The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (51 page)

No one at Motown ever denied Gordy could be that cruel if he chose to be.

Predictably, Flo accepted none of the criticism. On the weight matter, she shot back one time, “I am
not
getting heavy! Diana is too
thin
!” Then, as a parting shot: “And you are just too damn short to know what you’re talking about!” At times, as well, she would tweak Gordy by reminding him that she, too, was a world-famous Supreme, as opposed to his more limited fame. “Don’t nobody know you!” she said, digging into his fantasy of omnipotence.

Ballard had not been fond of Gordy right from the start, but could easily play him off with charm and proper deference. For several years, in fact, the two would enjoy hanging together, with Gordy taking her to lunch or on shopping sprees. Now, however, so fixated was he on Ross that he’d all but filtered Wilson and Ballard out of his awareness.

Worse, he seemed not to realize how much he was rubbing the other two Supremes’ noses in it when he ceaselessly invited himself to accompany the group on most of their tours—rather than letting Diana out of his sight and possibly becoming amenable to other men’s flirtations.

In so doing, he made sure no one could breathe with him around, not just Diana.

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Seeing him every day fawning over Ross was insufferable to just about everyone in the troupe, but far more so to the already obstinate Flo. On those excursions, not only did she not speak with Diana but she and Gordy couldn’t contain their contempt for each other. As Tony Tucker wrote in
All That Glittered
, “He went all over the world with them [and] you couldn’t help but notice the tension when he was around because he and Flo would be constantly but quietly bickering.” For Flo, making a fuss was the only way of dealing with the ava-lanche she felt coming down on her. However, it was Ross, not Gordy, who was the villain; if he was to blame for anything in her view, it was allowing Diana to castrate him—and it was driving her half-mad with paranoid delusions. She insisted that her backing vocals on “You Can’t Hurry Love” had been toned down or even erased, and that she had laid down the lead vocal for the cover of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” on the
A Go-Go
album only to have it scrubbed so Diana could have every lead on the album. Rewriting her personal history, she would claim that Diana had “never cared about Berry until she knew I was interested in him,” and that “[h]e and I used to get along just great until that bitch came along.”

The most galling thing for her was that “that bitch” now had everyone at Motown in her thrall. That was no delusion. Mickey Stevenson said that if Gordy had ever proposed that the wealth of the Supremes be spread around to buoy the other Motown acts—“so that we could all go out of business together”—he would have told him, “You’re crazy. Put the money on Diana because she’s a winner and I want to be paid on Friday.” Gordy himself, as Tammi Terrell sang in “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” seemed to be “not in reality” when he was with Ross. Even as he (needlessly) carried on the ruse that they weren’t fooling around, he flaunted her everywhere they went. In Puerto Rico and Las Vegas, he’d have her on his arm at the gambling tables, high-rolling and even letting her take over his hand at poker games. She was, in every respect, his good-luck charm, his Josephine. Not even her name-change could do justice to the stratum she was now on. During an interview Ross was giving late in 1966, when the writer addressed her as “Diana,” Gordy, who was with her, interrupted, saying, “Call her Miss Ross.” The same instruction soon went out to all Motown department heads.

To Mary and Flo, it was rich—that only a few years removed from the projects, Diane Ernestine Ross was now too good for a first name, not far removed from “Mrs. Rockefeller.” The same honorifics did not apply to them. But then, they had never been on the arm of “Mr. Gordy.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 262

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Even the strenuously temperate Wilson was rankled by his tunnel vision about Diana. Like many women, she had been captivated by the man’s roguish charm and spontaneous displays of generosity, such as when he surprised Mary and Diana by flying their younger sisters to New York for one of their Copa engagements as a graduation present.

But his verbal cruelty and insensitivity rarely were given a rest, and he was just so damned hypocritical. Ignoring his abundant moral failings, he ragged Mary constantly about her partying and laundry list of sexual partners.

True, Mary liked to play, one reason her love life never seemed to stabilize. Late in ’66, Duke Fakir moved out to go back with his wife and was replaced in her bed by another of the Four Tops, Obie Benson.

But neither of these relationships ever satisfied her hobby as a collector of the male gender, which was always obvious by the volume of overnight visitors to her room on the road.

If anything, this was just another mirror of Big Daddy’s own habits, which Wilson observed almost like a student. For instance, though he went to great lengths to hide it from Diana, he was already cheating with Chris Clark, the white Motown singer who happened to be a gorgeous and sexy blond. Not willing to wait until he was back in Detroit to fool around with her, he would sometimes fly Clark to where he was on the road and have roadies smuggle her into his room—which, with a sense of danger and betrayal that must have been perversely exciting, was always right next to Diana’s room, an adjoining door away from his Queen, who would be kept busy elsewhere as a diversion. As Wilson wrote in
Dreamgirl
, “The road managers and musicians were my friends so I got the scoop on these things.” Had she been a man, Gordy probably would have looked the other way—after all, he did that even when all of Motown knew, and recoiled in disgust, about David Ruffin’s horrible physical tormenting of Tammi Terrell. But his parochial paternalism led him to assume the role of a church pastor when lecturing her on the subject.

“Mary,” he told her one time, “I think you’re making yourself too available.”

“I like to be out,” she said.

With not a crumb of irony, or shame, he went on: “You should be more like Diana—untouchable, unreachable.”

She had to laugh out loud at the notion of Diana Ross as a role model of chastity-belt sensibilities—knowing that Diana kept her nose clean on the road only when he was there to stifle her. Before Gordy started to come along on tours, she had been plenty “touchable,” carry-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 263

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ing on “boy in every port” romances, including one with a white record promoter in D.C., Eddie Bisco, who would travel to see her on Supremes stops in northeastern cities (until Gordy found out and threatened to take Motown acts away from him if he didn’t keep away from her). Regarding Gordy’s right to pontificate, Mary could have answered him with two words—Chris Clark.

Gordy pulled the same pious rap on her in London after Mary and Flo hit the town without security and didn’t get back to the hotel until the crack of dawn. The next day, he began to chew her out—but not Florence, who could intimidate him. Wrung out and hung over, Mary was in no mood.

“Flo and me, we like to have fun at night,” she snapped at him.

“Don’t make us go to bed early just because you’re jealous of Diane,” whom, of course, he prohibited from such nocturnal meandering.

It was the kind of thing
nobody
said to him, except Flo. That the winsome Wilson had nailed him with an essential truth—one he wouldn’t admit to—left him at a loss. All he could do was force out a laugh and say, “Mary, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Realizing she’d struck a nerve, she drilled further in. “She’s the one who needs to save her voice and get sleep, not us. She’s the
leader
. All we do is [sing] doobie-doobie-doo. If you’re jealous of her, that’s your problem. Don’t make us suffer.”

“Mary,” he said, trying to end the matter on a light note, “you’d say anything to get out at night.”

Gordy, plainly, was unpained about the corrosive effects of Diana’s Norma Desmond–like vanity and how he was always enabling it, not least by letting her walk all over him. All Motown suffered for it. Marvin Gaye would later recall that he’d been “sick of hearing about Diana all the time from Berry.” If a non-Supreme, and Gordy’s brother-in-law, felt that way, one can imagine the depth of revulsion experienced by Wilson and Ballard.

In fact, despite Gordy’s cheating and sudden bursts of blithe indifference and cruelty—which didn’t spare Ross, about whom he felt the need to denigrate publicly, and absurdly, in a 1966 interview as

“lazy”—it was as if he lived in fear of her leaving him, rather than the other way around. Given Ross’s ambivalence and periodic self-loathing about the “secret” relationship through the years, his fear was well 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 264

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justified. Confessing she never knew who wore the pants in that unhealthy coupling, Wilson put it like this:

Seeing [them] together, I never knew exactly who was directing whom. When changes occurred, we never knew which of them had instigated them. But Flo and I could see that whatever Diane wanted, Diane got. In Flo’s mind this was unfair, and her resentment began to consume her. . . . [N]either Diane nor Berry gave a damn about what we wanted, and Flo made no bones about feeling betrayed and lied to.

It’s telling that in this indictment “Flo and I” becomes merely “Flo” when dealing with the personal repercussions of those changes—with Wilson not willing to admit that she might have been “consumed” by resentment or felt “betrayed and lied to.” In the end, Mary always thought better than to stand too closely with Flo in her defiance toward Gordy, which put Ballard out on an even shakier limb. But as differently as Wilson and Ballard handled their slightings, they were equally sick of Ross pulling rank on them, turning all those smiles on stage into frozen masks. The tragedy of it was that there were times when the ice and the hype melted and they were suddenly sisters again. During a show in March 1966 at Bilstrub’s Supper Club in Boston, Diana began weaving while singing “I Hear a Symphony” and appeared faint, mumbling, “What’s happening to me? I feel so small. I’m getting smaller, smaller, smaller.” A road manager rushed out and half-carried her off stage as the audience gasped and Mary and Flo stood rooted, not knowing what to do or say. The show was halted while, backstage, Diana was placed on a couch in her dressing room, an ice pack on her head, crying out, “I can’t go on . . . it’s too much.”

That’s when, according to a lengthy telling of the incident in the book
Call Her Miss Ross
, Flo became mother hen. Sitting down on the couch and placing Diana’s head on her lap, she rubbed her temples and calmed her, saying, “You don’t have to go on any more, honey.

We’re all here for you.” In this telling, as Mary stood crying hysterically over them, Flo, taking charge, demanded a phone and rang up Gordy back in Detroit.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Diane’s sick, that’s what’s happening!” she barked, then ordered him to cancel the rest of the two-week engagement. When he refused, she spat out “Son of a bitch” and told him, “This is all your fault!” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 265

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Gordy would fly to Boston the next day and, seeing Diana’s condition, did cancel the gig. He flew Diana home and put her in Henry Ford Hospital to recover from her “breakdown.” Flo was said to have visited her whereupon they had a teary heart-to-heart talk, with Diana suggesting that Flo sing some more leads and Flo asking her if she would be leaving the Supremes to go solo.

“I don’t know, Flo,” she allegedly said. “What do you think? Berry probably thinks I should.”

“Who cares about what Berry thinks,” Flo replied. “Who’s gonna take care of you if you leave? Not Berry, no way! He don’t care about you, Diane; all he cares about is money.”

(A mandatory note of caution: There is some doubt about elements of this story. Author J. Randy Taraborrelli, in an endnote, attributes as sources “many observers” and the road manager Sye MacArthur—none of whom were directly quoted—as well as a 1972 interview with Ballard. However, he allows that “it may be possible that she was confused” about certain details—and that Ballard herself asked that he not print the story, saying, “I think I may have said some things that are too personal.” Moreover, Flo’s actions as described here are not corroborated in the Motown literature—including the writings of Ross, Wilson, and Gordy—or by any source consulted for this book. Unconfirmed, too, is that Ross had a “breakdown,” as Flo apparently called it; she may have been suffering from exhaustion due to the Supremes’ hectic schedule.) Any such heartwarming moments, however, were fleeting; in an eyeblink the infighting and cattiness were back. Gordy would try to keep peace between them as best he could, usually by trying to induce some sympathy from Mary and Flo for the diva. Diana, he told them one day, was “miserable” because she felt “isolated from her friends,” meaning them.

“We’re the ones being isolated,” Mary pointed out. “She gets out there on stage and acts like we’re not even there.”

“Yeah,” Flo added. “She ain’t nothin’ but a show-off.” He couldn’t disagree. “But she’s
always
been a show-off,” he said, while insisting that “[s]he loves both of you”—and beseeching them to

“work it out.” Though they had to wonder why it was that
Diana
was unable to tell them those things herself, they said they’d try. But more and more the sword of Diana hung over their heads, as the issue of whether she would go solo gained pitch and fever in the media. Each Supreme had to deal with it in different ways. Diana, who most assumed was behind the whole idea, actually was quite torn, so insecure 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 266

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