The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (14 page)

I saw one at the state fair, Jackie; she was working somewhere—I forget where. Just a common job.” In show business terms, the women who had tried to imitate the original Supremes were never heard from again.

In any case, the feisty Florence Ballard continued to fight against her diminishing role in the group she had founded by speaking up on behalf of what she perceived to be group interests. “In between [nightclub acts], if we came home,” Flo said, “we’d be doing recording. We never really had that much of a vacation, and I believe that sometimes we were overworked, ’cause we worked practically the whole year without a break. And if we did come to Detroit, we were working because we were still recording, which is a job too. I objected—me—and Berry Gordy said I was the one who would always sit down, always think. I’m always thinking. I’m the type of person if I can’t think, then something is wrong. So we were in New York one time, and he said, ‘You girls are off for ten days, but I don’t think I’ll let you have a vacation, because Florence talks too much.’”

Flo’s underlying aim had been to reassert some of her leadership of the group, but Gordy’s reaction did not exactly buttress her position or even make her popular with her sidekicks.

Flo also fought back in other, counterproductive ways. Right or wrong, she believed that her founding and early domination of the group, along with her talent, should have made her the Supremes’ permanent leader and that she should have the enduring right to sing the lead on at least some songs.

When leadership was denied her, she sometimes became sullen and angry.

Generally happy, playful, and funny, she could also display a quick temper and sometimes responded to what she interpreted as insults, or attempts to limit her freedom, by challenging the offender verbally or even physically. It has been alleged that on one occasion she threw a drink in Gordy’s face, which, if true, certainly would have made her situation worse.

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c Soon Flo discovered another outlet for her anger and frustration: comedy. “I said, ‘I can’t sing “People” anymore; I’ll start doing some comedy.’ It just dropped out of the sky. Growing up, I used to jump around and kid around and this and that, but I never knew I had comedy potential.”

Following a Motown script of onstage banter, Diana had started referring to Flo, on stage behind her, as “the fat one.” One night Flo retorted—deep-voiced, sotto voce, and unscripted—“Honey, fat is where it’s at.” Laughter engulfed the crowd, and Sammy Davis Jr., who was in the audience, jumped straight into the air out of his seat and began applauding wildly, as did Harry Belafonte. Flo had neither planned this event nor anticipated the audience reaction, and her boldness frightened her.

“I was shocked. I was looking around and saying to myself, ‘What did I do? Where did I get the nerve to interrupt the act?’ I didn’t even know I was that funny. It just came out of my mouth, out of nowhere. I was just ad-lib-bing on stage. Berry Gordy came backstage after the performance and told me, ‘You stole the show.’ And I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh, stole the show,’ and worried even more.”

After her worry subsided, however, she began planning her guerrilla attacks in advance. “One song had a line, ‘Gold won’t bring you happiness.’

And I’d say, ‘Wait a minute honey. Give me some of that gold, and I’ll do my own shopping.’” Another version of this dialogue emerged when Diana would sing, “You may be rich; you may possess the world and all its gold, but gold won’t bring you happiness when you’re growing old,” and Flo would respond, “Now wait a minute, honey; I’m not so sure about that.”

Flo was stretching when she called this comedy. It may have struck the audience as wildly amusing, but in reality Flo was clearly protesting being shunted to the sidelines by calling attention to herself.

“After a while,” Flo recalled, “I knew exactly what to say and how to say it. I would wait until the audience had stopped applauding and then deliver another line. And that started them off again.” Her fans compared her to Pearl 82

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Bailey, “and I used to watch Pearl Bailey as a child, but I never tried to imitate her. It was just that people thought I had that flat type of heavy voice, and I just came across as if I were imitating her, but actually I wasn’t. I was never imitating anybody except myself, if you can believe it, just myself.

“I’m a strong believer in God, and I don’t know where the words came from or what happened, but it just happened, and that was it. Whenever I saw a spot where I could get it in, then I would get it in. . . . Berry Gordy liked what I was doing, because he would come backstage to try to perfect my comedy, ‘Say it this way; say it that way.’ But I had to say it my way. . . .

Saying it my way kept it coming across.”

At the Coconut Grove, where the group performed for a doctor’s con-vention, “Diane would say, ‘At the end is Florence Ballard. She’s the quiet one.’

I would be way back from the mike. And I would say, ‘That’s what
you
think.’”

The audience laughed loudly.

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Berry wanted to merge into a big movie company, but
probably those big white movie companies said, ‘Uh-uh,
Brother, no.’

—Florence Ballard

It was Flo
in whom Gordy first saw Hollywood potential.

Gordy’s filmmaking overture to Florence was preceded by a semiroman-tic overture. He had warmed up to the statuesque Supreme in London on the Supremes’ triumphant tour there. “Gordy wanted to take me out that night, so he took me to a club in Soho,” Flo said. “This girl was dancing with a snake or something—I don’t know, something weird, a weird bit—and he used to always tell me I needed to grow up. So I guess maybe he took me there so I could grow up, could see what was going on. The act was ridiculous! The snake was all around her arm. She was doing some weird things with the snake.

I told him I was ready to go. And he said, ‘You should see things like that.

That’s a part of growing up.’ But we left.”

At times, Gordy seemed concerned with Flo’s sexual education. “He even told me one time it was circulating through the company that I was a virgin . . . that he felt I should know more about life.” In 1975, Flo was still 83

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able to joke about this incident. When she told this story, the mother of three added “and to this day I’d like to find out what he meant!” and then giggled.

Perhaps Gordy truly believed Flo should expose herself to adult entertainment, but he may also have had hopeful thoughts about what her reaction might be. “I’m sure Berry liked me,” Flo said. “I don’t mean liked me maybe sexually or intimately or anything like that. But I’m sure he felt something for me. I’ll never forget one time he bought me a suede suit for no reason. I still have the suit. And he didn’t buy the other girls one. It was weird. . . . He told me, ‘I saw this suit, and I thought it would look good on you.’”

Motown insiders remember seeing Gordy and his father, “Pops” Gordy, standing together in company headquarters when Florence walked by. The old man would invariably whistle appreciatively in her direction.

Flo recalled that a short while after Gordy’s attentions to her, he put her in a film. “We were over in Asia, and he had these guys with these cameras, and he actually had me doing a movie running up and down the street, you know, just playing around. Everybody saw the movie but me. And I asked them what happened to the movie, and they said it wasn’t any good. But everybody else had seen it; I couldn’t understand how come I couldn’t see it. . . .

That’s when Berry first had that thing in his mind about movies.”

Later, in Paris, “Berry Gordy had this big film thing going,” Flo continued. “So he would hide these guys with the movie cameras, and he had us running up and down the streets in Paris, and the police got upset because we were messing up the traffic there. The police told us to cut it out, but Berry told Diane to keep on going. Berry Gordy’s a powerful black guy, you know. The policeman had a paper in his hand; I think he popped Diane with it. She got mad about it, I think, but I don’t think she was brave enough to pop him back. Anyway, they were right; we had no business in the street because we could have got hit.”

Although Gordy never really dropped his enthusiasm for movies in general, for some reason he soon changed his mind about Florence’s participation in them. The group was doing a show at the Fairmont Hotel in San 85

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c Francisco, recalled Flo, “and Berry was sitting in the audience between two big movie producers. He came backstage—it wasn’t even on my mind to go into movies—and he says, ‘Those were two movie producers I was sitting out there with, and they picked you, Florence, but I told them that you were just a deadpan and that Diane works the hardest, so she should be the one to do the movies.’

“I was startled, I was shocked. . . . I was hurt, very hurt,” Flo said, “because I had never thought of doing a movie, but for him to come back there and say that . . . if it had been me, I never would have said anything.”

Flo was still bitter about these movie-related incidents years later. “Some people say the Mafia ran Berry out of Detroit, but I don’t believe it. I believe he went to Los Angeles to try and be a big movie guy. Berry wanted to merge into a big movie company, but probably those big white movie companies said, ‘Uh-uh, Brother, no.’ If you notice, the only people doing movies with Diane is Berry Gordy. No one else is offering her a part that I know of.”

Flo was correct. Gordy ended up producing, in descending order of artistic excellence and profitability,
Lady Sings the Blues
,
Mahogany
, and
The Wiz,
all starring Diana Ross
.
In
Lady,
Diana played singer Billie Holiday, which featured Ross’s singing more than her acting talents. In
Mahogany,
in which she played a fashion designer, her acting talents were not impressive. In
The
Wiz,
Gordy shoehorned the thirty-three-year-old Ross into the role of Dorothy, a part made for a twelve-year-old that Judy Garland barely qualified for at age sixteen. As a result,
The Wiz
, while definitely a spectacle, was anything but an emotional grabber. Although Diana later appeared in a couple of made-for-TV productions, she never received a part in another Hollywood movie.

Not that Gordy didn’t consider other movie roles for Diana. Ross and Billy Dee Williams, her costar in
Mahogany
, were going to star in a movie to be called
Sesame Linday,
about a bail bondswoman and a Berkeley economics professor. Gordy also considered starring both of them in an untitled movie to be based in New Orleans, and he weighed starring Ross in a movie to be 86

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called
Tough Customers,
in which she would have played a Harlem numbers queen who fell in love with a white, Jewish gangster. This film idea may have been inspired by her marriage to Silberstein in 1971, even though Silberstein was no gangster.

As it turned out, however, the failure of
The Wiz
would not only end Ross’s movie career; it would also eliminate Motown as a major movie producer. Critics have argued that Florence, more statuesque, more capable of a range of emotions than Ross, and gifted with comic potential, could well have done better than Diana. We’ll never know.

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I knew a Diane that was a monster.

—Florence Ballard, 1975

As Gordy’s attraction
to and admiration of Flo waned, his criticism of her began. “He would say, ‘Flo, you don’t know how to be a star,’” she said,

“and maybe I didn’t, because as far as I was concerned, I was a person, and I had to be a person. I couldn’t be anything else. It’s frightening to go all the way to the top, and somebody says to you that you have to be a star, that you can’t mingle with certain people. People, to me, has always meant people, and I’ve always felt that if I don’t have people, then I don’t have anything; and I still feel that way. I was supposed to carry myself like a star. I knew I was a big entertainer, I knew I was rich, I knew I was making lots of money; I knew this. I had beautiful clothes, diamonds, everything at my feet; but to me a star is something in the sky, and to me I was a human being.

“Berry was talking about mingling. I would always talk to people instead of rushing and jumping into the car, fans and this and that. I would always stop and talk, and I just couldn’t break the habit. Mary was very good at it, but me, I would linger.”

“Flo was always her own person,” her friend Pat Cosby said. “She realized we have to be dictated to in life. There has to be a leader. But she knew who she was. . . . Flo never got lost in the fame, as far as her personality and 87

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as far as being herself. You have to be a strong individual not to get yourself lost in that.”

Flo was not only strong but also ahead of her times. She tried writing some songs for the Supremes. “Yeah, I tried; I sure did try, and Berry Gordy said, ‘Hm, that ain’t nothing.’ The other girls thought it was pretty good. But I don’t know. For some reason, me and Berry didn’t click.”

A few years later, the majority of the top-selling hits would be written by the artists performing them. The singer-songwriter became an icon. Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder began trying to convince Motown to allow them to write and produce their own songs. Motown refused, leading to major strains between the company and its creative artists.

Otis Williams wrote that when the Temptations formally asked Gordy for the publishing rights to songs they wrote, Gordy replied, “‘What are you going to do with publishing? Who’s going to administer it?’ [Music publishing involves giving others permission to record or use your songs, and collecting for that usage. It can be a very lucrative business and certainly has been for Motown.] He continued running down all the details,” and as he did so became angrier and angrier. “We looked at one another as if to say, ‘Whew!