The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (3 page)

“livin’ in shame,” destitute and back in the projects, Ross was met with catcalls by Supremes fans at the funeral.

Clearly, the Supremes’ saga has produced a good many fables, a convenient, fallen dream girl in Diana Ross, and a heavy in Berry Gordy.

These elements provided the grist for what is assumed to be the veiled story of the Supremes in Michael Bennett’s smash 1981 Broadway musical and later movie
Dreamgirls
. The assumption is only partly right; that set piece is tenuously based on the Supremes, but Bennett was no fool, knowing such an implied association would give breath and a large profit margin to his work. In fact, the story he hatched is close enough to the truth to peg Ross’s passive duplicity in the betrayal of Ballard, presumably for being too fat. But here the parallels come crashing down: The real Ballard certainly had her battles with the bulge, but the cause of her enforced exile had to do with internal, not external, factors, as she was the product of great personal tragedy. She also was never bedded by Gordy, as suggested in the Bennett revision. And, of course, she never had the last laugh on him—that would have been somewhat difficult given her early demise.

Still, it was indeed true that Ballard was nobody’s lackey. The inside joke was that Ross would call Flo the “quiet one” during her on-stage 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xix INTRODUCTION

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patter. The reality was seen in her wan smile and sad eyes, hinting at not a “quiet one” but a seething soul, tortured by her past, by Ross’s ascendance in a group Ballard had put together back in the projects, and by Gordy’s overbearing rules that kept them psychologically dependent on him. Even as the Supremes became rich and lived in anything but shame on swanky Buena Vista Avenue, they needed Berry’s approval to make withdrawals from their own bank accounts, a system that endured well into the ’70s.

Ross, for one, may have been so stung by the uncomfortable reminders in
Dreamgirls
of her, well, compromised past that she slammed Bennett for “turn[ing] my life into a paperback novel.” Her real gripe, however, may have been a lack of proper deference, since the producers—

“good friends of mine,” she noted—hadn’t “passed it by me.” Nor did she relent when the movie adaptation was released in late 2006 and was an enormous success. When the producers of the Academy Awards wanted her to sing the movie’s Oscar-nominated song, she clearly relished telling them to stuff it. (By contrast, the ever-amenable Mary Wilson said she loved the musical.)

Some semblance of what was real and unreal about the Supremes could, through the years, be gleaned in various works, at best, though not in full, in Wilson’s 1986 autobiography, the mandatorily titled
Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme
, which with good marketing sense sniped at Ross as early as page 1 and didn’t let up for the remaining 248 pages. It outsold Ross’s two more heralded but gratingly narcissistic and insultingly detail-free memoirs of 1993 and 2000 (yet a third arose in 2007).

Ross, who can give as good as she gets, retaliated by skipping the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 1988 rather than share a stage with Wilson, who accepted the honor alongside one of Ballard’s daughters.

To be sure, the best and most honest Supremes story could have been told by Flo Ballard. Instead, seeking the next best thing, one has had to wade through the muck and mucilage of “celebrity journalism” in place of actual journalism.

And their effect on the industry? We are talking cosmic. The Supremes, after all, took Gordy light-years beyond his original mission with Motown, which was an admirable one: to see to it that white power brokers wouldn’t annex and profit from the talents of new black artists and songwriters. When the Supremes upped the ante considerably, Gordy’s influence grew. His shop’s stew of gospel-based R&B and white pop thrived even as the old order’s pop music purveyors were drained of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xx xx

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power. From 1964 to 1967, after which the girl-group thing was essentially over, even at Motown, Berry kept American pop music breathing with a girl-group. One that was so singular and, well, dreamlike, that Gordy didn’t even bother to try keeping his other ace girl-groups, the Marvelettes and Martha and the Vandellas, in the loop. Instead, it was the male acts that benefited; the balls to the wall Supremes “sound” was easily reformatted in songs for Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, and the Four Tops. In 1966 alone, twenty-two Motown singles—an astounding 75 percent of all of its releases that year—made the charts.

And while R&B purists came to prick Gordy for his post-1963 assembly line of “black bubblegum,” those records formed the DNA of soul music in the ’70s and beyond, spread at first by Motown expatriates like Holland-Dozier-Holland and Philly soul masters Gamble and Huff. In retrospect, Motown’s real legacy—and thus the Supremes’—

was something palpable in the ’60s, and a prime example of music’s most desirable word: “crossover.”

Motown, an unstoppable force, shot the moon. With 100 No. 1 hit songs in the bank, today it is the most successful black-owned corporation in history, clocking in at around a half-trillion dollars in business at last glance. But while that makes for a heartwarming trope, it is also a fact that by 1965, Motown’s ethnic agenda was just a front; behind the black singers, black sessionmen, and black dancers (before their heels were cooled for Gordy’s real target audience, the supper-club bour-geoisie at venues like the Copacabana and the Las Vegas casinos), the business end of Motown was being run in the main by white showbiz lawyers and other assorted sharpies from L.A., where Gordy himself would move Motown’s operations in the late ’60s rather than stick it out in Detroit. There were, as well, whispers around the shop and along the meridians of the industry that the Mafia had partnered up with Gordy to get his records pressed and played on the radio and stacked in record stores.

Gordy’s moral penury was a worse-kept secret. At the Motown shop, it was a given that he would pay his artists only just enough to keep them from staging an outright revolt, or bolting to other labels—

an exodus he was unable to prevent later on with Ross, Lionel Richie, and Michael Jackson. Or with Holland-Dozier-Holland, who first walked, then waged years of courtroom warfare against Gordy seeking back royalties. For a long spell, Gordy was able to keep his star acts at bay by engendering a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. As his premier act, the Supremes bore the brunt of Gordy’s head games—and Flo Ballard re-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xxi INTRODUCTION

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ceived the most vicious treatment of all, which peaked after Gordy tried to ease her out of the act and an exasperated Ballard spat out an impetuous threat to spill his “secrets.” Unmoved, in 1967 he fired her and continued his psychological torture by allegedly conspiring to snuff her ill-fated solo career. Ballard took to the bottle even harder and grew increasingly desperate.

Gordy may have retroactively thought twice about her threat as it seems he discreetly eased her financial burden. But the effects of his public excommunication of Ballard are felt to this day. At the old Motown building on West Grand Boulevard, now a museum and shrine to the magic of the name, Cindy Birdsong is ever present in a slew of Supremes photos on the walls. Ballard, as if official Motown has applied an eraser to her memory, can be seen in a single tattered black-and-white shot, affixed unsteadily to the wall with a thumb tack. (Not that it matters; among Supremes courtiers Ballard has become vener-ated, even martyred.)

Gordy, meanwhile, who lived in monarchical splendor even as inner-city Detroit was decaying all around him, has personally reaped the whirlwind. In 1989 he cashed out of Motown for $50 million (a paltry sum at that, according to industry analysts who thought he could have done much better) and sold off half of his publishing interests—

over 15,000 songs—for $132 million. Eight years later, in 1997, Holland-Dozier-Holland took a loan on their publishing rights for $60 million.

Yet as much as Motown has been divided, subdivided, and ultimately absorbed by the gigantic corporate entities MCA, Polygram, and Universal, its past remains a timeless dawn, black America’s own Camelot.

Shuffling and reshuffling the same Motown oldies into one repackaged album after another have ensured a profit, no matter who the corporate parent might be. What to say of a conglomerate like Motown, which in its old age can license the re-release of every record it put out from 1959 through 1966, good, bad, or in between—the top of the line being the amazing six-volume, thirty-six-CD
Complete Motown Singles
remastered box-set series on Universal Music Group’s custom retro label, Hip-O Select—and turn a nifty profit, despite a per-volume price of $119.99 and an Internet-only availability? Hip-O Select in fact also found success with four other Supremes remastered sets—one a previously unreleased 1965 show-tune album
There’s a Place for Us
, and another a compilation of the group’s post–Diana Ross ’70s albums. This no doubt helps explain why most listeners would rather hear “You Can’t Hurry Love” for the 800th time than, say, “Love Hangover” for 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xxii xxii

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the second time. (Though the best way to glean the raw force, gentle nuances, and delicate camp/fantasy balance of the group is by watching with a hard eye the 2006 DVD anthology
The Supremes: Reflections.
) The challenge to a would-be biographer of the three original Supremes is not unlike what Holland-Dozier-Holland did inside Motown Studio A: Draw a line at that blessed point when it sounded right. Because there are three discrete orbits here, with loyalists accrued to each, one must hear out versions of the same events ranging from the truth to shadings of the truth to outright nontruths. In the matter of Florence Ballard in particular, everyone seems to have taken sides, sending vec-tors of conflicting claims shooting in every direction. Add to that the unenviable task of having to wade into the swamp of the celebrity journalists’ renderings of the same events, along with those by countless others who came through the Supremes’ glam/kitsch trough with a story to market. For example, is it possible that a latter-day Mary Wilson once performed an impromptu one-woman rendition of “Stop! In the Name of Love” for a cocaine dealer in order to score a gram or two, or that she could have snorted lines with Sammy Davis Jr. after greeting him at her dressing room door in the nude? These claims actually appeared in a real book produced by a major publisher and written by a former Supremes “go-fer,” who was also briefly Wilson’s manager turned professional drag queen. And while one’s first impulse may be to toss off sensational grist like this—or perhaps, given the very subculture of outcasts that worships the Supremes for the strangest of reasons (remember Masha), such claims come with the territory—a complicating factor is that other claims in that book actually seem to be on solid ground.

The multiplicity of opinion about what is factual, of course, would be especially virulent if Ross and Wilson were ever to find themselves isolated in the same room and discussing events they shared. Consider that the closest they’ve gotten to that scenario was at the Motown 25th Anniversary TV special, when Ross grabbed the microphone from Wilson’s hand and nearly stiff-armed her aside. So, while pains were taken to indeed hear out everyone in the forum, Ross and Wilson may actually be the world’s worst sources about the Supremes—at least when what they say is filtered through their own prisms, which is just about all the time. The same goes for Berry Gordy. All of them have been cited through the years in their own and others’ works, and the most trenchant of their recollections are noted in these pages as well. In the end, though, the line was drawn at what sounded right, aided and abet-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xxiii INTRODUCTION

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ted by the rules of corroboration. A great deal of stock was also placed on my own informed opinion because, well, it’s a habit by now.

Given these considerations, it’s only fair to call this book an un-authorized biography, though this should not be construed as a license to contrive or dish. Much time was spent tracking down as many original sources as possible, a good many of whom had never been consulted for their knowledge of the Supremes and the Motown operation. Some voices may have gone uncovered, but not for a lack of effort to locate them. Sadly, as with any story nearly a half-century in the making, many in that category are no longer around—most grievously, nearly all of the Funk Brothers and, of course, Florence Ballard.

The very good news is that enough crucial voices came forward to justify my hope and intention that these pages will stand as an invaluable reference guide to and looking glass into the Kismet that glimmered when Motown ruled the whole world, and when the Supremes ruled Motown.

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Prologue

ay 19, 2007, at a diner in New York City.

Eddie Holland didn’t look up from his bacon and eggs when asked: What is the Supremes’ legacy?

M The question surely would evoke chapter and verse from the mouthy member of the fabled Holland-Dozier-Holland team who composed and produced all but two of the Su premes’ twelve No. 1 hits, and practically everything else they committed to vinyl from 1963 through 1967. Then, and now, Eddie Holland was the wordman, fashioning peppy, then darkly plaintive narratives from Lamont Do -

zier’s conceptual keywords and his brother Brian Holland’s always infectious melodies. Today, they are in their mid-sixties, still cool enough to get away with wearing jogging suits and lavender-tinted shades to business meetings, and the years have done nothing to eat the relish off Eddie Holland’s tongue or pen.

Yet the question of the Supremes’ legacy left Eddie oddly inert, with only the clinking of dishes—and, appropriately enough, Motown tunes playing through speakers over simmering burgers on a grill—to fill in the lull. Finally, he raised his head.