The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (11 page)

After this year of unprecedented success for the Supremes, Berry Gordy had the three women, none of whom was represented by a lawyer, sign a new contract with Motown—a contract so one-sided that it became the model for all future Motown contracts. As under the previous contract, which the Supremes’ mothers had signed several years earlier, Motown would continue to keep complete control of the Supremes’ name, no matter who recorded under that name. If one Supreme was absent at a particular recording session and a substitute stood in for her, Motown would still call the resulting record a Supremes record but the absent Supreme would receive no royalties. Nothing in the contract required the company to make any recording of any songs sung by the women. If Motown allowed them to sit in the Motown building silently year after year, they’d sit there unpaid year after year. And if the company lost money on any particular recording, the contract allowed Motown to take it from any money the women might earn through live performances or other musical endeavors.

58

b

T
he
L
ost
S
upreme

In contrast to the previous contract, however, this new contract gave each member of the group 8 percent of 90 percent, a substantial raise from the three-fourths of one percent of 90 percent that they were receiving previously.

But this time, the percentages were applied to the wholesale price of the record, not its recommended retail price, as in the previous contract. The wholesale price was half the retail price. In other words, they were hogtied.

White record owners had taken advantage of black artists for years. Now Flo saw Gordy following in their footsteps. As she later remarked, “I’m telling you, the way Motown did some of those artists was a shame. We were just working, and Berry Gordy was the pimp; and we was like whatever you want to call it, we were making the money, and he was the only one prospering, not the artist.”

But these thoughts came later. At the time, Flo saw mostly good in Gordy.

She said she had “so much riding on him, faith, trust.” “I respected the guy for what he was. He would tell me, ‘Your money is being invested in stock, whatever; your money is in an account,’ with his signature on it and mine. He couldn’t draw without my signature; I couldn’t draw without his signature.

Where the account went, I don’t know. Where the stock went, I don’t know.”

Aside from this invested money, Flo and the other women would each receive a weekly allowance that would rise under the new contract from $50

a week each to $225 a week. As they had under their previous contract, the Supremes’ bank accounts grew, but slowly, since Motown continued to deduct from their royalties all the expenses of recording and producing their records, as well as the costs of sending them around the country and the world on tour.

As the number of their hits increased, the Supremes continued recording. They would record albums that included their own previous hits just before recording their next hoped-for hit. They’d also record at least two albums a year and 45s of all types—anything at all, in fact, to keep the

“Supremes” name in front of the public and ratchet up their revenues. This output included the albums
A Bit of Liverpool
,
The Supremes Sing Country
59

S
upremes at the
S
ummit
c

and Western and Pop
,
Merry Christmas
,
We Remember Sam Cooke
, and
Supremes
at the Copa
—in 1964 and 1965 alone.

Beyond television and recording, the Supremes’ nightclub performances were the centerpiece of their fame, especially their appearances at the Copacabana in New York City, where they debuted in July 1965. The Copa was home to the major superstars of the time, such as Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett. It was also the de facto gatekeeper for all the other upper-echelon nightclubs. As they say about New York itself, if you could make it at the Copa, you could make it anywhere.

Playing at the Copa, which served a largely white, well-heeled audience, meshed perfectly with Gordy’s crossover ambitions. To build the Supremes’

cross-racial appeal, he had them perform their latest hits interspersed with tunes from the likes of Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. The Supremes started the show on July 29, 1965, with “From This Moment On.” They then segued into “Put on a Happy Face,” performed three of their own hits, and went right into “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” After that they sang a female version of “King of the Road” called “Queen of the House,”

performed “Somewhere” from
West Side Story
, and finished with “You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You.” Not exactly a black-power set.

In all fairness, however, Gordy had chosen exactly the right mix for the Copa, and the Supremes’ appearance there was a massive success. Their triumph was partly due to the fact that something about the group’s elegant, feminine look fit the Copa aesthetic and the upper-crust circuit perfectly. In October 1965, after their Copa triumph, the Supremes would perform at Phil-harmonic Hall to a standing-room-only crowd.

By contrast, other Motown acts—Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Four Tops—all flopped at the Copa. It would be tempting to say that Copa audiences were partial to Motown women and less inclined to applaud Motown men, but the Temptations also did very well there—after an unnerving incident recounted in
The Temptations
by Otis 60

b

T
he
L
ost
S
upreme

Williams. Group member Melvin Franklin, who, like all the other Tempts, was wearing smooth-soled dancing shoes, tripped on some stray beads from a Copa Girl’s costume and spread-eagled himself all over the stage during a typical Tempts trot and twist. He recovered.

All three Supremes were ecstatic about the thunderous applause they received at the Copa and subsequently at other four-star nightclubs, although some aspects of playing the big clubs surprised Flo. “At all the clubs we were treated very well, very respectable,” she said. “Copacabana [owner] Jules Podell, he’s dead now, fantastic guy, anything we wanted, we got it. The audience was great, but it’s like the audience was sitting here and you’re right up there singing.

They’re sitting right up on you. There’s no stage, the stage was just the floor, and that took some getting used to. All the tables are sitting on the floor, and you’re on the floor also. But you can see very well. And at the Copa they have those girls come out first and dance, just like in the Pearl Bailey era.”

One 1965 performance at the Copa became the occasion for a historic meeting between the world’s two most popular singing groups, the Supremes and the Beatles.

“We were playing the Copa and they were playing somewhere in New York,” Flo said. “They had their manager call the Copa and say they wanted to meet us. And I said, ‘Oh wow! The Beatles want to meet us. We must really be somebody!”

By then the Supremes really
were
somebody, but the Beatles didn’t know what to make of them. The difference between reality and expectation on both sides was heightened by the fact that the Beatles were under siege and not at their best. Because the adulation to which they were subjected had become uncontrollable and dangerous, it had been decided to make this their last public tour. Lodged at the Warwick in Manhattan, as were the Supremes, they were trapped in their hotel by mobs of teenage girls who had surrounded the building. They protested by staying high.

61

S
upremes at the
S
ummit
c

The Supremes, anxious to meet the top male vocal group of all time, performed their first show of the night at the Copa, and during the break before the second show they rushed to the Warwick to meet with the Beatles in their hotel room. You can feel their excitement as they hustled toward the Beatles’

suite, imagining a glamorous, perhaps romantic meeting, and also perhaps sense their disappointment as they found the romantic British pop stars . . .

playing with toys, giggling inexplicably, and behaving in an excessively silly manner. Flo was surprised to see that the four superstars “had little cars they would wind up and scoot across the floor. We had time to talk, but they were too busy playing with their cars. When I saw them doing that, I looked and said, ‘They’re kind of strange.’”

The meeting was marred by an awkward silence most of the time. One of the Beatles would ask the women a question, they would answer, and the silence would descend again. Then someone would tell a joke, and everyone would giggle nervously.

From the Beatles’ point of view, as recounted in
The Beatles
by Bob Spitz, the Supremes looked like little porcelain figures outfitted in precious day dresses and little fur wraps. This surprised and disappointed the British singers, who had expected the Supremes to be rebels, as the Beatles imagined themselves to be. George Harrison later told Mary Wilson that the Beatles couldn’t believe three black girls from Detroit could be so square.

The British thought that everything the Beatles did was outlandish. They desecrated the Union Jack by making fun of it! Their hair was too long! They sang like girls! Their accents were low class! What the Beatles perhaps hadn’t realized was that the Supremes were going the other way entirely: they wanted to fit in with affluent whites and sell records to the respectable boys and girls whose mothers and fathers provided them with copious allowances. By seek-ing these goals, they were committing an implied and peaceful assault on segregation, but outside the South this was hardly a rebellion.

62

b

T
he
L
ost
S
upreme

Since the Beatles were obviously eager to get back to other things, the Supremes left quickly, with the excuse that they had to rush back to the Copa for their second show.

But Flo rose above the incident and saw the bright side even when, in the view of others, a mini-fiasco had occurred. “They’re some hell of writers,”

she said years later. “All the tunes they made I was crazy about. They have a lot of meaning to me.”

Performing at major clubs required a special set of musicians who could easily work with, and keep up with, the Supremes. It also required many more costume changes than the women had been used to. In fact, the number of costume changes went from zero to twelve or more per show. The Supremes wore white gowns, multicolored sequined dresses, pink chiffon outfits, plain pink fitted dresses beaded across the bustline, green semiflair gowns with jackets that were beaded at the top, and of course their black outfits. They didn’t stint on expenses. “Our personal dresses would cost maybe a hundred, two hundred; then we bought the perfume that cost so much an ounce. One year I spent $4,000 on clothes. That’s not much, especially if you’re a millionaire,” Flo said sarcastically, reflecting what Gordy was telling her about her net worth.

The Supremes’ financial situation worsened when the women started to let their popularity influence their spending. “We had charge accounts at Saks, Hudson’s, and places like that,” Florence said. “Whatever we charged, the bill didn’t come to us; it went to Motown and was paid by Motown out of the account. We started buying stuff after we got that second million-seller [“Baby Love”]. We all got charge plates at Saks. We started buying nice clothes, $100

dresses [a high price in the 1960s]. Well, hell, we were millionaires—we had to dress like it. Plus we were playing at all the big, plush clubs. In other words we had to have a personal wardrobe that had to be sharp. We had to walk into the club sharp. Maybe we didn’t have to, but we did. It was fantastic to be able to go out and buy everything we wanted and put it on and look like a million dollars.”

63

S
upremes at the
S
ummit
c

The women often talked among themselves about the clubs at which they appeared. Flo couldn’t shake the memory of an incident that occurred in Boston’s Coconut Grove club. “I was in the dressing room, and the lamp fell off the table. The place started shaking. I didn’t know they had earthquakes there. I never knew that. I said, ‘God, why did the lamp fall off the table?’

They said, ‘Oh, that’s an earth tremor.’ I said, ‘What!?’ I was ready to get the hell out of there.” (Some may be surprised to learn that Boston, like San Francisco, suffers from earthquakes. A quake in 1775 was strong enough to knock a statue off Boston’s Faneuil Hall.)

Sometimes the Supremes were preceded by warm-up acts such as chorus lines or comedians, including Rodney Dangerfield and Flip Wilson. “We did a nightclub engagement in Cleveland, and Flip Wilson was just starting out; he was the comedian there,” Flo said. “Flip had been trying for so many years, because we used to see him around different places we would go, and it seemed like Flip was just trying and trying. I’ll never forget that he was starting out at those little bitty clubs and then, boom! He hit it big.”

Logistically, the tours were arduous. “Whenever we did the Copacabana, that was for, like, two weeks,” Florence said. “Then we would go to Boston and play at the club there for two weeks. We’d go back and forth at different times.” The women would rush from the Clay House Inn in Bermuda to Blin-strubs in Boston to the Safari Room in San Jose to the Twin Coaches in Pitts-burgh, back to Detroit, and then back out again.

The strain of constant work had been bearing down on them since their first hit. The Supremes’ lives basically consisted of recording studio, nightclub performance, rehearsal, and bed—usually alone. Their social life was, and had to be, limited. They worked so constantly that they didn’t have a chance to spend money on anything except their careers, and homes they rarely visited. (The women had all purchased homes, complete with mortgages, on the same street in Detroit.) A visitor to Diane’s Detroit home concluded that the singer had never cooked on the stove nor even sat down in the kitchen, so rarely was she there.

64

b

T
he
L
ost
S
upreme