The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (10 page)

Ross, for her part, spent only as much time bonding with Wilson as her increasingly busy life permitted. She took a night job at J. L. Hudson’s department store on Woodward Avenue, busing tables in the cafeteria.

(It’s been speculated, though never confirmed, that Ross was the first black employee of Hudson’s to work outside the kitchen. If so, she has never mentioned this herself.) At Cass, she took extra classes in dress design, hoping to craft stage costumes she would wear, not only with the act but on her own, as a chanteuse who would have the spotlight all to herself.

But those plans hit a snag that spring when, after they’d been booked into another round of talent shows and the like, Milton Jenkins was suddenly out of commission, laid up in Henry Ford Hospital, finally 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 38

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done in by his reluctance to have his injured arm treated properly.

While no one seemed to know for sure the extent of the problem since Milton refused guests rather than let anyone see him helpless, Maxine Ballard, whom he had begun dating steadily, said that the arm had become infected, then gangrenous. When he could no longer ignore the debilitating pain he finally agreed to go in, and it was almost too late.

Not only was he close to having the arm amputated, Maxine said, “he was fighting for his life” when he went under the knife, then lay on his back under heavy sedation hooked to IV tubes for days after.

He pulled through, but came home with fifteen pounds eaten from his already spare frame and was bedridden for weeks, allowing only Maxine to tend to him. As it happened, by then the Primes had moved out of his room, and out of his purview. They, too, had stagnated over the fall and winter, leading a homesick Eddie Kendricks to move back to Birmingham and Kel Osborne to pack up for California to make it as a solo act. As well, Otis Williams and his El Domingoes had had it with Jenkins’s failure to do much for them and dumped him in ab-sentia. They hooked up with another manager, Johnnie Mae Matthews, a former R&B singer who—most rarely for a woman, black or white, even today—had formed her own label, Northern Records, and managed and produced other acts. (In future years Matthews would be dubbed “Godmother of Detroit Soul.”) She renamed the group Otis Williams and the Distants and cut two sides on them for Northern.

“Something happened and we left Milton,” Williams recalls, still unaware of the circumstances of Jenkins’s absence. “I think we really just outgrew him. He was operating in smaller circles than we thought we should be in. It was hard for Milton to take care of us and take care of all his ladies at the same time. Being a manager is a full-time job but so is being a pimp. Something had to give, and it was probably Milton.” (Taking the inbreeding of Detroit’s nascent singing groups a step further, the Distants now took in Melvin Franklin and Richard Street—who themselves had come through a lineage of note, Franklin fresh from a group called the Voice Masters, two of whose members were teenagers named David Ruffin and Lamont Dozier; Street’s stepping stone was a group with a brother and sister, Theodore and Barbara Martin, the latter of whom would shortly make her own jump in rank.

What’s more, Matthews’s studio sessions with the Distants included some familiar names: guitarist Eddie Willis, saxophonist Eli Fontaine, drummer Uriel Jones, and pianist Richard “Popcorn” Wylie, who brought in a bass player he’d formed a combo with in high school—

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James Jamerson. He also brought in a backup group, the Mohawks, one of whose singers was named Norman Whitfield. Everyone in that bunch—as well as the sundered Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams—

would find a far greater calling, and in short order.) Jenkins, as he gradually recovered, didn’t try to reconnect with the remains of the Primes, who were now down to one: Williams. He fell into an ennui of depression that could only be buoyed by the doting Maxine, who didn’t cast him aside even as he hit rock bottom and gave up on his acts—really just the Primettes by that point. Too proud, humiliated by his fall, and too weak to carry on the grind of rehearsals and bookings, he never bothered to hold the Primettes to their contracts, a decision he would come to rue in time. For now, he turned his attentions from the rigors of music and prostitution to living a semblance of family life with Maxine, whom he would marry in 1961 after she obtained a divorce from her serviceman husband. As he looked for honest work, so did the Primettes.

With a touch of symmetry, Flo turned over the affairs of the group to a guy
she
was dating, Jesse Greer. This was a stretch since Greer was just out of high school and with a fledgling vocal group himself, the Peppermints, but they had played the Flame Show Bar and the Twenty Grand, and he was thinking big. Unfortunately, he lacked Jenkins’s glib bluster and connections. After rehearsing the girls at the Brewster Center, he got them more of the usual talent shows and sock hops that the girls assumed they’d outgrown. Another was a fashion show in a beauty parlor called the House of Beauty, the owners of which ran an eponymous record label out of the back room.

These cut-rate gigs were memorable only for the chance they gave the girls to intermingle with boy singers backstage, where pubescent hormones and cheap liquor ran wild. Wilson would relate interludes of

“sipping cheap wine,” “making out,” and “get[ting] down.” Flo, in fact, carried her own experimentation far enough to break up with Greer, who of course bore her father’s first name and was, she decided now,

“too nice” for her tastes. Apparently, in matters of men and sex, her taste was bad boys.

Coming of age and rounding into desirable young women, the Primettes were already heartbreakers. When the Distants would intersect with them on the talent show circuit, Richard Street would trail Ross around like a heartsick lapdog—only to see her treat him as one, nearly literally with a pat on the head and a few words of empty chit-chat. It was as if Ross herself had to choose a
swain
, who usually turned 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 40

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out to be an older guy with some pull in the music game; anyone beneath that, no matter how handsome or chivalrous, she wrote off. This may explain why, according to Mary, Diane seemingly “had eyes for everyone but Richard.” Wilson, on the other hand, acted on hormonal impulse, coupling with Melvin Franklin during some of those backstage group gropes, though the most serious pairing was Flo and Otis Williams.

“We had,” Williams confided, “an instant affection for each other.

Flo was a few years younger than me, which could’ve been trouble, you know, for me. But I couldn’t help but spend time with her. Flo had a lot of sexual energy, but she had to really trust you first. We spent a lot of time talking about life before we ever did stuff. It was more than sex; we loved and respected each other.”

The most significant change during the early months of 1960 was in Diane Ross. Her confidence, tempered after being rejected by the Cass High School sorority, got a lift when they reconsidered and accepted her after all. The reversal came after she had refused to take no for an answer and threw herself into a plethora of school activities to impress them. It wasn’t so much that she got them to like her much better; they may even have been the same as when, originally, as Wilson observed,

“she brought out the worst in those girls.” Rather, she simply overwhelmed them with her obvious qualifications and tenacious resolve, or else they were just tired of her bugging them.

That attitude was no different when it came to the Primettes. In all group matters, Wilson ventured, Ross “was certain that she knew everything, and no matter what everyone else did . . . Diane would comment on it.” She almost always got her way. On fashion and cosmetic issues, her word was inviolate.

“Personal style,” she would tell Mary and Flo, sounding
trés
sophisticated, “is a real important expression of self.”

“Self,” evidently, was far more important to Ross than to her three mates. While throwing her weight (as sparse as it was) around was a constant with the Primettes, Wilson noted that Ross “didn’t seem to mind being away from us” as she went about polishing and refining her own rising star by taking weekend modeling classes. Years later, after Ross had proven her lone-wolf priorities beyond all doubt, she offered some rationalizations, writing in her autobiography
Secrets of a Sparrow:
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“Mary, Florence, and I were not true sisters. [We] started out as three strangers who were randomly placed together. . . . When difficulties arose, we did not have the kind of bond that automatically exists among family members.”

If Ross’s plans, even in 1960, wandered beyond Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, the latter was still somewhat blinkered—assuming, naively to be sure, that she was inveterately the Primettes’ fulcrum. Her sassiness could always convey the image for outsiders. But she may not have noticed that Ross had curried Wilson for leverage; accordingly, the course they were following was being laid down by the girl Flo believed couldn’t sing her way out of a paper bag.

But then Flo herself was providing a vacuum for Diane to fill.

Falling behind in her final grades, she was ordered by Lurlee to quit the Primettes when school let out that spring. It took an impassioned plea from Diane and Mary for Lurlee to allow Flo to return after several days. Just in time, it turned out, for the Primettes to enjoy their first big break.

In late June, they decided to enter the talent competition at the Detroit/

Windsor International Freedom Festival, an annual jamboree that began the summer before to celebrate in early July both the American and the Canadian Independence Day, with events on both sides of the Detroit River culminating in a gigantic fireworks display. One event, the talent show, sponsored by some of the area’s radio stations, offered a venue for local amateur singers and bands to compete for a top prize of $15 and a bit of local publicity.

While technically a professional act, the Primettes qualified because they’d never been paid a thin dime by Milton Jenkins. As putative amateurs, the girls again needed parental permission to get a spot on the show, seemingly a formality for a harmless gig in an All-American, apple-pie environment a far cry from the smoke-filled nightclubs. At least that’s what Johnnie Mae Wilson and Lurleee Ballard believed when they quickly signed the forms. Fred Ross was not so easily persuaded. When Diane presented him with the papers, he took the opportunity to make a stand, explaining calmly that the year-long singing excursion had gone far enough, and that any further indulgence for Diane would ruin her education. It was a rather strange case to be making, with Diane having just graduated tenth grade with honors. But Fred 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 42

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could see long-term implications in his daughter’s obsession with performing. Unless he drew a line here, he knew, she’d never get a college education. Her entire demeanor, the way her eyes burned hot when she spoke of being a star, said it all. He didn’t begrudge her, or her talent—

but from where he sat, enough was enough.

The argument, which Ernestine was helpless to mediate, broke the fragile
detente
between Fred and Diane, inevitably recharging the psychological friction caused by his distance and her angst about feeling like the second-best daughter.

“What do I have to do to please you?” she screamed at him melo-dramatically according to one account, though this is another subplot absent from her memoirs.

The stalemate went on for several days, during which Mary and Flo kept begging Fred to reconsider. When he held his ground, Diane nearly imploded, in her frustration returning to an old habit of biting her fingernails to the nub. At her wit’s end, she whispered to Mary and Flo that she might do something she’d never done before—defy Fred, by sneaking to the festival. One way or another, Diane wouldn’t miss this big chance. “Nothing was going to stop her from going,” Wilson would recall.

But Fred again blinked, saying later that he caved only because he was fed up with all of the “moaning and groaning” about it every day around the house. In truth, he almost always gave in to his children, especially, as Florence once remarked, if Diane “turned on the tears.” If she played the drama queen with her father, it was for a purpose, and all too obvious. Watching her get her way about the show, Mary and Flo were naturally relieved, but a little embarrassed for him. Fred, Flo would recall, was hardly the unfeeling “daddy dearest” Diane sometimes made him out to be, and in fact a “softie.” Indeed, both she and Mary envied her. As Flo noted, “At least she
had
a father.” Fred’s capitulation is, in historical terms, a major event in the story of the Supremes. Because the Detroit/Windsor show was the first stage they mounted that really mattered—not that the show itself was anything special, with its day-long procession of acts that careened from singers to belly dancers to ventriloquists (one of whom achieved a measure of fame as a ’60s television curio, Willie Tyler and his dummy Lester, who happened to be a classmate of Wilson and Ballard at Northeastern High). In this chaotic dog-and-pony show, the Primettes got most of the buzz.

Standing in yellow chiffon dresses on another scorching day before an audience of 500 people scarfing down hot dogs and cotton candy, they proved that Milton Jenkins’s intuition had been correct.

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They weren’t the best vocal group in the world, perhaps not even in the contest, but their voices and phrasing were tight and exuberant, swathed by Marvin Tarplin’s amplified guitar licks. Their moves were yet a bit stiff and knock-kneed, but with the core trio having caught up with Betty McGlown in feminine curves, they were undeniably sexy.