Fabulous Dead People | Mary Wells
Culture
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By CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS
| November 23, 2010, 12:57 pm
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While not every Motown aficionado thinks Chris Clark got all the obscurity she deserved, there is other glue that binds. No one disputes that romanticizing the eat-or-get-eaten early days of the label’s artists was a great act of myth building. Diana Ross’s father got so tired of hearing what a rough childhood she had in Detroit’s Brewster Projects, he told one of her biographers how nice the lawns and courtyards there were. “The apartment we were in had three bedrooms, a full basement, a living room, kitchen and dinette,” Fred Ross said. “It wasn’t so terrible at all, believe me.”
The problem is that sometimes it really was terrible — too terrible to put in a press release. Mary Wells (1943-1992) once defined misery as “Detroit linoleum in January — with a half-frozen bucket of Spic and Span.” Wells was 12 or so when she began helping her mother on her rounds as a cleaning woman. “Until Motown, in Detroit there were three big careers for a black girl,” she said. “Babies, the factories and daywork.”
Wells was fabulous on many levels. She recorded “My Guy” – along with the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby,” one of a handful of pop masterpieces that cannot be improved. On two songs that, like “My Guy,” were also produced and written by Smokey Robinson — “The One Who Really Loves You” and “You Beat Me to the Punch” — Wells was swept along on Robinson’s love of calypso and of Harry Belafonte, creating a sultry musical mini-genre whose compass points were halfway between the Motor City and Trinidad. Together she and Smokey taught Detroit to cha-cha.
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Wells sang with a pout, which isn’t easy, that made her seem almost dangerously sophisticated. On stage and in publicity stills, she had a tendency to dip, assuming a charming, slightly crouched pose that was all her own. In the language of the day, the Beatles were completely “gone on her.”
“Hey, ask any one of the Beatles who his favorite girl singer is and he’ll give you just one answer,” Shindig’s announcer cheered in 1965. “She’s the girl they recently invited to England to appear with them. And here with her first million-seller…”
The subject of a biography by Peter Benjaminson to be published next year, Wells was in (1960) and out (1964) of Motown before she knew what hit her. Having reigned so briefly and disappeared from the charts so suddenly, she seems a distant figure, part of an earlier era — grainy, black and white, and crowned with bad wigs — than she actually was. Yet if Wells were alive today she would be only 67.
If her run was short at least she was first. When Wells had her own car and driver, the Supremes were literally hitching to gigs. Mary Wilson of the Supremes recalled how Wells would swan through the lobby of Motown with “her entourage behind her and we’re standing there like, ‘Wow, yea, that’s, that’s the way we want to be.’”
It meant nothing at the time, because the Supremes were nothing, but in the ’80s, when Wells’s career was on the skids and she was limping along on the oldies circuit, smoking two packs a day, there was some satisfaction in being able to say that the boss’s mistress had done her grunt work. Diana and company are behind Wells on “You Lost the Sweetest Boy” and, I’d bet because only one person sang through her nose so alluringly, “My Heart Is Like a Clock.” Because of Wells’s association with Robinson, I always assumed the men who sang backup with such suave complicity were the Miracles. In fact it was the in-house Love-Tones. Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations was a Love-Tone for the time it took to cut “Two Lovers” with Wells, filling in for a group member who couldn’t make the session. “The lead singer got stabbed to death, and they kind of fell apart after that,” Wells remembered.
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She could claim other victories over the Supremes — and over the Motown founder Berry Gordy. In the label’s waste-not tradition of recycling musical tracks, Wells was there first with “Whisper You Love Me Boy.” Dying of throat cancer and evicted from her home, she took on Gordy, filing suit for breach of contract and infringement of right of publicity. For 25-plus years Motown, which Universal acquired in 1988, merrily operated on the belief that Wells’s contentious exit deal with the company included a name and likeness clearance, which it used to sell a monumental number of records. According to Wells’s lawyer, Steven Ames Brown, there was no such clearance. Mary’s third husband, the singer Curtis Womack, says the $100,000 out-of-court settlement she obtained was split 60-40 with Brown.
“Universal protected itself against any claims by demanding indemnity prior to buying Motown, so resolution was funded by Gordy,” says Brown, a royalty recovery specialist who has represented assorted Vandellas and successfully litigated for the return to Nina Simone of many of her masters. “I told Mary when we sued, ‘Don’t worry, sooner or later Berry will call me: My father was his podiatrist.’ And he did call. Some of the Motown artists were no better than their oppressor. But others were abused. Mary was one of them.”
Coached by her first husband, Herman Griffin, possibly the most minor act in Motown history, Wells sought to disaffirm her contract when she attained majority. Gordy paid her 3 percent of retail, less taxes and production and promotion costs. As an advance on a two-year deal, 20th Century wrote her a check for $250,000 — more than $1.7 million today. Accepting a portion of her royalties for the years remaining on her Motown agreement was maybe the worst business decision Gordy ever made. It’s fashionable for Motown partisans to dismiss “Never, Never Leave Me,” one of Wells’s two 20th Century releases, but with Wells turning up the pout, it’s a uniquely charismatic record.
Atco, the label she jumped to next, should have been a good fit. But when after one so-so album Wells was told to get in line behind Aretha Franklin and wait a year for studio time, she walked. “We could do nothing with her,” Jerry Wexler, the Atco chief, says in the notes to the excellent Wells compilation, “Looking Back.” “The fault wasn’t Mary’s. Nor was it ours. She was an artist who required the idiosyncratic Motown production,” which could not be duplicated. “Most importantly we didn’t have Smokey Robinson.”
Mary had a thing for the Womack men, and when she switched labels yet again, it was to work with her second husband, Cecil Womack, on two forgotten albums for Jubilee. Womack went on to eclipse Wells, writing the Teddy Pendergrass smash, “Love T.K.O.,” and teaming with his second wife as Womack & Womack.
By the time Wells was told she had cancer, she had burned through her 20th Century advance and more. With no health insurance, a trust was set up at the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, with contributions from, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Ross and Gordy, whose $25,000 check Wells singled out in an interview on “Entertainment Tonight.” “He did come through,” she said.
Wells “knew little about the trust,” Brown says, “except that someone else seemed to be using the funds for something other than Mary’s care. My reaction to the interview is that she was being gracious because of the settlement” Gordy made with her. Curtis Womack says Aretha Franklin insisted on bypassing the Foundation, sending $15,000 directly to Wells.
Doctors told Wells they could save her by removing her vocal chords, an option she rejected. “I miss my voice, you know, but hopefully it will come back,” she said in the same “Entertainment Tonight” appearance the year before she died. “I’ve been singing all my life. I don’t know any other trade.”
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