The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (7 page)

Though the cops called it an accident, Ross would write, “To this day, we all believe [she] was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.” In the mid-’60s, her younger brother, Arthur, whom the family called “T-Boy,” was involved in a dispute in a convenience store while in Bessemer. When the cops were called, one of them came in shooting before asking questions, and winged T-Boy’s ear before hauling him in.

Ross by then was a star, and had to pull strings from afar to get him released.

Ross, then, had seen enough of life to have filed away some useful information as she grew into an attractive teenager. She’d morphed from a stick figurine into a pretty, and wily, young woman; still a rail, as 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 20

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were all the Rosses, but with beckoning lips, an oversized mouth that when she smiled spread halfway around her face, high cheekbones, and padding in all the right places. And her eyes. They were globular, the whites a vast sea encircling dark pupils that projected slightly outward.

With her eyelashes painted, “striking” wasn’t the word for her. She was weirdly sexy. Indeed, if the girls were wary of her, the boys kept no such distance. Almost all who encountered her in school fell hard, even if most were too intimidated to hit on her. For her part, she kept a distance, leading more than one young man to wonder what they’d have to do to get Diane Ross to pay attention to them. Which, of course, only added to her allure.

The answer to that question wouldn’t come for a while, because she was still a bit of a prude in her mid-teens, unaware of her own budding charms. Yet, even if passively, she was making acquaintances who would bear future implications. As it happened, these were usually boys who had at least a modicum of musical talent. Even in elementary school, two such boys had been smitten with her, close friends named Melvin Franklin and Richard Street. Both were painfully shy, as was Diane then, and they all found singing a release. Then, when she was 12 and the Rosses moved to an apartment house on Belmont Street, she met a girl her age whose family lived on the block, Sharon Burstyn. Sharon had an uncle, a singer, who lived with them, and when Diane slept over, the two girls would hear him warbling downstairs ’round a piano with some buddies he’d formed a group with, first called the Chimes, then the Matadors.

He was surely a revelation for any young girl: light-skinned, blue-eyed, lean, and affable, and his voice was high-pitched and honey-dripped, nearly a falsetto, smooth and sensual. If you had to describe its effect, you could have called it smoky. In fact,
he
was being called that—not William or Bill Robinson, which was his name, but Smokey.

Amazingly, the moniker wasn’t for his voice but because as a kid he’d had blond hair, just like Flo Ballard, and blue eyes, and his uncle nicknamed him “Smokey Joe” so that, he explained, the kid wouldn’t forget he was black. It was simply a quirk of Fate that it happened to be the perfect trope for his vocal persona, and even at just 17, he wore the single-name moniker as his persona.

Smokey had ambition and then some, and the talent and ideas to drive it. He’d cobbled together a girl-group, the Matadorettes, around his girlfriend Claudette Rogers, whose cousin Bobby was in the Matadors. It was all very close-knit, like a big family, which at once appealed 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 21

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to the impressionable Diane Ross. Right away, she became smitten with Uncle Smokey, both in the carnal sense, though she was still a committed virgin, and because he seemed to hone and stoke her own ambition.

Around him, she loosened up, even getting bold. And he found his eye wandering in her direction.

Smokey Robinson has, for five decades, been circumspectly coy about the simpatico between them, recalling the young Diana Ross as

“shy . . . but always persistent. If we were practicing in the basement, she’d be listening on the staircase. If we were in the living room, she’d be on the front porch. She was a fan, a music lover, and sometimes

[she’d] sing. . . . ‘I love singing,’ Diane couldn’t deny, ‘but I’m not good enough to be a real singer.’. . . I always noticed her ’cause she was pretty and perky, pushing herself to do better.”

The problem, as she freely admitted, was that she couldn’t loosen up enough to sing for people without getting the vapors. Thus, she did terribly in music classes. As for ambition, that was another matter. One of her old music teachers recalls a junior high production of
Hansel and
Gretel
in which Diane was supposed to hold a flashlight in front of her but instead made sure to shine it on her own face. Even if this tale is apocryphal, it fits into a long argosy of similar occurrences, stretching as far back as her gawky, pigtail days, foretelling her can’t-miss future as a star.

At 15, however, all she had were dreams and a new address since Fred had moved his now-complete family to one of the Brewster-Douglass high-rise apartment houses. Diane, ever independent, chose not to stray from the crowd she ran in on Belmont Avenue and kept attending her old junior high, riding a city bus to the old neighborhood.

Thus, in the projects, she was just another fleeting face to Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who all passed by one another going about their own business. Moreover, what was known on a surface level about the Rosses around the Brewster-Douglass byways made Diane a candidate for ostracism. This was based solely on appearances, on the fact that they seemed somehow better off than most there; in lieu of actually knowing or even speaking with them, neighbors put the onus on the Rosses for being distant. That family was just so
perfect
, went the put-down; no wonder they were so snotty.

The acrid irony underlying this impression was that the Rosses weren’t perfect but merely, more or less, a normal and functioning family. Unlike Wilson and Ballard, and so many others, Diane Ross experienced no family rifts, no four-to-a-bed overcrowding, no long-suffering 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 22

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mother—and, most significant of all, no abandoning or alcoholic father. Fred Ross, always a stickler for education, was himself taking night classes in business at nearby Wayne State College, somehow squeezing enough time in between his multiple jobs. Yet rather than being admired for such self-attainment, out of envy the Rosses were perceived as “not one of us.” Accordingly, Diane’s contentious manner had to mean she was lording it over everybody else—though, to be sure, those who met Ernestine found nothing to dislike and had to alter their assumptions.

While the same could not be said of her daughter Diane, the rapidly maturing teenager carried forth on her own terms, toeing the line set by Fred Ross as an honor student. As of the spring of 1959 she, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard were still on separate paths, with no reason to believe they would ever cross. But Fate had other ideas.

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two

MOTHS

TO THE

FLAME

Down on the corner of John R and Canfield, the plum-red brick walls and dirty white arches of St. Josaphat’s Church can still be seen for hundreds of yards away, albeit in the creeping shadows of downtown Detroit’s new glassine palaces. Indeed, the stately old church, still foursquare and as unyielding as a rusty old bolt, may be the most identifiable vestige of the old, now dismantled, Detroit, its stubborn refusal to go down a bold refrain of what once was. In its salad days, by its location St. Josaphat’s was part of the rhythm and blues of the east side, a gateway to the seductions of John R and Canfield—and, to the parish, a refuge, with priests on duty around the clock to catch a stray soul or two after a particularly memorable night.

Not incidentally, the shortest walk from the front door took one to the biggest seduction on the block, the Flame Show Bar at 4664 John R

Street. Its name could not have been more perfectly applied. The Flame Show was beyond hot. At around 10 on a Saturday night, the joint was jumping, stinking of sweat, stogies, cheap beer, and cheaper perfume. It wasn’t merely crowded, it was Siamese-twin close, felicitously, joining blacks at the shoulder with a fair number of whites still extant on the east side or on loan from the better neighborhoods. The fire marshals didn’t try to enforce the capacity limit of 200 seats, allowing a great fuse of bumping and grinding when an act came on to sing or play jazz and the blues with the Maurice King combo, the Wolverines.

The exterior of the Flame Show quickened the pulse. The front door, angled catty-corner at the crux of the two streets, was recessed beneath a giant semicircular marquee with wooden letters spelling “FLAME,” 23

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each letter illuminated by dozens of neon lightbulbs. Acts were billboarded on three tiers of wraparound ribbons, and “FLAME SHOW

BAR” emblazoned the entire white wall on each side. The best sign, though, was outside the lobby—“NO DOOR CHARGE.” At any given time, the acts could be T-Bone Walker, Billie Holiday, Wynonie Harris, Sarah Vaughn, hometown sons like John Lee Hooker, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Little Willie John, or anyone who’d passed muster with the also aptly named King, who in his spangled turquoise tux was nearly royalty among the clubbing crowds. Having once led an all-girl touring jazz band some years before that had comprised whites, blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, and Native Americans, King wasn’t just a bandleader; he and the band seemingly could make anyone into a crowd-pleaser with a few well-turned moves.

He’d done just that with no less than Johnny Ray, the white crooner whom King let live with him during his tutorial, whereupon Ray had a brief but explosive run as a ’50s record heartthrob.

With lines always stretched down John R, patrons realized the preferred way of entry was to flash some green, not just for the doorman but inside, where the hustles went on nonstop, most heatedly along the 100-foot-long bar that snaked around two mirrored walls. As Thomas “Beans” Bowles, a horn player in the band, noted, “If you had enough money, you could get anything at the Flame”—and by that he meant
anything
, whether it be booze, reefer, women, and possibly a hot watch or ring.

But then, such bartering rituals were played out all around downtown, in the roughly sixty-block corridor that included Black Bottom—

so named not for a racial component but because the soil tilled by its French settlers was so dark and fertile, yet centuries later no less suitable for the asphalt-paved streets—and the more bucolic-sounding Paradise Valley (a grid more recently named for the Asian paradise trees that lined its thoroughfares). Both metaphors, opposite yet in tune, had become quasi-official euphemisms for the inner-city experience, a tacit suspension of hard reality eased into wistful plausibility by the bounds of music and community.

One went with the other, gravy to the mashed potatoes, and the plate was especially full in the late ’50s. The clubs were everywhere, clumped thickly along the motherlode of Hastings Street running straight down the heart of the Valley and bleeding onto side streets like Brush and Adams and Beacon, from the Ford assembly plant to the north down to Atwater Street hard by the docks of the Detroit River. As on John R, where the Flame Show formed a nexus with the Chesterfield Lounge, the Garfield Lounge, and the Frolic Show Bar, the clubs sat 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 25

MOTHS TO THE FLAME

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tooth-by-jowl with hotels, flophouses, rib shacks, barber shops, and pool joints, while in the street the hustle continued between the money-spenders and the money-grabbers.

Unlike in other big towns, where the club scene was supplemental to the industry that made rhythm-and-blues records, there
was
no such industry; it was a decentralized, small-time series of mom-and-pop operations run out of back rooms such as in Joe Von Batten’s record shop at 3530 Hastings. But the deals were usually made at the clubs, by hustlers who fancied themselves, among other things, music entrepreneurs. Their offices were their bar stools, and if they could walk out with a signed contract with a singer, they might get a record pressed and out on the street by the next week; if the sales brought in a few bucks, there was money to be made.

But this wasn’t Motown; it was Notown. There was a paucity of appreciable record labels in Detroit, so getting a nationally distributed record required shopping around a singer—or a songwriter or a new song—out of town, to established record labels in Chicago, New York, or L.A. That was a privilege only a select few had, and a few of that few could be found at the Flame Show—another reason why hustlers lined up at the bar sucking on Camels and draining malt liquor while hoping to cross paths with someone in the “in” crowd. Someone like, say, Al Green, the manager of the Flame Show who on the side managed Johnny Ray, Della Reese, LaVern Baker, and Jackie Wilson.

In the horde of wannabes at the bar, there were two hustlers who didn’t yet know each other but would in time become bound in a way they could not possibly have dreamed.

By the late ’50s, one of them, Berry Gordy, had actually made strides toward that end, giant strides indeed. And yet it wasn’t Gordy who would first enter the sphere of the three girls from the projects. It was the other barfly, a guy every bit as smooth as Berry Gordy—and far better tailored and coiffed—but whose only real talent, it seemed, was his rap. This was Milton Jenkins.

Maxine Ballard Jenkins has a picture of Milt Jenkins taken in 1959 at the Flame Show Bar—possibly, if also ironically, by none other than Berry’s sister Gwen, who, with another sister, Anna Gordy, operated the photo concession at the club. The shot captures what appears to be a carefree man in his early 30s posed in a wood-paneled corner, a curious fist-sized hole in the wall over his left shoulder. He wears a white sharkskin suit, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 26