The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (32 page)

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scious and subconscious minds, as the ultimate meed waiting at the end of the rainbow. They were indoctrinated, while walking in front of Powell’s mirrors with books on their heads, to “
Think Copa
,” and that wouldn’t change even if they were singing before winos at the Twenty Grand or the Roostertail.

To Mary and Flo, all this high-minded doggerel was a waste of time. Years later, Wilson had come to see the experience through an even harsher looking glass. Artists’ development, she said, was “the Motown Myth,” a fable that had grown out of the promotional piffle whereby “Berry took a bunch of ghetto kids with no class, no style, and no manners, put them through hours of grueling training . . . and then—voila—stars rolled out of Hitsville like cars off an assembly line. . . . Not only is this view incorrect, it’s insulting.”

“The truth is that Berry never signed anyone to Motown who needed to be ‘remade.’ . . . It’s always bothered me that some people have assumed that by accepting what some consider ‘white’ values, we sold out. It’s just not true.”

Ross, too, resented the implication of Gordy as their shaman; with some pique, she wrote in
Secrets of a Sparrow
that beyond Gordy choosing their songs and contributing to “our direction,” she gave him no credit for “the sophisticated elegance that we embodied. Or for the self-esteem, morals, and standards that we had. That’s who we already were.

Berry Gordy did not have to ‘create’ young ladies from ghetto teens, like some inner-city Eliza Doolittles. We were already ladies who had been brought up right.” As proof of this, she offered the fact that Gordy took to “forcing” the other Motown women to “live up” to the Su -

premes’ standards.

“We definitely started it,” she said. “Our attitudes and our looks were organic to us, and Berry was smart enough to see that and to work with what was already there.”

Back then, Gordy’s staging of “My Fair Ladies” was amusing, but only to a point—the one at which Wilson and Ballard saw that the whole program was primarily intended for Diane Ross. This crude reality became apparent when Gordy quietly sent Diane, solo, to an even more tony pinkie-in-the-air academy, the John Roberts Powers School for Social Graces. There, deeper modifications were made. As recounted by Nelson George in
Where Did Our Love Go
, she was ordered to lose the low-rent vestiges of her “Brewster self,” the first one being the “sickeningly sweet” Jungle Gardenia perfume she’d been wearing, by the bucketload—“It was said at Powers that if Diana walked in a 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 170

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building five minutes before you, you’d know it; her perfume would still be hanging in the air.” Next to go were her “Minnie Mouse false eyelashes,” her “three-inch blood-red false nails,” and the irritating

“giddy laughter” that “bubbled out of her whenever she talked of the places she’d been or the famous people she was meeting.” The Ross Rule was to make her not just glamorous but
warm
in a fine-spun way, as enticing and approachable (at least in theory) as she sounded on record—while at the same time as haughtily
unapproachable
in the real world as other crown princesses of pop like Barbra Streisand or Diahann Carroll. But all this did for the other two Su -

premes was to make Ross seem even colder and more calculating than before. Once more, Diane felt the sting of their discontent—much more so from Flo, since Mary’s ire usually subsided quickly, capsized by the notion that, powerless as she was, she could be disappeared in a hurry, replaced without a beat.

Flo was less mollified by such unspoken extortion, according to the cousin in whom she regularly confided.

RAY GIBSON: Let me tell you something about my cousin. She never gave a damn about fame. That’s not why she started singing. I can tell you that Florence never once told me, “Raymond, I’m gonna be rich and famous!” But she told me all the time, “Raymond, I’m gonna sing tonight!” And then they took that away from her. They wouldn’t let her sing anything but

“Baby, baby” in the background. The minute they did that, despite all the hits they were having, she really had no great attachment for the group.

Again, it had nothing to do with Diane being the star. Because when they started there was no star; it was just the three of them, together. And they were still making the same money, that never changed; they split the money, so it wasn’t like Florence was unhappy with the money, especially when it started to really roll in. It was just that the whole feel was different. It was Berry’s group now, not theirs. It was his vehicle to turn Diane into a star. That’s all it was. Florence could never get her head around that.

If you look at Florence in the old films, that was not a happy woman. I knew she wasn’t. We would still talk all the time. She would come off the road, which she hated because she hated to fly; it scared her to death. She loved being back 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 171

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home. And because she’d have all this pent-up frustration about not being allowed to sing, she’d come over and let it all out to me. She’d say she had no allies, that Berry would tell her,

“You’re all gonna be millionaires!”—that was supposed to fix everything. And Mary was . . . Florence would say, “Mary would never say no to Diane.” So no matter what Florence thought, it didn’t matter. Her attitude was, Why is it happening like this?

She tried to play the good soldier, she gave it a shot. Because she knew what was riding on it. She was making money, she was still singing. She didn’t want to be the cause of this big hit-making machine breaking up. But no one at Motown ever took any time to talk to her, ease her mind. I’ll tell you this, and I absolutely believe it. If Berry had just—one time even—

sat down with her and said, “Florence, I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you and what you’ve done for the company,” or, “If Diane goes solo, let’s talk about what we can do.” Or, “Someday you’ll have a solo career, too”—anything like that, even if he didn’t mean it, and you would have seen a very different Florence in those videos. But he never did. To Berry, Florence really didn’t exist as a person, she was baggage. Excess baggage.

It was so sad to me. I loved her so much, and she was part of the biggest act in the world. I was ecstatic for her. I’d tell everyone, “My cousin is Florence Ballard of the Supremes!” And sometimes she’d be ecstatic, too, like she’d call me from the road and gush, “Raymond, guess what—we’re gonna sing for the Queen tonight!” She’d sound like a little girl. But then reality would sink in, and she’d be depressed again. It was always like Florence was trying to climb out of a hole. Sometimes she would, but then she’d wind up falling back in again.

Diane, as she had before, felt transitory guilt about what her ascension was doing to Flo. However, she would usually construe it as an overreaction on Flo’s part, or even a pathological defect. As Nelson George wrote
,
“With tears in her eyes, [Diane] told her instructors how paranoid Flo could be.” Yet Ross apparently made little effort to distinguish between paranoia and Flo’s pride being ripped apart. All Diane could see was a Flo who was teeming with “resentment about the time and money Motown was spending on Diane, and it upset [Ross].” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 172

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What upset her the most, however, was that Flo wasn’t getting in line with the program.

Gordy reacted to the embryonic tensions between the girls as he always did—by covering them in yards of fabric. He gave Powell a generous budget to buy the Supremes a walk-in closet of new dresses for their upcoming appearances, everything from what have been lovingly described as “orange sherbet-colored cocktail dresses,” “orange and beige balloon-shaped cocktail dresses,” and “curve-hugging mermaid-shaped gowns” to “pert-looking frocks with box pleats and genteelly-scooped necklines.” The gowns could weight down a mule at up to thirty-five pounds, and each would be individually sequined, beaded, flanged, and otherwise embellished by, as Diane joked, “little old ladies who went blind” staring into that psychedelic storm of colors.

It’s doubtful Powell ever had in mind a sense of “autonomous” style for the black performers of Motown. In dressing the Supremes—always Job One—the grand objective was to prep them for audiences who were themselves awash in pearls, wing-tips, and Martinis. Her only cues were to approximate the hip fashion plates of the day, doyennes such as Jackie Kennedy or Gloria Vanderbilt, thus explaining why in that newspaper photo of them mincing through the Brewster project they were so tastefully appointed in their pill-box hats and elbow-length white gloves. At the time, as well, thin was not yet in; it would be Ross who would help make it so, down the line a bit. Curves were in. Playing to type, Powell inflated the Supremes with padded bras and hip pads—

neither of which Flo had any need for, but donned anyway, frequently complaining that she was being made to look fat. That led her to diet, another thing she hated, further souring her growing irascibility.

Diane and Mary, meanwhile, were delighted to suddenly be given

“womanly” figures for public appearances. Happily, Wilson recalled,

“Diane added hip pads, and I padded my backside.” When the new look padded Mary’s ego a bit too much, she was deflated, literally; one day, when Lamont Dozier watched her wiggling around Hitsville, he found a knitting needle, snuck up behind her, and strategically inserted it. Not feeling a thing, she went on wiggling, unaware that the needle was appended to her embossed derriere.

The reality of the times was that there
was
no paradigm of fashion available to African-American women. (Black men, too, were mired in a one-white-size-fits-all cultural maw; just as black women believed they had to wear straight-haired wigs, men such as David Ruffin—for all the barbed-wire blackness of his songs—put off going “natural” and 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 173

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kept straightening their kinky hair with gobs of Pomade, a carryover of the black stagemanship of the ’50s.) Many black entertainers, not knowing they were on the cusp of heavy social changes, borrowed liberally from proven and accepted cultural canons.

At the same time, few black girl-groups saw it fitting of the genre to imitate the most posh of the sophisticated white ladies. Mary Wilson can easily remember that “in those days rock ’n’ roll singers were not really glamorous. We were totally into glamour and we did it all ourselves.” As guilty of hyperbole as Wilson is about the last part, there’s no way of overstating just how radical the Supremes’ approach was in 1964. Four decades thereafter, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland went as far as to hold a retrospective exhibit of a dozen or so of the Supremes’ spangliest outfits. Museum curator Howard Kaplan explained to the
New York Times
in 2002 why this mattered to rock’s legacy. “Before the Supremes,” he said, “the [girl-group]

look was smart and simple, like the Shirelles; sassy and sexy like the Ronettes; or tomboyish and provocative like the Shangri-Las. But no one had ever done cocktail classy or set out to utilize certain visual sig-nifiers that made them palatable to a white audience.” Moreover, this perceived audacity was ignited despite the fact that, mere months before the Civil Rights Act was written into law, more than a few record companies refused to put black performers’ faces on album covers and 45-rpm record jackets. Little wonder the cosmetics industry didn’t give much, if any, thought to women of color, even those who became wealthy. Even when the Supremes did, they had to go on buying their wigs at the beauty parlors on John R Street, the only places they were available—even as Maxine Powell was shelling out Gordy’s money for Schiaparelli gowns at Hudson’s department store (where of course Ross had waited tables only a few years before) or commissioning originals from designer Bob Mackie and his apprentice Michael Travis.

It was a bold play, and it would work. For the first time in the rock era, African-American girls and women would form a bond with an African-American group that was challenging the primacy of the biggest white groups. Here, one music critic would write, were the aptly named Supremes, “looking affluent, living the dream, looking impecca-ble and flawless to a fault.” No one in this new generation had ever seen
white
stars portray the dream any better. That a trio of black women got there first left an impact that wouldn’t stop, long after the music had ended.

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They still had their shortcomings. No one could accuse them of being a distaff Temptations on stage, something that was all too obvious at the first show they did in the fall, a ten-day engagement at the Brooklyn Fox Theater from September 12 to 21, hosted by famous, fedora-wearing New York deejay Murray the K. Also on the bill were heavies like the British diva Dusty Springfield, Jay and the Americans, the Shangri-Las, the Ronettes—and, as it happened, the Temptations.

Now produced by Smokey Robinson, they had finally rung up a Top Twenty (and No. 1 R&B) hit, “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” Realizing the mesmerizing soul grit of David Ruffin, Smokey put him on lead for the follow-up, “My Girl,” which Smokey wrote during the Tempts’ Christmas gig at the Apollo Theater; by February, it would sit at No. 1 pop and R&B and endure as arguably one of the Top Five songs of the rock era.

At the Fox their repertoire of, by turns, flat-out wild and cleverly intricate steps only underscored the lack of same by the Supremes, who, to begin with, had no chance with the crowd in the backyard of the Ronettes, considering that their stage act was essentially a slightly toned-down pole dance.

Not that Gordy would ever have wanted the Supremes to try something like that; it would be out of their element and conflict with his vision. Still, their gawky hop-step cuteness just would not do. To rem-edy the situation, Gordy, early in 1965, would bring aboard a couple of veteran showmen to work with the Supremes when they arrived back home. That would be a while. After the Fox shows, they were off on their long road, a
very
long road, which would next deposit them 10,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean—this time in the Beatles’ backyard, London.