MUSIC: The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success and Betrayalby Mark Robowsky, Da Capo Press, 408pp, £15.99. A history of The Supremes chronicles their unsisterly rivalry and offers a dizzying narrative of the wider Motown family
THERE IS A horribly emblematic image from the funeral of former Supremes star Florence Ballard, who died, alcoholic and impoverished, of cardiac arrest at the age of 32. Funeral “planners” – presumably Motown people – wanted to dress Ballard in her open coffin in a Supremes gown, but her husband, an ex-Motown driver and a rather nasty man, insisted she wear a powder-blue robe. The robe was sheer enough that funeral goers could see through it the bruises on her legs from a beating he’d inflicted. The detail, from Mark Ribowsky’s new biography of the most successful female group in history, says a lot about the clash of surface and reality that characterised the Motown “family”, and the way some of its artists ended their run with the company feeling a tad abused.
The Supremes were Flo Ballard, Mary Wilson and Diana Ross, three girls who grew up in the Brewster projects in Detroit. Originally “managed” by a pimp named Milton Jenkins as the Primettes, the girls were only in their mid-teens when they first auditioned for Motown founder Berry Gordy. Though Gordy heard something promising in Ross’s adenoidal vocals, he was initially underwhelmed, and the girls had to hang around the Motown house (the recording studio then a fire trap of a basement) doing handclaps and back-up vocals before Gordy signed them in 1961.
For three years, The Supremes failed to produce a hit and might easily have vanished from the Motown agenda had it not been for Ross's drive and the fact that the philandering Gordy, 15 years her senior, was in her thrall. Given his "admixture of paternal and predatory impulses", it was a few years before they consummated the mutual obsession. The not-yet-famous Ross, meanwhile, cut her teeth on married Motown men who could help her, namely Smokey Robinson and song-writer/producer Brian Holland, who – with Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland – penned many of Motown's biggest hits. (The book offers such a dizzying narrative of "Motown family" members producing, writing songs for, sleeping with and marrying each other, I kept thinking what fun a family tree would've been.) Finally, The Supremes had their breakthrough No 1 hit in 1964 with Where Did Our Love Go. They went on to release 11 more No 1 singles.
From early on, it was clear that, despite Ballard’s initial leadership, it was the “weirdly sexy” Ross – with her big eyes, over-sized mouth and stick limbs – who was destined for mega-stardom. Even before the girls made it, Ross was busy elevating herself above the others, arranging for them all, for instance, to wear matching gowns to a gig only to turn up herself in something different and more eye-catching. Her manipulative and high-handed behaviour, and her bond with Gordy (the two would eventually produce a child together, conceived only weeks before Ross married music manager Robert Silberstein in 1971) drove a wedge between her and the other two Supremes.
Gordy had an ego and a drive to match that of his protégé. Born to a well-to-do family, he had been a professional featherweight boxer and a song-writer before convincing his siblings in 1959 to loan him $800 to start his own record label. By the mid-1970s, he had built the largest independent record company in the world. The “Motown Sound” was a fusion of soul and pop (though r’n’b purists dubbed it “black bubblegum”) and brought large white audiences to black music for the first time. In its heyday, the company’s artists included Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Jackson Five. But it was the girl group from the projects who first fulfilled Gordy’s cross-over ambitions: appealing to the white audiences of Las Vegas and New York’s Copacabana club.
GORDY LIKED TO project an image of the “Motown family” as a wholesome, happy, cohesive group. Whatever about the wholesome, early Motown was a communal affair, unlike the near-dictatorship Gordy would establish. (Ribowsky includes an image of a floor-to-ceiling painting Gordy commissioned for his home, which depicts him in the pose of Napoleon.) Resentment resulted from his obsession with The Supremes, and particularly with Ross, as other acts – several of whom also had hit records – felt neglected. Meanwhile, The Supremes themselves had never been a very sisterly trio, and Ribowsky goes into great – and sometimes repetitive – detail about the acrimony beneath the polished exteriors. When Gordy fired Ballard from the group in 1967 (for her drinking, her weight gain, her clashes with Ross), Ross was delighted.
By the late 1960s, Motown’s influence had peaked, its ethnic agenda was little more than a front, and there was unrest in the ranks. The legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland trio jumped ship and sued Motown for $22 million for conspiracy, fraud, deceit and breach of trust. In the 1970s, many of the company’s biggest names defected to other labels. (Ross left in 1981.) The Ross-Gordy relationship evolved into “something more like an addiction to mutually assured torture than anything resembling love”. In 1988, Gordy sold Motown Records to MCA and Boston Ventures for $61 million.
As part of a generation that knows Diana Ross primarily through her later incarnations – a solo artist with a penchant for schmaltzy mid-song soliloquies about everybody loving each other; a member of Michael Jackson’s pantheon of divas (Ross was named in Jackson’s will as back-up guardian of his children) – I had never paid much attention to The Supremes. Ribowsky’s book had me glued to YouTube clips of them from the 1960s. Despite Ross’s creepy preening for the camera and the sometimes obvious unhappiness of Ballard and Wilson, the music can still cast a spell and the three women together enchanted in a way that Ross on her own does not.
Ribowsky, who has also written a biography of Phil Spector, set himself the task of sifting through the “muck and mucilage” of celebrity journalism, and has produced an interesting account of the lives of the three young women who once ruled the pop world. (Ross, Gordy and Wilson – all of whom have written memoirs – were apparently not willing to be interviewed.) While he doesn’t try to hide his exasperation with the uber-diva and her “over-baked mawk”, he gives Ross her due and offers an outsider’s take on the inside story of a singular music empire. He is also clearly in love with pop music and revels in the occasional magic that The Supremes, with Motown behind them, were able to work.
Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel, Protection