The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (58 page)

‘This music shouldn’t [have been] called The Sound of Young America.

It should [have been] The Sound of
Black
America,’” which was of course what Gordy had studiously avoided.

And, indeed, “Reflections” hardly silenced the growing chorus chanting “sellout,” which only became more voluble when real-world events made a mockery of the Motown model of “assimilation”—the most immediate and traumatic being one that literally hit close to home. On July 23, 1967, while Gordy, the Supremes, and most of the Motown hierarchy were still hunkering in the desert oasis of Las Vegas, living large and white, Detroit began to go up in smoke. This was surprising in only one respect: that it took so long to blow.

Of all the inner cities in America, Detroit’s had probably eroded the fastest and hardest. By 1967, the old urban romance of Paradise Valley was perfect urban rot. As if boxed in by the ugly steel-gray erector-set maze of new highways, the Valley was a hypoxic ghetto in every sense: From a population one-third white when the Supremes were born, it was now almost completely black, poor, and neglected, its last thread of pride stripped when the highway construction necessitated that most of Hastings Street be obliterated. On John R, Beacon, 12th, St. Antoine, Warren, nearly every street, apartment buildings were subdivided so that six families could occupy space once barely sufficient for two families.

Most of the great old clubs where Louis Armstrong, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, and Bobo Jenkins—and the Supremes—

wailed were either rubble or abandoned, starved out by too-high rents 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 302

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and increasingly dangerous neighborhoods. The sirens heard every night in Brewster-Douglass were the music of the streets now. The Flame Show Bar, where Berry Gordy and Maurice King incubated, went down in ’63. The Twenty Grand and the Roostertail and the Graystone Ballroom—the latter still owned by Motown and used to record string arrangements, but in an increasing state of disrepair—

were hanging on for dear life, their days numbered as their neighborhoods crumbled around them.

With blight and crime came the usual suspects, at least for “the Man.” Since the early ’60s, the DPD’s “Tac Squad” of four-man patrol cars had been raiding bars and busting streetwalkers. With shouts of

“Hey, nigger,” the police pulled innocent people over and asked them to show identification; if they had none, they’d be run in and held for as long as deemed necessary. In ’64, a prostitute who had leaped from a police car was shot in the back and killed. Beatings, even deaths, in custody were not uncommon, more so as jobs in the auto plants dried up, clubs closed, and more people were on the street. In response, militancy rose; in early July ’67, the Black Panthers’ “Justice Minister” H. Rap Brown famously vowed that unless America, and Detroit in particular, didn’t come around, “we’re gonna burn you down.” On the 23rd, it happened. The spark was a raid on an after-hours club on 12th and Clairmount during which eighty-two blacks were arrested. Outside the club, a seething crowd began vandalizing stores, looting, and setting fires. Within forty-eight hours, when the National Guard and the 82nd Airborne were called in to quell a confla-gration, the fires burned through the days and nights, including on West Grand Boulevard.

Inside Studio A on the first day, the musicians smelled the musky smoke outside and said the hell with the session; running for what they thought were their lives, guitars and horns dangling from their arms, they made for their cars, some with their pistols drawn.

“When we heard what the whole thing was about,” recalls a still-shaken Jack Ashford, “we were afraid Joe Messina would be shot in the street for being white. Hell, we didn’t know if we’d
all
be shot. Joe didn’t know what to do, where to go. I had this sport jacket, why I don’t know ’cause it was, like, a hundred degrees and gettin’ much hotter out there. So I threw the jacket over his head and said, ‘Joe, just come with me.’ I had him under my arm, leading him through the smoke to my car. And, man, you could hear them gunshots gettin’ close. I took him home and wouldn’t let him leave ’til everything was calm.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 303

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That took five days, when the grim toll reached 43 dead, nearly 1,200 injured, and over 7,000 arrested. Out in Vegas, Gordy—who, after he sent Flo packing, had nothing more serious on his mind than which VIP party to attend, including grand galas hosted by the Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Carson and Mr. and Mrs. Milton Berle—heard of the riot on the news and tried to get back home, but the airport in Detroit was closed for the duration. When he finally could, he was deeply relieved that no one in the Motown family had been hurt and that, amazingly, none in the row of company buildings were damaged. (Some would subsequently wonder quixotically if perhaps the rioters spared Motown out of some kind of residual debt to Gordy—though why scores of black businesses
weren’t
spared isn’t answered by this chimera.) But he was, as Marvin Gaye once said, “freaked” by the close call and soon moved the central operation of the company a half mile away to the Donovan Building, a fortress-like ten-storey office tower on Woodward Avenue, then began selling off most of the townhouses that had been used for peripheral business. Studio A, with its new twenty-four-track recording machine and other expensive upgrades, would still be the recording site. But even that vital center of Motown gravity, and of American popular music, was becoming a casualty as circumstances and lives changed all around it.

By the fall of ’67, Gordy, as did the Supremes, existed in a weird bi-lateral holding pattern in which immense success seemed to indicate impending change. For all the flak he took for being so spectacularly successful in what he did, “Reflections” had opened yet another door for Motown, through which would follow other “serious” work such as Whitfield’s with the Temptations and Marvin Gaye. Meaning that if Gordy still had a “purity” problem, at least he didn’t have a relevancy problem. Or, certainly, a financial one. By the end of ’67, Gordy would tithe his Taj Mahal on Outer Drive to his sister Gwen and move on up to an even bigger, more ostentatious household, an Italian Renaissance mansion on five acres along ritzy Boston Boulevard with underground tunnels between the main and guest houses and the indoor and out-door swimming pools—“Gordy Manor,” he would grandiosely dub it.

At the same time, he had commissioned top Beverly Hills realtors to find an appropriate “second home” for him in L.A., as well as one for Diana in the same neighborhood.

His meal ticket, the endlessly relevant Supremes, meanwhile, were still so popular that Gordy, paradoxically, was prevented from being able to bring about Ross’s solo breakout. As long as the hits and the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 304

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bread were plentiful, he could afford to wait. He trusted that HDH

would keep that ship sailing. He would turn out to be wrong.

The frisson of “Reflections” aside, it fell short by a tick of meeting Gordy’s “No. 1’s only” rule of order, breaking the Supremes’ second streak of chart-toppers at five. Released on July 24 backed with “Going Down for the Third Time,” it sprinted upward during the week of August 26 before making it to No. 2 on the pop charts and No. 4 on the R&B charts, blocked from the summit by the four-week occupancy of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Even so, “Reflections,” almost certainly selling nearly a million copies, extended the continuity factor of the group, buffering any potential fallout from the Ballard mess. Trying to manage how that story would be played in public, Gordy ordered that nothing be said of the reason it happened, explaining years later that “[i]n the sixties, alcoholism was not dealt with the way it is today. It was something to be kept secret.” Instead, he sicced Motown vice-president and head of publicity Mike Roshkind on the media.

Roshkind, a 40-ish, well-connected flack who had once been a PR

advisor to John F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, was an accomplished “fixer,” doing Gordy’s bidding with a blend of courtly charm and thinly veiled threats of future noncooperation. Roshkind fed reporters and editors spin that Ballard had left on her own, with no bad blood, and that everyone was on the same page, which wasn’t being turned but continued. It might be best, he suggested, if they’d just leave it alone. Most newspapers, magazines, and radio stations did just that, the story being confined to a mention here and there, with the prescribed spin. In the September 4 issue of
Soul
, a small-circulation black tabloid, for example, the headline was “FLORENCE ASKS OUT.” (Less sanguine was a take in the pocket-sized black tabloid
Jet
that wrote titillatingly of “a hair-pulling, knock-down-drag-out fight” between unnamed Supremes in Vegas “over the change in billing,” a fight that did not happen.)

In truth, the page
had
been turned, months ago; from now on, Mary Wilson would be downgraded from co-Supreme to stage prop, which was what Cindy Birdsong was hired to be. Neither would object openly since the Supremes were still working under the terms of the original communal contract, which evenly divided all monies three 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 305

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ways. While that seemed patently unfair to Diana and Mary, given that Cindy had not sung a note on a Supremes record, and never would, Mary nevertheless considered herself fortunate that Diana wasn’t getting what she really wanted, and bugged Gordy endlessly to effect—

namely, the lion’s share as the “star.” Gordy, though, refused, having concluded that the group had been through enough strain and needed to act and think as a team again—not that his continuing gifts on the side to Diana, the latest being a white Rolls-Royce, made that any easier.

In any case, because the “third Supreme” position had been smoothed into anodyne superficiality—with the second Supreme not far behind—

Flo was often still assumed to be there (aided to no end by Birdsong’s uncanny resemblance) or else happily off finding domestic tranquility.

In the end, did it even matter? That was the operative question in the fall of 1967, when the Supremes and/or Motown were accorded a spectacular succoring in the media that all of God’s and Gordy’s money couldn’t have bought. First, in September came breathless articles published in
Time
,
Cosmopolitan,
and
Fortune
, and in December in the
New
York Times Magazine.
This was the ultimate quad rifecta, covering the four bases Gordy cared most about: upscale Americans, upscale women, upscale businessmen, and upscale urbanites.

All had been written before Flo’s dismissal, and fortunately three focused mainly on Gordy, the
Time
piece titled “HEAVYWEIGHT

FEATHERWEIGHT” and
Fortune
“THE MOTOWN SOUND OF

MONEY,” with the latter describing him as “a Negro [who] owns his own company in an industry still almost entirely white owned.” The
Times
’ 20,000-word paean, “THE BIG, HAPPY, BEATING HEART

OF THE DETROIT SOUND,” read like one of those paid-for
Billboard
inserts, complete with images of eight Motown album covers—

and pictures of several acts, including the Supremes, one of which showed Ballard applying makeup.

Gordy could live with that, especially with passages such as “It is sometimes said of the Supremes that they have a ‘white sound.’ Diana rejects the description. ‘The white sound means the commercial sound,’ she explains a little hotly, as if to say, ‘This is our sound, baby, not theirs,’” and, “‘A Supremes record will sell almost 500,000 almost automatically,’ Gordy says. ‘Kids buy their records without even listening to them. We are putting something into their homes sight unseen, so we want it to be good.’”

But Rona Jaffe’s
Cosmo
piece had been calculated as center-ring treatment for the girls. Titled “THE SUPREMES: THEY MAKE YOU

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BELIEVE AGAIN,” it cast them in a hip-to-be-square light, as “the most unusual pop vocal group in the country. They don’t take pot or LSD, talk hip language, or attend love-ins and protest rallies.” And in the text arose the ghost of Florence—“a tall,
zaftig
, earthy honest, completely un–show business, more woman than girl, constrained, private . . . the ‘Quiet One’ [who onstage] is suddenly radiant, more radiant than a mere audience could ever make a girl [but] painfully shy.”

“We’ve been together nine years,” she is quoted. “I can’t believe it’s gone by so fast. If I had stayed home and been a nurse or something, I’d probably be saying what a long time it’s been.” The irony of those words was likely lost on most, and for Gordy the minor embarrassment paled before the marquee value of the publicity, including Jaffe’s final panting paragraph: “The Supremes sing and the Ice Age cracks wide open. It is the cracking of the ice that has covered all our hearts in the cool, cool sixties. It is a sound that makes you believe again in love.” So what if it actually made Ballard believe in anything but? In the larger lens, the Supremes were much bigger now than the sum of their parts. In fact, because Ballard’s departure was never framed as a firing, it wasn’t completely clear that she wasn’t just on sabbatical. When the
Detroit Free Press
touched on the matter in its September 1 edition—more than a month after she was canned—the headline ambiguously read: “SUPREMES FLO BALLARD: IT’S

SAID SHE’S LEAVING.”

Thus, the Ballard blurbs in the
Times
and
Cosmo
came in rather handy, keeping her ghost lurking in the periphery, for those who might care. Because Cindy wasn’t yet being introduced regularly on stage (the

“sexy one–quiet one” routine was put in moth balls), maybe that third Supreme was Flo. Or, as Diana had told Johnny Carson, maybe she was just a stand-in.