The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (13 page)

In heady company for a college kid, Pearson spent his evenings in the Copa audience with celebrities such as Richard Burton, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Joe Louis and his nights dancing at the scorching hot Ginza nightclub in Manhattan with Flo, Diana, Mary, Martha Reeves, and Gordy.

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From Flo’s point of view, she said, “I liked guys I could have a lot of fun with. And I had a lot of fun with Roger because quite a few times we’d go out to dinner or we’d go to a discotheque and dance the monkey, the jerk, all that kind of stuff. We’d have a ball.”

Pearson said the relationship ended because “you know how young people are. We drifted apart.” He also noted, “Tommy Chapman came into her life about that time.”

Thomas “Tommy” Chapman was “Berry’s chauffeur, flunky, whatever you want to call it,” said Flo. “Tommy would pack Gordy’s stuff, his suit and clothes and this and that. He also worked with Mary.

“I was kind of a standoffish type,” Flo said. “I wasn’t that interested in too many guys. I never have been. One was always enough for me.” She also discussed the love lives of her fellow Supremes: “Mary had a friend in Puerto Rico. . . . Very good-looking Puerto Rican. He was crazy about Mary; I mean
crazy
. He was real jealous. But she ended up marrying another Puerto Rican, Pedro Ferrer [Ferrer was from a Dominican family; his father was a banker in Puerto Rico]. . . . Diane dated Timmy Brown [of the Philadelphia Eagles].

. . . I don’t think there was too much to it. That’s the only person I can remember her dating, except for Berry Gordy.”

By 1969 the gossip columns would call Gordy and Ross “constant companions,” and the question most asked about them was why they didn’t marry.

Gordy said in 1970 that he and Ross “haven’t chosen to be married for several reasons.” Then he laughed and added that he had “tried to marry her a couple of times. But why should she marry me when she’s got me already?

She’s free, rich, and talented. Get married for what?”

Shortly after Gordy issued this statement, Ross would become pregnant with Gordy’s child, later named Rhonda. During the pregnancy she married Gordy’s friend, a public relations executive named Robert Ellis Silberstein, who was aware of Rhonda’s parentage. “The whole company is surprised and hurt by it,” a Motown executive said of the marriage. The company may have been surprised and hurt, but Gordy’s feelings at the time remain unclear. He and 74

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Silberstein continued their friendship, often traveling together. Ross and Silberstein divorced in 1977, after having two daughters of their own. In October 1985, Ross married Norwegian businessman Arne Naess Jr. She saw a kindred spirit in Naess. He was divorced, had three children and, like Ross, had an ambition that wouldn’t quit. “My ambitions are like a mountain without a summit,” Naess once said. “When you have the top in sight, there’s always another peak over the rise, further on and higher up.” The couple had two sons but separated in 1999 and later divorced. Naess died in a mountain-climbing accident in Africa in 2004.

But Diana’s romantic relationships were not uppermost in Flo’s mind back in the mid- to late 1960s. She had her own deteriorating relationship with the Supremes to worry about.

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Flo was the one with the voice.

—Tony Turner,
All That Glittered: My

Life with the Supremes

The Supremes had
started as girlhood friends, worked their way to the top as hardworking young women, and gained international fame as talented, glamorous superstars. Along the way, their friendship had been sorely tested, and the struggle for each woman’s position within the group had become increasingly bitter. Florence had been allowed to do the lead on “Buttered Popcorn” and on the Sam Cooke hit “Ain’t That Good News.” On
The Ed Sullivan Show
, Flo and Diana had performed “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” almost as a duet, with Flo’s strong voice filling out and underscoring every word sung by Diana. Flo’s voice can also be heard in all its glory in the two other recorded Supremes songs in which she was featured as the lead, “Hey Baby” and “Heavenly Father.” In Detroit, one critic had commented, “The group has two lead singers, and only one is being featured.” Otis Williams of the Temptations wrote that Flo’s voice “had a real depth of feeling and a strong churchy sound. When Flo opened her mouth to sing, you sat up in your chair.”

But as the Supremes’ star had risen, Florence had begun to feel her role diminish. In February 1963, when the group had been recording a country and western album on which Florence had been given the lead on one of the 75

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tunes, according to Flo, Diana broke off the recording, walked into the control room, and told the producers that she was the lead singer for all the songs.

“Mary and I heard it through the earphones, and neither one of us could believe it,” Flo said. “We had started out as children—that’s what we were, fourteen or fifteen—and I felt that because of our relationship, because we were as close as I thought we were, the lead should have been spread around, as in ‘You do this, and I’ll do that.’ But it wasn’t. Diane wanted the complete lead, the complete control of the group.”

And Diana kept getting what she wanted. Flo had originally been slated to sing the lead on “The House of the Rising Sun” on the Supremes album
A Bit of Liverpool
, but that was taken from her. She and Diana had shared the lead on the song “Manhattan,” meant for
The Supremes Sing Rodgers &
Hart
, but the song was cut from the album and not released until 1986, ten years after Flo’s death. When Flo did the “Silent Night” lead for a Christmas album, the recorded track was mysteriously “messed up,” in Flo’s words, and not released for many years.

Flo’s last remaining lead, in “People (Who Need People),” had been taken from her in one of several dramatic ways—depending on whom you believe—

in the summer of 1965. (That the Supremes competed fiercely over who would do the lead on “People” and other tunes made popular by Barbra Streisand says much about the depth and doggedness of Gordy’s crossover dream.) The lead on “People” was tailor-made for Florence’s soulful sound and not at all suited to Diane’s voice, and at first the women were very democratic about it: Flo was assigned the lead at the beginning of the song, and Diana took the lead in the middle of the tune. Florence even thought the “People”

lead should be spread around among all three singers. There was recent precedent for this—when the group had recorded a country album, each woman had sung a verse of the lead on one song, Willie Nelson’s “It Makes No Difference Now.” As Flo later said, “It’s a heavy load to get up there and do two shows a night, with the lead on every song. But Diane wanted to be the lead singer on every song.”

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c And Gordy agreed that she should be. According to Nelson George, author of
Where Did Our Love Go?
, Berry dismissed Flo’s aspirations as a lead performer at a rehearsal at a Detroit nightclub, the Roostertail, in front of most of the Motown brass. Flo was allegedly only four bars into “People” when Gordy told her to stop. “Let Diana do the song,” Gordy said. Flo flinched visibly and began crying, according to George.

According to Mary Wilson’s account, however, the Copa was the site of a less dramatic scene. Wilson wrote that Harvey Fuqua, a Motown employee in charge of the company’s Artist Development Department, merely

“announced” that Flo would no longer perform “People.” Many wondered about the announcement, since Flo had performed the tune on opening night at the Copa and, even though she had just recovered from the flu, sounded terrific. “A couple of nights later, however, Diane was singing it,” Wilson wrote.

According to Wilson, “We all suspected that Berry had taken the song from Flo, but Flo was thoroughly convinced of it, and she was crushed. How much more of the spotlight did Diane need? From that moment on, Flo regarded what was in fact the highest achievement of our career as a disaster. She was sad and moody, and I could see the three of us being torn apart.”

Wilson wrote that Flo’s response was to get defensive—“Understandably so. A talented singer and the founder of the group, Flo felt her professional existence was being threatened.”

All Flo would say in 1975 was “They stopped me from singing the lead on ‘People.’ They said the show was too long or something.”

With that, the battle for lead singer was effectively over, and Ross had won.

While the undeniable commercial success of the combination of H-D-H songwriting and Diana’s leads, coupled with her hard work and crossover appeal, may have made her the favored candidate for permanent lead Supreme, it was undoubtedly Berry Gordy’s admiration of her that sealed the deal. His decision to back Diana totally over Flo also demonstrated how little Gordy cared about race and how much he cared about success and money. Diana epito-mized style over substance and strove to look like Twiggy and Jackie Kennedy, 78

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two of the whitest women there ever were. Flo was just the opposite. She carried the essence of soul—a deep sadness—inside her and in her voice. Gordy believed correctly that whites preferred style to soul, and because whites were the major record buyers, he saw Ross as commercial success personified.

The “soul vs. success” controversy even extended to hair styles. During the Supremes’ career thousands of fans wrote to them, urging them to wear their hair natural. They didn’t; their white fans might not have understood.

(After Flo left the Supremes, she wore her hair natural, as accurately portrayed by Jennifer Hudson in the
Dreamgirls
movie.) In March 1966 the women even allowed the name “Supremes” to be used as the name of a new white bread.

Their photos appeared prominently on the crisp white wrappers.

Diana’s push for vocal dominance succeeded, at a price. Apart from strain-ing personal relationships, it also diminished the musical quality of the group.

From then on, various Supremes producers urged Flo to stand far back from the microphone to prevent her distinctive, emotion-filled voice from overwhelming Ross’s lead.

In the sense that teasing often reflects an underlying tension, a relative of Flo’s had tried to slow Diana’s grab for the glory. Winnie Brown, a niece of Flo’s by marriage, traveled with the Supremes for a while as their hairdresser.

Whenever the Supremes went on stage, Brown, a great joker and storyteller, would walk the Supremes to the wings of the stage, and then, when the Supremes were announced to the audience, maintain her grip on Diana’s arm, literally holding her back while the other women walked out on stage. Brown mugged for the other women while holding on to Diana, making the meaning of her gesture all too clear. (Brown continued to protect Flo until the very end of Flo’s life. After Flo’s death in 1976, when her body was laid out for viewing, Brown did Flo’s makeup and hair.)

Florence fought for the Supremes’ musical purity as well as for her own role in the group. When the women were recruited in 1967 to record the title song for the movie
The Happening
, Gordy wanted to add three additional singers behind Flo and Mary to buttress Diana’s lead. Flo objected, telling 79

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Gordy complied in this instance, but Flo’s victory was short lived. Despite her objections, the voices of these singers, Jackie Hicks, Marlene Barrow, and Louvain Demps—called the Andantes—were added to several other Supremes tunes. Later, Ross’s lead vocal was sometimes even recorded and mixed with
only
the Andantes’ recorded voices so that records could be produced faster while all three Supremes were out performing live.

When the Andantes performed this service, it sometimes hurt the song.

Otherwise decent songs such as “Forever Came Today,” “The Composer,” and

“No Matter What Sign You Are,” all backed by the Andantes, never rose higher than #28 on the charts.

Using substitutes for Flo and Mary was also a jolt for many Supremes fans. The three individual Supremes were featured on almost all Supremes album covers. On the cover of
The Supremes Sing More Hits
, they were distinguished not only by their individual photographs but also by each woman’s autograph. In fact, Flo and Mary were quite possibly the only backup singers in rock ’n’ roll history to have been identified by name in a verse of a hit in which the lead was sung by their major antagonist. Superfans of the Supremes might even interpret these lines in “Back in My Arms Again” as tailored to the pressures on each woman within the group. Diana sang, “How can Mary tell me what to do?” about the usually tongue-tied Wilson. And could “Flo, she don’t know . . .” possibly be about Diana’s plans to eliminate Flo from the group, even though the rest of the line is “the boy she loves is a Romeo”?

Whatever the reasons for the references, they separated the group from the other female groups of the day. The Vandellas and the Marvelettes, for example, usually performed as a semi-nameless collective. The Supremes performed as three distinct women. The audience knew their names, who they were, and sometimes what they stood for.

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The Andantes didn’t profit much from their labor. “After Motown left Detroit [in 1972], they got different jobs,” Flo said. “One moved to Atlanta.