Originally Posted by
telekin
But from another perceptive, how did women - black women at that, exert agency in an industry that was/is largely hostile to them? I can see why singers like Aretha and Melba Moore, to name just a couple, had their brutal husbands take charge of their careers. In almost all cases even when it was successful professionally, it ended terribly in their personal lives. Obviously there was an element of control there too, but also a sense that as a woman, they needed someone who could fight for them among all the other similarly brutal men who held power in the business.
The way I see it, Mary was backed into a corner at the time. The relationship with Motown was poisoned by this time. Given how Motown politics worked, they couldn't act as a group's management like they once did, but they got around that with "inside" and "outside" managers. So, for a group like The Supremes, perhaps you toed the line and got an “inside” manager, but you still weren’t getting anywhere. You never really knew if your managers were working for your benefit or for Motown’s. Mary’s efforts to own the name were stymied and Motown wasn’t going to let another group get away with their name after The Tempts and the Four Tops did, so she couldn't use that as leverage to go get a better deal elsewhere. At this point, she was left to fight from the inside, it seemed.
If anything, Pedro was someone who had legal training, unlike her, and someone who, at least in her mind, she could rely on to fight for her interests, which were increasingly the group’s interests, no matter what.
Granted, I wasn’t there, so I am only bringing this up for argument’s sake. Pedro may have been better, or even worse than any of us imagined as a manager. But it always rubbed me the wrong way whenever I see people on this forum and elsewhere suggest that there were zero rational reasons behind Mary putting Pedro in that position. Like it had to have been because she was “dickmatized” or something, not because of all the other pressures around or in the context of what other women in her position were also doing.
A somewhat related anecdote - in the aftermath of RTL, I joined a lot of the Supremes fan groups on Yahoo! I think they might have been called Yahoo Clubs at the time. Unfortunately all of those messages are lost to the ether now. Anyway, I remember Susaye had her own group at the time. Not sure if Susaye still checks these forums, but I remember at one point the topic of Pedro came up. And while I can't recall the exact statements word-for-word, I do remember being surprised by her assessment, which was a lot less harsh than I and perhaps many of the other group members had expected it to be.
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