The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (12 page)

It was only a matter of time before Loucye told him to move. Berry, whose pride was singed from having to mooch off his sisters (he even had to let Loucye pick up his child-support payments), quickly complied. That led him to his next destination—his sister Gwen’s place.

By then, she too had moved deeper into the music business, forming a partnership with Davis in a label they called Anna Records, after her sister, who had invested in the enterprise. Mover and shaker that she was, Gwen had secured a national distribution deal with Chess Records, the Chicago R&B label. She lived in an apartment building that had become a kind of Gordy Arms, home as well to Berry Sr. and Bertha, two of whose sons ran the print shop and cleaning store on the ground floor.

The Gordy sisters were, like Gwen’s mounts at the Brits, purebred show horses. Craving attention, they would step out on the town in feathered boas, satin gowns, and six-inch heels, to the long gazes of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 50

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people on the street. If they were lucky, their brother Berry, with his raggedy clothing and hole-dimpled shoes, wouldn’t be anywhere near them. And yet Berry was working on his own five-year plan that he figured couldn’t be gauged right now but would take him far and beyond the for-show wealth of his family. That was why he wanted nothing to do with Anna Records. When Gwen and Billy invited him to be its president, he politely declined. It wasn’t only that he felt guilty enough sponging off his sisters; it was that he saw Anna Records as the kind of small-time thing he wanted to sidestep. His vision, his drive, was suited to something
big.
He was, he told Gwen, going to own his own label and run his own empire, someday.

“Baby, we understand,” she told him, trying not to sound patroniz-ing about his pipe dream. “You’ve got to do what makes you happy.” There were hard lessons he’d already learned about the business. Writing hits for Jackie Wilson, for instance, meant nothing in terms of capital. Other than a $1,000 handout from Al Green early on, he and Davis had received nothing in royalties. Where did those dollars go?

“Expenses,” Green would say, mantra-like, “expenses.” But at least they’d gotten something. Then, in late ’58, Green, in New York on tour with Jackie Wilson, dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving the job of Wilson’s manager to his young white assistant, Nat Tarnopol. Compared with Tarnopol, Green was a philanthropist; Nat would sooner have reached into an alligator’s mouth than into his pocket, as Berry found out when he asked him if he could tack some Gordy-Davis songs on the B-sides of the Jackie Wilson records with their songs on the A-sides. Doing so would thus double the royalty. Nat wouldn’t hear of it, and reacted obnoxiously.

“So, you guys want both sides, huh? Or what?” he said, in a veiled threat.

Feeling bold, if not wise, Berry said, “Or . . . we can’t write for Jackie anymore.”

“Jackie is a star. You need him—he doesn’t need you.” With that, Tarnopol informed them that their work was no longer needed. Gordy then went straight to Jackie Wilson, but instead of loyalty from his old sparring mate whom he’d turned into a solo star, he got a spineless response.

“Berry, I love you and your family,” Jackie said wanly, “but I can’t go against Nat.”

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Gordy’s only recourse was to call in contacts he’d made to pitch songs. One outlet was George Goldner, the racketeer-cum-music company owner who oversaw the New York R&B labels Gone and End, which put out records by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Chantels. Goldner had once, on a trip to Detroit, pressed a 100-dollar bill in Gordy’s hand and winked, telling him it was for “future considerations.” The future came sooner than they both expected.

Gordy also had cushioned the Wilson fall by lining up local singers to cut Jackie Wilson demos. One of those was the 17-year-old kid with the weirdly light skin who had become Diane Ross’s object of desire and ambition back in the projects—Smokey Robinson, who had caught
his
break, without knowing it yet, when he brought his group the Matadors to audition for Nat Tarnopol late in 1957. Berry and Nat were still tight then, and Gordy was in Nat’s office when the group—which now included Smokey’s girlfriend, Claudette, replacing her brother who had gone into the Army—sang their songs. The ever-charming Tarnopol told them they were awful and to get the hell out. But Berry had heard something else, something endearing, and ran into the hall after them.

He told them who he was and that he liked their stuff.

Smokey, who doted on music industry arcana, became excited.

“Berry Gordy?!” You work for Jackie, right?” he gushed.

Gordy told the excitable boy to call him when he had a good, solid song he believed in. The call came within a week, sparking an Abbott and Costello routine.

“I got it,” Smokey said.

“Got what?”

“Got a job.”

“What’s that?”

“Our first hit.”

The song, a spinoff of the Silhouettes’ enormous smash “Get a Job,” was a tame knockoff that used the same “sha na na na” riff of the original; but the story it told of a guy trying to find work with comically bad results drew Gordy’s attention. He quickly sold it to Goldner, who gave him the gig of producing it. Gordy and Smokey then cut it at United Studios using the same musicians Green used for cutting Jackie Wilson and Hank Ballard records: jazz pianist Joe Hunter’s combo, who were regulars at a club called Little Sam’s. Only weeks later Goldner had it out on End, but with a new group name, the Miracles, which Smokey thought up after Berry told him that “Matadors” sounded “a little jive.” Gordy and Robinson picked up stacks of the records at the pressing 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 52

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plant and took copies around to the local radio stations, and though the disk tanked nationally it was a nice regional hit, as were three more Miracles records through the end of 1958.

The Smokey model was an indication of what Gordy was gradually building. Along with the Miracles, he was knitting a circle of similarly young, unproven but precocious talents. Another was 17-year-old Eddie Holland, who wanted to sing instead of going, as he was, to business school. He knocked on Gordy’s door—actually Loucye’s door—one day out of the blue and asked if he could sing for him. Because he sounded almost exactly like Jackie Wilson, Berry immediately put him to work—at no pay—cutting demos for Wilson.

Recalls Holland:

I was sent there by this guy Homer Jones, who owned theaters in Michigan. When I met Berry, he didn’t know me from Adam but he invited me in. That’s how he is, he’ll listen to anyone.

He had a very charismatic personality, a different type of cat. He was confident. Yeah, he was living with his sister, but listen, he was not down and out. Hardly. I mean, he didn’t
need
money.

Because he was in New York like every week. Guys in the industry would be calling him all the time, telling him to come to New York and play his demos, and he’d take me with him; we’d be staying in hotels in New York. So
somebody
was payin’ him!

Before long Eddie brought his younger bother Brian to meet Berry.

Like Eddie, Brian was a baritone, but Berry took to him for his smarts, and for how well he absorbed Gordy’s advice. With both brothers he cut a few sides, which he sold to the small Kudo label. That they went nowhere mattered not a whit to them.

“I didn’t care about having hits, that’s not what I was there for,” Brian Holland says. “I just wanted to be around Berry Gordy. I’d be hanging around and he’d have me do things. Like one day he said,

‘C’mon, Bri, let’s get down to the studio. You be my engineer today.’ I said, ‘Berry, I never engineered a record.’ He said, ‘Just use your ears.

Do what you hear.’ Like it was as simple as that. But I engineered that day, and he kept on using me as an engineer, a singer, writer, whatever.” A laugh—“Of course, it didn’t occur to me that he was doing this because he didn’t want to pay a real engineer, singer, or writer. And he wasn’t payin’ me, neither. But what I was learnin’ from him was priceless.”

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Other protégés came through, and stayed. These included a vocal group called the Satintones, a name associated most notably with bass singer Robert Bateman; Gordy’s brother Robert, who recorded under the pseudonym Robert Kayli; soul singer Mable John, sister of R&B

legend Little Willie John; and Raynoma Liles, a tiny young woman with platinum-dyed hair who sang in a duo with her sister Alice and had what Gordy thought was perfect pitch, ideal for use as a background singer. Soon he cobbled a loose, varying conglomeration called the Rayber Voices, after his and Liles’s first names, to sing backups not just on his records but, at a $100 a session, on others’ acts as well.

Notes Eddie Holland:

One thing about Berry Gordy, he was totally unique. He was not cookie-cutter, man. He wanted to create a product totally unique, using the talents of others he sensed something in.

Berry wasn’t a genius, never came across like he thought he was.

He was like us. Hell, we were
all
insecure. If we’d had to write in a certain style, we’d have been lost. But with Berry, he didn’t
want
any one style. Didn’t matter if it was R&B, rock, pop, whatever. You may not know this but Berry himself liked Doris Day music more than any soul music! He
loved
Doris Day music. So if he said to us, “Write what you feel,” we knew it was no bullshit. That wasn’t something you could have done working within the music establishment. Nobody in that crowd would ever have said, “Use your ears.” They would’ve said,

“Use
our
ears.”

Most comforting to the inner circle, even amusing, was that a man a good decade older than they were could at times seem like a child.

“Listen,” Eddie Holland says, “Berry Gordy in his heart and mind was just a big kid. I think he wanted to be like us, rather than wanting us to be like him. If we had a better idea than him he’d say, ‘Let’s go with that.’ We all learned to listen to everyone else, because among us, somebody was going to nail it just right, a guy, a girl, a kid, an older guy.

Didn’t matter who’d get the credit. We were doin’ it for all of us.” In the end, he concludes, the secret of Motown’s success was the community behind the music. Pre-Motown, Gordy’s shop was heavily communal. Each record, demo or for real, was a group affair, with the Rayber Voices, whoever they happened to be at the moment, buzzing around like fleas. Without consciously going for one, Gordy found that 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 54

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his collective had created a “sound,” in the smooth, balanced backgrounds characterized by Bateman’s primordial bass and Liles’s sonorous top end.

“I can remember that Berry started getting calls from record people all over the country,” Eddie Holland says. “They’d come to town just because they had a new record and they wanted to play it for Berry, to see if it was any good. Berry might say, ‘You know, man, that song can be a hit—but it needs another background dub.’ And he’d suggest this backup group, the Rayber Voices, and then they’d get a paid gig out of it. He’d play those suckers.”

Near the end of 1959, Gordy could finally stop depending on his sisters to support him financially. He was not materially richer, but after he’d become intimate with Raynoma, she bade him to move into the three-bedroom flat in which she lived with her 3-year-old son. By then, as with most women he met, she was in love.

That this happened so often with Gordy was more than coincidence. He had, to be sure, a remarkable ability to make women see in him only what he wanted them to. What Liles saw she described as “a latter-day Socrates” and “an inveterate philosopher” who would “spin beautiful, entrancing monologues about trust and sincerity and honor, all with a scholar’s flair.” Even the songs, she thought, were little parables of Berry Gordy himself, “embod[ying] a theme of honesty” underlying, as she put it, the fact that “[l]iars were an abomination to Berry.” What she didn’t see, apparently, was the hypocrisy underlying the fact that, for all his lofty ideals, Gordy could lie his ass off without qualm. To Liles, that simply meant he had a side that was “mysterious” and “untouchable,” and nothing but “compelling.” Splitting hairs further, she admitted that he often “avoid[ed] sticky personal problems or complaints,” an indication, she maintains, that he was not a wimp but

“a man who could see the leadership in others”—such as, well, her. Because at those times when Socrates punted, he’d tell someone he didn’t want to deal with, “Go and talk to Ray.”

Meaning, perhaps, that Gordy’s best talent was as a salesman rather than a decisionmaker. In fact, if Liles is right about one tale she tells, he was selling more than records. He was selling the same thing that Milt Jenkins was. According to the tale, he let word of it slip during a grumpy, unguarded moment.

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“I’ve got to get out of this business,” she remembers him saying when he stumbled in after a long night.

“What business?” she asked.

“I have a few girls,” he went on. “Down on John R, but I’ve got to get out. I can’t do what the motherfuckers down there do. They beat the women up, forcing them out on the street if they’re sick or pregnant. Heartless sons of bitches.” Saying he felt sorry for “my girls,” he concluded, “I’m just not cut out for it.”

Hearing this, Liles was torn between shock and amusement, the latter because if Berry did actually run in a subterranean world where procurers looked like Milt Jenkins, he surely must have been the world’s least impressive and worst-dressed pimp. Or maybe just the world’s worst pimp. How, for example, could he ply that trade and not even own a car? He may have fudged for a while by making sure he was seen tool-ing around town in a gold Cadillac—not letting on that the wheels were on loan from Nat Tarnopol. After they’d fallen out, though, Berry got around on city buses that took him over to John R. “What kind of a pimp was he,” she remembered thinking, “taking the bus?” The subject would not come up again, so it’s anyone’s guess as to whether and how long he continued in the flesh trades. But, in a believe-it-or-not plot twist, after this revelation Liles went out and turned a trick, without telling
him
—evidently to add a few bucks to the till. When she showed him the money, she wondered what she’d say if he asked where it came from. She needn’t have worried; and if he suspected how, it seemingly didn’t bother him.