The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal Read Free Page B

make up a heavy slice of Ross’s audience. Among Supremes’ fans, that Ross plays the diva role to the point of asking to be called “Miss Ross” or even “The Boss”—even if she does so with a wink—is cringe-worthy. Not that this evolution was unexpected back at Motown; it was evident even as Ross played out the Supremes. Indeed, many among this loyal legion felt as abandoned as Wilson and Birdsong when Ross abandoned them , just as they blamed her for Flo Ballard’s banishment, though Ross’s passive role in that drama was no different than Wilson’s, and she later generously footed some of Ballard’s mounting debts; after Ballard’s death in 1976 at age 32, which came after years of indeed
    “livin’ in shame,” destitute and back in the projects, Ross was met with catcalls by Supremes fans at the funeral.
    Clearly, the Supremes’ saga has produced a good many fables, a convenient, fallen dream girl in Diana Ross, and a heavy in Berry Gordy.
    These elements provided the grist for what is assumed to be the veiled story of the Supremes in Michael Bennett’s smash 1981 Broadway musical and later movie Dreamgirls . The assumption is only partly right; that set piece is tenuously based on the Supremes, but Bennett was no fool, knowing such an implied association would give breath and a large profit margin to his work. In fact, the story he hatched is close enough to the truth to peg Ross’s passive duplicity in the betrayal of Ballard, presumably for being too fat. But here the parallels come crashing down: The real Ballard certainly had her battles with the bulge, but the cause of her enforced exile had to do with internal, not external, factors, as she was the product of great personal tragedy. She also was never bedded by Gordy, as suggested in the Bennett revision. And, of course, she never had the last laugh on him—that would have been somewhat difficult given her early demise.
    Still, it was indeed true that Ballard was nobody’s lackey. The inside joke was that Ross would call Flo the “quiet one” during her on-stage 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xix INTRODUCTION
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    patter. The reality was seen in her wan smile and sad eyes, hinting at not a “quiet one” but a seething soul, tortured by her past, by Ross’s ascendance in a group Ballard had put together back in the projects, and by Gordy’s overbearing rules that kept them psychologically dependent on him. Even as the Supremes became rich and lived in anything but shame on swanky Buena Vista Avenue, they needed Berry’s approval to make withdrawals from their own bank accounts, a system that endured well into the ’70s.
    Ross, for one, may have been so stung by the uncomfortable reminders in Dreamgirls of her, well, compromised past that she slammed Bennett for “turn[ing] my life into a paperback novel.” Her real gripe, however, may have been a lack of proper deference, since the producers—
    “good friends of mine,” she noted—hadn’t “passed it by me.” Nor did she relent when the movie adaptation was released in late 2006 and was an enormous success. When the producers of the Academy Awards wanted her to sing the movie’s Oscar-nominated song, she clearly relished telling them to stuff it. (By contrast, the ever-amenable Mary Wilson said she loved the musical.)
    Some semblance of what was real and unreal about the Supremes could, through the years, be gleaned in various works, at best, though not in full, in Wilson’s 1986 autobiography, the mandatorily titled Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme , which with good marketing sense sniped at Ross as early as page 1 and didn’t let up for the remaining 248 pages. It outsold Ross’s two more heralded but gratingly narcissistic and insultingly detail-free memoirs of 1993 and 2000 (yet a third arose in 2007).
    Ross, who can give as good as she gets, retaliated by skipping the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 1988 rather than share a stage with