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.Notcounting Ed Sullivan, from late 68 to mid- 69 they made guest shotson Bing Crosby and Bob Hope TV specials, and hosted The HollywoodPalace (or rather, Ross hosted, with Wilson and Birdsong allowed to sayexactly nothing).As well, Diana guest-starred with Rowan and Martinand no less than Lucille Ball on a Dinah Shore NBC special producedby Schlatter-Friendly called Like Hep! during which she was treatedpoorly by the aging, choleric Ball, who ordered a servile Diana aroundlike a servant.To the survivors of TCB, that could only have been consideredturnabout being fair play.0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 347twenty-twoTHELASTMILEary Wilson had become so disenchanted with Gordy andRoss that early in 1968 she broke protocol and began callingFlo every now and then, just to say hello.In the early spring,when Flo had come home to promote her first ABC record,MMary got the idea to bury the lingering bitterness betweenFlo and her two arch-enemies.Gordy was about to hold a big poolparty at Gordy Manor and Mary, wanting to play good guy, suggestedthat Flo come with her. It ll be great, she burbled.Flo, who had a hardenough time swallowing her issues with Mary, reeled at the thought. Mary, she said, you know that s a bad idea.Forget it, will you? C mon, let s do it.Don t worry about Berry and Diane.All yourfriends will be there.We ll be with you.It went against every one of her instincts, but Flo did want to healold wounds she had confessed to Tommy that she found it difficult tofeel hatred for Diana, that she still cared for her and so she went.Later she told Tony Tucker with relish that when she waltzed into theparty, You could have heard a pin drop in a bunch of goose feathers,such was the shock among the Motown crowd, many of whom hadurged her to stick it to Gordy when they partied at her house, but whoon Gordy s turf could only stare at her too scared of Gordy, as Flowould put it, to say word one.Gordy and Ross must have been more than a bit shocked, too, butneither raised an objection as she walked around in her flower-printsummer dress.But they kept a wary eye glued to her all the while from3470306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 348348 THE SUPREMESacross the pool, and, as Wilson recalled, There was an undercurrent oftension. Finally, Diana sashayed over and asked how she was. Pretty good, you? Flo answered pleasantly enough.But then Diana began to act like, well, Diana.Slyly mentioning thatshe d heard Flo s record had failed, she asked how her career was going. Fine, Flo said, her jaw tensing.Diana continued making small talk but began walking from Flo toBerry and back again, as if relaying some sort of top-secret informationto him, which made Flo s insides grind.Settling onto a stool at the ca-bana bar, Flo began to tipple more heavily to calm herself, and wasfairly loaded when Diana again floated over and said, Oh, isn t that thesame dress you wore five years ago? It s amazing it still fits a classicRoss-ism.From anyone else, the comment could conceivably have beencomplimentary, if meant, say, in the sense that it was amazing thethen-pregnant-and-showing Flo could fit into one of her dresses fromthe old days.But because it was said by Diana, it was heard only as aslight about Flo s weight which, if so, was a truly dim-witted thing tosay about a pregnant woman.When Diana floated away, Flo, about to boil over somethingGordy and Ross wanted to happen called out to Mary, loudly enoughto deafen the music being played on loudspeakers, If she comes backover here, I m gonna kick her! Or at least that s Wilson s version; Tuckersays the way Flo told it, it came out this way: If that black bitch comesover here one more time, I m gonna kick her black ass!As the guests went mute and turned to observe the gathering storm,Mary anticipated the worst.While she perhaps might not have beenoverly upset that Gordy and Ross had been embarrassed, her prioritywas getting Flo out of there. Flo, I think it s time to go, she said, an instant before Gordy bel-lowed from across the pool, Who brought that woman here? and, Whoever did better get her out of my house!Flo, by now very drunk, may have wanted to fight back, but whenshe got up off her stool her legs gave way and she half-collapsed, her fallbroken by Mary who held her upright and walked her off the propertyto Mary s car a drill Wilson had become quite practiced at throughthe years and drove her back home.Flo chewed out Mary for taking her into this latest humiliationthe worst part for her being that Mary again had failed to say a word onher behalf when things got ugly and personal.Despite Wilson s protes-tations otherwise, and her recent independent streak, Flo believed Mary0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 349THE LAST MILE 349was conning herself, that she was just scared to death of BerryGordy.She s scared for her own financial future because Gordy sdrilled it into her head that she can t sing anymore. Even more harshly,she told Tucker, Mary s just brainwashed and just a puppet. If thatwas so, then Wilson was living with her own humiliation.All that Wilson would admit to in Dreamgirl was that after the poolparty fiasco she had curs[ed] myself for trying to make us all friendsagain. That, she now knew, would never happen, because [w]e had allsuffered wounds that would not heal.So lofty was the status of the Supremes in 1968 that after the MartinLuther King rites of mourning and tribute Gordy decided to inject thegirls into the national political discourse.Though he had backed BobbyKennedy for the Democratic nomination, after yet another nationaltrauma when Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambas-sador Hotel on June 6 after winning the California primary, Gordy feltit was his duty to endorse Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.That meantthe Supremes had to as well, whether they cared to or not.On July 23, a month before Humphrey would claim the nomina-tion as police ran wild clubbing anti-war demonstrators in the streets ofChicago, Gordy arranged for the girls to publicly endorse Humphrey ata press conference at New York s Waldorf-Astoria
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