Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  Duke loved sports and excelled at basketball, football, and track at Pershing. Levi might have been an even better athlete, but his lone obsession was music. Fakir recalled seeing him outrun the state champion in the hundred-yard dash and saying, “You’re a hell of an athlete,” to which Stubbs replied, “Man, all I want to do is sing.” The conception of the group that would become the Four Tops began near the end of their high school days with an invitation to a farewell-to-Pershing party thrown by a group of girls who came from black Detroit’s high society, upper-middle-class young women who had been debutantes at the annual Cotillion Ball. They were also singers and called their group Scheherazade. The party was invitation-only, and Levi and Duke were invited, mostly because the girls wanted to hear them sing. It was an early variation of the friendly battles of the bands that Berry Gordy later organized at the Graystone Ballroom, in this case Scheherazade versus the boys with no name. To round out a quartet, Stubbs and Fakir recruited two friends, Lawrence Payton and Obie Benson, who attended Northern High, the same school that four years later produced Smokey Robinson. “Just follow me,” Levi said to his singing mates when the girls urged them to perform. The result was smooth and harmonic, as though they had rehearsed for weeks—Levi as lead, Duke as first tenor, Lawrence as second tenor, and Obie the baritone-bass.

  By that summer they were calling themselves the Four Aims, sporting white wool suits from Hot Sam’s, winning amateur shows at the Warfield Theater, and taking bookings at places like Eddie’s Lounge in Flint. Duke had earned a basketball scholarship to Central State University, a historically black school in Wilberforce, Ohio, and Obie Benson also had a college scholarship, and their intention was to sing through the summer and then leave for school. “But once we hit that stage, we knew we were not going to college,” Fakir recalled. “It was amazing how excited we felt. ‘Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom.’ ‘Sixty Minute Man.’ ‘Three Coins in a Fountain.’ This was something we all loved to do.” Renamed the Four Tops, they began a decade-long rise on the show circuit, from the Detroit Auto Show to the Paradise Club up at Idlewild, a black resort in Michigan, to the Flame Show Bar and 20 Grand and Roosevelt in Detroit, to spots in the Catskills, to singing backup for crooner Billy Eckstine on a nationwide tour—and finally, late in 1963, Berry Gordy came calling. “I wanted them bad,” he later confided. “I could see how loyal they were to each other, and I knew they would be the same way to me and Motown.”

  Loyal, but not naïve, not after ten years in the business. Unlike most of Gordy’s artists, whose first-ever paycheck came from Motown, the Four Tops knew what a contract looked like. When Gordy handed one to the group, expecting them to sign on the spot, Duke Fakir said he wanted to examine it overnight before signing, even though they had decided ahead of time that they would go with Motown no matter what. When Gordy said he did not like delays and that no one before had ever asked him for time to sleep on it, Fakir studied the contract and said, “I don’t see any advance on here.” Gordy said he did not give advances, but eventually relented, giving them each a token $100 advance. He also promised to produce hit records and make them stars.

  That took longer than expected because of the detour into the unproduced American songbook. Still, they kept busy in the Motown studio, often performing as backup singers for the company’s female singers and groups. It did not take long for Fakir to develop a relationship with Mary Wilson of the Supremes. These were the last days of Motown’s magical early period, before the debilitating addictions of success and envy and ambition took hold and things and people started to fall apart. “Mary Wilson bought this house and she would have parties and do the cooking and have Marvin Gaye and HDH and Smokey and everyone come over. Ten or twenty people at a time come over,” Fakir recalled. “She could cook great, and I was a good bar person and it was such an amazing feeling. You can never capture that in words, just cannot capture it in words, to know how wonderful and full and gratifying and fun it was during those early days.”

  One night late that spring while the Four Tops were in Detroit playing at the 20 Grand, Brian Holland burst into their dressing room and announced, “Fellows, we got your hit.” He was carrying a tape recorder, and when he pushed the Play button they heard a raw instrumental version of a tune on tape with Holland singing the melody live. Motown was operating twenty-two hours a day, and though it was late at night Holland persuaded them to follow him back to West Grand Boulevard so they could start working on the song while the feelings were still fresh. While Brian Holland worked with Duke, Obie, and Lawrence on the background vocals, Eddie Holland took Levi into the control room to perfect the melody. Eddie sang it, over and over, until Levi said he wanted to write it down with his own pen. “Although you’re never near / Your voice I often hear.” When Levi felt he had the right phrasing, they started to record the first take of “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’,” the big hit that Berry Gordy promised and that served as the template for the inimitable sound of the Four Tops for the rest of the sixties decade.

  Among the words of wisdom that Gordy’s mother, Bertha Fuller Gordy, imparted to her eight children, What you learn is never wasted ranked among her favorites. She was a teacher first and always, and a demanding one, from the time her husband met her, when she was instructing third graders in a segregated elementary school in Georgia, through all her years in Detroit as the matriarch of one of the city’s most accomplished families. Her second-youngest son spent most of his early years feeling that he was a disappointment to her. She wanted her children to be college graduates; he was a high school dropout. She wanted them to be in professions that she could boast about to her friends. His boxing would not cut it. Working on an assembly line certainly would not. Nor selling jazz records or jotting down songs that popped into his head. But those concerns were long gone. What he had learned as a boxer in terms of competition, what he had learned on the assembly line about how to create a product, what he had learned from his pure love of music—none of it was wasted. It had been Mom Gordy’s wordless nod of support that swayed a few of his reluctant siblings to vote to give him the $800 family loan with which he started Motown, and now, with a studio teeming with talented artists, from Stevie Wonder to Marvin Gaye, from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles to Martha and the Vandellas, from the Supremes to the Temptations and the Four Tops, she was so proud of him that she would take friends on tours of the West Grand Boulevard studios, ask various employees to introduce themselves and explain what they did, then proclaim to her guests as they were walking away, “And my son owns it all.”

  Bertha Gordy had been born in the previous century, in 1899, and in 1964 was turning sixty-five but not slowing down. She was a regular presence at Motown, and also in various social clubs, among them the female auxiliary of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the African American variation of the all-white club with the same name minus the “Improved,” a word that seemed especially apt for Mrs. Gordy’s philosophy. The female Elks often held functions at the Graystone Ballroom on Woodward Avenue, now owned by her son, and in honor of Bertha’s milestone birthday they joined with Motown to hold a testimonial banquet for her at the Graystone. The men dressed in tuxedos, the women in ball gowns with corsages. All eight of her children and seventeen grandchildren were there. Councilman Mel Ravitz presented her with an honorary resolution from the city of Detroit. Berry Jr., transformed from misfit to family hero, spoke on behalf of her children, delivering tributes and gifts, including one that captured both his rise and the capitalist acuity of the Gordy clan: a long-playing record covered with dollar bills.

  • • •

  In the movements of black Detroit, the most common paths traced up and down, north and south. Since the days of the Underground Railroad, through the era of the Great Migration and beyond, Detroit had been one of the pole stars of the industrial North, drawing first runaway slaves, then factory workers and families by the thousands. One and two generations later, many transplanted southerners returned to Georgia and
Alabama and Mississippi when they could, enduring the indignities of Jim Crow segregation to reconnect with their roots. Some of them went back precisely because of the South’s overt racism—to fight against it. In March 1964 John Conyers Jr. was one of those making the reverse trip.

  The Conyers family roots were in Georgia. John Sr. had left Georgia in the early twenties and found work at the Chrysler plant in Detroit, where he was subjected to the northern variation of Jim Crow. He and other painters in the plant were paid less than white painters for the same work, a bitter fact that led him to make a personal complaint to Walter P. Chrysler himself. That started his long career as a union activist, operating on the left wing of the United Auto Workers. His son, a graduate of Northwestern High and a Korean War veteran who worked his way through Wayne State Law School by selling vacuum cleaners to the Gotham Hotel, among other institutions, had taken his father’s activism into law and politics. For two years after the 1960 elections, he had worked in the field office of Democratic congressman John D. Dingell Jr. across from the Fisher Y on Dexter Avenue, a mile or so from Motown. During the summer of 1963, after JFK made his nationally televised speech on civil rights, Conyers had been among the Detroiters recruited at a White House conference to help push civil rights legislation and litigation through the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law. By the middle of March 1964, he was launching a campaign for an open congressional seat in Detroit adjacent to Dingell’s and also volunteering his legal services in the southern struggle.

  On March 21 a call came to the Detroit branch of the National Lawyers Guild about a case in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where a civil rights worker needed legal help. A young worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been arrested and accused of raping a fifty-eight-year-old African American woman. The young man claimed that he had been framed by local authorities to intimidate the movement. Conyers took the assignment and arrived in Hattiesburg the next day, uncertain whether he would even be allowed to practice in Mississippi, where he did not have a license. He had heard that there were only three black lawyers in the entire state at that time. When he tried to visit his client, the jailers denied him permission; a call to the police chief was needed to secure that most basic legal right. The next day, at a preliminary hearing for the defendant, the courtroom was filled to capacity with white and black onlookers, some from the civil rights movement, some from the community, sitting wherever they could find room. When the prosecutor saw this, he moved “in the name of peace and tranquility” that blacks sit in their own section, still the Jim Crow practice in Mississippi. In response, a bailiff bellowed, “All right, all you niggers, get to your own side!”

  Conyers rose to object—to the language and the motion. The judge, according to contemporaneous accounts, apologized only for the language. When officers tried to segregate the courtroom, a few white ministers from the North who were in Mississippi as part of the Freedom Movement refused to budge, prompting the judge to clear the room altogether, defer the hearing, and hold the defendant in jail until the next grand jury was seated. With the case on indefinite hold, Conyers returned to Detroit. Unfinished business. He was preoccupied much of the coming year with his congressional campaign, which he eventually won, taking a seat that he would hold for more than fifty years.

  From the South to Detroit while Conyers was still in Mississippi came Martin Luther King Jr. to give a speech at Central Methodist Church at Woodward Avenue and Grand Circus Park. Nine months earlier he had led the triumphant march past that very church on the way down Woodward to Cobo Hall amid the joyful jostling of at least 150,000 people. His host back then, Rev. C. L. Franklin, had largely retreated from the civil rights scene, though not entirely. At a testimonial dinner in his honor in February, Franklin had announced his intention to stage a Freedom Jubilee at Tiger Stadium in June. No one had heard much about it since. There was no march when King came to town this time, but three thousand listeners filled the church to capacity. Before the address, Ofield Dukes asked King if the assassination of JFK had heightened his own sense of vulnerability. He had a small entourage, but no bodyguard. In cities like Detroit, he said, the police protected him, but they had no interest in doing that when he was in the South. This was one month after Cassius Clay had defeated Sonny Liston in Miami to become the heavyweight champion, stunning most of the sporting world, including the boxing-savvy crowd that watched on closed-circuit TV at the Fox Theater in Detroit. Since then Clay had announced that he had become a follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. He had taken the temporary name Cassius X on the way to becoming Muhammad Ali. King was not impressed. The black Muslims, he said, were champions of racial segregation, “and that is what we are fighting against.” Sounding a theme expounded by many big-city sports columnists, King added, “Perhaps Cassius should spend more time improving his boxing skills and do less talking.”

  Detroit remained a friendly northern front for King. The politicians, the police, the media were all accommodating. At the start of the year, the Free Press had invited him to write a column explaining his goals for 1964 and then turned over much of its Sunday feature section to carry the message. King wrote that the movement of nonviolence was working, that he did not foresee “any widespread turning of the Negro to violence,” and that beyond the Negro thrust toward full emancipation he worried about the next step: economic equality. The rise of what he called “monstrous automation” made unskilled and semiskilled black workers especially vulnerable in manufacturing centers like Detroit.

  King was followed into Detroit two weeks later by Malcolm X, his intellectual adversary, who had just broken away from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, though his brother in the city, Wilfred X, declined to join him in that bold move. Malcolm spoke again at King Solomon Baptist Church, the site of his “Message to the Grassroots,” and if anything his words were more explosive. “This is the year of the ballot or the bullet,” he said. “We have a younger generation now who don’t care about odds. The white man don’t have heart. He’s brave with tanks and jets and atom bombs, but all a black man has to work out with [is] that blade. On a dark corner, it’s even-steven.” Betty De Ramus, a local writer, was in the audience that night. She described the speaker as “lean and tall with the stride of a conqueror and a fearless tongue.” She thought of Malcolm X as a “master manipulator of emotions” and found that she was arguing with herself as she debated his message. “First aggression, then guilt for not being aggressive sooner, and when it was all over he had you wondering about yourself. He’s a man who holds an audience in the palm of his hand.” Officers from the Detroit Police Department controlled traffic outside before and after the event. There were no bullets and no blades in dark corners. And nothing was even-steven.

  • • •

  George Edwards, who considered the Walk to Freedom the high point of his tenure as Detroit’s police commissioner, had receded from the front lines even farther than Reverend Franklin. He was deciding federal appeals court cases now, not dealing with the racial tensions of Detroit or the insidious doings of the local mob. But there was still unfinished business from 1963 and his days at 1300 Beaubien. On the day that King spoke at Central Methodist, the trial judge in the bribery case against the Party Bus mobster, Tony Giacalone, criticized Edwards for talking so much in the press in the days and weeks after the police made their bust at the Home Juice Company on June 20. Edwards would say later that he knew the judge, John A. Gillis, to be a “freewheeling Irishman” who did not like the police crackdown on the hookers downtown and did not believe the Mafia existed in Detroit.

  As it turned out, whatever Gillis believed or disbelieved, he was not the main problem for Edwards and the case against Tony Jack and his boys. The defense lawyers were too good, and the main witness was too weak on the stand. The case turned on a minor issue: where James W. Thomas, the officer who had been wired to take bribes from Giacalone, typed his notes and reports related to the case. When the defens
e lawyer, Robert Weinberg, questioned Thomas’s claim that he had typed the notes only at the precinct office when the notes clearly showed they were the work of two distinct typewriters, Thomas essentially choked and blurted out, “I lied.” Where the notes were typed meant very little; Thomas’s confession meant everything. Despite the tape-recorded conversations and the solidness of the case, Giacalone was acquitted.

  During the heat of the mob investigations in 1963, Edwards had invited Martin Hayden, editor of the Detroit News, to lunch at the Detroit Athletic Club and confided that he had written Hayden a letter that was to be opened if anything untoward happened to him. He said he did not think his life was in danger, but this was just in case. “I guarantee you’ll have the damndest newspaper story you have ever seen,” Edwards said. As it turned out, he survived, and the letter was never opened. Fourteen years later, a box was delivered to the front desk downstairs in the Detroit News Building on West Lafayette. It was addressed to Martin Hayden and taken to his wood-paneled office. His secretary opened it, to her horror. Inside was a severed human head. Unfinished business? A classic Mafia move, but the morbid gift-givers remained unidentified, though it was determined that the cadaver head had been lifted from the Wayne County Morgue. When Hayden retired, Pete Waldmeir of the News decided to write a column about him. As Waldmeir later recalled, “The interview went along fine until I ran out of questions and finally asked him if finding that head in a box was the strangest thing that ever happened to him in all those years in journalism. ‘No,’ he responded wryly. ‘Having you ask me a dumb question like that is the strangest thing that ever happened to me in all my years in journalism.’ ”