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.One day, Diana came onto the set with Rhonda,pulled him aside, and whispered in his ear, She knows. What did she say? he wanted to know.Diana said Rhonda had been shocked but that she handled itlike the champion she is, while admitting that the girl s reaction was soneutral she didn t know if Rhonda was sad or happy about findingout.As Liles pointed out, Rhonda had grown up the daughter of a 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 384384 THE SUPREMESwhite man and had to rethink her identity upon finding out her fa-ther was a black man, and one with whom she d casually shaken handsover a hundred times. And yet Gordy had little more to say of the gut-wrenching experience himself beyond semi-perfunctorily noting thatRhonda was watching me as I had watched her for years, looking forsimilarities.Every now and then I saw what I thought was a smile of herrecognition of some of me in her.We didn t talk about it as such, but Ibelieve that day resolved some questions she may have asked herselfover the years. In fact, Rhonda came to master the art of spinning the drama in aninnocuous feel-good manner.In 1994, she would tell the New YorkPost of Gordy, I ve known him forever as a friend of the family.Butwe always did have a special relationship even before I knew he wasmy dad. The long years of lies about Ross and Gordy s love child were onlyone myth perpetuated by Diana.Everyone who knew her became con-vinced early on that her marriage to Robert Silberstein was nothingmore than a business arrangement with fringe benefits that would pro-tect her from the scandal of living as an unwed mother.In fact, Silber-stein was actually put on her payroll, for reasons never explained.Butone possible reason may be that the handsome manager looked goodon her arm.Says Liles: I found Bob to be a warm, soft-spoken guy,and it was sad later on to hear Diana say that the only way she couldtolerate him was as an escort. Most telling was that Gordy didn t recede in her life; rather, he was,Liles recalled, sort of a third party to the marriage, accompanying thetwo of them everywhere. If the marriage was a sham, it was no more sothan the notion that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy were no longer de-pendent on each other.The truth was, they may have been more so.The Ross public façade as an ambassador of conventional morality andfamily-values entertainment wasn t damaged, though, and it kept deliv-ering.But she and Gordy had to be patient, as it seemed she had totrade several records that stiffed for one that didn t, like her 73 No.1smash Touch Me in the Morning written and produced by a new 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 385EPILOGUE: WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? 385Motown recruit, Michael Masser, who had to put up with Ross deni-grating the song as not good enough for her and its Oscar-nominatedLP of the same name.When Gordy then tried pairing her with the red-hot but difficult Marvin Gaye, it nearly died aborning after Gaye re-fused to stop smoking pot around the again-pregnant Ross. Man, don t smoke no weed, Gordy told him. Diana s gonnahave a baby.You don t want drugs around the baby. Fuck Diana Ross, he said, saying stoned what so many aroundMotown had wanted to say for so long. I m gonna smoke this weed orI don t sing. As a result of the discord, it was decided that the only way to getthe project done was for them to cut their vocals separately, at separatestudios, never seeing each other.Thus, all those dreamy love songs ontheir two ensuing Top Ten singles and Top Thirty album were sung bytwo people who detested each other something that seemed to be theoverarching rule now at Motown.It took until 1976 to hit the top again with the Oscar-nominatedtheme from Gordy s second vanity movie project for her, Mahogany(Do You Know Where You re Going To) the only saving grace fromwhat was a $3.75 million bomb when Gordy fired the original directorand took over the job himself, ensuring a classic of unwitting comedythat the Ross Billy Dee Williams chemistry couldn t bail out.It wasGordy, though, who took most of the hits, with Time s review skewer-ing him for squandering one of America s most natural resources: Di-ana Ross. That year would bring Ross a Tony Award for a one-woman Broad-way musical that was taped for a TV special.It also brought anotherNo.1 single a cover of the Sylvester disco hit Love Hangover, pro-duced by Hal Davis and the Top Five I m Coming Out, a sly winkat the drag-queen life written and produced by Chic s Nile Rodgers andBernard Edwards after seeing drag queens dressed like Diana, who wasincreasingly being embraced by gay fans.But now that she and Gordywere psychologically worn out by each other and barely able to speakwithout acrimony, Ross did something she never thought she would:entertain offers from other record companies.Still enmeshed in their morass of lawsuits with Gordy, HDH werenonetheless able to get Invictus and Hot Wax Records off the ground 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 386386 THE SUPREMESafter the turn of the decade.Following early success with Honey Cone,their sessions in the old converted theater on Grand River Avenuehelped maintain the pulse of the Detroit music scene that had grownfaint when Motown transplanted itself to the coast.Many of the town smusicians, including sundry Funk Brothers who had to go scroungingup work for the first time in years, were down with Holland, Dozier,and Holland when they hit their first stride of the decade with a four-some that what were the odds? sounded remarkably like the FourTops: namely, the Chairmen of the Board, whose lead singer Norman General Johnson was a near-replicate of Levi Stubbs.Their debut In-victus release, Give Me Just a Little More Time, stormed to No.3 in1970.The same year, HDH would deliver Freda Payne s Band ofGold, also a No.3, and hit the top with Honey Cone s Want Ads. For a while, it seemed as if their magic touch just might make Invictus/Hot Wax another Motown.The problem for HDH was that Gordy was in a far better positionto wait out the lawsuit battle, his lawyer fees absorbed into the Motownfiduciary structure.For HDH, spending hundreds of thousands of dol-lars in an endless and fruitless court war bled their resources dry, threat-ening not just their new company but the trio s excessively lavishlifestyle.In 1972, with everyone fatigued by the constant hearings anddepositions, HDH approached Gordy with an offer to settle, on termsfavorable to him.After all the overheated rhetoric and invective aboutservitude on one side and a vendetta on the other, in the end the wholemeshugas was reduced to exactly what Eddie Holland had sworn itwouldn t be about: mere dollars.The terms of the settlement weresealed by mutual consent; reportedly something like $200,000 went toMotown for the breach of contract which by the time it was paidwasn t even a symbolic victory for Gordy, who had ultimately proven hecould get along quite well without his old mates and had moved far be-yond the grind of Supremes and Four Tops ditties. The only financialwinners, Gordy would say, were the lawyers. For HDH, the early glow of Invictus/Hot Wax began to flicker asmusical tastes changed, execrably, from the stripped-down soul andpop-funk of the early 70s to the syncopated miasma of disco, leavingHDH to have to keep up with the work of younger, lesser producers
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