The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (20 page)

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adjutant, Ross by habit had no compunction against taking aim at Smokey Robinson, her friend and courtier of favors. She began almost from the start to wiggle her way into Smokey’s deep consciousness.

As it was, he had felt comfortable enough in his friendship with her to foot the bill—or “loan” her, as he has recalled it—for the cosmetology and modeling classes she was taking on weekends. But as she turned up her “aggressive charm,” he apparently had in mind lessons of another kind for her. The kind for which he’d accrued a reputation around Motown—not his public incarnation as a doe-eyed romantic spinning lyrical mush about wanting “a lifetime of devotion” but the glandular, baby-faced Lothario wanting just ten minutes in a secluded nook.

Smokey, then, was a ripe target for any sweet young thing, and because there was no shortage of those around 2648 West Grand Boulevard, the exploits of “little Smokey”—and how he loved to “shop around” despite his storybook marriage to Claudette—generated tons of hushed “water fountain” gossip among the girls. The Supremes were typically curious about how accurate the stories were about his prodigious sexual appetite, and when he’d amble through the halls in his tight slacks all female eyes would steal a glance southward at the

“goods.” Flo actually seemed to be the most curious, detailing the inventive ways she would ravish him, but for her and Mary both, his

“other” goods—his wedding ring—kept it a fantasy.

They assumed the same went for Diane. Not that she hadn’t flirted with him in her cloying way, but she did that with all the Motown men, and always with Berry Gordy, harmlessly enough. But Ross also understood the ethos that drove those men, in which power was indeed an aphrodisiac as it was transfused into the plasma of Hitsville males by the biggest lecher of them all. Marvin Gaye once said of his boss to the writer David Ritz, “Berry was the horniest man in Detroit. He married black and fooled around with whites. You’d think he was working, but he might be freaking with some chick right up there in his office.” A similar Gaye quote, to J. Randy Taraborrelli, went: “Berry Gordy was leading the way, and he’d be up in his room freaking with whoever was in his life that night. He was the father figure. So why wouldn’t all the ‘children’ follow suit?”

Yet there was a limit to Gordy’s ways—Motown’s female acts were off limits. Perhaps to prevent himself from going too far, Berry made it clear that his young girls were chattel in every sense, to be guarded, herded, and protected from men like himself, and not to be tarnished the way all other women in the world were wont to be. He went to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 99

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extremes seeing to it that they were chaperoned on tours and shadowed by bodyguards who would menace any fans who got near them.

The Motown circle of performers could turn only to themselves for company on the long, lonely road, initiating a slew of intra-company sexual canoodling through the years, most of which ended when the tours did.

Gordy liked to posture about those sorts of “incestuous” shenanigans, too, but with a presumed wink and nod, an artifice similar to his regular lectures to the “children” about the evils of, and fines for, gambling on the bus rides—then, when he would go along on a selected tour, he’d be in the back, betting thousands of dollars at a clip on endless rounds of hearts or five-card stud. But everyone could tell the difference when he ordered his lieutenants to keep their hands off the girls. About this, he was dead serious.

Diane Ross was not alone in her willingness to test Berry’s First Commandment, but with a single-mindedness unmatched by any other Hitsville woman—or man—she broke ground that no other women, and few men, ever did. The magnetic attraction between the two of them was already palpable, though kept at bay by both. Again, if impure thoughts of hitting on a 17-year-old girl crossed his mind during the early Supremes history, his avuncular feelings for the Supremes as a whole submerged them.

Besides, as Marvin Gaye suggested, Gordy was up to his mustache with more experienced women, his marriage to Raynoma Liles doing nothing to prevent an affair he carried on with a woman named Margaret Norton—with whom he’d had sex on his
wedding night
, according to Robert Bateman. When Liles found out, she, too, had an affair, with the Satintones’ Sonny Sanders. Soon after, she and Berry had it out, with harsh words and fists flying in the apartment they had moved to on Lawton Street in 1961 when Motown became overcrowded, right in front of a visiting, and startled, Smokey Robinson.

Things would get even worse, when a psychotic Liles stalked Norton in a parking lot and held a gun to her neck, before Smokey, who fortunately happened to be there again, collared Liles from behind and yelled to Margaret, “I’ve got her! Run!” Later, Raynoma sat in her car in front of Norton’s home for hours, set on murder-suicide. But when Margaret didn’t come out, she drove off—all the way to New York, Berry having agreed to be rid of her by letting her run the skeletal New York office of Motown Inc. There, she was subsequently arrested by the FBI for illegally holding back large numbers of Motown records 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 100

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earmarked for distributors and selling them directly to record stores—

an early form of bootlegging. With Liles facing jail time, Gordy got her to sign away all her 50 percent stock interest in Motown in exchange for a $10,000 lump sum, $16,500 a year for ten years, $2,000 a year in child support, and a promise not to press charges. (None of these highly entertaining details made it into Gordy’s memoirs, or Robinson’s.) He would obtain a Mexican divorce and take up with Margaret openly, though refraining from marrying her, his eye ever wandering.

But if the busy—and no doubt exhausted—Gordy was out of range for Diane Ross in 1961, she and his loyal 21-year-old scion created in his image quickly bloomed from stablemates to bedmates, under the guise of working on “projects.” What’s more, rather than murkily “living in shame,” Diane made sure it didn’t stay a secret. One day late in

’61, she flounced in with some shocking news for Mary and Flo.

“Guess what? I dated Mr. Smokey Robinson!” she crowed, as giddy as if she’d just hit the jackpot in a casino.

Mary and Flo were duly impressed, not least by her absolute lack of discretion about making it with a married man, but also by her flaunt-ing of the Motown moral etiquette, flawed and hypocritical as it was.

Seeing them with their mouths agape, and not really knowing what to say, Diane was radiant.

When Flo was finally able to blurt out, “This is gonna get back to Berry,” Diane’s smile was the only retort she needed: If she was to be the “it” girl, she wouldn’t give a damn about her bad reputation, which might even make Gordy see her more as a woman than as a daughter figure. It’s not clear when Berry did get wind of it, but with Ross boasting to everyone but the janitor about how Smokey would send her flowers on the morning-afters, their affair became the worst-kept nonsecret ever at Hitsville, at least until her future liaison with Gordy took off.

Not that Smokey would ever own up to it. Walking a verbal high-wire and using every euphemism he could think of for “adultery,” he wrote in his autobiography that “[w]e rehearsed together, we worked late. We developed an intimacy, genuine love, and respect. We enjoyed each other’s company.” Eventually, he noted, it got back to Claudette, who confronted him, with the colloquy going like this:

“Word is [that] you’re really enjoying Diane’s company.”

“She’s my friend.”

“People say she’s more.”

“People say all kinds of shit. If the gossip’s upsetting you—”

“It’s upsetting me a lot.”

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“Would it make you feel better if I didn’t see Diane so much?”

“It would.”

“Then I’ll cool it.”

(Perhaps Smokey had a certain interlude in mind when he later wrote one of his most famous lyrics, for the Miracles’ “Ooh Baby Baby”:

“Although she may be cute, she’s just a substitute / Because you’re the permanent one.”)

Given Ross’s pride and joy in her handiwork—knowing that any opprobrium by the Motown women would be undercut by their envy—

she clearly relished the
schadenfreude
in humiliating Claudette, justify-ing her own immorality on the thin reed that she wasn’t the other woman but the
only
woman keeping Smokey satisfied. In this, Ross wasn’t the only Motown woman about whom Claudette Robinson was scorned for being so blind in the face of her husband’s obvious philandering, though as the years wore on most everyone would pity her for her long-suffering gallantry—enduring no fewer than
eight
miscarriages, once after Smokey was ill and he, unbelievably, let her take over the role of lead singer for the Miracles on a long tour, despite being eight months pregnant. She stoically stuck out the marriage for twenty-seven years. Yet, today, dispassionately, she rejects any grudge or blame for how he repaid her blind loyalty.

CLAUDETTE ROGERS: That was so long ago. The whole Motown thing is like a past life. People still like to dredge up things that may have happened, but for me, it’s like who cares? I look at it like this: Only Smokey and Diana could tell you what they did with each other. Because I don’t know. I mean it. If they had an affair, I wasn’t aware of it. There have been a lot of rumors, and when you hear something so many times, it might very well have been that way.

People do things in the dark, and if they ever want to share it in the light, I’ll be listening. But all I know is that I asked Smokey, one time, if he was doing it with Diana, and his answer was no. And obviously, for me to stay married for all those years, I had to believe him or it wouldn’t have gotten very far.

She has had a good guffaw over the years seeing herself alternately cast as a shrew and a wimp in various deliberations of this topic. One account had her slapping Ross’s face; another, pushing Ross out of the way when she stood next to her trying to act congenial during Motown 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 102

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publicity photo shoots. Still another had her stabbing one of Smokey’s tarts. By contrast, she was also said to have walked in on one such tryst, politely excusing herself, and walking back out.

Oh, God, there are so many stories, so many rumors, and I treat the Smokey and Diana thing as one of them. What Smokey wrote in his book, that dialogue between us, if I said that, I don’t remember. I always thought the reason he stopped recording them had nothing to do with me. It was because he wasn’t producing any hits on them.

Oh, I have no doubt she liked him—they all did. Many, many women today still do. If he and Diana took it further, so be it. But all you can do as a wife is trust your husband. And I never thought I had to shun Diana, either. We’ve been friends for a long time. When she lived in California, we were five blocks from each other and she would come over with her children. Our daughters played together, her nephew played with my son. What would be the point in not being friends? If that happened forty-five years ago, what would it mean at this point in my life to be upset with her, or him?

Whatever happened, happened. It didn’t make a dent in my life. Whatever it was, it’s something they have to deal with, on their own, with their God.

While the liaison continued, Smokey took time from his work with Mary Wells to squeeze in sessions in late December 1961. For the floun-dering Supremes, this proved critical, as it came at a time when the group had kept active by taking more backup singing gigs, at the going rate of $2.50 each per session. One of those involved a song written and sung by Gordy’s brother Robert Kayli, “Small Sad Sam”—a comic riff on the Jimmy Dean hit “Big Bad John,” which became a minor hit late in ’61. The only known Supremes date after “Buttered Popcorn” was on August 14 when Gordy cut low-grade fodder with the titles “(He’s) Seventeen,” “Save Me a Star,” and “Heavenly Father”—with Mary singing lead on the first and Flo on the others, all probably intended as future B-sides.

The December session had a make-or-break feel to it. The girls would record a tune called “Your Heart Belongs to Me,” which Smokey had composed to chip off the separation-anxiety theme that had driven the massively successful “Please Mr. Postman,” but going a step further 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 103

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by placing the wayward boyfriend in Army boots overseas. For this schmaltzy cry of a lonely heart back home, Ross stepped up and over a funky bossa nova beat, pouring heavy vocal syrup about her “lover of mine, gone to a faraway land, serving your country”—and she did it convincingly, over some nicely turned backing harmonies by Wilson, Ballard, and Barbara Martin Richardson.

The cut passed muster with Gordy, who released it with “(He’s) Seventeen” as the flip side on May 8, 1962. Gordy’s support was evidenced by his decision to put out the disc on the Motown label, which had no viable acts save for Wells and the prodigal Eddie Holland; Eddie’s United Artists run had ended in ’61 and he was now back with Gordy, scoring a Top Forty hit in March 1962 with his song “Jamie.” This put the Supremes under the pressure of expectation, and the results were mixed. While “Your Heart” was no “Mr. Postman,” ringing in at No. 95 pop, it did so under the handicap of being beaten onto the market by the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy,” a thematic duplicate that tore up to No. 1 and all but obscured the subsequent Supremes song. Given this, the latter’s showing was arguably satisfactory—and, as their first charting, inarguably a step up for the Supremes, proving they could play on the same field as the Marvelettes and Shirelles, if not as cleanup hitters.

That was good enough to convince Gordy to schedule more sessions for them, minus Smokey for now. Even so, they were hardly on the front burner. It would take until November 1962 for the next Supremes product to see daylight, as other more urgent girl-group doings played out at Motown. Most notable among these were the Marvelettes’ three chart hits in 1962 alone—one a Top Ten, “Playboy.” Another was the quick rise of a girl-group that had been named the Del-Phis, who were seemingly borrowing the Supremes’ script, with lead singer Martha Reeves having made her entree at Motown as Mickey Stevenson’s secretary; by late ’62, she and her two groupmates were cutting songs in Studio A as Martha and the Vandellas for Gordy’s third label, the eponymous Gordy Records. And the Andantes had begun to emerge progressively as the go-to girl-group for backup work, their pi-quant yet unobtrusive three-part harmonies like powdered sugar to be sprinkled into any tempo or mood.