The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky

Author:Mark Ribowsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press

fourteen

“BABY, JUST POUR”

Gordy’s true confessions about the making of Diana Ross—in the biblical sense—revealed details no one seemed to know, or were willing to talk about, either back then or for years afterward. Even Ross, breaking form, didn’t brag around the shop about it, biting her tongue at the time and keeping quiet to this day. Of course, everyone had known something happened between them when they were on their own in Paris—a liaison that would eventually produce an out-of-wedlock daughter—but it was too touchy a subject for them to want to indulge it, usually to protect Gordy, in deference to his power and his wish to keep it from the public. Indeed, even in Mary Wilson’s “tell-all” memoirs, she told almost nothing of this monumental shack-up beyond the hazy euphemistic recollection that Diana and Berry “began dating” sometime around early ’65, making their convulsive affair seem more like a prom date.

In truth, what Diana was doing was sleeping with the boss, and because the company was aware of this, it’s a stretch to believe that Gordy was somehow able to keep it from Margaret for more than five minutes: How, for instance, could he possibly have explained his unexpected “layover” in Paris with Diana? Provided she didn’t live with her hands over her ears, it’s only logical to assume Margaret, unlike Claudette Robinson and Sharon Holland, accepted being cuckolded as a consequence of owning Gordy’s part-time attention. As far as is known, she never staged any confrontations or psychotic scenes or let fly with any “it’s either her or me” ultimatums.

For the rest of the Motown family, the Gordy-Ross union was as much a part of the environment as the “Hitsville, U.S.A.” sign. There is one story in the Motown literature that Diana, dying to blab about it lest she implode, told Flo, “I got him!” Barely stirring, Flo asked, “Who?” Exasperated, Diana gushed, “Berry! I got him!” Flo’s yawning response was, “So?” If this dialogue really happened, Flo’s diffidence could have been a false front, hiding her own envy. Or, just as likely, it could have been that Flo had grown up and wasn’t capable of squealing in excitement like a pig-tailed teenager at the idea of a grown woman spreading her legs for her employer, no matter how far it got her.

If it was the latter, Flo was not alone. For most of the entrenched crowd at Motown, all of them older and wiser, affairs were a fact of life; but this one so violated Gordy’s little-followed rules of propriety that it reduced him in their eyes from benevolent despot to moral reprobate. The proof wasn’t so much that he couldn’t keep a professional distance from one of his stars but, rather, that he couldn’t see what effect his Supremes obsession was causing. The thud that Martha Reeves had felt on the England tour had been felt even earlier by Marvin Gaye, who would recount for author David Ritz shortly before Gaye’s 1984 death during a violent dispute with his father: “No one was prepared for the Supremes’ [success].

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