The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (17 page)

She was wrong. But by the time she realized it, she was too far gone.

From the near abyss of the winter, the Primettes were back in business by spring. They’d even found a foolproof way to defuse Diane’s diva games. When she again came down with a last-minute “illness,” Richard Morris hired her sister, and foil, Barbara Jean to fill in for her.

That
got her well in a hurry, and there’d be no relapse.

By then, too, they had replaced Betty McGlown—but only after Diane had vetoed Mary’s candidate, a childhood friend named Jackie Burkes, who was in another singing group. Unwilling to take in someone who if a major disagreement arose would likely side with Mary, Diane made things so unpleasant for Jackie that she told Mary, “Forget it.” Knowing what Burkes would have to put up with, Mary didn’t try to change her mind. “Jackie,” she would say, “would have been crazy to pursue it,” given Ross’s hostility and petty ways.

A more palatable choice for Diane was Barbara Martin, whose group with her brother Theodore and Ross’s ever infatuated school chum Richard Street had split up, leaving her free. Cute and willowy, she’d graduated the previous spring from Northeastern High and the music teacher there suggested that Flo call her. She did, and Martin readily agreed to join. When they sang together a few days later, the chemistry seemed propitious, made so for Diane by the fact that Martin was the antithesis of the hectoring McGlown—and was actually intimidated by Diane herself. Moreover, she was a superior dancer who could tweak their wooden stage act.

After Martin was introduced to Richard Morris, he said he’d book a new round of gigs for them. Days passed, then weeks, with no word from Morris. Just as when Milton Jenkins went missing, no one seemed to know where he was, either, on the street or at Motown. As it turned out, his disappearance had a darker aspect, as Flo eventually found out when a friend who knew Richie, too, told her he was in jail—having been arrested for violating parole for a past, uncertain crime.

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As little as the girls knew of Jenkins’s shady doings, if he’d been busted for pimping, it wouldn’t have shocked them the way Morris’s in-carceration did. And while his jail stay was brief, the Primettes wasted no time moving on. Understandably feeling as if they’d been put through the ringer by lower-case managers, and sick of being kept in the lurch after two years, they agreed that they would chuck any more Berry Gordy stand-ins and wannabes and cash in their precious chit for the real thing.

In late November, they went back to West Grand Boulevard, not to do hand-claps and nondescript backing vocals but to put it to Gordy.

The message was that there had been enough fooling around, so sign us already.

In the time since their Motown audition, much had happened that would make Gordy more receptive to such a notion. It wasn’t just that the group was a year older and had built a track record of sorts, even if it was mainly a failed single. More important, the girl-group genre had perked up again when a foursome from New Jersey, the Shirelles, went Top Forty in October 1960 with a sweet but suggestive song called “Tonight’s the Night,” recorded for a small independent label called Scepter; as the year ended, another Shirelles tune, the even more provocative “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” written by Donnie Kirshner’s top tunesmiths, the husband and wife team of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, hit No. 1 on the pop chart in early ’61—a first for a girl-group of the rock era.

Gordy, as an industry scion and student of the Kirshner exemplar, realized he needed to plant some pop seeds in his R&B crop. Robert Bateman, in fact, seemed to be his girl-group talent scout. Of course, he had seen the primal Primettes before anyone else who mattered. More recently, he’d witnessed a group from suburban Inkster, Michigan, perform in a high school talent contest, the prize for which was a Motown audition; even though they’d lost, Bateman went backstage and offered the group, which for some reason was called the Casingyettes, an audition, too. That could have meant appearing before anyone at 2648

West Grand Boulevard, but Bateman made sure Gordy heard them.

Again, though, the latter couldn’t commit, telling them to come back with an original song. (That would happen in early ’61, when he’d sign them and call them the Marvelettes.) Gordy had also employed a distaff 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 82

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trio, the Andantes, as background vocalists—Raynoma Liles having quit singing late in 1960. (Their leader was a teen named Louvain Demps, who had been the first client of the Rayber Voices.) Gordy would likely have called the Primettes back on his own. As it was, when he saw them again on the Motown lot, they didn’t need to ask about a contract. Nor did he abide by, or seem to remember, his caveat about their needing to finish school before that could happen.

Martin was already rid of school, and Ross and Wilson were only a few months away; and Ballard had chosen to drop out of school altogether, rather than run the risk of being left back—a decision about which Gordy was diffident now, but would hold over Flo’s head like a machete later, when it served his purpose.

Noticing the girls in the reception area, he approached them with a big hug for Diane, Mary, and Flo, and another for the new girl. He then hustled them into Studio A, where he was supervising a Mary Wells vocal session. If it was meant as a signal that he had something in store for them, the girls picked up on it. Ross in particular. She had come in that day prepared to kill Gordy with kindness. She even had a pair of cuff links in her purse that she’d made for him in a school crafts class—with his initials inscribed on each. Finding an idle moment to hand them to him, she wasted no time in asking, with batted eyelashes,

“Are you going to sign us today?”

“Didn’t I tell you I would a year ago?” he said, avoiding a direct yes.

She stared at him with mock impatience.

“Welllll?” she demanded, drawing out the word playfully.

Gordy’s cohorts could hardly believe it. Here was a sparring match of wits between the old boxer and a briny high school girl half his age, and he was the one covering up. He was able to keep the upper hand by informing them the contract papers had to be drawn up, and that would take a little time. In the meantime, he said, “Let’s see what you can do.”

The Primettes spent the next month and a half waiting on those papers. As semi-official Motown artists, they paid dues doing backup vocal work for Mary Wells on songs like “He Holds His Own,” “You Lost the Sweetest Boy,” and “Honey Boy”—all of which went unreleased—

as well as for Mable John and Singin’ Sammy Ward. Gordy even let the girls have studio time for themselves, during which they cut at least three singles.

The first was “I Want a Guy,” written by Gordy, Brian Holland, and Freddie Gorman—the last a new Motown stringer who in another 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 83

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quirk of Detroit’s inbred music community happened to be a mailman whose route included the Brewster-Douglass building Ross lived in. Diane heard him noodling the tune on a piano in the studio one day and pestered Gordy to let her group record it. Apparently, she asked very nicely because Berry himself produced it, with Diane on lead.

In retrospect, it’s a wonder either of them survived the experience.

Written as a perky ditty, it was murdered right off by Gordy with a bizarre deep organ sounding like something out of a Bela Lugosi movie that persisted with wild, inapt flourishes throughout the song. Ross completed the crime with a screechy twang, executing an odd, quivery glissando on the word “want.” Both mentor and protégé, however, were quite satisfied with the work—Ross could even wax in
Secrets of a Sparrow
that “I vividly remember this session. It felt so important. With my eyes closed and my arms outstretched, I poured my heart into this song.

When I listen to it now, I feel nostalgic; I can hear that teenage yearning in my voice.”

Gordy must have heard the same thing. He penciled it in as their first release and, in its wake, approved more sessions for the group. Out of those came one more Gordy-written stinker, “The Boy That Got Away”—featuring Ross baying as if she’d inhaled helium and trying vainly to sound cool with a spoken “one-two, one-two-three” downbeat intro—and two others written and produced by Smokey Robinson,

“Who’s Lovin’ You” and “After All.” While the latter is intriguing because the lead vocal was split among all four girls—and, given this, the only record on which Martin’s strong baritone can be clearly heard—all these tracks reveal less about the limitations of the group than those of Gordy and Robinson in getting a grip on the girl-group form. Not really knowing how to update pop and R&B the way they had in “Shop Around,” they lost the buoyancy and effervescence that the Primettes had evinced when they performed on stage. What came out of the mixed tracks were more like two-chord demos that cribbed Chantels and Shirelles melodies and slapped them on top of the Gordy “sound,” with its deep bottoms, crisply accented highs, and misty echoes. The missing element: imagination.

Gordy and Robinson agreed that they were rather lost in these efforts, and that the last two should not be released; they would remain unreleased until forty years later, when they appeared as historical curiosities on the five-disc
Supremes
box-set. Still, aside from Ross’s trouble some nasal delivery—which was incidental to Gordy’s opinion that her voice had an indefinable commercial kick—the Primettes were judged ready 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 84

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for their close-up. After the new year, Gordy got moving on the promised contracts, and on January 15, 1961, the girls were called in to sign them. All of them were accompanied by their mothers, even Barbara, who at 18 was of legal age; the others still needed parental consent for making Gordy their de facto guardian until they came of age. Again, Fred Ross had objected, on the usual grounds: that if Diane, now two months from her 17th birthday, went ahead with her singing, she would never go to college. And, this time, Ernestine was prepared to stand with him. Very skeptically, she agreed to come to 2648 West Grand Boulevard with her daughter, to meet Gordy face-to-face.

When they met, she wasn’t impressed. Gordy was wearing a fluffy white Angora sweater—“Who’s Mr. Fancy?” she said when he came into the room—and he seemed disinclined to say much as he turned over the contract business to Motown A&R* man Mickey Stevenson, who couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than Diane, though he’d been in the music business since he was 9 years old, as a singer and behind-the-scenes mover. Eyeing Gordy mostly from a distance, Ernestine believed that the diminutive, baby-faced Gordy, too, was a young man. At least Milt Jenkins had some seasoning. Gordy, she kept telling Diane, was a “kid,” a term she kept using even after being informed that he was in fact in his 30s. “How could this kid,” she would ask, “be anyone’s guardian?”

Seeing how wary all the mothers were, Gordy called in his sophisticated sister Esther to explain to them about the selectiveness of the Motown “family,” how the men of Motown were Boy Scout–pure, and how the girls were all chaperoned on the road—often by some of the girls’ mothers. Esther had the rap down to an art by now, having quelled many mothers’ fears, but it was touch-and-go right to the end.

Barbara’s mother was, if anything, more recalcitrant than Ernestine, becoming haughty and, as Wilson recalled, “condescending in her attitude that her daughter was too good to be a singer.” But under group pressure, intensified by the charged atmospherics of Motown, Ernestine Ross, Lurlee Ballard, Johnnie Mae Wilson, and Barbara’s mother ultimately left their marker on each eye-glazing fourteen-page, double-spaced contract.

* This acronym is industry shorthand for “artists and repertoire,” the functional meaning of which is the scouting and signing of talent, though Stevenson’s purview was far greater, extending to producing, writing, green-lighting songs for release, and keeping musicians paid and loyal to Motown.

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Technically, the deal was not with Motown but, rather, with Berry Gordy Enterprises and specifically Tamla Records, and was typical for such contracts of the era—which, if any young performers had run them by a lawyer, would quickly have set off alarm bells. Of course, it helped the industry panjandrums that this rarely if ever happened, the scent of fame trumping the notion of not signing. In this construct, the fine print, filled with numbing legalese, was a formality of interest only to the muckety-mucks. Of more compelling interest to prospective Motown acts and their elders was a simple proposition: Would Berry Gordy do wrong by his “family”? The answer, implicitly, was no.

Still, not one among the three mothers felt sanguine about leaving their signature that day.

“They just didn’t trust this little guy, Berry Gordy, not with our emotional development or with our money,” Ross would recall.

Their gut feeling was well founded. As they would discover later, what they had signed was the abrogation of every conceivable right a human being has, except possibly the right to vote and to have a trial by jury. The decision on how, when, and how much to pay them rested solely with “The Company.” They had no inherent right to question The Company draining such remuneration for unspecified “expenses” (Gordy having learned
that
trick from Al Green and Nat Tarnopol). In what may have seemed a trivial matter at the time, Motown retained 100 percent of all royalty rights to future commercial applications of songs in movies and commercials. And, though the Primettes probably didn’t imagine this would ever pertain to them, Motown had the exclusive right to hire and/or fire any member of any group at any time for any cause.

As for those royalties, the terms were, again, standard: a 3 percent royalty to be split equally among the members—due on 90 percent of the retail price of each record sold (which was always at a discount on the market)—
less
taxes and “packaging costs.” That broke down, in the market value of the times, to approximately two cents per record sold at seventy-five cents; the net earnings on a record that theoretically sold 1 million copies (and, again, that would have to be by Gordy’s word, with no outside auditors to verify it) would work out to roughly $20,000, which when divvied by the current foursome would be $5,000 each. Gordy would pocket the rest—$730,000—
plus
whatever he deemed to cover expenses and costs.