Temptations (Updated) Read online

  Praise for Temptations

  “With their insistent vocal harmonies, snappy suits, and split-second stage choreography, the Temptations carved out a soulful slice of pop music history in the 1960s and early 1970s as one of the all-time great examples of the Motown sound. . . . As might be expected, the road to the top wasn’t as smooth as the Temptations’ trademark harmonies. Group cofounder Williams hits the low points and the ‘magic moments’ in this straightforward account of life as a Temptation, onstage and off.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Temptations is a significant addition to the growing canon of books relating to the phenomenon of Motown Records.”

  —NELSON GEORGE, Billboard, and author of Blackface

  “Temptations is the poignant and well-written story of the group through the eyes of Otis Williams, one of its original members.”

  —Essence

  “This book is a must for Motown maniacs. . . . Totally delightful.”

  —Inside Books

  “Williams writes about womanizing, booze, drugs, and the other ‘temptations.’ . . . [He] candidly discusses the group’s falling out with Motown Records and its love/hate relationship with Motown emperor Berry Gordy. The singer also provides insights into Motown’s magic.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  TEMPTATIONS

  OTIS

  WILLIAMS

  WITH

  PATRICIA

  ROMANOWSKI

  All chart positions referred to are from Billboard magazine and were compiled from Joel Whitburn’s Record Research, a series of books available through Record Research, P.O. Box 200, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin 53501; www.recordresearch.com

  Photographs 1–9, 14, 21, 22, 30–32, 35–39, 42, 43, 45–49, 51, 53, and 57 are from the personal collection of Otis Williams.

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2002

  This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Temptations is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1988, with the addition of a new chapter. It is reprinted by arrangement with the authors.

  Copyright © 1988 by Otis Williams

  Updated edition copyright © 2002 by Otis Williams

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109

  New York, New York 10003-1503

  www.coopersquarepress.com

  Distributed by National Book Network

  The previous edition of this book was cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Williams, Otis.

  Temptations / Otis Williams with Patricia Romanowski.—1st Fireside ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Fireside book.”

  Includes index.

  1. Temptations (Musical group) 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Romanowski, Patricia. II. Title.

  ML421.T43W5 1989

  782.42166'092'2—DC20

  [B]

  89-6392

  CIP

  MN

  ISBN 978-0-8154-1218-2

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Shelly Berger, Billie Jean Bullock, Cherie Ann Dobbins of Star Direction; Marilyn Ducks-worth, Stacy Creamer, Suzee Ikeda, Steve Martin, Robb Hogan, Howard Flash Jackson, my Aunt Lucille Woods, and Uncle Wade Woods; Brandy F. Davis for watching over my father, Edgar Little; my brother, Allan Little, and his family; Abe Somer and Jill Berliner, my attorneys; Cholly and Mae Atkins; Maurice King, Fred Moultrie, Edwin Lombard, Joe G. D’Oliveira, my business managers; D’Anza Bringier, Linda Penn, Bruceaud Terry Taylor, Ann and Willie Mitchell, Bill Tannen, Annie B. Cain, and Patty Romanowski and Phil Bashe—you’re both wonderful. And my loving wife, Goldie, and daughter, Elanda, The Temptations, and my loving son, Otis Lamont, may you rest in peace.

  —OTIS WILLIAMS

  I’d like to thank Miller London at Motown Records, Bill Hathaway at Record Research, and the guys at Strider Records in New York and Memory Lane Records on Long Island for helping me compile the discography. Among the friends whose support was invaluable, I’d like to single out Elisa Petrini, Nelson George, Mitchell and Rana Schneider, Larry Geller and Joel Spector, Gypsy da Silva, and Sarah Lazin. My husband, Philip Bashe, as always, has a special place here.

  Shelly Berger, Billie Bullock, and Karen Fisk at Star Direction smoothed the way. And Shelly and Stacy Creamer offered countless valuable suggestions and the kind of encouragement every writer should have.

  Finally, very special thanks to the Temptations, for being. And to Otis, for his friendship, honesty, and trust, all of which made this assignment a dream come true.

  —PATRICIA ROMANOWSKI

  TEMPTATIONS

  1

  In 1986 I stood on the empty stage of Detroit’s Fox Theater, the last of the city’s grand old movie palaces and the only one to have been renovated. With its over five thousand seats stretching back between ornate plaster walls and glowing under the refurbished chandeliers, it struck me as a place, maybe the only place, that time forgot. Of course, I knew that these seats were not really the ones I sat in, surrounded by friends, all up and screaming for Frankie Lymon or Jackie Wilson. They’d been cleaned up, probably reupholstered, but they could have been the same. Coming in through the old stage door, I recalled all the hours I’d spent outside it, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of my idols, maybe one of the Cadillacs, or a beautiful woman, like Faye Adams.

  They might have changed the stage, but not enough that I couldn’t close my eyes for a moment and feel the rhythmic vibrations of our dance steps as we strut and glide through our first Motortown Revue or Christmas Show in the early sixties. Out beyond the edge of the stage I can see only a hundred or so illuminated faces, all smiling, all laughing, all bobbing in time to the music. Our music. Sometimes it feels like they might be the only people there, but then a thunderous roar reminds me that there must be hundreds, probably thousands just like them in the darkness. Beside me three of us swoop and spin behind a shining four-headed chrome microphone stand, while a fifth stands off somewhere to our left. If it’s Eddie Kendricks, maybe he’s singing “Just My Imagination,” making the girls down front swoon. If it’s David Ruffin, in a lightning flash he’s sent his microphone flying skyward, turned, done his split, come up, caught the mike, and is heading down into the crowd. Every beat of every song prompts a move, a look, a note that comes so naturally, I might have been doing it all my life.

  In those moments when this is all I think, when the adrenaline runs so high that it feels like a drug, time’s stood still. This is the Apollo in 1966, or the Copacabana in 1967, maybe an English television studio in 1965, a little makeshift stage in a school gymnasium in 1963. And these are four of my very best friends, my brothers, all parties to a pact that says we will never part, that we—David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams, and I—always will be the Temptations. After a couple more numbers on any given night, no one but me knows that mixed in with the sheets of sweat that pour down my face there are tears.

  Then something always happens to remind me that time—about fifteen years’ worth—has flown by. I notice that the women in the front aren’t
dressed the same, or I catch a hint of gray on one of our heads, or a move I’ve executed a million times calls for an extra hustle. It’s not 1963 or 1967, it’s 1982. The Temptations have been together for over two decades. Yet after a few more shows, only two of us—Melvin and I—will step onstage after an emcee winds up his introduction with “. . . the temptin’ Temptations!” David and Eddie will have returned to their own careers. Paul Williams, though taken from us in his prime, we hope, is watching. And with us, as always, will be three other Tempts, guys whose voices are as much a part of our history as our own.

  As the group’s founder and spokesman I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to the Temptations, and not just because I’m part of it. Over the years I’ve been very proud to learn what our music has meant to our fans. Guys have played it to cheer themselves up in Vietnam, a young woman in South Africa asked to be buried with one of our albums in her coffin, and for countless babies some special Tempts song provided the soundtrack for their conception. As I keep edging closer to my thirtieth year as a Temptation, the group’s role as part of one of the greatest phenomena in American popular music—Motown—becomes clearer. The only part I don’t understand is how I could live through all this and still be just twenty-nine.

  In everyone’s life, there are certain key people and events—linchpin friends and incidents without which there’d be an entirely different story to tell. My life has been blessed with many such people and events, and not a small amount of good fortune. But at the heart of my story, of the Temptations’ story, is the place where it all started, the place I will always go back to: Detroit.

  I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when my mother brought me up to Detroit from Texarkana to live with her and my stepfather, Edgar Little. She’d moved up north right after I was born, and though I’d visited her in Detroit since, living there was something else. Unlike small-town Texarkana, Detroit was a lively, thriving city, with tall buildings, seemingly endless blocks, and smooth, paved streets. I couldn’t imagine a city bigger or more exciting, but even then I was too little to understand how extraordinary and special Detroit really was.

  For decades Detroit had been the city of opportunity. Generations of Southern blacks emigrated to this integrated haven to man the city’s auto plants or take other work, almost all of it better-paying than what they’d left behind. But I was too young to be concerned with such matters back then. All I saw were the nicely painted one- and two-family homes, the gleaming new cars, the big department stores crammed full of toys. Everything about Detroit was wonderful, newer, better. And I was fascinated.

  Even though Texarkana wasn’t more than eight hundred fifty miles from Detroit, the two places might as well have been on different planets. My birthplace was a plain, rural town that straddled the Texas-Arkansas border where my grandparents earned their living farming. My three surviving grandparents—Lucinda Eliga, Frank Fisher, and Della Gooden—each lived in what they call shotgun houses. You could stand at the front door and look right through like you were looking down a shotgun’s barrel. There were three rooms, one right after the other; that was it. You can still see those little wooden houses in the rural South; back in those days, they were “fashionable” in those parts. To some, we may have seemed poor, but I never wanted for anything as a kid. Being the first grandchild on either side of the family ensured that I was loved to death and as spoiled as any kid brought up by two strict, God-fearing grandmothers could be.

  Most of my early raising fell to Della Gooden, my father’s mother. Her son, my father, was Otis Miles, but everybody in town called him either Sonny One or Bird Head, because he whistled so well. Walking home late at night on one of the dark gravel roads, he’d always be whistling. I’d hear him, and then my grandmother would say, “There goes Sonny One.” It’s probably an inherited thing, because I’ve always been one to break out whistling.

  Despite my old man’s peculiar-sounding nicknames, he was a lady-killer. The local women loved him. He was somewhere in his late thirties and single when he met my mother, Hazel Louise Williams. Hazel grew up in Texarkana, and her own mother, Lucinda Eliga, never wed Hazel’s father, so what fate held in store for Hazel Louise wasn’t viewed so much as a moral lapse but as the usual thing. Hazel, or Haze as I always called her, loved Sonny One, though she was a very young girl when they met. The attraction must have been mutual, but I think it was one of those hot, passionate things; my parents never did get married—at least not to each other. I was born on October 30, 1941, in my grandmother Lucinda’s house, helped into this world by a midwife and handed over to my mother, a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Though my birth never put too big a crimp in Sonny One’s style, it changed my mother’s life. I was a baby when she moved to Detroit, leaving me behind with Grandmother Gooden. Extended-family ties ran deep, and this kind of arrangement was common there. Grandmother Gooden’s son didn’t have to be married to my mother for her to love me. Sonny One would come to visit us every so often, and I saw him in church because he was our deacon. But our relationship never developed into a day-to-day, father-and-son thing. I knew that he was my father, but he was not the type to say, “Come on, boy. Me and you are going to hang, and I’ll tell you about this and that.” Luckily, my grandmothers more than made up for any lack of parental guidance.

  Grandmother Gooden was the elder of my grandmothers. She’d been born only a couple of decades after emancipation. Grandmother Gooden took her job of raising me to be respectful and polite very seriously. She had worked very hard and owned her own house. Like Grandmother Lucinda Eliga and my mother’s father, Frank Fisher, Grandmother Gooden loved me more than anything in the world, but if I ever misbehaved or got out of pocket, she’d light up my butt, no questions asked.

  Both grandmothers loved the church, and every Sunday we sat in the hard wooden pews of the white, wood-frame church, listening to the Baptist preacher’s sermon and singing the hymns, all full of joy and hope and the love of God. Church was very important to us, and even the little ones would be called upon to take part in different church activities.

  By the time I was five or so, Haze had been in Detroit for several years. She came down for visits and sometimes took me up north with her for a few weeks at a time. We always sat together at the back of a Greyhound bus, eating fried chicken from a greasy paper bag. I recall just staring at her. She was very, very pretty, with gorgeous dark eyes and freckles. Although the few times we shared back then come back to me very clearly today, added up, it wasn’t a lot of time, and as I grew older I became more conscious of the fact that she wasn’t always around.

  At church they’d picked me to stand up and recite a little poem about Jesus for a special church meeting. Haze promised to be there for my recitation, and so Grandmother Gooden browbeat me for weeks before the recital. “Boy,” she would say, “you get in there and learn that now so you can make a good showing when your mother comes.” I practiced and practiced my poem. I wanted to make Haze proud.

  Came the big day, and I sat in church looking all around, waiting for Haze. After what felt like an eternity, the pastor called my name. I walked up to the front of the church, and my little heart broke when I saw that Haze wasn’t there. All the practice was for nothing if my mother wasn’t there, but I stood up and rattled off my poem. Everyone applauded. I was heading back to my seat, feeling crushed, when Haze walked in. She’d missed it. Grandmother Gooden talked to the pastor, who announced to the congregation that I would recite my poem again. I was just beaming, so happy to see my mother and to know that she hadn’t forgotten me.

  I also spent some time with Haze’s mother, Lucinda. She was born in 1899 in Hope, Arkansas, and was another God-fearing woman. She always used to cook me what we called hot water (pronounced “hot-ta-water”) bread, which is corn pone cooked on top of the stove in a big skillet full of hot water. Talk about something that’s good! Jesus! I couldn’t get enough of it. I close my eyes, and I can see Grandmother Eliga standing at the
stove, saying, “Otis, Granny’s fixin’ you some hot water bread,” and then she breaks into one of those sanctified shuffle dances, a lively kind of time step. She has one hand on the skillet handle and the other up in the air, her finger pointing to God. Her dress is flapping around her, because she’s really strutting it and carrying on, and singing one of those old spirituals: “I’m going to have a little talk with Jesus, tell him all about our troubles.”

  Although both grandmothers were strict Baptists, they also believed in some of the old ways, things like curing sicknesses with homemade remedies, different potions and salves concocted from herbs and roots. They also had knowledge of other methods of curing disease, such as Grandmother Lucinda’s treatment for my asthma. When I was older, she took me out to Belle Isle, near Detroit, and stood me up against a young sapling. As she marked my height on the scrawny trunk, she said, “Now, every year you grow older, and this tree grows older, your asthma will pass out of you.” And it did.

  The uses of the old learning went beyond breaking fevers and curing blisters. My mother’s father, Frank Fisher, who also cared for me, grew up in New Orleans and was full of tales about bizarre occurrences, superstitions, and maybe a little bit of voodoo. My grandmothers knew and spoke of the powers various herbs and mixtures had, and what really stuck in my mind was their talk about how a woman could put stuff in a man’s food to make him love her, or mix up something else to get back at him. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a really determined woman could fix a guy for good if she could just get a piece of his clothing or a few strands of his hair. My cousin Delores, I, and a few other cousins listened to this for hours, fascinated and scared out of our wits. My grandparents were very matter-of-fact about it and made it sound like all women knew this stuff. Just their way of talking about it made you believe every word. After a few hours of listening, I’d lie in my bed afraid to close my eyes.