The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (11 page)

Wilson would recall that when they did “Night Time Is the Right Time” during their standard five-song set, Flo’s singing on the wild bass line was so intense that the crowd was “totally amazed.” Then, when Diane pealed a fluttery, high-pitched counterpoint, “the whole place just went crazy.” From that moment on, it could be said that the two polar, and nuclear, forces of the group—Ross and Ballard—were established, to the benefit of the group, but also that the two performers had embarked on a collision course.

On that day, though, they all were winners, and richer for it by $15—at least for a little while. As self-appointed group “treasurer,” Mary stuck the cash in her pocket; later, after they changed clothes and went on some of the rides at the amusement park, she went to divvy it up but found her pocket empty. When she told the girls the money was gone, apparently taken by a pickpocket, Diane accused her of lying so she could keep the money for herself. Even at the time, it didn’t seem the best of omens that the first payday they ever had, they still got nothing.

But it was Florence who committed a far more grievous sin after the show—or at least it could have been a sin had a decision she made stood. Assuming she was group leader, an enormously tall black man with a very deep voice approached her and introduced himself as Robert Bateman of the Motown company. At the time, Flo had strayed from the other Primettes, whom Bateman praised for their performance. Handing her a card with a phone number on it, he told Flo to call to set up a day and time for the group to come in and audition for his boss, Berry Gordy.

That name resonated with Flo as it did with everyone else on the Detroit music scene, but not completely favorably. Word on the street was that while Gordy’s year-old Motown shop was happening, he had bled a lot of young, naive acts dry when the royalties were supposed to be paid—not that this was an uncommon occurrence in the music industry in general.

“Berry Gordy?” she repeated. “Ain’t he the guy who cheats his artists?”

Bateman, who no doubt had heard this before, didn’t flinch or withdraw the invitation. “This could be the biggest thing that ever happens to you,” he said, his deep voice almost grim. “Don’t blow it.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 44

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Flo, of course, always took such lecturing as an insult. Rather than hurry over to the other girls to tell them of the Motown entreaty, she narrowed her eyes at Robert Bateman as he walked away and then, believing she knew best, said nothing about it to the others. Indeed, Wilson has maintained stoutly that no one from Motown or any other record company spoke with anyone in the group that day. Bateman himself, however, contradicts that, saying he surely approached Florence Ballard.

“Yeah, I discovered them at that festival, I loved ’em when I heard

’em,” he says. “I was the guy who brought them to Motown.” But Bateman’s own memory is a bit fuzzy in that he swears the meeting somehow happened
after
the Primettes had already been to see Gordy, plainly a chronology that makes no sense since, in that case, he could neither have discovered them nor brought them in.

In fact, he
didn’t
bring them in. That came about only after Diane Ross reckoned it was high time to get the group signed to a recording contract, knowing exactly the man to broker that deal—the lean, pale-skinned singer she’d found so beguiling when she watched him rehearse with his group, back when Smokey Robinson was a nobody. Now, only two years later, he was a nobody no longer, and that
really
beguiled her, considering that in the interim Smokey’s group—renamed the Miracles—had become the most recognizable signature voice of Berry Gordy’s original label and up to then the only jewel in his crown, Tamla Records.

Still in its incubation stage, the label and its parent company, Motown Inc., had no national pull and Gordy had to lease out many of its records to other, bigger labels, including some by the Miracles. But Gordy had accumulated a raft of chits by writing for Jackie Wilson, and by calling them in he was able to get enough airplay on the Detroit radio stations to score the Miracles regional hits, as well as to parlay a family loan and some fleeting royalties into establishing a headquarters/

studio in a rundown two-story row house on West Grand Boulevard.

With characteristic bravado, he slapped a sign over its bay-windowed fresco front landing that read “Hitsville, U.S.A.” That was a prophesy that had a long way to go before it could be fulfilled. But Gordy had nerve, and he had a concept of black capitalism far more fantastical than his concept of music. He couldn’t have known he was fated, like the Supremes, for unspeakable success, or that he was on the cusp of a social and historical context for his lofty dreams. All he knew was that he had his seedlings, in his label and in 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 45

NOTOWN TO MOTOWN

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Smokey Robinson. Meanwhile, Smokey himself, though
he
couldn’t know it, was the piper of the next new thing—when pop would meet R&B and modify “race music” as never before, running clever lyrical and melodic hooks into venerable rhythm-and-blues grit. These were the
grooves
, as the cats on the street said, that would give Gordy’s new paradigm of black self-reliance a virtual soundtrack.

For Diane Ross, then, it was suddenly a good idea to want to drop in on her old friend Smokey. With none of Florence Ballard’s compunc-tions or principles, she seemed to already know that her future was tethered to the guy with the shady reputation who ran Motown.

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BERRY

Berry Gordy ran on the same streets and alleys of Paradise Valley as Milt Jenkins, pursuing the same elusive success with women and music. But until the late ’50s his luck with each ran sour. Unlike Jenkins, Gordy was not a high roller; he had no Cadillac parked outside the Flame Show Bar, no fly threads, no bling, no pretty face. He stood a good half-foot shorter than Jenkins, around five-six on a good day, and usually looked a bit scraggly. But he was always a player, or at least could convince the crowd he was. That he could do a convincing imitation of a high roller, however, was a factor of his birth into a rich and very helpful family.

Born, aptly, on Thanksgiving day, November 28, 1929, as Berry Gordy III, he was the second youngest of seven children, most of the rest of whom he watched grow rich and fat while for him life remained a constant struggle. His lot was, understandably, a source of embarrassment within the family, seeing as how he was the namesake of its patriarch, Berry Gordy Jr., who was such a respected and approachable grand duke that no one knew him as Berry Jr., only as “Pops.” His son, Berry III, in turn, requisitioned the “Jr.” for himself, chucking the more formal and pretentious honorific of a third-generation Berry.

Pops Gordy, though, was a tough act to follow. A self-made man from square one, he had arrived in the great black migration from his native Alabama in the ’20s. He did his grunt work on the Ford assembly line, saved and invested his money wisely, and by the ’40s had opened a market in a relatively upscale West Detroit neighborhood, calling it, tellingly, the Booker T. Washington Grocery Store.

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The Gordy matriarch, Bertha, kept herself busy broadening her own horizons in academia. She studied retail management at Wayne State University and business at Michigan University, and after graduating from the Detroit Institute of Commerce she founded and became secretary-treasurer of the Friendship Mutual Life Insurance Company, whose mission was selling insurance policies to black families. Known and consulted regularly by white business and political leaders, Bertha was the classic example of what upper-class whites were talking about when they said some of their best friends were black.

The younger Berry Gordy never ran in crowds like that. He was a hard-boiled, unfocused teenager who got into so many brawls in and around school that Pops told him to save his fists for where they could help him—namely, prizefighting. In the city that produced the Brown Bomber, Brown Berry was no Joe Louis, either, but good enough to progress through the amateur Golden Gloves chain, first as a wiry 112-pounder, then a brawny 126-pound featherweight by the time he quit school in the eleventh grade to turn pro. This decision upset his parents and always haunted him, as he would become overly sensitive to the fact that he never fully learned how to read and write.

During his fight career, Gordy sparred with a slightly older Golden Gloves winner named Jackie Wilson, who wanted to sing for a living and soon would be fronting the R&B group Billy Ward and the Dominoes. Gordy would never have his glove raised as a Golden Glove winner, but he did ace eight of fourteen bouts. Fighting on the undercard of a few big boxing shows at the Detroit Olympia, he earned up to $500 a fight, and was trained by Eddie Futch, who would take Joe Frazier to the heavyweight title, and with whom he was nearly killed while driving back from a fight in Chicago. He also had fights in California, but if he had the hunger he never had the size to go much further.

When he hung up the gloves in the late ’40s, he could have gone to work for Pops; instead, he enlisted in the Army, spent two years on bases in Arkansas and Michigan, then shipped out to Korea, all while earning a high school equivalency degree. Returning home in 1951, when he was 22, he married a 19-year-old girl named Thelma Louise Coleman, moved into an apartment, and fathered a son and two daughters. But he still couldn’t find steady work. Usually his days were spent rolling sevens and craps in alleys. Somewhere along the line, he decided he could make it as a singer, then as a songwriter, and he began frequenting the clubs, making some early contacts with the music crowd. Talking the ever-optimistic Pops into lending him $700, he opened the 3-D Record Mart.

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3-D, though, didn’t survive beyond two years and went under in 1953. He then bit the bullet and went to work (as Pops had) in the Ford plant, fastening chrome strips and nailing upholstery to skeletal cars rolling down the assembly line. He continued to write songs and to spend time at the clubs—too much time, apparently, because in 1956

Thelma felt abandoned and hit him with divorce papers, alleging he was a hopeless philanderer who stayed out all night, had “refuse[d] to speak to her for long periods,” had an “ungovernable temper,” and had struck her “without any just cause or provocations.” He didn’t answer the suit, which Thelma soon dropped, but they separated in 1957; they would divorce two years later.

Berry kept looking for a break. And he got it without having to do anything except be the brother of two strong-willed, very together women, Gwen and Anna Gordy. They were typical (save for Berry Jr.) children of Pops Gordy, accomplished and beautiful women, and they, too, eyed the music scene, not as performers or writers but as would-be entrepreneurs. In 1957, they jointly purchased rights to the photo and cigarette concessions at the Flame Show Bar, putting two other of their brothers to work in the darkroom developing the pictures that Gwen and Anna had taken of merry-making patrons.

Berry must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven since, through them, he had an entree to the man he always wanted to meet—

Al Green, who of course was managing, among his other acts, Berry’s former sparring partner Jackie Wilson. Recalling this, the biggest break he ever got, Gordy duly noted his sisters’ intervention in his memoir, but not without a strained attempt to justify their charity on his behalf.

“Beautiful [and] glamorous, with business in their blood and love in their hearts,” he wrote in
To Be Loved
, “they turned heads whenever they came through the room” and “[e]veryone adored them and seemed pleased to meet me, their brother, the songwriter.” In reality, at the time he could not claim a single songwriting credit, a single record, a single meaningful act in the business. But he did have his famous nerve, and charmed Green into extending an invitation to his office so he could hear his songs. When Gordy arrived, he found himself in the waiting room with another songwriter, Roquel Billy Davis, who wrote under the pseudonym Tyran Carlo. Neither had anything Green could use, but they became fast friends and song collaborators. A few weeks later, they returned to Green with a new composition, “Reet Petite,” the title cribbed from the Louis Jordan song “Reet, Petite and Gone.” Conceived by Gordy as a ballad, Davis changed it to an upbeat rattler, and while Gordy would call it “a so-so song,” Green was sold.

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At the time, Jackie Wilson had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes for a solo career, and he and Green were seeking a song to cut as his first project for Decca Records’ Brunswick label. That song became “Reet Petite,” which, with Wilson’s bombastic style and a big-band kick, went to No. 62 pop and peaked at 11 on the R&B charts, a handsome enough return to justify more work for the Gordy-Davis team. In the next two years they cranked out over a dozen, some of them bearing the name Gwen Gordy as co-writer—possibly Berry’s way of paying her back for going to bat for him with Green, though a greater side benefit for Gwen was the romance she began with Davis.

Four of these songs—“To Be Loved,” “Lonely Teardrops,” “That’s Why I Love You So,” and “I’ll Be Satisfied”—charted, with “Teardrops” the best, a No. 7 pop hit.

Gordy now had a name, but little else that was positive. In fact, his life was a mess. At 27 he was broke, living apart from his young children, unable to afford housing. He’d moved in with another of his older sisters, Loucye, who had one of those amazing Gordy family résumés—having been the first civilian woman (and perhaps the first African-American) to be a property officer at the Michigan and Indiana Army Reserve base in Fort Wayne, Indiana. (She was also a successful businesswoman and the founder of and an instructor at the Brits and Spurs riding academy created expressly for black equestrians.) Unable to turn her little brother down, she opened her ritzy townhouse to Berry and, by extension, his clique of rag-tag music buddies, even permitting him to set up a makeshift studio in her basement, from which the din and cigar smoke billowed and stunk up the house.