The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (50 page)

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Ross eased out a gossamer-soft opening incantation: “I need love, love to ease my mind / I need to find, find some someone to call mine, but mama said, . . .” before checking off the litany of maternal caveats—that “You can’t hurry love, no, you just have to wait,” that

“Love don’t come easy, it’s a game of give and take,” and to “Just give it time no matter how long it takes.” The swelling urgency of Diana’s voice, and the frustration of her priceless elongation of the “no” into

“noooooo” on the first piece of motherly advice made clear that “my poor heart” would break if she had to wait any longer for “that soft voice to talk to me at night” and “some tender arms to hold me tight.” Mary and Flo, meanwhile, were of no help, peppering her with the taunting admonition that “You just have to wait.” The theme was of course a classic girl-group cliché, but also something new and fresh.

The latter tune—renamed “You Keep Me Hanging On”—was a kind of primordial pop-funk. It had a looser, harder-driving arrangement, tempered by the sense of angst that leapt from Eddie Holland’s lyric sheet. The intro, equally as striking as that on “Hurry,” was a mercurial high guitar burst by Robert White that sounded like Morse code, met by a haunting organ and then an explosive Pistol Allen snare drum roll that unleashed a torrent of long, ringing chords, spiked by White’s persistent dot-dash-dot “code” and Jamerson’s sinewy bass clomping on the bottom.

The Supremes, too, let loose. Giving voice to Mr. Holland’s monumental opus of love trapped inside possession, Diana wailed, “You don’t really love me, you just keep me hanging on,” cajoled the guy to “be a man about it” and “set me free” because “You don’t care a thing about me, you’re just using me,” and was reduced to practically shouting, “Go on, get out, get out of my life, and let me sleep at night.” Mary and Flo joined the fray, bellowing the choruses. It was a two-minute, forty-seven-second psychodrama, unlike anything ever heard before at Motown.

The conundrum for HDH was which of the two songs to put out first, a colossal decision given the pressure. They, and Gordy, went with the more upbeat, tighter “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Released on July 25, 1966, backed by “Put Yourself in My Place,” it burned up the charts, reaching No. 1 the week of September 10 and staying there for two weeks. It also returned the Supremes to the top rung of the R&B chart for the first time since “Back in My Arms Again”—which was pure gravy, given that their R&B days were long over.

Indeed, Shelly Berger wouldn’t, and couldn’t, position them in an R&B fold. “Mr. Gordy and I never discussed it but it was implicit to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 256

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me: The Supremes were a white act,” he says. “They were immediately mainstream. That was due to Holland, Dozier, and Holland more than anything else. It wasn’t only the Supremes. Look, there’s a reason why Motown was the only major record company that didn’t have an R&B

division.”

One can quibble that Motown’s Soul and VIP labels, created as homes for harder-core R&B artists—Earl Van Dyke and the Soul Brothers, Jimmy Ruffin, Shorty Long, the Originals (Soul), the Vel -

velettes, the Elgins, the Monitors (VIP)—more than qualified for that distinction. However, Soul, too, bent with the flow of Motown’s priorities, its product distilled for maximum hit-making potential such as that realized by Junior Walker and the All Stars and Gladys Knight and the Pips; and VIP simply floated along, taking on distinctly nonsoul acts such as white singers R. Dean Taylor and Chris Clark.

“Mr. Gordy had many labels, because it was easier to get all the acts air play,” explains Berger. “If everyone was on the same label, a radio station wouldn’t play more than a fixed number of Motown or Tamla songs. He also put out the album of Martin Luther King’s speeches, but that was a personal thing to Berry. The whole company plan was that he did not want to be pigeon-holed just because he was black. Really the only record that went out at Motown was a pop record. That’s why the Supremes were so perfectly emblematic of Motown.” Berger considered his mandate to obliterate the line between black and white—and did so quite literally in one respect.

“I was the one,” he says, “who changed the standard Motown contract. I put a clause in that if there was a segregated audience for any show, the act or acts would be paid in full and we wouldn’t play. It wasn’t necessary once we got to the ’70s, but it stayed in the contract up until the end of the ’80s. Berry remembered those early tours through the South; it left a mark on him, the divided auditoriums, the singing for whites on one side, then blacks on the other side, all that shit. He said, ‘Never again.’”

All this racial de-emphasis crested with the Supremes, about whom there was a kind of subliminal obeisance to certain virtual realities.

Berger, for example, never fielded a single offer for the girls from anyone but a white promoter. The contrast was especially stark when in 1967 Berger became the Temptations’ manager. “Then, if a black promoter was on the line, it had to be for the Temptations. And not one black promoter ever called and said, ‘I want the Supremes, too.’ Never.

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As of 1967 they were still the hottest female act under the sun—the hottest, period, in the public eye now that the Beatles had given up touring to concentrate on studio work. “You Keep Me Hanging On,” released on October 12, 1966, with “Remove This Doubt” on the flip, raced just as fast and far as “You Can’t Hurry Love,” careening to No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts the week of November 19—again, for a healthy two-week run. Their latest album,
The Supremes A Go-Go,
became the first Supremes album to go No. 1 (and the first No. 1 R&B album since
Where Did Our Love Go
), its inclusion of “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart” and “You Can’t Hurry Love” making up for the filler of mainly Motown covers—“Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can’t Help Myself,”

“Get Ready, “Shake Me, Wake Me,” “Come and Get These Memories,”

“This Old Heart of Mine”—and of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” and the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy.” Not for public consumption were the fissures within the group caused by Diana’s rising star and Flo’s envious, booze-fueled antagonism toward her; that was effectively plastered over in the “glitz, glam, and gowns” fable of the Supremes. Yet under the literal and figurative

“Snow White” patina, any tranquility in the group was only temporary, and fast becoming a rarity. By now, the three Supremes had drifted into their own camps, each of them, along with their personal lackeys and hangers-on, openly contemptuous of the others. Flo had come to so detest Diana that even in public settings it was hard for her to keep from letting fly with a cutting remark. Whenever Diana had an objection to a bit of Cholly Atkins’s choreography, Flo, watching her get all ruffled, would yowl, mocking Ross’s adopted name, “Uh-oh, Miss
Di-an-ah
’s gonna run and tell it, just watch.” Everyone knew what she meant: Diana would complain to Berry and get her way. The comment was, as ever, right on the mark, and a hoot, and inevitably would play out like that; at the next rehearsal, the choreography would be done as Diana wanted.

Ross, for her part, simply acted as any diva would, pretending Flo wasn’t even there, or else glaring at her with disdain, muttering not quite under her breath about Flo’s lack of class—meaning perhaps her lack of deference to the star of the act. Communication between the two ran between mechanical shop talk about dance moves and utter silence. More and more now, that awkward situation was handled by 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 258

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giving Diana a private dressing room, with Mary and Flo sharing another one. For Flo, that was just fine.

“It’s not as if me and Mary want to look at her skinny little ass,” she remarked one time to her go-fer Tony Tucker, who would hear Flo talk trash about “that Diana woman” all the time, such as that “[s]he’s always been snooty and looking for a fight.” Flo also relished relating the story of Ross aiming the front grill of a car at Gladys Horton in the parking lot of the Howard Theater, when, Flo insisted, “[s]he tried to run over a little blind boy!” A favorite Flo aphorism went like this:

“That woman is like a fire engine. It don’t care about who gets in the way. The only thing to do when you see it coming is move.” Flo had done just that when Gordy anointed Ross; now, every day, she had to move further out of the way for Diana. In doing so, she told herself, and anyone who would listen, that Ross wanted her and Mary out of the way rather than have to compete with them.

“She’s just jealous, plain jealous,” she said, according to Tucker.

“She’s a jealous woman. She’s jealous of Mary for being pretty and she’s jealous of me because people around here are my friends, which is more than anyone can say for her, honey.”

With Flo becoming more unhappy and unstable, Diana, as with Gordy, had little sympathy for whatever may have been a cause of her disruptive behavior and her drinking. In fact, mired in mutual contempt, whenever the two were in each other’s company off-stage, each seemed to lose her mind a little. During one of the Supremes’ engagements at the Copa, Flo often would tell the driver to stop their limousine so she could get out and greet fans who regularly trailed after the car following shows. For all of Diana’s showy attestations of “love” for Supremes fans while on stage, she generally avoided such impromptu human contact in uncontrolled situations, and would huddle in the back seat, hiding behind Mary, who would make an effort to cheerfully wave to the fans.

Knowing how uncomfortable Diana was, Flo would take her sweet time, sometimes even leading groups of fans down the street and treating them to slices and soda at pizza parlors. Worse, one time when a construction gang was hooting and whistling at the girls as they got into the limo, Flo held back and began doing a sexy catwalk down the middle of the street. Diana, dying of embarrassment, hissed to Mary about Flo’s “disgusting” display. “She’s making a spectacle of herself !

How common!” To which she added, “I’ve never seen anything so shocking.” Diana then ordered the driver to leave without Flo. When he hesitated, she shouted, “Do you hear me? Do you want to be fired?!” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 259

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It wasn’t the only time Flo was left behind. Whenever she was even slightly tardy leaving a theater or club, Diana would issue the same order, leaving Flo on the street having to hail a cab back to the hotel. At least Flo wouldn’t have to ride with Diana, an interlude that always seemed to bring on a spat between them.

Flo got her revenge after one of the Copa engagements had ended and the girls were being driven to JFK Airport for the trip back home.

Suddenly, Flo yelled to the driver, a Motown road manager named Phil Wooldridge, “Pull over! Let me drive this car.”

“No, Miss Ballard, you can’t drive,” he told her, apparently having been briefed to that effect by Motown, in case she might try something like this.

“I
know
how to drive,” she sassed. “I’m from Detroit where these cars are
made
. Let me at that wheel!” Bounding into the driver’s seat as Wooldridge scrambled out of the way, she soon had the car fired up and the pedal to the metal, in the thick of heavy traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. Weaving in and out of lanes, with her purse dangling from her arm, she spun the wheel back and forth, creating chaos on the road and a very dangerous situation as the car’s tires screeched in tune with the screams of terror from those inside—especially from Diana, whose eyes were as big and wide as hubcaps and was shrieking, “You’re going to kill us all!” For twenty hair-raising minutes, the future of Motown—not to mention the life of each Supreme—was riding with that car. For Flo, it was a rush, maybe not least of all because the Supremes were back in her hands again, even if just for the duration of this ride. And just seeing Diana turn ashen with fear seemed to make it all the more exhilarating. At one point Diana, prayer-like, wailed, “Oh, Jesus,” over and over. Even speeding down a highway, Flo had a ready one-liner. Turning her head around, she chastised Ross, “Never take the name of the Lord in vain.” Still not easing up on the accelerator, she overshot the airport exit.

Flipping into reverse, she backed up against oncoming traffic. Finally, she stopped at the entrance to the terminal, the car’s front wheels on the sidewalk. In the back, Diana and Mary were entangled and moaning. Diana’s wig was half off her head, causing Flo to break out laughing. A skycap, who’d nearly been run over, dashed over to the car to see if anyone was hurt. Squinting through the windshield, he forgot everything else when he saw the familiar faces.

“You’re the Supremes!” he gushed.

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Flo didn’t much care who was in the line of her ire, including Big Daddy himself. She had taken to derisively calling him “Napoleon,” riffing on that ridiculous painting he had in his mansion, using it as a scalpel to chip at his corpulent ego, as in “Hey, Napoleon, how are the troops doing today?” If she really wanted to get under his skin, she’d call him “
Little
Napoleon,” knowing how sensitive he was about his height. Not irrelevant, too, was that Gordy had made it clear that when business associates, and even his Motown flock, spoke to him, he was to be addressed as “Mr. Gordy,”
not
, as had been the case from day one, Berry or BG; in the corporate Motown mindset, Berry was no more.

Mr. Gordy rarely went back at Flo, fully aware that she seemed to enjoy making a big scene out of nothing. Usually, his response to her cracks would be an Edgar Kennedy–style slow boil. But he now began to level criticisms about her performances, either that she was singing too loudly on stage, overwhelming Diana’s softer leads—something he and everyone else believed was intentional on her part—or that she was gaining too much weight. The latter, of course, would become a central catalyst of her demise, legendarily so, and Gordy may well have played that card expecting the obstinate Ballard to gain
more
weight, out of spite, and thus put herself in greater jeopardy of remaining a Supreme.