ROAD MANAGER FOR THE SUPREMES: THE TONY TURNER INTERVIEW

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Road Manager for The Supremes:
The Tony Turner Interview
Exclusive By Gary James
Review East Coast
Correspondent
Tony Turner has worked with some of Motown Records greatest recording
artists. They include both The Supremes and The Temptations. As road
manager for those acts, Tony had the best job in town or did he?
Recently The Review was able to take a journey down memory lane as Tony
Turner talked to us about his time with people such as Diana Ross, Mary
Wilson, and the artists that made Michigan an internationally known
epicenter for entertainment.
The Supremes
 
Review: Were you a fan that was hanging out and Mary Wilson offered you
a job?
Turner: No. Actually, I was born & lived in New York. It was fate. To
make a long story short, I happened to be wandering around 34th Street
and 5th Avenue when I was 12 years old at the corner where the B. Altman
Department store once stood. I decided to take a peak inside of this
huge magnificent store because I was a kid from Harlem and had never
been inside a store of that caliber.
As I went into the vestibule of that store I ran into Florence Ballard.
She was talking and grappling with 25 shopping bags full of things she
had just bought, and simply asked me to help get her packages from that
point out to the curb so she could hail a taxi. That was my first
encounter with The Supremes.
She started weaving this long intricate story of how she was going to be
on Ed Sullivan. Of course I didn't believe her. She explained that she
was a singer and had I ever heard of the Supremes, and that she lived in
Detroit and had been to Europe. She was quite talkative. I was not a fan
of The Supremes, had never heard of Motown, and knew nothing about
Detroit, so my introduction was completely by accident. It was a classic
case of being in the right place at the right time.
Review: You put up with an awful lot of verbal abuse, didn't you?
Turner: Well, I had been around Motown people for so long, since the age
of 12, that you get used to a certain amount of abuse. I would say it
was more like a parent with a child. Your father or mother scolds you
but still you really love them and know they don't really mean it.
If you were thin-skinned you could never last at Motown. Even in the
early days there was always this attitude that they were the stars. They
were bred on that old Hollywood system that to be a star you act like a
star, so I basically ignored it.
It's not glamorous work when you're doing it, but it is glamorous to
people outside the profession. It makes you a star in your everyday
life, no matter what you do if you become known as Tony Turner the Road
Manager for Diana Ross. People want to know you because of who you work
for and it brings the employee a certain amount of snob appeal.
Review: I recall hearing something about a school in New York City that
taught a person how to be a road manager. Is that something that can be
taught?
Turner: Oh, believe me, it is an art. Road managing in my opinion is
nothing more than being a babysitter for adults. You have to possess
good organizational and people skills. You have to be thick-skinned and
a 'proven' person. You have to be able to change things on a moment's
notice. It's like being a schoolteacher and taking a class out on a
field trip.
Some groups are easier to manage than others are. I didn't go to school
for formal training other than Motown. I learned simply by being there
since the age of 12 and watching others do it. But in developing your
skills as a road manager, you have to know a lot about the travel agency
business and ways to get your seats on planes that are fully booked. You
need to know ways to get hotels, limos, know the right restaurants in
different cities, and basically keep good contact as you travel around
the world. Plus, you have to build up a good file of contacts, because
chances are you will be going back to that city.
Promoters can be terrible crooks and very deceitful people, so you are
in charge of a great deal of money that you have to collect. You are
also in charge of payroll and I've found that sometimes musicians can be
worse to work for than the stars themselves.
However, you have to be almost like a union delegate. You have to keep
your band appeased, because once you get a band that is completely crazy
and wild, they can cause major problems. Being a road manager is not for
everybody. You get very little sleep and all kinds of abuse. Everything
that could possibly happen is your entire fault. Plus you have to be up
hours before the star and hours after the star.
Review: Let us say there had never been a Motown. Would a CBS or MCA
have signed an act like The Supremes or The Temptations?
Turner: Well, you had The Shirelles. You had The Chantels. Earlier you
had The Coasters and The Cadillacs, so you did have some black groups
that had some prominence before Motown.
I would confidently say that without Berry Gordy, good luck, and the
Grace of God none of this would have happened. There's been no place
like Motown since and I doubt there ever will be a company in one
location that would churn that many people basically out from the same
neighborhood. It was simply sheer luck.
Without Motown I believe some of the Motown stars would have become
stars on their own at other companies, but I don't think we would have
had a Supremes, per se. I do not think we would have had a Temptations.
I think people with lesser talent like Otis Williams (Temptations) and
Mary Wilson (Supremes) would not have ever become stars had they not
been in a group situation.
Review: There's an old Motown saying, 'Good manners can take you places
money cannot.'
Turner: Indeed.
Review: Like where? Turner: Good manners can take you anywhere you want
to go in the world. People like people who are nice and have good
manners and are cordial. They remember people that way.
If you are a multi-millionaire but just a despicable person, eventually
the doors will close on you.
Diana Ross has tons of money. She's a millionaire, of course. There are
people that will not deal with her because of her attitude and manners.
So although she has the money, there are certain stores & restaurants
that do not ant her business. They won't put up with the theatrics, the
special requests, and the rudeness. So that is one lesson she did not
learnŠ
Review: Of all the Motown artists, it seems that Diana Ross was the
smartest when it came to business matters. Is that why other Motown
artists disliked her?
Turner: No, I don't think Diana Ross was the smartest, nor do I think
that she had a great sense of business. I think the resentment stems
from the fact that among the original stable of Motown stars, by the
stars themselves, Miss Ross was considered one of the least talented.
I think the resentment from people like Martha Reeves and David Ruffin
was the fact that she was sleeping with Berry Gordy (Motown founder).
Therefore, she was afforded certain allowances and certain perks that no
one else at Motown was afforded. She got the better gowns, the better
hotels, the better shows; more was spent on her music and more was spent
on publicity.
Anything that came into Motown was first looked at as a potential
vehicle for Diana Ross. The jealousy towards Diana at Motown was simply
because she was considered by her peers as not that talented, and she
only got as far as she did because she was sleeping with Berry.
Review: You wrote in your book 'Deliver Us From Temptation' that Marvin
Gaye liked to dress up in women's clothing; that he was a cross-dresser.
I always thought of Marvin Gaye as a ladies' man or a womanizer, in
today's terms
Turner: He was a womanizer AND a cross-dresser. Those people wore many
hats at Motown. Motown was a very sexual sort of place.
People were quite stunned by that revelation. Of course, people at
Motown wished I had not written about it; but it is true and like
everything else in my book, it was verified by different parties other
than myself. It didn't cause any lawsuits from the Marvin Gaye estate,
his children, or his ex-wife simply because it's too easy to prove.
There are photographs.
Review: David Ruffin of The Temptations once said Mary Wilson of The
Supremes was trash.
Turner: David Ruffin was right. If you go back to how she carried
herself privately, she was a woman that everyone at Motown had slept
with, so she was a party girl, so to speak.
By her own admission, in her own book, she said when Gordy told her she
made herself 'too available' that she 'liked to be out.' She's a party
girl. That's not to say she's trash per se. She likes men. David Ruffin
liked women. So there was a double standard there. A gentleman back in
the sixties & seventies was a Hugh Hefner playboy. A woman was a tramp,
a slut, a whore, and that's how David Ruffin looked at her.
To the outside world The Supremes were the epitome of Black Womanhood,
but to the insiders they were considered Black Barbie Dolls.
People didn't know for years that Mary Wilson met with Tom Jones, Flip
Wilson, Steve McQueen and David Frost - a string of prominent men inside
& outside of Motown. She was beautiful and men liked her, and she liked
men. But, David was right - she was trashy.
Review: Yet Mary appeared on Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich &
Famous, so her financial condition must have been pretty good.
Turner: After she wrote Dream Girl: My Life With The Supremes she made
quite a bit of money and immediately took most of it and bought a house.
She bought an English Tudor for about $600,000. She continued to work
and fell on some hard times and sold that and moved to Washington.
I understand that she rented a plane and was living in Las Vegas. She is
a person like the rest of America who has to work. Mary Wilson is not in
a position to retire.
She called me at my home in Long Island and said, 'Oh, I'm going to be
interviewed for The Rich & Famous. I said that was fabulous and that
they sometimes interviewed people on location or in a hotel suite and
asked where they were going to conduct the interview.
She said, 'At Home'. I went completely crazy. I said you couldn't have
Robin Leach interview you in that tiny bungalow. I told her to get a
suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and tell them your house is being
renovated, because she couldn't have them visit that little thousand
square foot place out in the Valley.
We moved all her gold records and paintings and took Mary's old Rolls
Royce and put that in the driveway. Once again, it was my old training
from Motown that at all costs you keep up the star's image.
Review: Financially speaking she was?
Turner: Broke. The nice beautiful Rolls Royce couldn't go over 30 miles
per hour. She spent about 30 grand to have the car reconditioned, which
I thought was a bad move. About a year later she sold it for like 20
grand, so she lost money on it. But she had been badly ripped off. Long
gone were the huge mansion and the home up in Hollywood Hills. She was
living in Studio City on Eureka Drive in a small bungalow right off a
main thoroughfare with one bathroom and two little bedrooms. There were
about eight people living there. She was still working, but not making
what she used to.
Review: Tony, you're into real estate. You've got a house on Long
Island, an apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side and a house in
Florida. How'd you get so smart when it came to business?
Turner: I paid attention to the business and money whereas the stars
paid attention to being a star. I didn't have someone to make my
decisions for me. I made my own decisions. If you're making money it's
always best to count your own money. You don't need someone to count
your money for you.
If I'm gonna go broke, I'd rather go broke because I had the money and
spent it all, not because I had it and only got 10 percent of it because
somebody else spent it all.
There's no reason why Mary Wilson should have ended up broke, or
Florence Ballard while Berry Gordy ends up living in Bel-Air. There has
to be some balance, so I watched the mistakes they made and paid close
attention. Of course, I didn't have their drug habits either, which ate
up a lot of money.
Review: So your message to aspiring artists today would be:
Turner: Look at what happened to these talented people that were known
throughout the world - living legends - the whole bit. Do not let this
happen to you.
Count your money, honey.