The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (12 page)

Sometimes success made the Supremes paranoid and also stressed out their entourage. On one of their early tours, the Supremes’ road manager whose job it was to collect the group’s money at each engagement took in more than $100,000 in cash during the first five days of the tour. “We had so much Goddamn money I couldn’t believe it,” he said. He changed the money into thousand-dollar bills to reduce its bulk but still felt nervous carrying it around. Then he divided it for carrying purposes among the backup musicians, the three Supremes, and himself, but he still had night-mares. He eventually panicked, buying eight pistols, two each for himself and two each for three of the other men escorting the group. They all walked around warily with their thousand-dollar bills and their guns, but no one tried to rob them.

Although money was all around them, Flo had no idea how much the Supremes were earning or how much was being put aside for her. Neither did Mary and Diane. In their financial innocence, the Supremes were and still are joined by many other pop musicians whose inclinations, upbring-ing, and lifestyle, coupled with the traditions of the music business, can sometimes make them allergic to precisely the knowledge they need to protect their interests.

In spite of all the effort the Supremes were putting into their round-the-clock schedule, Flo said, “All the money we made would go back to Motown except for the allowance we were getting, $225 a week. We would get the gowns, but there was an account set up for the Supremes, and out of that account, whatever we bought, it was paid for by the Supremes account. . . .

Motown never paid for anything.
We
paid for it. I didn’t have a business mind.

I didn’t know that we should have seen the contracts. I should have known how much we were making for each engagement. The money should have been placed in our hands. The only thing they were supposed to take was their percentage, and the rest was supposedly to go to us.”

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The clubs they performed in may have varied, but the Supremes’ act didn’t, at least in its early days. “Every now and then maybe we’d take out a tune,” Flo said. “If the first show would go overtime, then maybe we’d have to shorten the second show, and we’d just pull out a tune or something. And then sometimes we would add a new tune to the show. But basically the show stayed the same, stayed the same.”

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They kept talking and talking and talking, looking at us from the feet on up. I said, ‘God, we
must be some kind of freaks.’”

—Florence Ballard, on an

experience in Japan

The year 1966
saw the Supremes in some surprising situations and locations as they toured the world.

Berry Gordy had become friends with Lord and Lady Londonderry, direct descendants of William the Conqueror. The name “Londonderry” has loomed large in British history ever since. The present Lord Londonderry is an intriguing and charming man. His second wife, Doreen Wells, was in the 1960s and early ’70s the most acclaimed ballerina in Britain. That may explain why Lord Londonderry was interested in entertainers in the 1960s, and why Gordy sent the three very entertaining Supremes and their road manager to stay for more than a week at Lord and Lady Londonderry’s stately home, also known as Wynyard Park.

Wynyard Park is not far from London, but in Flo’s mind, they had been abandoned in the dark and dangerous English countryside. “It was very spooky,” Flo said. “And so were Lord and Lady Londonderry. They looked 67

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like they were here and they weren’t here. They were just the strangest-looking people to me. . . . I don’t know where Berry Gordy came up with the idea for us to stay out there; I don’t even know how he knew these people. Lord Londonderry showed me all around the estate, and I’m sorry I went, because he showed me their mausoleum. I saw it and said ‘I’m getting the hell out of here, quick!’ . . . I did not go into the mausoleum; I don’t think any of us went in. The only place I’d seen anything like it was in the movies.”

Florence was so shocked by the idea of entering a place of death that she didn’t notice that at least one and possibly both of the other Supremes went inside the structure and admired it.

On high alert in the rural darkness, Flo soon realized that “the Londonderrys left us there. . . . And then I really became suspicious. The first night we ate in one of those big dining rooms with servants. I was looking out the window—it was pitch black out there, no lights—and I kept seeing something big moving. Turned out it was their Black Angus cattle.

“Then we all went to bed in adjoining rooms with all the doors all open between them. I got into bed, and my feet hit something. All three of us did the same thing. ‘What the hell was that?’ we all screamed and ran out and met up in the hall and then started laughing about it.” The Londonderrys’

servants had placed a hot water bottle in the bottom of each bed to warm their guests’ feet.

“For a while it was just the three of us and our road manager, Donald Foster,” Flo said. “Then Lord Londonderry came back and stayed a while.

And I swear, every night we were all having us a drink. After a week we got kind of used to it. We figured out nothing was going to bother us. But I swear, when they said we were leaving, I looked up and said, ‘Thank you, God.’”

In September 1966 the Supremes took off for Vietnam. “We were going to perform in Vietnam at first,” said Flo, “but then they canceled out because the war was getting really bad there. They said they were bombing like mad.

We were going to entertain the troops there and visit the hospitals. But we landed in Vietnam only for refueling. I’ll never forget those airports, just pitch 69

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black, no lights whatsoever; at least I didn’t see any, and they were telling us not to get off the plane at all, because they were putting fuel in the plane and then taking right back off.

“We took off and landed in Okinawa [ Japan], and there we visited the hospitals and saw all the soldiers who had been wounded in Vietnam. . . .

One guy was shot, and they didn’t even have him bandaged; they’d just sewn him up, and the stitches were like a ‘Z,’ starting on his shoulder and all the way down. He had been shot by a machine gun. And this other guy, both his eyes were gone; a grenade had blown up in his face. He was touching us and saying, ‘I’m just so happy that you all are here,’ and he was holding on to us and said, ‘I’m going back home now; I’m injured. They don’t need me anymore here. But I’ll be glad to get back to the States.’

“I looked at one guy, especially the guy that was shot with the machine gun, and my head started swirling. I got real dizzy, and I could hardly stand to look at all of them anymore, no legs, no arms. . . . I just got sick. . . . I’d heard about the war, how bad it was, and how the guys were being blown up and this and that, but to see it was—phew!—too much. We performed in the ward, singing along with the record, but I could hardly even sing along with the record. We had this little record player, and we were singing along with it and just doing dance steps. The ones that could see us could see us, and the ones that lost their eyes—they were just sitting and listening.”

The three Detroiters went on to Manila, and then to Tokyo, where Flo encountered Asian curiosity. “We went shopping and were in this big store trying to buy this Japanese material to have some Japanese dresses made,” Flo said. After about half an hour, “all of a sudden a large group of Japanese women” rushed over and surrounded them. “It scared the hell out of me because they had us in a circle. I didn’t know whether they were going to attack, or what. I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ and one girl who could speak English said they’d never seen black American women before. . . . They kept talking and talking and talking, looking at us from the feet on up. I said, ‘God, we must be some kind of freaks.’”

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In Tokyo, photographers took pictures of Flo, Mary, and Diane, who had since January started going by “Diana,” dressed like geisha girls. Florence noted that the wigs they wore for these photos weighed twenty-five pounds each.

Although the Supremes didn’t perform in Hong Kong, they spent a day in that city, where Florence continued to react to the differences between Detroit and urban Asia. She noted that “these people were just living on top of each other, they would hang their clothes out, they lived in big buildings, they had clothes hanging out the window on lines. They’d be walking down the street smoking weed, marijuana, as if it was nothing. They had it in their pipes. They’d be walking down the street smoking it as if it was tobacco. I mean, you could smell it so thick.” She segued into her own history, or lack thereof, with drugs.

“I don’t smoke marijuana, although the majority of people I know do. I never tried any dope at all. I was always told when I was a child about dope.

My mother really talked to me about marijuana. When I was a little girl, I never heard anything about heroin. As a matter of fact, I just learned how to pronounce ‘heroin’ about three years ago. I used to call it ‘heron.’ . . . I basically don’t see anything wrong with smoking marijuana, but when it comes down to this cocaine, heroin, and stuff like that, then I got no use for you; you have to get away from me then.”

The Supremes’ earlier gig in Puerto Rico in January had been much more pleasant. “The people were enthusiastic about us. Plus, there were quite a few vacationing Americans there,” Flo remembered. [Puerto Ricans also are Americans, but Flo’s terms of reference are widely shared.] “They even had another lounge at the hotel where the Supremes were performing that featured Puerto Rican acts, so we would finish our show and then go over in the same hotel and watch the Puerto Rican show. Then we’d go over to old San Juan and do a little dancing. I danced with the Puerto Ricans I met there—nice, friendly gentlemen who never did anything out of the way. We’d just go down there after the show and dance and then go on upstairs and go to sleep, then get up and go to work.”

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It was in Puerto Rico that twenty-three-year-old Florence met a college student named Roger Pearson, “a white guy, very good looking,” she said, with whom she had a relationship. “I swear he used to follow me everywhere,” Flo said. “I’d look up, and there was Roger. He was a millionaire and very nice.

I think his father owned Dreyfus Funds, or something like that. [Roger Pearson’s father, Samuel Pearson, was in fact closely connected to the Dreyfus Fund and its founder, Jack Dreyfus. Samuel Pearson, Samuel Strasbourger, and Robert Tulcin were originally Dreyfus’s partners in the 1960s.] He’d come out on the road, and we’d go out and have dinner and stuff like that together; then he’d leave and go back to college—that was that. He followed us anywhere, but only in the States. He popped up in Florida one time, and he popped up in Washington, D.C. I began to get used to him popping up.

“He would come to the room. He knew how to get through. Everybody knew him—Diane knew him, Mary knew him—he became just like a friend.

. . . When we were playing in New York, he was in this steel gray Rolls-Royce.

That was the first time I saw a Rolls-Royce. Berry Gordy didn’t even have a Rolls-Royce then. He wanted to take me out that night in the Rolls-Royce after the performance, and I told him I was too tired. Very good-looking guy.

Oh wow, I can imagine what he looks like now. Blue eyes . . . the sharpest physique in this world. But I don’t know. The only thing I could be to him was a friend. I guess he just didn’t appeal to me.”

Today Roger Pearson is a successful attorney who has served as first select-man (mayor) of Greenwich, Connecticut, and ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for Congress in 1988 in Connecticut’s Fourth Congressional District. Diana Ross also was a Greenwich resident, until 2006. Pearson said he met Diana Ross on a Greenwich street on one occasion, and she didn’t recognize him. There’s no doubt, however, that Flo would have recognized Pearson. “We were together for one and a half years. . . . We were pretty close.

We were a couple,” Pearson said, his definition of their relationship varying slightly from Flo’s.

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Pearson’s recollection is that his first meeting with Flo took place while he and his brother Michael were vacationing in San Juan. To celebrate Roger’s twentieth birthday, the two went looking for entertainment at the El San Juan Hotel, discovered that the Supremes were performing there, and bought tickets to the show. Pearson recalled, “They were a hit. They did a very slick show.”

After the show he met Flo by chance in the hotel casino. “She looked at me, I looked at her, and I told her that I had enjoyed her music,” he said.

From then on they got together whenever they could. After the Supremes had finished a performance at the Yale Bowl, they all piled into his 1963 Pontiac Tempest and went bowling, but Flo had to cut the evening short because she split her pants, said Pearson.

On another occasion, after one of the group’s shows at the Copa, their evening was dampened by the fact that there was a dead body with a sheet over it lying in the street outside. A New York City police officer had been arguing with a buddy when the friend became enraged and struck the officer on the head, killing him.

Pearson said that when he and Flo went out together in New York City in the 1960s, which they often did, he still felt slightly uneasy about other people’s opinion of the daring step they were taking across the race barrier:

“I never knew,” he said, “if the stares were for her or for us or for both.”

Pearson and Flo went out frequently during 1966 and the first half of 1967, including every night when the Supremes were performing at the Copa, Pearson said. Previously, he had served as a congressional intern and met then-congressman Gerald Ford in Washington, D.C. Later, after Pearson became friendly with the Supremes, he spotted the congressman in a Supremes audience when they were performing at a D.C. hotel and took the future president up to the Supremes’ suite with him to visit with the women after the show.