The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (48 page)

‘What the hell are you doing?’ But even so, that wasn’t his business.

And if it was one of the backup singers, he wouldn’t have even cared.”

“It was Berry who made that call. And of course you would want Florence. She was a Supreme. The only reason you wouldn’t have Florence was if she couldn’t make it, which would be the case more and more. But not at the Copa.”

Florence did make it. She joined the Supremes at the Copa, and the engagement was as big a hit as the last time. To Gordy’s credit, he retro-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 243

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ceded on replacing Ballard rather than callously dismissing the evidence of her charisma with the public and the advice of nearly everyone except Harvey Fuqua. That the group had risen so far, so fast, so illogically for a girl-group and a black act certainly carried a deeply personal and satisfying sense of satisfaction for Berry. As myopic as he was in seeing the group as an extension of Ross’s interests, he knew that his own guiding hand had been responsible for their apotheosis, with just a little bit of help from Ross, Wilson, and Ballard. Having taken all three for the ride, he was soul-mated with them—all of them—now, and for the foreseeable future.

The first attempt to fire Ballard averted for now, Gordy would wait it out. Not that he didn’t want Ballard banished, and not that he’d forget about it, but nothing would happen until the time was right. The same applied to the master plan—separating Ross from the group and depositing her, alone, on the big stages she pined for. But that would take even longer, when he could feel it in his bones that the group was about to ebb, yet before Ross had lost any of her cachet. Whereas that would be a tricky bit of maneuvering, the first part of the equation was all too easy. By now, no one could get enough of the Supremes, and their itinerary ran the length of Gordy’s arm. Just in the first three months of the year, they were off to shows at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, the Roostertail Club back home in Detroit, the San Juan Hotel in Puerto Rico, and a return engagement of the Motown Revue at the Olympia Music Hall in Paris that was recorded for a live album. Their TV appearances included the Dean Martin and Red Skelton shows, as well as Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
.

The once-quarantined Motown was able to sell a syndicated special,

“The Supremes at the Copa,” broadcast on March 18, 1966 (though
Time
’s review of the broadcast pricked “the best-known evangels of the Detroit Sound” for “frequently abandon[ing]” their “Sound” to “adopt some Broadway airs”).

A whole new audience presented itself when, in a
Billboard
poll of college students, the Supremes came in second only to the Beatles (though just who these students were could have been questioned, since even the Rolling Stones didn’t make it onto the list of thirty acts). The girls had made only one appearance on a campus, a December 1965

show at Bridgeport University that sold out in six hours. Seeing the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 244

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potential, Gordy chartered a massive Motortown bus tour of some two dozen colleges—the “Hitsville U.S.A. to Collegeville U.S.A. Tour”—in the early spring of ’66, ingeniously tapping into both the nostalgia quotient of the generation that had been weaned on Motown as early teenagers and the secondary sociopolitical messages—real or imagined—

of all black music forms in the mid-’60s. Ironically, the Supremes were about the only Motown act
not
on the tour, so busy were they elsewhere.

There was, as well, superstar-worthy media exposure, with Supremes stories coming out only two months apart in
Time
and then
Look
, both articles trenchantly different from previous press treatment of the group in that the focus was on them, not the company and its grand aspira-tions.
Time
’s March 4 piece, “The Girls from Motown,” hit all the salient talking points, from their “Negro ghetto” genesis to their “Copa cup runneth over”—and the comforting observation that “the trio’s childhood friendship, surprisingly, shows no suspicion of strain.” Despite the big league they were in, having made $250,000 each in 1965, which “may hit $400,000 this year,” their “modest duplexes” were “lux-uryless” and “just spartanly comfortable,” reflecting the girls’ “sensible, unawed view of their instant riches.”

“You know,” Ross was quoted, “my father didn’t want me to get into this business. When I left, he said, ‘If you don’t make it, don’t come crying around here asking for help.’” (Not mentioned was that these now fully grown women weren’t permitted checkbooks, bankbooks, or any information about their tax returns or access to their money.) The May 3
Look
article, “The Supremes: From Rags to Real Riches,” contained some of the same financial details, obviously spooned up by Motown. But portions of the whitewash peeled off in unguarded and, for Gordy, unexpected moments of candor. Diana, for example, still smarting over Ed Sullivan’s lack of proper deference on stage to the Supremes, started right in with a diva-licious tirade: I can be anything I want. I’m ready to do all the extra things—

acting roles, be the star of a big Broadway show. But where are the offers? We had six [actually five] number one hits in a row but we’re still treated like some ordinary rock ’n’ roll group, except in clubs.

On TV shows like “Ed Sullivan” we’re pushed on and off the stage like we were nothin’, and there are the Supremes cryin’ behind the wings. On “Hullabaloo” they gave me a cue card with a stupid speech to say. How dare they do that? I 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 245

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could be the mistress of ceremonies, but they never ask me. I see all the phonies who never even had one number one hit runnin’ around actin’ like the stars. I’ve got something they don’t have and the kids know it. I’m for real, and every time I sing a song, it’s part of my body.

Mary fretted about impending burnout, with a helpful suggestion: Every once in a while, I look at our work schedule, filled every day into next year, and I say, “Boy, your life is really going away, Mary.” But it wouldn’t make sense to work seven hard years like we have and then quit. . . . We’re so different and yet so alike. . . . Diana is a rather lonely type. She’d go out and conquer everything, just to have something to do. We’ve got to take the load off Diana. It’s endangering her voice; we must even things out.

Florence takes things in easy stride. She’ll go along, but she wouldn’t go out by herself and make something happen in her career. She’s a very lovable person, but some people don’t understand her. They think she’s haughty and vain. When I first met her, she was the swingiest girl in Detroit. Now, she doesn’t like to party.

What we have now is what other girls want to have, fame and money. But we don’t have fellas. I guess there’s time for that stuff later, when it slows down. But I’m so tired. I’m glad we’re young; we are leading such a fast life, traveling and no rest, and all our mothers are worried about us.

Flo, echoing the change-of-life trope, spoke with pride of her founding of the group, and with lament of the simple things in life she had missed out on:

I was the one who got the whole thing started with our careers.

I rounded up Mary, who rounded up Diana, and later on, I even picked the name, The Supremes. . . . When we started out on the road for Motown we were excited and self-conscious.

We used to dress up and wear hats on planes; now, we wear slacks and anything comfortable. . . .

I used to be a swinger myself and knew every new dance.

Now, when I listen to our records, they give me a feeling of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 246

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wanting to move, the feeling you just want to get up and dance. . . .

I’m the motherly type. I think a woman needs six to eight children to make her happy. . . . We all wear engagement rings—we’re married to Motown. When I see somebody I like, I take it off real quick. . . . When I used to live in the projects, I always thought it would be fantastic to have a phone. [I would] dream about getting out of the projects. It takes a while, but it comes sometimes. At least, it came for me and for Diana and Mary. We had nothing much before. Now, well, now we’re the Supremes.

Gordy loved all the free publicity but hated the straight talk—

which was repeated in a
Chicago Tribune
piece written during a trip to the Windy City for a show at the Aire Crown Theater. The paper’s reporter, allowed to accompany the girls on the plane and in their limo, chronicled Diana’s fits of temper and her facetious answers to questions she never believed would be put into print. Asked at one point about what she dreamed of at night, Ross mockingly riffed, “Frightening, terrifying things. . . . One night I dreamed of a cat leaping on me, digging his claws into my skin.” She also unthinkingly divulged that her mother had tuberculosis—something Ernestine did not want even her own friends to know, as in those days TB was lumped in with other bestaining “social” diseases like leprosy. When Ernestine read the article, she was in tears.

When Gordy saw it, and the
Look
quotes, he was furious. Scolding all the Supremes, he lit into Diana in particular for her lack of discretion, telling her she was “crazy” for talking about Ed Sullivan like that—“Do you know how hard it is to get you on that show?” he raged.

Not again would such
vérité
glimpses, or seditious chatter about “taking the load off Diana,” be permitted. Media access was restricted, tightly, and the girls would be made available for mere minutes at a time, to channel prescribed pabulum to any given query.

They were, after all, the
Supremes
.

While the long road seemed smooth and paved with yellow brick, there were potholes ahead. For one thing, recent Supremes’ songs, contrary to Gordy’s “No. 1’s only” dictum, hadn’t moved great amounts of vinyl.

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This even though elements in “My World Is Empty Without You” were breathtaking, such as the haunting ensemble string arrangement by conductor Paul Riser.

The latest HDH unveiling, “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart,” had, in its title and lyrics, a dash of Eddie Holland cheekiness that may have been too clever by half for another wail about the burning and yearning of heartache—something that for many Supremes fans had become trite. Indeed, one might have assumed that “Itching in My Heart” was a parodic send-up of the thematic obsessions of most every HDH song, with a classic blues hookline that if not done right might come off like a punchline—“Love is like an itching in my heart, and baby I can’t scratch it.” However, the assumption would be wrong.

EDDIE HOLLAND: There was nothing light-hearted about it.

Humorous, yes, but only in a funny-sad way, not a funny ha-ha way. Both Brian and I were going through some heavy shit in our personal lives at the time, and the lyrics were coming from two broken hearts. Think about it. Love isn’t only yearning and burning in the heart; it’s an itching that you can’t make go away, it taunts you. It tickles you to death. And that makes you angrier and angrier because you feel completely impotent.

That’s what the song is about, completely hopeless frustration.

Accordingly, Brian and Lamont Dozier produced the track with a hard edge, a gruffness not usually heard in their records. Alan Slutsky defines the tune as “one of the most simple, direct and in-your-face grooves” in the Supremes’ catalog, its sneering staccato stabs of rhythm topped by Earl Van Dyke’s hammered piano licks and bottomed by James Jamerson’s thudding bass, which at times becomes fuzzy in over-amped distortion. In fact, over four decades later when Slutsky produced the deluxe edition of the
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
CD, featuring instrumental remixes of several hits from the original multi-track tapes, he included “Itching”—even though, after stripping the vocals, leaving only the naked tracks, he was mortified by what he heard.

The bass track sounded like shit. Actually, there were
two
different bass parts, Jamerson’s and probably Tony Newton, a backup bass player of the day. Jamerson played the deep bottom, Newton the upper bottom. But they were out of tune with each other and didn’t mesh well at all in terms of pitch 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 248

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and rhythms. I thought, “How could they let a track like this go to vinyl?” But when you placed the track into the total mix, it sounded perfect! That was the genius of HDH. They were cutting in eight-track, which was high-end at the time, but they didn’t care about the technical proficiency of a track, only how the song sounded as a whole. They wanted
music
. That song would never have made it out of the studio today like that. They’d have to get all the levels right—and it would probably sound like crap with all that perfect technology.

The capper was Diana’s urgent delivery on lead: From the opening lines about how the “love bug done bit me” and the resulting “burning sensation,” Eddie Holland’s overwrought imagery—“Love is a nagging irritation / Causing my heart complication / Love is a growing infection /

And I don’t know the correction / Got me rockin’ and a reelin’ / And I can’t shake the feelin’”—is so convincing that it makes you want to reach for some peroxide.

The record, released on April 8 backed with “He’s All I Got,” received the usual warm reception from
Billboard
(in which Gordy took out a full-page ad touting the new record), highlighting it on the Spotlights page as “[m]ore exciting sound from the girls in this slow rhythm rocker with a solid back beat. Should top their ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ smash.”

That, however, did not happen; “Itching” would go only as high as No. 9 in late May, four notches below the apogee of “My World”—