Supreme winners in all respects
Mary Wilson says famed girl group’s secret was they dared to dream
With make-up applied, wig in place and hipshaking figure cosseted inside a soul-queen frock, it’s difficult to believe Mary Wilson is a 75-year-old grandmother.
The singer, standing in a TV studio in west London, is about to go live on Good Morning America, where she will be unveiled as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars.
“My daughter Turkessa, my son Pedrico and my 11 grandchildren are so thrilled
. . . Finally, Grandma is cool!”
Laughter from the US studio audience filters down the line — the joke being, of course, that she was cool decades before her first child was even born.
As a founding member of the Supremes, Wilson dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic between 1964 and 1970 with hits such as Where Did Our Love Go?, Baby Love, Stop! In The Name of Love, You Can’t Hurry Love
and You Keep Me Hangin’ On.
The Supremes are one of the most successful girl groups of all time. But Wilson didn’t make much money then. When Diana Ross left the group in 1970 and Wilson took over the accounts, she discovered she had just US$100,000 to show for the hits. Motown had been their lawyers and their managers, and the founding members — Wilson and Florence Ballard — had just been young girls with no experience of business.
Not that Wilson harbours any ill will towards Motown. She features in a new documentary about the record label, Hitsville: The Making of Motown.
She also talks fondly about the hit factory in a new book, Supreme Glamour, that how 17-year-olds in home-made shifts ended up as pop queens.
“We’d go in to record a song, then we’d have to go into different classes. And [Maxine] Powell [Motown’s resident stylist] would say: ‘You ladies are just diamonds in the rough, and we’re here to polish you.’
“And then we had Mr Cholly Atkins, our choreographer. He taught us all the hand movements.
“Then, Maurice King, he was really wonderful . . . Maurice, who was [also] the band leader, would write out these really eloquent passages for us to say in the middle of the songs.”
Motown, then, invested in the best of the best? Wilson nods. “Artist development was comprised of all of these different lessons from people who were former performers.
“We learned from real professionals, who’d been out there working for years, on the Chitlin Circuit we called it, the black [nightclub] market.”
The result was a global culture-quake. Of course, as
biographies have revealed over the years, the polish concealed deep fissures.
As the group became successful, Ross fought to establish herself as the lead singer and force Wilson and Ballard into the background. She began an affair with Motown founder Berry Gordy and would double-cross her bandmates by slipping into a different dress from theirs at the last minute, to set herself apart on stage.
Another alleged ruse was to stretch out her hands when live on TV to obscure Ballard and Wilson’s faces.
“We did lose our lustre,” is all Wilson will say now. “We’re always sisters. But we’re not friends in terms of [calling] and saying: ‘Girl, guess what’s happening today?’ We’re like distant cousins who don’t see each other.”
She has more than made up for her paltry takings in the early years of the Supremes — she now prefers to focus on the positives. “We created history.”
Asked if she had any idea at the time, she says: “No! We were just being ourselves, using the gifts that God gave us. We were just enjoying ourselves. I can’t speak for Florence and Diane, but as I got a little older, I realised, ‘Yeah, we did touch other lives’. And not just women. Men, too.”
Wilson herself touched the lives of two very famous men: Tom Jones, with whom she had an affair (the two would fly all over the world to meet each other); and Steve McQueen, whom she dated for four months. She also knew Michael Jackson very well, as a fellow Motown artist.
Was she surprised by the allegations of child abuse made in this year’s film, Leaving Neverland? “I was surprised, sure. Because that’s not what I knew . . . I’m sorry if that was true. Really sorry.”
Wilson’s involvement with Dancing with the Stars turns out to be brief; she is the first contestant to be eliminated. But one suspects her 100-watt radiance will not be dimmed.
“How did three little black teenage girls from Detroit, Michigan, become the most beloved and biggest-selling female singing music trio in music history?” she asks at the beginning of Supreme Glamour. “It came down to one mutual thing that we had in our hearts: We dared to dream.”
We were just being ourselves, using the gifts that God gave us. Mary Wilson of the Supremes