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

to his big talk of managing them.
    The Cavaliers fused tight and intricate harmonies, but rather than just stand there (as was the rule for such acts of the day), they added nifty, finely choreographed dance steps. Jenkins wove in more material, including high-toned Mills Brothers songs. He then chose a different name for them, commensurate with their high-hat style—the Primes.
    But the Primes never got prime. Certainly not in Cleveland, prompting Jenkins to give it a shot in more-happening Detroit, where 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 28
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    he moved with the core trio of Primes late in 1958. But Motown was another no-town for them, and Jenkins had a brainstorm: creating a girl-group to back up, and sex up, the Primes, along the lines of Ike Turner’s Ikettes and Ray Charles’s Raelettes. No question Milton knew where to find girls—but girls who could actually look good and sing, that was a challenge. One thing he knew was that there were tons of girls who lived at that big housing project, Brewster something, who might fit the bill.
    And so it was that, one hot afternoon in mid-June, 1959, Milt Jenkins, taking along his Primes to help make his case, jumped into his Cadillac, put the top down, and headed for Brewster-Douglass.
    Diana Ross and Mary Wilson—allegorically, given their personal differences decades after the Supremes’ demise—recall the origin of the Primettes in accounts that differ in nearly every detail. Wilson’s is that Milt Jenkins found Florence Ballard on that fateful foray into the projects and that Flo then made good on her vow, just days before, to start a group with Mary; the two of them, Wilson recalled, had nothing to do with Diane Ross’s entry.
    Ross, for her part, insisted in 2007 that she remembers those days
    “like it was yesterday,” but apparently too many yesterdays had passed even fourteen years earlier to recall anything much about Jenkins in her autobiography. She relegated Jenkins to just one page of the 275-page book, noting that he, Kendricks, Williams, and Kel Osborne—
    the first two of whom would of course find fame and fortune in the Temptations—happened to show up at her door, not explaining how they knew of her. Further, she said that she, Ballard, Wilson, and a fourth girl, Betty McGlown (whose name she misspelled as “McGlowan”), were already performing together at “church socials and the like.” As an aside, she recalled that Jenkins was dating one of Flo’s older sisters.
    In fact, that sister, Maxine Ballard, would meet Jenkins during his Cadillac run to the projects—and wind up as Jenkins’s wife until his death in 1973. And some of her own recollections are helpful in resolving a few of the differences between the Ross and Wilson tales. At the time, she was 16, married to a Marine who was stationed overseas—
    and clearly susceptible to the attentions of a dude like Milt Jenkins. As she recalled, “I had not seen my husband for months. We had no children and, truthfully, had not been together sexually for a very long time.” On that day, Milt, his arm in the ever-present cast, was clad in a 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 29
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    knee-length white leather coat, black boots, and crisp black slacks.
    Williams, Kendricks, and Osborne also looked buttery in their linen pants, short-sleeved print shirts, and snap-brim hats. But it was solely Jenkins for whom Maxine had eyes. As for the “tall and handsome” Milt, “his eyes were busy undressing me.” So aroused did she become that she confessed she nearly had an orgasm right then and there. Jenkins, she attested, “awakened me from a deep sleep. I thought I was a grown woman, but he made me feel like a young girl eagerly awaiting her wedding night.”
    He no doubt knew the effect he was having on her. But he was there for a reason, and he asked her, “Are you interested in singing?” Barely able to speak, she