The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (22 page)

She might have been, too, but for the ability her groupmate had for making squalls like this evaporate with a few beseeching words. Indeed, when Mary returned, she found Gordy pacified. After a brief lecture to the girls and O’Den about the evils of lying, he said no more about it.

That led to yet another round of a now-well-worn question heard at Hitsville: Was there
anything
that Diane Ross couldn’t talk Berry Gordy into and out of ?

Only one thing, it seemed: making the Supremes into stars. In fact, the group’s stagnation, which had become a matter of concern to Gordy and of derision to the more prominent acts, led Barbara Richardson to a momentous decision in early 1962. Ross, Wilson, and Ballard knew she would be taking a leave of absence to give birth; but she stunned them when she announced she wouldn’t be coming back thereafter.

Mary and Flo tried to talk her into returning. But Diane—who now thought of Barbara as excess baggage, and had shown pointed contempt for her by not attending her wedding—merely shrugged, having already concluded that the group had a better chance of flourishing as a trinity. When Mary brought in a replacement candidate, a singer-dancer named Diane Watson, Diane was uninterested.

“Forget it,” she harrumphed. “If the three of us can’t make it as a trio, we won’t make it at all.”

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Too weary to go to war with her, and no doubt cowed by her semi-mythic tendency to get her way, Wilson and Ballard acquiesced. For better or worse, from here on out they were going to be a threesome.

Gordy, for his part, didn’t give a fig about the latest Supremes intramural exercises. However, even the most insignificant action could inspire a Gordy overreaction. Because Richardson had not bothered to come to him first before announcing her departure, she technically had violated Gordy’s sovereignty in matters of hiring or releasing a performer; accordingly, she would not see one thin dime in royalties from past or future uses of Supremes records she had sung on, several of which were included on the first Supremes album in 1963. Thus was the fourth Supreme excommunicated from the Motown sacrarium. But because history had a way of repeating itself at Motown, in ways good and not, it portended a vague sense of unease around 2648 West Grand Boulevard. Too vague, surely, for the first Supreme to foretell that the very same fate would await her, further on down the road. As for Richardson, she didn’t mind enough to fight Gordy for what she was due; she became a nurse and quietly melted into the loam of Detroit, rarely making mention of her brush with the cosmos.

To be sure, Gordy’s gaze was trained far over the heads of any group as 1962 drew on. That summer, he was deep in the plenary phase of his most ambitious gambit yet—turning Motown into a virtual touring company. It had not taken Gordy long to hatch this idea as a logical outgrowth of the fragmented tours that had brought him such a handsome return. The chore was given to Esther Edwards to cobble the details. She immediately went to work studying the logistics of the Dick Clark “caravans” and grand-scale soul “revues” of the 1950s, which had been so pivotal in helping Jackie Wilson hone his act and sell the songs written by her brother. But her marching order was to keep control in the hands of the ITMI and not leave Motown at the mercies of outside bookers and promoters.

The first piece of business was to hire a tour manager. For that, Edwards plucked from out of Maurice King’s orchestra at the Flame Show Bar the lanky baritone sax player Beans Bowles, who was given the unenviable task of hiring musicians who could take a two-month sabbatical from their local gigs to travel thousands of miles on a bus. True, just about all jazz and R&B cats had gone that route in their days, so many of them having ridden shotgun all over the South, East, and Midwest 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 112

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on the chitlin’ circuit; but they’d not done so accompanying acts they didn’t know a thing about. Even though the Gordys would be paying $300 a week, a handsome wage for the hep-cats of the era, Bowles could find no takers in King’s combo. He had better luck when he ran the idea past Choker Campbell, a garrulous, barrel-chested, bespectacled sax man who’d been in the Lionel Hampton band and whose twelve-piece Show of Stars Band had been the house band for many of the ’50s soul revues, at times graced by the legendary jazz pianist Big Joe Turner.

The Show of Stars unit was considerably younger now, generally aware of the Motown sound and hungry for that kind of pay at a time when the hard-core R&B gigs were beginning to dry up. The Motortown Revue, as the 1962 tour would be called, had scored its first coup.

Even so, the biggest cog in the Revue machine was having one of those outside heavy hitters whom Gordy was wary of but realized he needed. He did make sure to go with a black promoter, figuring a brother in arms would be less inclined to skim, grift, or swindle him—

that sort of thing, he reasoned, was
his
province, in underpaying his own stable of talent. The promoter in question was the savvy Henry Wynne, whose booking agency Supersonic Attractions had made its mark in the ’50s convincing white theater owners to take his acts, most of whom were black. Wynne strung together a growing list of local promoters who were willing to advance Gordy (with a huge cut for Wynne) cold cash for the Miracles, Mary Wells, and the Marvelettes, thereby stoking a cash flow that could spill over to other Motown acts on the tour.

The Gordys likely would have been satisfied with a dozen or so shows along the Midwest-Northeast corridor, but Wynne pulled in deals all along the eastern seaboard, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, from border states Kentucky and Tennessee, down through the Carolinas and Georgia, Florida, and—most intriguingly and forebodingly—

the Deep South grid of Alabama and Mississippi. The South in general was a two-sided coin. Save for the cosmopolitan markets of Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, Dixie was a largely untapped rock and roll market, lagging behind country-western and hillbilly music in the cradle of the Grand Ole Opry. In the Mississippi Delta, where the blues were born, in markets like Mobile and Birmingham, rhythm still hadn’t caught up to the blues. Thus, millions of black teenagers had been neglected by the white radio stations; and they were too young and too disinclined in the new, emerging pop culture to indulge in the hoary blues and jazz of the chitlin’ circuit.

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Gordy, then, was excited by the idea of prospecting down South, but he knew that doing so would be wading into treacherous waters, sending young and sassy black men and women through the back roads of Jim Crow country, in no less than the ultimate symbol of black uppityness—a
bus
! Even in the planning stages, the prickly realities were daunting. Some shows in Dixie would see the races partitioned by police tape, and local police were no doubt eager to enforce the separation (necessitating that an act perform the same song twice, once to each side of the arena). This made a mockery of what Gordy was trying to accomplish with his crossover musical dreams. But in 1962 he was still going to have to take his dreams in small doses, and with much trepida-tion, considering the potentially catastrophic nature of the risks.

Indeed, any incident that would reflect badly on someone in his employ, or be rigged to do so, could have set the cause back years.

Moreover, if any of the performers became a victim, he couldn’t have faced himself. How to explain such a horror to a parent, since to begin with most of the parents hated the idea of sending their children into this region? As much as his black pop was a stimulus for, and a marker of, civil rights gains, and as much as Gordy wanted to be an emperor, he had no interest in being a martyr, Berry the Just, figuratively stoned to death for his cause and the greater one.

These considerations were implicit in Motown’s music; by design, it was organically but not overtly black. Its themes were rigorously anti-racial. If covers of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs by bland white acts sounded absurd and alien in the ’50s, covers of Motown fit snugly into the early ’60s pop fold: The nascent Beatles, in the cellars of Liverpool and Hamburg, were among the first to do so, appropriating

“Please Mr. Postman” in their act (though not half as well as, or with the hit quality of, the still-whiter rendition by the soft-pop band the Car-penters twelve years later, which retraced the trip to the top of the pop chart taken by the Marvelettes’ original). This was why Gordy felt sanguine enough to dare try prying open the alligator jaws of the South. If Jim Crow was to be slain, it would have to be through the persuasive powers of the new crossover recipe of soul music.

With all this as prologue, on October 23, 1962, two rented buses rickety enough to make one wonder if it would survive the first right turn off West Grand Boulevard rolled up in front of 2648, each with a sign reading “Hitsville Motor City Tour” on its sides. Forty-five people carrying light luggage, suits bags, cosmetic cases, and other sundries clambered inside. Among them were eight Motown acts, twelve musicians, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 114

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two chaperones, sundry roadies and bodyguards, and one emcee—

comedian Bill Murray, known as Winehead Willie (and a distant cousin of Mary Wilson). Ready or otherwise, they would be spending the next fifty-six days in each other’s close company, moving in and out of thirty-six cities on an excursion that would have room for only four days without a show, including one stretch that would burn through November 2 in Boston until December 4 in Pensacola without a single day off. There’d also be no less than a week of shows at the Apollo Theater.

Three of the seats on one creaky bus were reserved for the Supremes.

But if Gordy had his druthers, they would have been waving goodbye to the tour-goers with him.

The girls naturally assumed they’d earned their place on the tour by having a hit, such as it was in the case of “Your Heart Belongs to Me,” and were eager to pump themselves into a known commodity. Yet for weeks Gordy dithered, reluctant to make a decision, apparently wanting to shelter them from any harm. It was an odd concern for three tough chicks from the projects, and one he didn’t share for the even younger and more obscure Vandellas. But Gordy was rarely rational about the Supremes—or, more centrally, Diane Ross. With his Freudian admixture of paternal and predatory impulses toward her, he couldn’t help but worry about her welfare—as Ross would write in her memoirs, Gordy regarded her as a “baby deer.” But, with the Smokey Robinson episode in mind, was it that he simply wanted other men—music men like him, the worst kind, he would have agreed—to keep their mitts off her? Knowing how well she could always make his eyebrows sweat, how many others might fall hard for his “Bambi” on the long road?

Whatever his reservations, in the end Gordy knew he stood no chance against Diane’s dewy-eyed pleadings. Even Fred Ross was de-fanged by now, unable to stand in the way of a daughter of legal age.

He, of course, loathed this tour thing that would leave these black people virtually naked against the perils of the South. And he now was forced to sit up at night waiting for her to get home; when she would walk in he told her she looked like a cheap hooker. But if Fred Ross, as she would write, “couldn’t come to terms with [my] dressing up and wearing makeup” and ask through gritted teeth, “Why do you have all that black stuff around your eyes?” his biggest peeve was his abiding distaste for Motown’s father figure. Fred, she said, putting it mildly, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 115

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“wasn’t sure he trusted Berry.” Neither did Ernestine. Again, it was Esther Edwards who assured the both of them that, as the head chaperone of the girls on the tour, she would protect their honor from men who, she didn’t need to add, were not unlike Berry Gordy Jr.

After giving in, Gordy gave the Supremes a fresh record to pimp, one from his own pen, “Let Me Go the Right Way,” with which he would cast a soulful veneer around the group. The song was written with room in the lyric for Ross to show off a grittier, funkier texture to her voice, and Gordy took them into the studio on August 30, 1962. But Gordy couldn’t produce it as deep soul; trying to strike a balance, Marvelette style, between offhand soul and vanilla pop, he came up with a sprightly dose of catnip set to a cha-cha beat and featuring some interesting chord changes, as Ross sang the lead in a lower, more mature pitch over a repeating “ba-doo” chorus by Wilson and Ballard. Unsatisfied, he kept mixing and remixing the tapes, by his own estimation over 100

times, which he insisted occurred over fourteen straight hours in the Motown control room, long after everyone else had left for the night.

In his autobiography Gordy insists that he stumbled out of the building after putting the song to bed, haggard, unshaven, and half-asleep—

just in time to wave goodbye to the Motortown Revue as it pulled away on its maiden voyage. But, as with many of Gordy’s recollections, this one is probably fanciful; in truth, the tour didn’t commence until nearly two months after the Supremes’ session, and when it did push off Gordy was bright-eyed and clear-throated, issuing to his troops a rousing pep talk.

It was quite an assemblage, too. By the time the big day came, virtually everyone on the Motown roster was on board—though the privileges of being a Motown vice-president were clear when Smokey and his Miracles left not on the bus but in their own car, one of five that accompanied the Revue; the others were used to tote the musicians’ instruments and occasionally one of the other top-shelf acts like Mary Wells and the Marvelettes.

That triumvirate of Wells, the Miracles, and the Marvelettes—the only well-known acts on the tour—would be the headliners; their names always appeared high on the marquees in the biggest letters.