The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (69 page)

His problem, though, was that the radically altered record-buying market seemed genuinely uninterested in them, based on the flagging sales since “Love Child”—no shock given Gordy’s own indifference in releasing Supremes material throughout most of the year, almost all of which seemed intended to empty his inventory of Supremes product, a far different mindset than demanding “No. 1 hits only.” The albums, too, reeked of staleness. Two more Supremes-Temptations albums arrived in the fall. The first,
Together
—another cumulation of covers including those of old songs by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the Band’s rock classic-to-be “The Weight,” Sly and the Family Stone’s

“Sing a Simple Song,” and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” (with Mary Wilson’s solo)—was a long fall from
Join
and
TCB
; released in September, it lumbered in at No. 28 pop, 6 R&B. One other track,

“Why (Must We Fall in Love)” was released only in the U.K. and made the Top Forty there.

Next came the soundtrack of the Supremes and Temptations’ TV

sequel, “G.I.T. on Broadway.” The acronym this time stood for “gettin’

it together,” something that the show, broadcast on November 12, 1969, did anything but, weighed down as it was by having the two best pop-soul acts in the world perform antiseptic medleys of show tunes—

with unwittingly hilarious selections from
Fiddler on the Roof
—and a few unfunny comedy sketches. (One, “The Student Mountie,” required the Supremes to wear Indian headdresses, buffalo skins, and moccasins; and the Tempts, Mounted Police uniforms.) The real task, it seemed, had less to do with the songs than with trying not to die of embarrassment. The memory still makes Otis Williams shudder: “Sure it was embarrassing. But again, you did what they wanted, picked up the check 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 366

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and hoped no one ever mentioned it again.” A laugh. “So I really appreciate you askin’ about it, man.”

The soundtrack, out in early November under the name
On Broadway
, somehow got to 38 on the pop charts and to 4 on the R&B charts.

And for the Supremes’ next single, Gordy could only put out, on August 21, fodder from
Together
, “The Weight”—actually a surprisingly effective cover of the Robbie Robertson parable of unknowingly making a compact with the devil, produced by Frank Wilson in a jazzy, up-tempo style with a lively lead vocal by Eddie Kendricks. But, backed with another album cut, “For Better or Worse,” it stalled at No. 46, the worst-charting Supremes single in five years.

Worse, by the end of September no song had yet been found that could properly close the book on Diana Ross and the Supremes, causing delay for the long-awaited announcement that Ross was leaving—

and Gordy and Diana’s relationship to fray. With the deadline looming for Motown to be able to get a song out and up the charts in time for the finale at the Frontier Hotel, there arose the horrifying possibility that the curtain-dropping might be postponed until there
was
a hit.

Frayed after the hours she had spent rehearsing prodigiously staged numbers with Gil Askey designed for the solo act, Diana whined to Gordy, “When can I get out?”

After listening day after day to possible Supremes songs, he was coming close to losing it, at one point foaming that he wanted Diana

“out of this group” but that “we got to have a hit or she ain’t goin’

nowhere!” (Gordy and Ross blew right past these dicey hours in their respective memoirs, as if the path to Ross’s solo career was smooth sailing.) However, when people speak of Berry Gordy being blessed with the luck of timing and the timing of luck, it’s because of the kind of thing that happened next.

With no choice but to dip into the pool of recordings Diana had made for use as a solo, he settled on a cover track of a flop record Johnny Bristol had made during his early singing days as part of the duo Johnny and Jackey for Harvey Fuqua’s Tri-Phi label in 1961—

“Someday We’ll Be Together,” co-written by Bristol, Fuqua, and his partner Jackey Beavers. The track had been cut for Junior Walker and the All-Stars as a follow-up to the Bristol’s “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love),” an enormous summer hit that year, already adding back-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 367

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ground vocals by Motown singers and by sisters Maxine and Julia Waters. Before the lead could be cut by Walker, Gordy redirected it to Ross, who laid down the vocals at a June session.

The track was anything but subtle, Bristol having coated it with layers and layers of strings that buoyed rather pedestrian lyrics about regret and yearning. “Long time ago, my, my sweet thing / I made a big mistake, honey,” it went, continuing, “Ever since that day / Now, now all I wanna do is cry, cry, cry.” There was no happy ending, only, well, yearning—“Wanna say, wanna say, wanna say / Someday we’ll be together

/ Yes we will, yes we will.”

The problem was that, all this schmaltz notwithstanding, Diana’s vocal was borderline sleep-inducing. This caused Bristol so much concern that he opened his microphone in the booth and took to melodi-cally prodding Diana, exclaiming, “You tell it!” and “Oh yes, baby!” as the song went on. His exhortations bled into her microphone and were recorded on the track. Even the Funk Brothers couldn’t do much with it as the mix was overwhelmed with strings. In toto, Allan Slutsky says, the song, though “quite competent,” is “not exactly a barn burner of a groove.”

Gordy in fact regarded the record as not entirely finished, mainly because of Diana’s mordant vocal, which had some Motown executives wondering if the “someday” would be taken to mean that Diana was dreaming of a lovers’ reunion in the hereafter, when both lovers were dead. Was it a rock and roll death song, like “Teen Angel” or “Tell Laura I Love Her”? Was it a suicide death wish? But Gordy was down to the nub, and heard something that worked. With no time to fiddle with tracks, Bristol’s ad-libbed asides stayed on. Thus, the last Supremes single was a two-time hand-me-down from 1961 with background vocals from a Junior Walker session.

It was a strange brew, for sure.

It was also, as it turned out, the best song that conceivably could have served the purpose.

Charmed as Gordy was, the song was heard only, and by huge numbers, as a dreamy insistence codifying that the Supremes would “be together” forever—not as an end at all because the end never would come for their music. All the “clans” in the world working day and night could not have come up with anything that inspired, and perfect.

The rest was gravy; released as Motown single 1156 on October 14, 1969, it caught the wind from day one, seeming to reconstruct the Supremes’
au courant
sizzle whenever it was heard. It was in the Top 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 368

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Forty the week of November 15, crashing into the No. 1 spot six weeks later, the week of December 27—just as it was displaced from the top rung on the R&B chart after two weeks—when the Supremes were well into the Frontier engagement; though moved out after a week by

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” it would not leave the Top Forty for fifteen weeks—matching the run of “Love Child” and becoming the best-selling Supremes single ever.

(Repeat caveat: With Motown records veiled in secrecy, even with Gordy long out of the company, few know how many it and other Supremes’ records sold. An educated guess is that “Someday” has sold around a million and a half copies to this day, and over a million in its day, as did “Where Did Our Love Go,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Love Child,” and “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me.” Several others—“Baby Love,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Come See About Me,” “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and “Reflections”—may well have done a million to date.

Had Gordy ever opened his account books to the RIAA, Ross, Wilson, and Ballard would have earned as many as nine [Birdsong two]

platinum records, all of which, plus perhaps four or five more, would have gone gold. Similar guesswork math applies to Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson, whose sales figures were confirmed only after 1977.)

“Someday” was a lightning strike that moved all of Gordy’s plans forward. The official announcement of Ross’s impending exit came in November. It also allowed him to use it as the anchor for the final Supremes studio album,
Cream of the Crop.
Released on December 3 with a mélange of B-sides and other middling Motown fodder such as the Syreeta Wright–originated “The Beginning of the End,” and covers of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,”
Cream
soured at No. 33 pop (though it did reach 3 R&B). But now Gordy had cause to put out two other albums to exploit all the publicity and sentimentality of the end of the line for the Supremes; one was the mandatory
Greatest Hits Volume 3
, released just fifteen days later (going to No. 31 pop, 5 R&B), while the other,
Farewell
, would be a live double-album of the final show at the Frontier (actually pieces recorded from the last three shows) produced by Deke Richards and issued as a two-LP deluxe edition box-set—one of the first of its kind—in April 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 369

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1970 (46 pop, 31 R&B). (It was reissued as a two-compact-disc box-set titled
Captured Live on Stage
in 1992.) That hectic and profitable December, the Supremes were booked on the 21st to do
The Ed Sullivan Show
for the twentieth and last time with Ross. And if Diana, Mary, and Cindy had to get it together again and force some good vibrations, for Cindy it was a relief just to be there, or anywhere.

Though Gordy had turned his back on “rough” Detroit—and endlessly cursed the rampant crime there, which had recently included an unsolved crime (someone came into 2648 West Grand Boulevard and fired off a gun, fortunately hitting no one but leading a secretary to quit in fear)—the only time that any of the Supremes was the victim of a crime was in the “safe haven” of the Hollywood Hills when on the night of December 2 Birdsong opened the door to the apartment she shared with Charles Hewlett and one of his friends and a man she later described as crazed and white came out of the dark and held a butcher knife to her neck. Forcing her to tie the hands of Hewlett and his friend with rope, the guy dragged her by the hair into the garage, shoving her into the passenger seat of her own car before getting behind the wheel and taking off on a joyride along the Long Beach Freeway.

After thirty harrowing minutes, she bravely reached for the knife, cutting her hands in the process, then in a “Mannix”-like stunt jumped out of the speeding car. She could have been killed on contact but, though bloodied, she was, miraculously, not seriously hurt, coming to a stop in a ditch by the road. She then got up and ran into the road, fran-tically waving and screaming at oncoming cars for someone to stop and help her—which also could have gotten her killed. By another miracle, a California Highway Patrol car just then came along and picked her up, taking her to Long Beach Hospital.

The story broke the next morning on the news, with cops calling it an attempted kidnapping. Hearing of it, Gordy was scared witless, exposing as it did how easily the safety of his priceless commodities could be compromised. Already on edge since the summertime Tate-LaBianca murders, carried out by a crazed pack of hippies who turned out to be the Manson “family,” Gordy hired private security to guard his home. Apparently, the girls were encouraged to do the same, at their own expense.

To some around Motown, the whole thing seemed a bit incredible, and there were whispers about it maybe being a publicity stunt. Others spouted wild rumors that Hewlett, whom no one at the company really 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 370

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knew, could have been working with bad guys to set up Cindy for a ransom, even though an ex-con high on drugs and booze was arrested a day after the crime in Las Vegas, still in Cindy’s car, and admitted he had done it in an amateurish kidnap-and-ransom attempt. He was eventually sent to prison for kidnapping, armed robbery, and felonious reckless driving, with Cindy testifying at the trial.

None the worse for wear after a short hospital stay during which Diana and Mary rushed to her bedside, Cindy joined them for the trip to New York and their final
Ed Sullivan Show
together. Those who hadn’t heard the announcement of Diana’s departure on the news learned of it that night from a stone-faced, tuxedo-clad Sullivan, who prefaced the girls’ performance by intoning, with the emotion of a tur-tle, “As you know, Diana Ross is continuing her career as a single star.

And now, in their last appearance together, here is Diana and the Supremes singing their current number one record, ‘Someday We’ll Be Together.’”

As he spoke, the instrumental track of the song began playing—

there was no way the Sullivan orchestra could have done justice to the string arrangement—and the girls were seen behind him in the camera angle focusing on Sullivan from stage right, striding onto a set with three columns lit with different color lights. Wearing long, robe-like gold lamé and chiffon gowns with flouncy dolman sleeves and chandelier-sized earrings dangling below chin level, they formed a triangular position, Diana in front; then, as Sullivan finished his intro—without a word about Wilson and Birdsong carrying on the Supremes—the camera switched to a straight-on angle when they began to sing what for the vast majority of Americans would be their final song together.

As such, the performance immediately was heavy on the heart. Diana holding a hand-held microphone, sang in just the right subdued vocal shade of the recording, while Mary and Cindy, who had to again learn a song they hadn’t recorded, stood on either side smoothly hitting the extreme high notes of the chorus with sad smiles on their faces.

But, perfect as they were, there seemed to be a chilled air on the set.