The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (63 page)

The first week of October, “Love Ain’t Love” came out in a 45 jacket with the title and “Florence ‘Flo’ Ballard” superimposed on an illustra-tion of a pensive Flo. In the
Detroit Free Press
, a review effused, “You begin to understand why a trio might split—with two lead singers and only one being featured.”
Detroit
magazine put her on the cover surrounded by flower-filled vases in her home, the cover line reading

“FLORENCE BALLARD: THE NEW LIFE OF AN EX-SUPREME”; inside was a photo of Flo and Tommy in a lovey-dovey pose in front of the house.

But, again, airplay was sporadic. Reminiscent of Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson handing out early Motown records, Tommy drove around town with boxes of Flo’s records in his trunk, leaving copies at the radio stations and record stores, to little avail. Seeing the record was going nowhere, ABC Records, perusing the meager sales of its self-prophesied Flo Ballard washout, decided to cancel the album, which had been tentatively titled . . .
You Don’t Have To
. It also declined the option for a second year on her contract. One of its executives commented, disingenuously, that they hadn’t gotten the hoped-for “Su -

preme sound” because Ballard was just “a good ballad singer.” There was no mention of the company’s near-complete lack of effort on her behalf. (The album, along with four Supremes songs with Flo on lead, was released in 2002 by Spectrum Records as
The Supreme Florence Ballard.
) According to Mary Wilson in
Dreamgirl
, word on the street was that Tommy had also “made outrageous demands” of the company

“which weren’t appreciated.”

For Flo, the second termination within a year was just as big a kick in the teeth as the first, the timing of it especially cruel; when she received the call from New York, she was having contractions and within hours would be on the delivery-room table. Now, mixed with the joy of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 331

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giving birth on October 13 to twin daughters, named Michelle and Nicole, were bilious rants that she’d been betrayed, misused, and blackballed by the “evil” Berry Gordy.

RAY GIBSON: She was so disgusted that she gave me the tapes of the album—I still have them, too. I took them with me when I moved to California and I’ve kept them ever since. I don’t know if Tommy paid for them or if they just said take

’em, we don’t want them. But when there was no album, she couldn’t stand looking at those cans. She said, “Raymond, here, if you don’t take them I’m just gonna burn ’em.” That was how disappointed she was. This was the fruit of her labor for the last year; she believed so much she was on the way to success, and then it all came crashing down.

She said ABC didn’t use her right, made her do songs she didn’t care for, then everybody was scared of Berry and wouldn’t play them. She told me, “Honey, people would have come to see me out of curiosity,” but no one even knew about her, no one could see her. And to her it was a big conspiracy against her, orchestrated by Berry.

I listened to those tapes and I liked what she did. On some of them she’s amazing. But I just wonder what would have happened if Florence had gone to an R&B label that really wanted to nurture her and not worried about being a pop star and an ex-Supreme. There would have been less pressure to become an instant star. I wish she’d just gone somewhere and sang her heart out and not had that “I’ll show you, Berry, I’ll show you, Diana” attitude. But who was gonna tell her that—Tommy?

Let’s get real. Tommy wanted nothing less than her to be a big star, so that he could be a big star, too, in his head.

Leaving themselves precious little room to fail, they left themselves no alternative.

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twenty-one

“THIS MUST BE

THE

DIANA ROSS SHOW”

The Supremes themselves seemed to be running uphill that fall of

’68, the biggest challenge being to find a song that would propel them back to the top of the chart.

By then, with the Capitol deal done, proving conclusively that HDH weren’t going to repent and come back home to Motown, Gordy had filed suit against them for breach of contract, asking $4 million in punitive damages and to enjoin them from working for any other company but his. The injunction was granted, but it was determined, oddly, that because Eddie Holland had never signed a producers’

contract with Motown, having kept working with a writers’ contract, he was free to go ahead producing records at Invictus Records, despite the song writers’ contract Motown had in its files for him. However, Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, having properly executed producers’ contracts with Gordy, were forbidden from doing any work at the new shop. That effectively brought Invictus to a standstill. Now, in serious danger of being checkmated by Gordy right out of the box, HDH

countersued Motown on the grounds of, well,
everything
—conspiracy, fraud, deceit, and breach of fiduciary trust—for $22 million.

Moreover, in an action they knew would burn Gordy like battery acid, they asked that Motown, with all its accounts and copyrights, be placed in receivership—a legally veiled way of saying they wanted Berry Gordy removed from the financial management of the company he ruled. It was, to Gordy, not business but strictly personal. “Instead of defending themselves against my lawsuit,” he wrote in
To Be Loved
, 332

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“they were throwing up a smokescreen with this absurd counterattack, attacking me on everything I stood for in business and as a person.” The numbers were dizzying, to be sure, so much so that Eddie Holland can’t quite pull off saying, “I don’t think it was so much over money.” But when he says it
was
about “a greater creative outlet” that Motown “was not structured for,” one can decipher that as code for exactly what Gordy said. The HDH game plan was big—to force Gordy out. Accordingly, in Eddie’s colloquialism, it was as if “a little spark start[s] and then the next thing you know, it’s a full blaze.” One that would burn for years—for no other reason, Gordy would write, than as “a personal vendetta on Eddie’s part.” HDH, however, did find a way to get around Brian and Lamont’s being enjoined by the court from producing records, by doing so under the dual pseudonym of “Wayne/Dunbar”—not that this fooled anyone within the industry with the possible, ironic exception of master conniver Berry Gordy, who was too preoccupied to know, or to care. Or was it that he didn’t mind HDH making more money from new hit records so he could get a better payday when damages would be assessed by the court?

Indeed, HDH were about to get richer; in June 1969, Buddha Records also got into the HDH business, giving them a second designer label, Hot Wax, an extraordinary double play for the trio, who wasted no time getting busy. The first Hot Wax rollout was—what were the odds?—a female trio. This was the Honey Cone, who had two releases that year, “While You’re Out Looking for Sugar” and “Girls It Ain’t Easy,” both with a Motown-style groove more suggestive of the Vandellas and Marvelettes than of the Supremes.

Neither of these were big hits; but then, “Wayne/Dunbar,” recording in a converted theater on Grand River Avenue with a core of new musicians and moonlighting Funk Brothers—including James Jamerson’s backup, Bob Babbitt, who Eddie Holland says “was as close to James’ feeling as anybody we found”—were just getting warmed up.

This was precisely what Gordy was afraid of, HDH doing elsewhere what they could have been doing at Motown. Which is why the uncertainties that fall of 1968 were indeed about more than money.

With his reputation and dominion at stake in the coming war with HDH, it was imperative that someone, anyone, reestablish the enormous economic security blanket only the Supremes had proved they could provide.

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And none too soon. Hard on the heels of the failure of “Forever Came Today” came two more flops. For some reason, Gordy released a pair of low-grade Supremes albums in August, both of which were just about dead on arrival. One, consisting of cover songs from the Barbra Streisand movie
Funny Girl
, was rushed out to beat the movie soundtrack album but did a fraction of its business; at a pitiful 76,000 copies sold, it was easily the worst-selling Supremes album to date. The other,
Live at London’s Talk of the Town
, a wan copy of
At the Copa
with Cindy Birdsong in and Flo Ballard out, was the usual fodder of hit medleys and show tunes—including Ross on full-throated lead on Flo’s old show-stopper “People”—recorded on their recent tour of England. But it was only a more respectable failure, coming in at No. 57 (though nearly salvaged by reaching No. 6 on the R&B chart).

These flops convinced Gordy that HDH were right in one respect: He
did
need a “wider creative outlet”—not the semi-autonomous operation HDH fancied but a fresher approach to developing material.

Even so, whatever new process was found, it would begin and end with Gordy, with no room for flighty creative types getting in the way with their egos and personal agendas. The cause would be egalitarian—

everyone under the thumb of Berry Gordy. He was solidifying all the operations in this way. For example, expunging the A&R department of its HDH traces, he changed its name to the Creative Division, which was headed not by a creative type but by Ralph Seltzer, the lawyer he trusted more than anyone.

Gordy wasn’t so foolish as to believe he could do it all himself. This was 1968, not 1961. As well, he saw a choice opportunity to fill two needs at once: coupling a Supremes restoration with a greater role for the boys on the coast. While the important recordings were still going to take place in Studio A, for now he would be building a Motown West complex with another state-of-the-art studio, and he wanted the writers and producers encamped out there to be acclimated to a prime-time role. Thus, starting from scratch on the new Supremes song, he brought to Detroit Frank Wilson as well as R. Dean Taylor, a white Canadian emigré who’d recorded self-written songs for Motown’s VIP

label and collaborated on the Temptations’ “All I Need” and the Four Tops’ “I’ll Turn to Stone.”

When the L.A. boys got in, they were taken not to West Grand Boulevard or a hotel room but to a ballroom in the Pontchartrain Hotel, where Gordy had deposited two other white Motown writers, Deke Richards and British native Pam Sawyer, and old hand Hank Cosby, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 335

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who had helped mold Stevie Wonder’s material. As Gordy recalled it, “I told them we’d lock ourselves in until we came out with the right product,” and they began right away working around the clock.

Actually, in those skull sessions Gordy played little part, disappearing for hours and coming back asking, “What you got?” The answer, for a day and a half, was: nothing. Gordy then took a seat at the piano and improvised some HDH-style chords, “with a sad, soulful feel,” he would recall. That’s when Sawyer, a very hip young woman who had previously written in the blue-eyed soul idiom for the Young Rascals, piped up, possibly semi-delirious from exhaustion, that the song be about an illegitimate child—“A love child!” she shouted.

No one thought this was either a remotely sane suggestion or, more important, one remotely appropriate for the princess-bride Supremes—

except for the one person everyone assumed would be the first to object. Instead, Gordy stroked at his beard and said, “Love child. That’s heavy. I like it.”

That, in retrospect, may well have been the precise moment when the Supremes were saved and Motown proved it could get funky. The song that emerged from The Clan—which is what the song writers actually called themselves as a group, with a capital T and C, in a snarky send-up of that other clan, the one spelled with a K—would leave an indelible a marker of when rock got real; like “Eleanor Rigby,” it was a prying eye into the soul of hopelessness, but with the extra sensitivity supplied by putting a human face and voice on what only “other people” were.

The lyrics were withering and sure-footed, the daring twist being that the bastard is a girl who sees herself reflected in others’ eyes as a

“hurt, scorned, rejected love child” and begs off sex with a demanding guy with the plaint “Don’t think I don’t need you / Don’t think I don’t wanna please you / But no child of mine will be wearing / The name of shame I been wearing” and “This love we’re contemplating / Is worth the pain of waiting / We’ll only end up hating the child we may be creating.” All the verses, in fact, seemed to be written with a scalpel peeling back flesh: being born in “an old, cold rundown tenement slum,” starting school in “a worn torn dress that somebody threw out,” being

“never quite as good, afraid, ashamed, misunderstood.” This was serious, dangerous stuff—for Gordy, like sticking his hand in a bonfire and hoping it wouldn’t come back charred to the bone. While “Reflections” had widened Motown’s thematic purview, it was still about love, albeit in ruins. The only other time he would have 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 336

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to consider the danger in a song was with “Cloud Nine,” which he instinctively rejected as an obvious drug metaphor until Whitfield cajoled him to go with it. (In 1969, it would win Motown’s first Grammy, as “Best R&B Vocal Group Performance.”) “Love Child” was an even tougher call for Gordy with its all-too-literal parable of ignominy, but for the fact that he approved its construction—and that, with it, The Clan had hit a grand slam. And, now, it really was Gordy’s own love child.

Accordingly, he appointed himself head Clansman and returned to the studio in earnest to work on the track on September 17, 19, and 20. Joining with the arranger Paul Riser, The Clan (the production end being all the writers but Sawyer, plus Gordy) kept the track rooted in the chugging HDH snare-bass-tambourine beat while vaulting into new directions with remarkable precision and cohesion. “Nothing short of miraculous,” Alan Slutsky calls the mix of classic Motown, psychedelic soul, and proto-funk, with the low-register riffling guitar licks so ahead of the game that “they could have been used as is on Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
.”