The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (10 page)

“The song was different, simple, and had good timing,” Flo remarked, having revised her opinion after the song took off. “People started going crazy over us.” As often as they could, the three women would rush to buy
Billboard
or
Cashbox
to see how far up the charts their first hit had climbed.

Although some in the company were still rooting for Flo as the lead Supreme, “Where Did Our Love Go?” would help cement that job for Diane.

The song, which began with the memorable hammered-out phrase “Ba-by, 50

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Ba-by,” was written to be sung by a girlish type, and that was Diane to a T.

Small and delicate, with big, wide eyes and a high-pitched voice, she was perfect as the lead singer on a song that pleaded flirtatiously with the dominant male to whom it was addressed. Flo—tall, voluptuous, and deep-voiced—

wasn’t built for the part. She was also a strong and independent woman, very much like Motown stars Martha Reeves and Mary Wells, both of whom would later leave the company.

As “Where Did Our Love Go?” shot skyward on the charts, Gordy called the Supremes and told them to fly home from California rather than take the bus. It was the first plane ride any of them had ever taken, and they shortly discovered they would be catching planes almost every day after that for months on end. Their climb had begun.

Flo remarked, “I really liked catching a plane because my back was killing me, and my seat was swelling on all those buses.” She also noted, “Thirty days of that can kill you. It can. It can.”

After their return from the tour, the Supremes were told that travel expenses had eaten up more than their earnings. The cost of publicity, second-rate motel rooms, and carry-out meals aside, Motown paid the women who’d just hit #1 nothing for their three months on the bus tour.

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A hell of a singer, probably the strongest of the
three girls.

—Marvin Gaye, on Florence Ballard

Berry Gordy
congratulated Flo, Mary, and Diane with unusual warmth when they returned to Detroit from the Dick Clark tour. No longer were they the “No-Hit Supremes.” “Where Did Our Love Go?” had turned them into the “Group with a Future.” But the Supremes were hardly alone in producing a hit for Motown that year. Others included “The Way You Do the Things You Do” by the Temptations, “You’re a Wonderful One” by Marvin Gaye (with strong backing vocals by Flo), and “My Guy” by Mary Wells. “After a while it was like Dial-a-Hit,” says a former Motown songwriter. “Just like dialing the fire department.”

But Flo, Mary, and Diane had definitely become stars, and underneath all their excited and self-congratulatory thoughts lurked the terrible twin questions: Can we stay on the fast track to fame and fortune? and Will Diane sing lead on every song?

Their first priority was to get their act into tip-top shape. The second was to play the major venues worldwide and be dazzlingly successful at them. The third was to fight it out for group dominance. The first step took place in private, the second in front of millions, and the third, behind closed doors.

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Although it may seem odd now to think of Florence Ballard as the potential leader of a group that later became Diana Ross and the Supremes, it was anything but odd when the group began its climb. Marvin Gaye saw Flo as

“a hell of a singer, probably the strongest of the three girls.”

This strong singer was now part of a hit-making group in training. Maurice King, who reigned as Motown’s Artist Development maestro, taught them their singing parts for each new song. (The parts were different for each woman, since they were performing in three-part harmony.) King and Motown choreographer Cholly Atkins mapped out their stage act down to the last hand gesture.

Atkins had had a lot of experience mapping out stage acts. Born Charles Atkinson, he had won a dance contest early in life and gone on to a long career in show business. In 1946, he and Charles “Honi” Coles formed the team of Coles and Atkins. They toured with the Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Lionel Hampton bands. Later on, Atkins choreographed Little Anthony and the Imperials, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Cadillacs, the Cleftones, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Moonglows. Where Cholly was, chore-ography followed.

King and Atkins concentrated mostly on Mary and Flo, not because they were any less skilled than Diane but because Diane, who had most of the leads, had more freedom to move on her own, whereas Mary and Flo performed strictly choreographed routines that kept them behind their mikes. This rankled. Modeling teacher Maxine Powell taught manners and techniques to all three Supremes. It wasn’t easy to climb out of the back seat of a limo or up onto a piano wearing a miniskirt and retain any dignity.

Since the Supremes had had only one hit so far and their tunes before that had been less than memorable, they learned a raft of standard tunes, such as

“Put on a Happy Face” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” Their plan was to mix these standards in with their one hit and what they hoped would be their future hits. All that mixing, however, required them to rush into the recording studio as soon as they returned from the road, record a tune that had been pre-53

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c pared for them while they were away, and then rush back out on tour, hoping the song they had just recorded would rise to the top of the charts while they were out performing. If it did, they would then be able to sing it live for the first time to an audience that would by then be demanding its performance.

There was no question that the Motown spotlight was now on the Supremes. Gordy kept urging his producers to make their best efforts for the group, yet for a while none of the songs they recorded during these brief breaks between nightclub engagements managed to rise to #1. Still, Gordy was optimistic about the Supremes’ prospects and sent them, along with many other Motown acts, to tour England in October 1964. This tour was much different for Flo and her friends than the domestic Motortown Revue Tours, on which they had been hangers-on at best. This time, they were the stars.

Gordy was optimistic about Motown’s prospects in Europe. For years, white English groups had been covering and rerecording black music for the English market. Gordy had a hunch that English buyers would be interested in the real thing if they were exposed to it. The company’s English contacts weren’t encouraging, however. English record retailers had told Motown executives that there were too many tambourines on the company’s records and that English record buyers didn’t like tambourines.

There was another potential problem. The established English radio stations looked down their noses at black records and often refused to play them.

But pitching and rolling in the icy waters just outside British territorial limits were modern-day pirate ships, seaborne radio stations broadcasting illegally into England. The pirates were determined to show their power by making hits out of records the legal stations wouldn’t even play. With pirate support, the Supremes, at least, were successful.

The ground for their arrival had been well prepared. Growing prosperity and parental permissiveness in 1950s England had allowed groups of mostly young white men to dress sharp, hang out at clubs all night, and use amphet-amines. Called “Mods,” short for “Moderns,” they were intent on being fash-ionable and discerning not only in their choice of clothing but also of music.

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Since British pop charts at the time were dominated by white hits, the Mods reacted by becoming major fans of rhythm and blues, produced mostly by black Americans, and quickly jumped on the Motown bandwagon.

The Supremes started out the tour riding English buses between engagements, “and their buses are even worse, I mean really worse” than American buses, Florence noted. “But eventually we were able to get a limousine, which we got because we were making big money there. . . . It was really a ball over there, except I couldn’t get used to the food. . . . But the people were just fantastic. They were just all around the airport with so many beautiful flowers.”

While the group was touring England, “Baby Love,” which they’d recorded over the summer, started climbing the charts, hitting #1 on October 25, 1964.

In fact, life in Europe got better and better as time went on. “Other than the food, Europe was a ball,” Flo said. “One thing I liked there was the clothes, the way they dressed over there. . . . I like the discotheques there, the places to go. And they had lots of places to go for entertainment.

“There’s a guy in the Animals who wanted to take me out one night. I think he came up to my shoulder (in height), and I said, ‘Oh no, that would never do.’ But we all left and got together at the disco and danced and had a ball, let our hair down, then went back to the hotel, went to sleep, got up.

. . . It was relaxing to go to the discos and get away from our work. It was relaxing to sit back and watch somebody else work, to sit around, listen to music, drink, have a dance, unwind.”

The Supremes were on a fast path to the top, and the three women were still, at this point, clearly able to enjoy spending time together.

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I said, ‘Oh wow! The Beatles want to meet us.

We must really be somebody!’

—Florence Ballard

Once back in
the states, the Supremes wouldn’t get much chance for another rest break. “We began to do a lot of TV work,” Flo said. “
Ed Sullivan
,
Hollywood Palace
, places like that. . . . After people see you on TV, nightclub owners and like that, then they’ll start hiring you. And the offers began to roll in; boy, did they roll in . . . the Copacabana, Coconut Grove . . .”

The Supremes’ popularity grew, as Flo noted, as a result of their repeat appearances on national television programs. They were the guests of Steve Allen, Red Skelton, and Dean Martin, the TV icons of their time. But most important of all was
The Ed Sullivan Show
, at the time an unprecedented maker or breaker of pop acts.

A former reporter for the New York
Daily News
, Ed Sullivan wasn’t hand-some; he bent too far forward, held his hands together either behind or in front of him or stood on stage with his arms folded, pronounced “show” as

“shew,” blew his lines regularly, and often mumbled incoherently. But TV was so new and insecure at the time that CBS executives decided that a man such as Sullivan, credentialed by the New York
Daily News
—an obviously solid social institution—and a former MC of some war relief performances during 55

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World War II, had the best shot at winning audience acceptance for their national variety show. The show was a major success. At eight o’clock every Sunday night, millions of people gathered round their TV sets to watch and listen to the entertainers Sullivan had chosen for them. He introduced more than ten thousand musical and performing acts and artists to the American people from 1948 through 1971. Sullivan was the star maker of the age.

The Supremes’ first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on December 27, 1964, was a nail-biter. “The first time we did the Sullivan show we almost didn’t get on,” Flo said. “There was something about his show, they say it’s always best to be second or third on his show because if for some reason the show runs over, and you’re the last one on, you won’t get on, you won’t get on at all. [On that first show] we almost didn’t make it. We were supposed to do two tunes, but we could only do one. After that, we began to be pushed up to the front of the show.”

Those who see videotapes of
The Ed Sullivan Show
will find themselves amazed all over again at the changes in show business since the 1960s.
The
Ed Sullivan Show
was America’s major national television show, yet the Supremes were backed on stage with what looked like a large piece of white paper, and they were fronted with one lone microphone on a stand, into which all of them attempted to sing.

Nevertheless, the Supremes’ appearance on the show, singing their third consecutive #1 hit, “Come See About Me,” was a major step for the three women. Before this point, they had been intruders in the vast, white, middle-class culture that governed American acceptance. The show cemented their national and cross-cultural appeal, and they were invited back many times.

“We appeared on his show so many times,” Flo said. “He got to know us then, and it got to the point where after we would finish doing a number, he would come over and talk to us. That’s when we knew we were stars. . . .

We became very close to Ed Sullivan, and a lot of people used to ask me,

‘Well, how is he? Is he mean?’ and I said, ‘No, he’s a very, very nice man; he’s 57

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very sweet to me.’ He talked backstage with the same voice that he talked with out front. That’s his natural thing.”

The Supremes also knew they had arrived when the Coca-Cola Company hired them to do commercials for its soft drinks in May 1965. That same month they did a ten-day stint in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Flo was impressed by the sheer volume of the money changing hands. “In those ten days we grossed over $100,000. Boy, I sure wish I could have gotten my hands on it.”

But perhaps the pinnacle of the Supremes’ popularity occurred in August of that year, when the Mission Control Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Houston played “Where Did Our Love Go?” for the
Gemini 5
astronauts who were then orbiting the earth. Those now jaded by the space shuttle’s comings and goings cannot grasp what awe the astronauts inspired in the 1960s. For the Supremes, having one of their songs beamed to
Gemini 5
astronauts, who were at the center of the world’s attention that day, was an honor of the highest order.