Free The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal by Mark Ribowsky

happened,” recalls Otis Williams with a laugh. Williams, then a Detroit teenager with a doo-wop unit called Otis Williams and the Siberians, would intersect briefly with Jenkins later in 1959 when the group reformed as Otis Williams and the El Domingoes—the root of the future Temptations—and was managed by the enigmatic cat with the sling.
    “We’d ask him all the time, we’d say, ‘Milton, you all right? What’s the story?’ He’d just fluff it off, change the subject, and say, ‘Yeah, I’m all right, man. Don’t worry ’bout it, I’m gonna get y’all a big record deal!’ So after a while, we just left it alone. We figured he was embarrassed to talk about it because he’d gotten into it with one of his girls who busted him up.”
    The truth was less colorful: He’d been involved in a car accident and broken his arm. But because he was afraid of doctors, he’d fashioned a sling and waited for it to heal, which it never seemed to. But then, Milt liked courting mystery—the biggest being how a guy with no job anyone knew of could afford threads like that and a fire-engine-red Cadillac convertible. Those wheels were his prized possession, his real calling card. He would keep it parked outside the Flame Show—he always seemed to get a perfect spot—and when he’d get out he’d have one or more gorgeous women on his arm and other gorgeous women would crowd around the car for a better look, some leaving pieces of paper with their phone numbers on the windshield. Once inside the club, Milt would go around shaking hands, talking big, and running long bar tabs.
    How he was able to afford this lifestyle was never spoken of, even when he was among intimates. Even decades later, Mary Wilson was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 27
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    writing in her memoirs of Jenkins’s “secret life.” “We never knew exactly where Milton’s investment capital came from—he never had a nine-to-five job, and he never volunteered any information. Of course, to the streetwise, the answer was probably obvious. Because we were so young . . . we didn’t really think too much about it.” It was good enough to think of him, she wrote, as “one of the most interesting people any of us had ever met.”
    Neither did Otis Williams blow the whistle on Jenkins in his Temptations memoir. But he had no hesitation responding to a question about how Jenkins made his stack.
    “Milton,” he said, “was a pimp, a playboy pimp. A lot of them guys back then were. They wanted to be a manager, but they needed bread to do that, so they made it any way they could. Drugs, women, running numbers, whatever. They lived in seedy places where they could ply those trades. Milton lived in a flophouse across the street from the Flame Show Bar. That was his seat of power.” And from where he tried to score business as a manager. Working the music crowd, he had accrued some pull. He could secure a rehearsal hall or a studio, or book a gig; but though he would periodically embark on trips to New York trying to score recording deals for his acts, so far he’d come up empty. Still, he’d done well in Detroit for a guy who’d gotten there only a year or so before.
    Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Jenkins saw no possibilities for advancement in that city and emigrated to Cleveland in 1957. Looking for acts to manage, he was in the audience one night for a show at the Majestic Hotel where a five-man vocal group appeared, splitting the bill with a contortionist named Caldonia Young. The former, known as the Cavaliers, had three teenagers no older than 17 who, coincidentally, had also come north from Birmingham. They were Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, and Kel Osborne. Having formed the group back home, they added another singer, Willy Waller, in Cleveland, subsequently adding two more, Fred Fluellen and Paul Hayes. Jenkins took an immediate liking to the group and, after introducing himself backstage, they acceded