The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (8 page)

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its waist-length jacket cinched along his middle by a belt buckled on his right hip, and a white ascot sitting atop his open-neck collar. The jacket is burnished with three rows of two darker buttons from nipple to navel. Standing casually, and with maximum cool, his left leg forward and bent slightly at the knee, he wears black buckle-up shoes and his left hand is perched lightly on his thigh, a huge pinkie ring just under a cuff fastened by an ace-of-spades cuff link. His face is handsome, with a high forehead under bushy hair, a mole on his right cheek, a pencil mustache, and a smile so broad that his eyes squint. He appears to be no more than 130 pounds, pinkie ring included.

Little wonder that everyone knew when Milt was on the prowl.

And as if he needed any more of a calling card than his appearance, he’d always make sure he was seen with a cast on his left arm, though no one ever knew why.

“I never knew if he hurt his arm in a fight with somebody or what, because he never did tell us what happened,” recalls Otis Williams with a laugh. Williams, then a Detroit teenager with a doo-wop unit called Otis Williams and the Siberians, would intersect briefly with Jenkins later in 1959 when the group reformed as Otis Williams and the El Domingoes—the root of the future Temptations—and was managed by the enigmatic cat with the sling.

“We’d ask him all the time, we’d say, ‘Milton, you all right? What’s the story?’ He’d just fluff it off, change the subject, and say, ‘Yeah, I’m all right, man. Don’t worry ’bout it, I’m gonna get y’all a big record deal!’ So after a while, we just left it alone. We figured he was embarrassed to talk about it because he’d gotten into it with one of his girls who busted him up.”

The truth was less colorful: He’d been involved in a car accident and broken his arm. But because he was afraid of doctors, he’d fashioned a sling and waited for it to heal, which it never seemed to. But then, Milt liked courting mystery—the biggest being how a guy with no job anyone knew of could afford threads like that and a fire-engine-red Cadillac convertible. Those wheels were his prized possession, his real calling card. He would keep it parked outside the Flame Show—he always seemed to get a perfect spot—and when he’d get out he’d have one or more gorgeous women on his arm and other gorgeous women would crowd around the car for a better look, some leaving pieces of paper with their phone numbers on the windshield. Once inside the club, Milt would go around shaking hands, talking big, and running long bar tabs.

How he was able to afford this lifestyle was never spoken of, even when he was among intimates. Even decades later, Mary Wilson was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 27

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writing in her memoirs of Jenkins’s “secret life.” “We never knew exactly where Milton’s investment capital came from—he never had a nine-to-five job, and he never volunteered any information. Of course, to the streetwise, the answer was probably obvious. Because we were so young . . . we didn’t really think too much about it.” It was good enough to think of him, she wrote, as “one of the most interesting people any of us had ever met.”

Neither did Otis Williams blow the whistle on Jenkins in his Temptations memoir. But he had no hesitation responding to a question about how Jenkins made his stack.

“Milton,” he said, “was a pimp, a playboy pimp. A lot of them guys back then were. They wanted to be a manager, but they needed bread to do that, so they made it any way they could. Drugs, women, running numbers, whatever. They lived in seedy places where they could ply those trades. Milton lived in a flophouse across the street from the Flame Show Bar. That was his seat of power.” And from where he tried to score business as a manager. Working the music crowd, he had accrued some pull. He could secure a rehearsal hall or a studio, or book a gig; but though he would periodically embark on trips to New York trying to score recording deals for his acts, so far he’d come up empty. Still, he’d done well in Detroit for a guy who’d gotten there only a year or so before.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Jenkins saw no possibilities for advancement in that city and emigrated to Cleveland in 1957. Looking for acts to manage, he was in the audience one night for a show at the Majestic Hotel where a five-man vocal group appeared, splitting the bill with a contortionist named Caldonia Young. The former, known as the Cavaliers, had three teenagers no older than 17 who, coincidentally, had also come north from Birmingham. They were Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, and Kel Osborne. Having formed the group back home, they added another singer, Willy Waller, in Cleveland, subsequently adding two more, Fred Fluellen and Paul Hayes. Jenkins took an immediate liking to the group and, after introducing himself backstage, they acceded to his big talk of managing them.

The Cavaliers fused tight and intricate harmonies, but rather than just stand there (as was the rule for such acts of the day), they added nifty, finely choreographed dance steps. Jenkins wove in more material, including high-toned Mills Brothers songs. He then chose a different name for them, commensurate with their high-hat style—the Primes.

But the Primes never got prime. Certainly not in Cleveland, prompting Jenkins to give it a shot in more-happening Detroit, where 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 28

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he moved with the core trio of Primes late in 1958. But Motown was another no-town for them, and Jenkins had a brainstorm: creating a girl-group to back up, and sex up, the Primes, along the lines of Ike Turner’s Ikettes and Ray Charles’s Raelettes. No question Milton knew where to find girls—but girls who could actually look good and sing, that was a challenge. One thing he knew was that there were tons of girls who lived at that big housing project, Brewster something, who might fit the bill.

And so it was that, one hot afternoon in mid-June, 1959, Milt Jenkins, taking along his Primes to help make his case, jumped into his Cadillac, put the top down, and headed for Brewster-Douglass.

Diana Ross and Mary Wilson—allegorically, given their personal differences decades after the Supremes’ demise—recall the origin of the Primettes in accounts that differ in nearly every detail. Wilson’s is that Milt Jenkins found Florence Ballard on that fateful foray into the projects and that Flo then made good on her vow, just days before, to start a group with Mary; the two of them, Wilson recalled, had nothing to do with Diane Ross’s entry.

Ross, for her part, insisted in 2007 that she remembers those days

“like it was yesterday,” but apparently too many yesterdays had passed even fourteen years earlier to recall anything much about Jenkins in her autobiography. She relegated Jenkins to just one page of the 275-page book, noting that he, Kendricks, Williams, and Kel Osborne—

the first two of whom would of course find fame and fortune in the Temptations—happened to show up at her door, not explaining how they knew of her. Further, she said that she, Ballard, Wilson, and a fourth girl, Betty McGlown (whose name she misspelled as “McGlowan”), were already performing together at “church socials and the like.” As an aside, she recalled that Jenkins was dating one of Flo’s older sisters.

In fact, that sister, Maxine Ballard, would meet Jenkins during his Cadillac run to the projects—and wind up as Jenkins’s wife until his death in 1973. And some of her own recollections are helpful in resolving a few of the differences between the Ross and Wilson tales. At the time, she was 16, married to a Marine who was stationed overseas—

and clearly susceptible to the attentions of a dude like Milt Jenkins. As she recalled, “I had not seen my husband for months. We had no children and, truthfully, had not been together sexually for a very long time.” On that day, Milt, his arm in the ever-present cast, was clad in a 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 29

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knee-length white leather coat, black boots, and crisp black slacks.

Williams, Kendricks, and Osborne also looked buttery in their linen pants, short-sleeved print shirts, and snap-brim hats. But it was solely Jenkins for whom Maxine had eyes. As for the “tall and handsome” Milt, “his eyes were busy undressing me.” So aroused did she become that she confessed she nearly had an orgasm right then and there. Jenkins, she attested, “awakened me from a deep sleep. I thought I was a grown woman, but he made me feel like a young girl eagerly awaiting her wedding night.”

He no doubt knew the effect he was having on her. But he was there for a reason, and he asked her, “Are you interested in singing?” Barely able to speak, she replied, “No. Why?” As he explained about the Primes and Primettes, Flo didn’t know if the whole thing was some sort of con, but the guys in the car seemed down to earth and made small talk with her. And she was duly impressed that they had a singing group, and more than a little intrigued that they were looking for a singer, especially when Maxine, trying to keep Jenkins around longer, told him, “My sister sings.” At that, Flo jumped in. “I’ll sing in your group, mister.” Maxine, always protective of Flo, told her, “Flo, you ain’t doin’

nothing until we go ask Mom and Dad.”

Jenkins waited in the car while she and Flo went inside and told Jesse and Lurlee of the opportunity for Flo. Predictably, neither was excited about it. “Daddy wanted no part of the whole music thing,” Maxine confirmed. “He said we were too young.” Jesse, though, was not calling the shots for the clan. He was very sick, and had not long to live. It was up to Lurlee, and she didn’t cast the notion away. Instead, wanting to hear what this Jenkins character had to say, she went outside with Flo and Maxine and heard out his rap. He was smooth, all right; of that she had no doubt. Maybe a little too smooth.

“If you’re a manager,” she sniffed, “show me papers or something, or else you ain’t getting nowhere near my daughters.” Lurlee perceived that Milt had designs on both Flo and Maxine.

And it worried her that if she allowed him to have dibs on Flo, Maxine might enter into an adulterous fling with him. As it turned out, she had reason to worry. Still, how could she crush Flo’s dreams of singing? As long as she had assurances that he was on the level, she’d go along with it. Milt obliged her. He left, soon to return with a sheaf of papers, including publicity photos of and newspaper ads billing the Primes.

Lurlee looked them over and made her decision. “You have something for me to sign?” she asked.

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He whipped out a contract that required both Flo’s signature and her own, since Flo was a minor. This document, in effect, granted Jenkins legal guardianship during the time she would be in his custody.

Milt left the projects that day feeling pleased. He now had a young singer under his thumb, and her hot sister soon to be in his bed. Driving back downtown, he sat a little higher in his soft leather seat. It had been a good day.

Because Florence told him she knew other singers her age, Jenkins left it to her to bring one around to his place later that week. That was when, according to Wilson, Flo ran up to her in school and gushed to her all about being in this new group called the Primettes, which needed another girl—“That’s you!” Flo told her.

When Flo told her about going to Milt Jenkins’s place to sing for him, Mary was game. But she, too, needed permission. That night she told her mother about the offer, her words spouting so quickly that Johnnie Mae didn’t quite get the group’s name.

“The Primates?” she said, looking pained.

“Prim-
ettes
.”

Johnnie Mae, as warily as Lurlee Ballard—but seeing the look in her daughter’s eyes when she said that this could be “the chance of a lifetime”—agreed that she could at least go and audition for Milton Jenkins.

A couple of days later, Mary and Flo set out on foot after school for the other side of the tracks, treading through the red-light streets of Paradise Valley looking for the address Milt had given Flo. It turned out to be a transient hotel across the street from the Flame Show Bar. The two wide-eyed girls were thankful for the late daylight, but had to ascend a dark stairway; as they went up, they gripped each other’s hand tightly, not knowing who or what was lurking in the shadows. Arriving at Jenkins’s room, they knocked and Milt opened the door to a large, furnished flat he shared with the Primes. Clothes and food wrappers littered the floor, lampshades were askew, the air reeked of God knows what. Bur Milt and his crew were again nattily dressed and courtly in manner. As the Primes ran through some songs, Flo and Mary sat down at a table at which there were two other girls. One of them was a tall, attractive, slightly older girl, around 17. She said her name was Betty McGlown, that she was Paul Williams’s girlfriend, and that he’d asked her to be in the Primettes.

The other girl, with her pipe-cleaner limbs and bulging eyes, they knew from the projects.

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“Hi, Diane,” Mary said.

“Oh, hi,” Diane Ross responded. “Do you girls sing, too?” Mary and Flo blanched, arching their eyebrows at each other. They could have been thinking the exact same thing: “Does
she
sing?” For her part, Ross seems not to remember anything of this interlude. It’s absent in her memoirs, in which her only citation of the Primettes’ mentor is that “[i]t was Milton Jenkins who really got us started when he brought around this group of guys from Alabama to meet us girls” before he “started managing us too.” The gaps were large, and, once filled in, the story is far more fascinating than Ross and Wilson seemed to have realized, since it bespeaks young Diana Ross’s passive means of getting ahead, sometimes despite herself. Consider that even as a complete unknown in the larger sense she had a name on the local teenage talent show circuit, an indication of how closely inter-twined was the community of acts performing in East Detroit.

For instance, there was Otis Williams’s act. A few years older than the Primettes, and worldly by their standards, Williams had actually recorded with some minor success. His first group, the Siberians, cut two sides for Detroit deejay Bristol Bryant’s label, “Pecos Kid” and “All My Life,” before re-forming as the El Domingoes. One would think he’d have been far beyond Diane Ross’s realm of experience in 1959, but many of the kid-groups ran in the same circles and performed on the same talent shows as the adult ones, and on that circuit were the two former schoolmates of Ross, Melvin Franklin and Richard Street, who had maintained their friendship with Ross.