The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (52 page)

THE SUPREMES

was she that she might be a catastrophic failure on her own in such a highly visible and surely over-hyped endeavor. Further, like Gordy, she was less than sure the time was right just yet, or if it ever would be.

Wilson, always looking for reasons not to worry, took that ambivalence as assurance that she needn’t. The back-biting, she recalled thinking, was a “phase” that would soon “come to an end.” Flo, surprisingly, for all her anger, was even more convinced nothing would change. In her biggest delusion of all, she believed Diana would stay put for the same reason that Flo could get away with anything she laid on Gordy: that individual personalities and schemes bowed to the one-ness of the act
.

“Maybe that bitch is fixing to be the only diva in this group but she ain’t ever leaving, and Flo ain’t either,” she vowed, according to Tony Tucker.

What Flo, and Mary, didn’t know was that these things had already been decided. Only the timing of the move was in doubt. From hen-pecked Gordy’s perspective, the act was nothing more than, as Shelly Berger says succinctly, “a lead singer and backup.” With all the money riding on the lead, for one of the backup singers there’d be only small change; for the other, a lump of coal.

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When Gordy let his mind play out the scenario of Diana going solo, he pegged the Supremes’ Las Vegas debut at the Flamingo Hotel, to run from September 29 to October 19, 1966, as the group’s “farewell” event, bathed in all the appropriate mawkish rites of joy and sadness as a new fairy tale would be born and the old one refit. According to the plan, Ross’s breakout would be accompanied by the announcement of the “new” Supremes, which in the manner of the “old” Supremes would be fronted not by Mary Wilson or Florence Ballard but by a fresh lead singer. While no final decision had been made, for that role Gordy was leaning toward Barbara Randolph, a muscular-voiced former member of the Platters who was now on the Motown Soul label. Her tall, slinky “Suprem-esque” carriage made her a logical choice. Meanwhile, Shelly Berger would go on managing the revamped Supremes, but his main thrust would be Ross.

“A lot of things were already on the fire,” Berger says. “We were already starting to develop the
Lady Sings the Blues
movie for Diana. In fact, we had Diana come out to Hollywood and we took her around to the studios, meeting directors, producers, acting coaches. She met Doris Day, which Diana said was the biggest thrill of her life. We wanted everyone to know that Diana Ross was the next biggest thing, and to get on the bandwagon. The impetus for all that was her going solo.” However, Ross’s insecurities and the Supremes’ ever-expanding bottom line put all that on the back burner, with Gordy holding back on the move he desperately wanted to make. The Flamingo run was still a 267

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smashing success—though not without its hurdles. The most vexing, as usual, had to do with Flo. Although she posed no problem early in the run, after one particularly long night of drinking she was still asleep when the other two Supremes arrived at the hotel for the night’s shows.

“I’ll never forget [that night],” Ross would recall. “Mary and I were thrilled to be there, it was one of the places that we never imagined at the beginning of our career we’d get the chance to play. But here we were, as excited as we could be, and then Florence showed up, late and drunk. Our costumes were tuxedos. Florence had gained so much weight, her stomach was bulging out of her costume. We were embarrassed to go onstage with her.”

Gordy, who could barely watch, buried his woes at the blackjack tables. But even with his lucky lady on his elbow, he lost something like $25,000 and his credit was cut off, forcing him to call Motown and have more cash wired out to Vegas; also, Diana blew several thousand more on her own.

The mixed bag of their Vegas debut was a proper augury of the Supremes’ path ahead. As Gordy looked beyond to the terrain of 1967, the future suddenly seemed considerably less titillating. But there was a definite upside. Because Gordy had intentionally held back on booking the girls, anticipating what would have been a gradual break-in period for the “new” Supremes—and with his own time surely to be dominated by all matters Ross—the “same old” Supremes actually had little else to do
but
record songs in the studio. Following their Christmas gig at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami and at the New Year’s Eve King Orange Jamboree Parade, the only time they left the Detroit area the first three months of ’67 was to do an
Ed Sullivan Show
on January 22.

That suited HDH just fine. Over that winter they cut a hardy flow of vinyl, including an album that seemed the height of egomania but which in reality was simply a sure-shot profit-maker for them and Gordy. Titled
The Supremes Sing Holland Dozier Holland
, it was for many casual fans the first time they’d heard of or seen the names of the tunesmiths behind the thrones; and for those who
had,
a bit redundant—hadn’t the Supremes been singing Holland-Dozier-Holland for years? For Gordy, though, it offered a unique and irresistible lure—

a secondary bonanza of royalties on old hits by having his big gest artists cover them. Mixing HDH evergreens like “Heat Wave,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “I Guess I’ll Always Love You” and “I’ll Turn to Stone” with “You Keep Me Hanging On” and the latest Supremes single—“Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone”—Gordy had himself a low-overhead cash cow.

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Predictably, the album, released on January 23, quickly went to No.

6 on the pop charts and No. 1 on the R&B charts, and even brought the Supremes back onto the British album chart for the first time since
Meet the Supremes
, at No. 15. Concurrently, “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” released two weeks prior with the aptly titled “There’s No Stopping Us Now” on the flip, ran all the way up to No. 1 the week of March 11, making for a telltale triumvirate of No. 1 hits in succes-sion, with “Ruby Tuesday” coming right before it and “Penny Lane” right after. It also provided the strongest proof yet that the Supremes were on such a roll that even a song that deviated from the forensics of the hit-making machinery could still come up aces.

It wasn’t that the HDH formula was different but, rather, a matter of where and with whom it was carried out—not Studio A and not the Funk Brothers. In fact, “Love Is Here” may be the best rebuttal HDH

could make in the dust-up about who was most responsible for their sound. The song was recorded in L.A. after Gordy, thinking ahead to future session work for his big acts on the coast, had sent HDH out in the late summer of ’66 so they could test the acoustics of the studios (mainly Hollywood Sound Recorders, a virtual copy of Studio A, converted from a garage in a two-story home by its owner, engineer Armin Steiner) and connect with West Coast musicians.

Those sessions were historic, in that they were apparently the only known instances when some of the later musicians from Phil Spector’s

“Wrecking Crew”—pianist/keyboardists Don Randi, Larry Knechtal, and Mike Rubini; guitarist Tommy Tedesco; bassists Carole Kaye and Bill Pitman; drummer Earl Palmer (who went back to the mid-’50s with Fats Domino’s band); and arranger Gene Page—also played for the second most famous producers in the world (as opposed to crank-ing out Motown filler for Hal Davis and Marc Gordon, as had the legendary West Coast drummer Hal Blaine).

While “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” sounds not a bit dis-cordant from other Supremes songs, Motown scholars and purists can immediately discern it as an “outside” product. Allan Slutsky, for instance, says, “You can tell it’s an L.A. session just by listening to the drum and bass, which sound great but lack the round fatness the Detroit players were known for. And the guitars and tambourine are pulled back far beyond what was the norm in Detroit.” The tempo was glacial, even maundering, with an electric harpsichord intro featuring Wilson and Ballard in a high soprano wail melding into a mass of strings and horns—nearly Spectorian in its hollowed stateliness. And 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 270

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Eddie Holland’s grim tract of a woman wooed, won, and abandoned—

including three spoken soliloquies, a novel and even daring gimcrack for the times—was every bit as hopeless as “My World Is Empty Without You.’”

What made it fly farther was the hazy prettiness of Gene Page’s arrangement and Diana’s uncanny knack for tapping the very nuanced range of emotion of that lyric; while she made the usual wounds burn through the radio, so did her sense of optimism that she and the cheating dog would work it out; that she wouldn’t let it
not
. Just acing those three Lady MacBeth proto-“raps”—which with their over-the-top melodrama could easily have been laugh-out-loud funny—was a world-class coup, intoning as she had to with dead seriousness a bathetic line like “You closed the door to your heart / And you turned the key, locked your love away from me,” and stamping the pity of it all with a knife-in-the-heart glottal gasp, something that would emerge as a signature Ross vocal affectation (and years later for Michael Jackson, who shamelessly cribbed it).

So delighted were HDH, and Gordy, by this accidental gem that the auteurs returned to L.A. trying to strike gold again on the next Supremes single, which actually made perfect sense because the girls would be recording the title song of a new movie—moving Motown’s footprint further into the Hollywood community. The flick, a Columbia Pictures kidnap-ransom farce called
The Happening
, starring Anthony Quinn and Faye Dunaway, had the pedigree of producer Sam Spiegel, he of
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Bridge on the River Kwai
fame, and its plot blurred good and evil. As such, it was intended to attract audiences on the cusp of the late ’60s counter-culture wave—a focus that, clearly, had nothing to do with the Supremes other than the fact that they were, well, “happening.”

For HDH, the problem was that the title track, as composed with the film’s musical director Frank DeVol, was supposed to be the aural image of a swirling carnival, its pipe-organ feel simulated by piccolos and a Herb Alpert–style Tijuana brass. Laying down early tracks in L.A., they couldn’t catch the groove. Needing a stronger, funkier bottom and backbeat, they started over again in Studio A in March. That was when the missing element was found—James Jamerson’s mercurial bass licks, meaning that Jack Ashford may have been right, after all, about Jamerson’s bass being intrinsic to the Motown sound. It’s an argument that will never be settled.

“The Happening” single was another against-the-grain winner, its sprightly cadences matched niftily with nonsensical jibber like “I saw 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 271

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the light too late / When that fickle finger of fate, yeah came and broke my pretty balloon / I woke up, suddenly I just walked up to the happening” and a repeating killer hook—“Ooooh, and then it happened”—

by Wilson and Ballard mid-song. The record far outran the movie, which tanked at the box office when it opened in late March—when there was a gala opening at Detroit’s Adams Theater, with the Supremes entering on a red carpet—whereas the concurrent release of the single, with a song called “All I Know About You” on the reverse, soared.

In fact, it was the first time that a title song had stolen a movie since
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
in 1955.
Time
even savaged the picture by citing from the song’s lyric—“Is it real, is it fake? Is this game of life a mistake?”—answering snarkily, “Indeed it is, at least in this film.” Not so the song. The week of May 13, a bare two months and a day after “Love Is Here” had held the spot, “The Happening” went to No. 1.

That made four No. 1 hits in a row, with radically diverse material each time. There seemed nothing they could do that would disturb their still upward spiral—until Gordy’s “Broadway airs” took them too far afield.

He had them record an album of show tunes, as they had two years before with the unreleased
There’s a Place for Us,
but with the gimmick that all of the songs were Rodgers & Hart show-stoppers—the same Rodgers who had slapped down rock and roll as a repetitive bore.

The album would be released to coincide with the Supremes’ appearance on an ABC TV special “Rodgers & Hart Today,” to run on March 12, 1967, in which the famous duo’s songs would be performed by contemporary acts, the others being Bobby Darin, Petula Clark, the Doodletown Pipers, and, keeping it real, Count Basie. It was such a vanity project for Gordy that he returned to the grind of the studio to co-produce the album in L.A. with Gil Askey. Some two dozen tracks were made with the girls, enough for him to consider turning it into a double LP. The sessions ran through October of ’66, then most of December back in Detroit for the overdubs.

For Flo, it was especially torturous. Expecting no alms from Gordy, she was pleasantly surprised when told that she and Mary would have one song each with which to emerge from the background shadows: Mary would get a co-lead on “Falling in Love” and Flo would have a duet with Diana on “Manhattan.” But while Mary’s made it onto the finished LP, Flo’s didn’t; unhappy with the track, Gordy first stripped 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 272

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her vocal, then junked the cut altogether along with twelve others—

two of them with titles Flo could have related to: “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “You Took Advantage of Me.” What remained included the likes of “Blue Moon,” “Where or When,” “This Can’t Be Love” “My Heart Stood Still,” and one more that Flo would surely regard as ideal for Diana, “The Lady Is a Tramp” (which in fact had become a fixture of the stage act).