The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (27 page)

words to the three music gurus, especially as the Funk Brothers took on mythic status
ex post facto.
(Never credited by name or even as the Motown house band on any Motown album liner notes until the ’70s, they were known by few other than hardcore jazz and R&B denizens in Paradise Valley, and then primarily for their club work.) The influence of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 139

SPLITSVILLE IN HITSVILLE

139

the Funk boys on all Motown producers, and vice versa, seems to have inflamed the egos of people who otherwise worked in perfect harmony, with each side seeking the last word. And (as shall be seen) the debate takes on added detail and clarity in light of HDH’s future work with the Supremes.

When the track was done, HDH coated it with thick echoes, leaving little room for the vocals to breathe. Submerged in the din, the Supremes approached irrelevance, although Ross valiantly kept pace with the breakneck tempo, needing to upshift her voice to soprano level to do it. To HDH, the record is a reflection of their arrogant phase, and the lesson learned was not to drown out the Supremes, or any of Motown’s wondrous singers. “We learned from every one of our songs,” Eddie notes, “especially a song like that.” Even so, the HDH magic was still apparent. The chugging melody and big-band kick won quick approval from Gordy’s Friday-morning panel of song arbiters; though again, when Gordy asked his famous one-criterion question regarding a side’s release—“If you had a dollar, would you rather buy a hot dog or this record?”—the aye or nay votes by Mickey Stevenson, Janie Bradford, Barney Ales, Clarence Paul, HDH, even Smokey, mattered not a whit if Berry liked it and they didn’t. Going unanimous on such open ballots at times like those was usually a wise decision.

“Lovelight” was released on Halloween, when the Supremes were on tour with the Revue and were promoted to the third act on the card behind Martha and the Vandellas and the fading Contours. But they couldn’t possibly reproduce the densely layered cacophony of the record on stage and so they stuck with the raw emotion of “My Heart Can’t Take It No More.” At the Apollo gigs, they cooked up a dramatic affectation. Looking prim but sexy in taffeta knee-length dresses and wigs coolly angled to the side, they began with their backs to the audience, then turned as one on the opening line, Ross extending her left arm followed by Wilson and Ballard doing the same. Their voices were strong and cohesive, and if Diane was still making her eyes pop she also was more at ease than ever. The crowd gave them an appreciative, if still no more than polite, round of applause.

The tepid reception notwithstanding, during the show’s finale, when all the Motown acts emerged to join in on the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” Diane quickly strayed from Mary and Flo on the far left end of the line of performers and elbowed her way next to Smokey, where no one could fail to see her singing and bumping hips with the star of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 140

140

THE SUPREMES

the show—as if both were the headliners—while other acts looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

The upward flight of “Lovelight” justified that sort of preening.

The single, backed with the soft, bluesy “Standing at the Crossroads of Love” (the title of which, but not the song, HDH would later recycle as

“Standing in the Shadows of Love” for the Four Tops), quickly cracked the Top Hundred in mid-November. But its climb was abated, along with every other showbiz product, on Friday, November 22. On that day, everyone inside Motown huddled around radios, shocked at the tragic news that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas.

Gordy was so distraught he sent everyone home for the day, canceling several sessions. Incredibly, even as the president was fighting for his life, and people around Hitsville shuffled about in an almost catatonic state, Marvin Gaye’s thoughts were elsewhere. Peeved that his latest record, “Can I Get a Witness,” wasn’t making much noise on the charts, he had scheduled a meeting with Gordy for that day to hash it out. Ignoring the breaking news from Dallas, he barged into Gordy’s office, where he chewed out Barney Ales’s sales department. After Gordy had assured him they were pushing hard for him, Berry jocularly told him to “be a good boy, okay?” Gaye, irrationally taking it as a racial insult, screamed, “See! See, BG! That’s a whole bunch of bullshit. You think I’m a boy just like the white man!” Exasperated, and in no mood to put up with Marvin’s bullshit, not today anyway, Gordy snapped.

With a roar, he swept his arm angrily across his desktop, sending papers, picture frames, and whatever else flying across the room. Then, getting in Marvin’s face, he seethed, “Don’t you realize the president was killed today?” before elbowing Gaye out of the way and going home to grieve for JFK. (By some accounts—but not Gordy’s—he pinned Gaye against the desk, his hand around his neck, not letting him breathe before being pulled off of him by other Motown executives.) In March 1964, he would name his illegitimate son by Margaret Norton “Kennedy William Gordy.”

Out on the road, the Motown tour dates were canceled for that weekend. The performers sat around in their hotel in a daze, crying while they watched the funeral services. For the Supremes, the timing of

“Lovelight” also fell victim to the shots in Dealey Plaza, the ongoing shroud of mourning across the country blunting record sales for them and everyone else looking forward to a strong holiday market.

Admirably, “Lovelight,” which likely would have flirted with the Top Ten, still managed to do well enough; it hit the Top Forty around 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 141

SPLITSVILLE IN HITSVILLE

141

Christmas time, peaking at No. 23 (and 2 R&B) early in ’64. Wanting to piggyback on it, Gordy now released “Run, Run, Run,” only to suffer a setback when the song made it to only No. 93 on the pop charts and No. 22 on the R&B charts.

At that point, Gordy must have thought: “
Now
what?” The Supremes, a Motown commodity for three years, had not one significant hit. No other act there survived that long as a loss leader. Worse, the Ross–

Brian Holland liaison seemed for a brief, ugly moment like it might backfire and wreck the Supremes’ growing simpatico with HDH.

That moment occurred when Sharon Holland made up her mind to put an end to her husband’s fling with Diane.

With none of Claudette Robinson’s near-saintly all-forgiving nature, Sharon decided to have it out with Diane during a Motown event at the Twenty Grand in February 1964. That night, after eyeing Diane with a scowl, she began to thread her way through the crowd until she was standing nose to nose with her. Diane, talking with someone else, didn’t know Sharon was right next to her. Turning her head, she was jolted by those two staring eyes. Making an effort to be nice, Diane was able to get out “Hi Sha—” when she was cut off by an eruption of profanity followed by a warning.

“If you don’t stay away from my man,” Sharon screamed, “you’re a dead woman!”

Even with the noise in the club, she could be heard, and conversations and laughter were stilled as people paused to watch the fight—

including an embarrassed Holland, who stood blank-faced, drink in hand, looking like he wished he could disappear. Diane, for her part, gave not an inch, standing tall as she could on her heels to meet the taller Sharon—“not a small woman,” Mary Wilson recalled—at eye level.

“If he was your man,” she hissed, “he wouldn’t be with me.” Sharon answered with more expletives, spraying spit on Diane’s face. This was usually the point when Ross would back off and slink away. But now her fists were clenched, as were Sharon’s. With the fur about to fly, and no one in the room particularly eager to break them up, Mary and Flo—who themselves might not have minded seeing Diane get her hide tanned—did a quick huddle and decided to move in to shield her.

As Wilson tells it, she and Flo “circled around Diane, with Flo stepping right in the middle. Sharon kept saying she was going to kick Diane’s butt, and for a few minutes we had to hold her back—she was raring to go.”

0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 142

142

THE SUPREMES

Given the size difference, Mary and Flo were afraid Sharon would floor Diane and then “take a swing at one of us,” but they were able to drag Ross kicking from the club and get her a lift home. For days, the incident was the talk of Motown, with the requisite conjecture about whether Sharon had made the same threats on her cheating husband’s posterior, a likely circumstance considering that he and Ross thereafter agreed to be “just friends” and co-workers. That, however, may have had something to do with Brian shifting his philandering to another diva under his guidance—the tall, elegant, and equally ambitious Martha Reeves.

In fact, in the bramble bush of Motown intra-“family” carrying on, that affair had taken breath before the one with Diane was extinguished—leading Ross to relocate her loathing from Gladys Horton to Reeves, a subplot that would only intensify over the next year.

It’s a wonder, indeed, that Holland wasn’t too winded to do his work.

On the other hand, perhaps his tangled personal business supplied the motivation to turn in some of his finest compositions. The Vandellas’

first hit, for instance, “Come and Get These Memories,” was a bouncy but barbed farewell to a once-loving relationship (the guessing game being whether the old lover in the song was Diane or Sharon, whom he would divorce soon after).

It would be Diane, of course, who refused to leave his soul—not then, not four decades later. The affair may have been severed but the relationship wasn’t, in contrast to the general studio
interruptus
with Smokey. Having learned that she could not burn another Motown bridge like that and prosper, going platonic with Brian was the proper, cosmopolitan thing to do, and she clearly had an easier time doing it than did Holland, the enticements of Reeves aside. But, for both, it would be the single most providential thing they ever did.

0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 143

ten

A

“LOUSY

SONG”

Before that providence could come to pass,the Supremes would have to keep from falling off the earth. They certainly had a dim effect on the pulse of music as the seismic year of 1964 pressed on. This was so even though by mid-year the girl-group genre was in full flower, on a broad level helping to erect an effective fire-wall around the American record industry as the Beatles and wanna-be Beatles were invading the U.S. charts. Indeed, the extent of the Brit

“takeover” and its immediate “new order” of music has been egregiously overstated through the years. Because while the Beatles did have six No. 1 hits in 1964, and Peter & Gordon, the Animals, and Manfred Mann one apiece, the year’s fourteen other No. 1’s were by American acts, including such swingin’ “new” acts as Dean Martin, Lorne Greene (
Bonanza
’s Ben Cartwright), Roy Orbison, Bobby Vinton, and Louis Armstrong, who turned in the year’s biggest seller with the Broadway show tune “Hello, Dolly!” Five No. 1’s would be held by American girl-groups—the Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”), the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”), and three alone by a very long-overdue Motown trio known as the Supremes. And these were merely hits that went to the top; below the summit was a constant infusion of plasma by girl-groups that picked up where the Shirelles, Orlons, and Ikettes had left off when they ebbed, such as the Ronettes, Crystals, Chiffons, Cookies, Toys, and Jelly Beans.

The sun wouldn’t shine on the girl-groups (with one notable exception) much longer; but as of mid-’64, they were no less than the buffer of American rock, padding record companies’ bottom lines and easing 143

0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 144

144

THE SUPREMES

their transition to the eon of the self-contained band and greater autonomy for artists as the Brill Building model of centralized power drew its last breaths.

Motown, as a Brill pinchbeck, would need to alter its assumptions accordingly; one primary step would be the renewing of artists’ contracts in 1965 with higher royalty rates. And yet, before the full meaning of 1964 had played out, at Motown and worldwide, the girl-group that would have the biggest impact of any American recording act on the industry had a tenuous place at the table.

For the Supremes it must have been like being seated at the kiddie table, permitted to speak only when spoken to. By one indication, early in ’64 promotional flyers touting new Motown records were sent to the local deejays. The Supremes were not forgotten, but they were dwarfed by their more bankable shipmates. One such flyer bore a banner at the top reading “SURE-FIRE HITS!” Underneath were designs of two hearts, one large, one small; superimposed on the larger was “‘Locking Up My Heart’—The Marvelettes, Tamla #54077.” On the tinier one, requiring a magnifying glass to see clearly, was “‘My Heart Can’t Take It No More’—The Supremes, Motown #1040.” Photos of each group were inside similarly lopsided hearts on the right border. Within this schematic was the “heart” of the Supremes’ problem—they were a factory second act, nothing “sure-fire” about them.

Some of Gordy’s flacks wondered just why he was giving even that much play to them instead of to acts who’d delivered a good deal more, like Martha and the Vandellas. “We asked that, too,” says Rosalind Ashford. “We had three big hits already and we not only had to put up with Diane’s pissiness but also were getting less promotion than them, a group with no hits. It was hard to take, believe me.” Apparently, considerations like budgetary allotments had to do with more than a young female singer finding her way to a mattress that mattered, since Martha Reeves would seem to have earned some Ross-like frequent-flier mileage by sharing Brian Holland’s. The only reasonable answer to the riddle was that Gordy simply saw something organically tangible in Diane’s voice that made her—and, oh yeah, the other two—worth waiting for.

While the Supremes were duly grateful, all the snide talk about what had to be going on
sub rosa
between Diane and Berry to attain this patronage began getting to them. It got to Ross, too, though of course she had sparked so many salacious rumors in the past. Recent whispers were that the Supremes would be dissolved so Ross could go 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 145