should be here right now,” she told the audience. As the new Supreme came into view, some catty types in the crowd could be heard insulting her gown, a black polyester crepe facsimile of the obscenely expensive Mackie frocks worn by the others. Later, after the huzzahs had died down and the crowd had filed out, there would be private parties, endless champagne toasts, and the unveiling of a gigantic cake inscribed “Someday We’ll Be Together.”

At that moment, no one wanted to look back, only ahead, even though the only story that would matter was their past, the grainy history of how three girls unified by the deprivations of the ghetto became three cultural icons and as mature women headed off into three completely different directions: toward unequaled fame and fortune, toward a life without end as an ex-Supreme, and toward a life that ended much too soon.

Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard, and surely Cindy Birdsong, could not have fully understood why it happened that way, or why what they were leaving behind was so much bigger than them, something that would take decades to quantify—although Diana seemed to have a glimmer in telling
Look
that “[p]eople will always think when they see three Negro girls, three black faces, that they’re the Supremes. It’s a beautiful image to keep. There we are, fixed in time, forever and ever.”

The only thing that really mattered—
to them—
wasn’t the metrics or metaphysics of “Someday We’ll Be Together.” It was that, on
that
day, it was over. And to that, they could say hallelujah and amen.

0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 376

Epilogue

WHERE DID

OUR LOVE

GO?

That the Supremes’brand name chugged on unabated with its most famous member exchanged for a lead singer who had the nerve to wear polyester in Las Vegas was, Shelly Berger believes, something on the order of sorcery. “When has any other super group been split like that at the height of their fame and not only retained their cache but made new fans? They carried on about as long as they had with Diana.” His conclusion: “Only Motown could have done that kind of thing. We did it with the Temptations, too, after David Ruffin.”

In 1970, only Motown had the power and the creative timber to change the swiftest river currents and long-held industry assumptions.

The mom-and-pop operation run by Mom and Pops Gordy’s ne’er-do-well son, stoked by their $800 loan he had to get on his knees for, was a strict paradigm of capitalism and black entrepreneurship. In ’69, when only death could have pried Gordy’s Motown stock from him, those shares alone were worth $5 million. (Even when he would finally let a few shares go, giving 236 to Esther Edwards in 1972 and 235 to Smokey Robinson in ’74, he still retained 4,494 of the company’s 4,995 shares.) Since Motown was organized under the IRS code as a subchapter S company, as Motown historian Peter Benjaminson noted before Gordy sold out, “Motown’s money is Gordy’s money. If the company spends money, it comes out of Gordy’s pocket. If it makes money, it goes into Gordy’s pocket.”