The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (15 page)

We really touched a nerve with this!’ We’d never seen him so angry.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Flo’s attempts to relate to the fans and to increase her contributions to the Supremes, Diana’s ambitions grew, and, according to Flo, her treatment of her girlhood friends became atrocious.

Pointing out that “Diane always tried to hog the show” and “Diane is very ambitious,” Florence recalled, “We had a routine when performing ‘Stop!

In the Name of Love’ where at the end of the tune we’d throw both arms up in the air. Well, people used to ask me, ‘Why did Diane always get in front of Mary, right in front of her when she threw her arms up?’ blocking Mary completely from view.

“And it got to the point, I’ll never forget, one time, while we were performing in Boston, Diane’s mike went out, so without any warning at all she walked over and snatched Mary’s microphone out of her hand. Mary snatched 89

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it back. Here they are snatching this microphone back and forth, and I’m standing there still singing and looking at them. You know what should have happened was, Diane should have said, ‘My mike is out,’ and just started singing on the same mike with Mary. It could have been done like that. But she walked over and actually snatched that mike. It’s funny, but it was ridiculous too.”

Flo, by contrast, came to Diana’s aid during another Boston performance in April 1966. “We were singing the tune ‘I Hear a Symphony,’ and everything was fine with me and Mary; we were singing the background, just singing back, and all of a sudden Diane began to back up away from the microphone, real slow. She said, ‘I feel so little. Everything looks so tiny. I feel like I’m shrinking.’ I said, ‘What!?’ She was holding her head.” Mary and Flo kept on doing the background until the song was completed, “and then we went offstage too, and our road manager at the time, George McArthur, picked Diane up and carried her into her dressing room.

“That’s when I called Berry Gordy and told him that Diane couldn’t perform, she was ill. I had her head in my lap, and I was trying to massage her head, and she was just moving her head from side to side and crying, and she said the pain in her head was so . . .

“Berry Gordy flew in, and we went back to Detroit; and she went into Ford Hospital in Detroit.

“The nurses, when I went in [in 1968] to have my twins, they were telling me how nasty she was when she was in the hospital.” Florence defended her longtime persecutor. “I said, ‘Well, she was ill, though,’ and the nurses said,

‘We were trying to be nice to her; we knew she was ill.’ They said she slammed the door in their face and carried on. To this day, this day, they haven’t forgotten her; they have never forgotten her for that.”

According to Flo, Diana did not reciprocate when their situations were reversed. Ironically, the group was performing in Boston to raise money to fight disease, when a disease dropped Flo. “I came down with pneumonia.

We had been overseas, and the doctor said what happened was I had caught 90

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the flu over in Europe and was carrying it in my system, and all of a sudden it just hit me.

“I couldn’t perform because my throat was so sore and I was so weak. . . .

And Diane looked at me and said, ‘You know you’re not sick.’ The way she looked at me was very vicious. She said, ‘You’re not sick. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Later on, Diane said to me in the car, ‘I don’t think you should be in the car with us, because whatever you’ve got is probably catching.’ She was very nasty. That really hurt, sick as I was. And I said she’s got to be the nas-tiest ass in the world. I went back to Detroit, and I could barely walk or anything. My temperature kept going up, and the doctor told me I couldn’t perform. . . . But she insisted that I just wasn’t sick. I don’t know what was wrong with her.”

After the group returned from Boston and was rehearsing in Detroit, Florence recovered enough to go over and join the rehearsal and was greeted by Diana. “‘What are you doing here?’ she said, and I just looked at her, and finally said, ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ and she said, ‘Well, nobody told you to come here.’ Oh, she was very nasty; she was very, very nasty. I told her nobody had to tell me to come, but I was told to come because there was a rehearsal going on; and they knew, Cholly Atkins and all of them, they knew I had been ill, but they told me to come anyway so I could just sit and watch and learn that way.”

Shortly afterward, Motown showed how much it cared about Flo when its employees were taping a television performance on Belle Isle, an island in the Detroit River. “Berry talked to my doctor, Dr. Carlson, and asked if it would be OK if I did the TV show. Dr. Carlson said ‘Actually, I don’t think that she should, but if she’s out there for just one hour, then it’s OK.’ I was out there from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 that evening, and from that I had a relapse.

“They knew I was only supposed to be out there an hour, and when I was out there, I began to get sick. I told them, ‘Hey, I have to go because I’m not feeling well,’ and they kept saying, ‘Well, we’ll be taping you all pretty 91

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soon now, pretty soon now.’ Pretty soon never came, and Berry just didn’t give a damn. All he could think about was ‘Look, there’s money to be made.

I don’t give a damn if you’re sick or what.’ That’s when I began to . . . look at him in a different way altogether, and as far as I was concerned, he was just a sadist, a selfish, vicious man. Sure he’s a genius, he made a lot of money

. . . but the truth is the truth.

“All my joints were inflamed, and I went from a size 12 to a size 7 in about two weeks. I just couldn’t move. If I tried to move my arms, it was just so painful I just couldn’t do it. . . . The doctor kept giving me vitamin B-12

shots, which finally worked. . . . But Diane didn’t even come over to see me when I was sick. I don’t know what made Diane like that, because when we were growing up, she always wanted to be the best at everything, and there’s nothing wrong with that; but when you try to step on other people, I don’t know, somewhere along the line you’re going to get stepped on someday. Of course,” Flo said in 1975, “she’s doing real well now, moviewise and this and that, but I guess that’s what Berry Gordy wanted: Diane to be a star.”

Occasionally, Diana broke the pattern by supporting Flo against Gordy. “We were going to take some pictures in front of one of the [Detroit] high schools, and Diane and Mary and I were trying to decide which high school to use, whether Cass, Northeastern, or Northwestern, and I said it really didn’t make me any difference. So Berry Gordy said something I’ll never forget; he said,

‘I can see why it doesn’t make any difference to you, Flo, since you never finished high school.’ So Diane looked at him and said, ‘Well, you didn’t finish high school either, Berry.’ It was the one time she stood up for me.”

In general, though, Diana attacked Flo, and Flo responded. “I didn’t take no stuff off Diana,” Flo said. “If she said something to me, I’ll say it back to her.”

Pat Cosby noted that “Florence was always very honest. She didn’t hold back her thoughts.” No one who knew Flo would disagree, but that doesn’t mean some people didn’t advise her to act differently.

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“Mary would always tell me, ‘Whatever she says to you, don’t say anything back to her, because you know what they want you to do—they want you to keep arguing back and forth so they can get you out of the group.’

“This was the first I’d heard of that. I told Mary that if Diane said something mean to me, I’m going to say it back to her. So she would say a few words to me I didn’t like, and I would tell her to go to hell and a lot of other things.

“I couldn’t understand exactly what was going on. The three of us didn’t do things together anymore. The only time we’d see each other would be in a dressing room or onstage. And our rooms were all on different floors and miles apart.”

Mary had her emotions much more locked down. Flo said, “I’ll never forget when Diana walked into the dressing room in Las Vegas and found these [false] eyelashes on the floor. She picked them up and said, ‘Humph!

These couldn’t be nobody’s eyelashes but Mary’s because they’re very dirty.’

Mary didn’t say anything back to her. If it had been me, I would have let her have it, but Mary just held it in. And I didn’t think it was fair that I should hold it in, or Mary should hold it in, because Diane wasn’t no queen—not to me—and she still isn’t.”

Meanwhile, rumors were circulating feverishly that Diana would be leaving the group to perform on her own. Mary, in a tribute to Florence’s voice and performing ability, claimed, “I still retained the smallest hope that when and if Diane left, Flo would be made the lead singer.”

Diana remained a queen to Gordy, however, and Flo sank further and further in his estimation. “It seemed like I was always under pressure from Berry,” she said. “I remember we were in Canada getting ready to catch a flight in Vancouver in 1966, and just out of the clear blue he walks up to me and says, ‘You know, you told me you wouldn’t try to stand in Diane’s way if she wanted to be a single artist.’ And I told him, ‘That’s right, I wouldn’t stand in the way if she wanted to be a single artist, but by the same token, I didn’t say I would leave the group either.’ So it went on and on and on.”

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Flo’s increasingly precarious position in the Supremes became vividly clear to her in May 1967, when, she recalled, “We got to the Copacabana, and Cindy Birdsong [a singer who had substituted for Flo on one occasion]

was there. They had been grooming her with tapes for a whole year, and I didn’t even have any knowledge of it. They had a whole tape of the show we were doing, the nightclub act, so she was learning the tunes and everything with the tape. Having Cindy at the Copa caused me to feel more pressure because it was as if they were saying, ‘We’re getting ready to put you out now.’

I was thinking, ‘I may be out, I may be in,’ that sort of thing, but I was trying to keep calm about it and not worry about it, about what they were saying. But I was wondering, ‘Am I in or Am I out?’

“I lay down in the dressing room in Las Vegas, and I looked up at the ceiling, and I said, ‘God, what’s happening? . . .’ I was scared, unhappy; it was a whole bunch of mixed-up feelings.”

When the limousine pulled up in front of the hotel to take the women to the Copacabana, “Instead of me getting in the limousine, Cindy Birdsong was asked to get in the limousine,” Flo remembered.

“So I rode to the Copa in a Lincoln that Tommy [Chapman] was driving. Cindy was there mainly to study me, to study my performance. We finished the engagement at the Copa, and I don’t know which way Cindy Birdsong went after that. We went on and worked the Coconut Grove, and then we went to Las Vegas. That was at the Flamingo Hotel in July 1967: that’s when I made my last performance with the Supremes.”

As if parading Flo’s replacement in front of her and giving that replacement Flo’s seat in the limousine didn’t send Flo the message Gordy wanted her to hear, he had also been thickening the steady stream of criticism he directed at her. “Berry . . . knew how to get to me, because he always said he wanted to control me, and if he couldn’t control me, he didn’t want me around,” Flo said. “So I guess by being controlled, I was supposed to be a puppet on a string, and he was supposed to pull my string, and then I’d dance 94

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to his tune. Well, I’m not that type of person, and I don’t dance to anyone’s tune, unless I want to.

“Berry’s a weird dude, very weird. . . . Funny thing about Berry, I’ll never forget, he had a blue suit, and this other guy who worked for Berry had one just like it. He told the guy he couldn’t wear the suit, and the guy actually didn’t wear the suit anymore. And I say all these guys running around letting Berry put the stuff on them, I mean, telling them what to do, like you’re my slaves—you do what I do, you do not dress like I dress, you do not look like I look. . . . I don’t have any use for people like that. Because as far as I’m concerned, they’re not people. I don’t know what you call them, but they’re not people.”

The contrast could not be clearer between Flo and Mary Wilson, who did everything she was told until the original Supremes broke up, and Diana Ross, who almost always made sure well in advance that Gordy would give her only the directions she wanted to hear.

The contrast between Flo and Diana was unmistakable in another way.

As Flo put it, “Boy, was I stacked.” Gordy, not really into this sort of statuesque beauty, considered Florence fat. “That was something Berry Gordy always used to say,” Florence said. “He used to have a line whereas he’d tell me, ‘Florence, for you to be a fat girl, you don’t sweat that much,’ whatever that meant. Sometimes he’d just out and tell me, ‘Florence, you’re too fat.’

Well, I was a size 12, and I guess next to Diane maybe I was fat, but as far as I was concerned, I was pretty damned stacked. I got pictures to prove that; I just had a nice body. You know, size 12, five foot seven, that’s a perfect size.

I’m a 14 now [in 1975], and that’s not a bad size, not for my height and my bone structure. I wasn’t meant to be skinny.

“Some places we played, especially in Manila, they didn’t even pay anyone any attention but me. The guys’ reaction in the audience were something else. I accumulated so many, call it, fans, but I would say friends also, and they were mostly male, and they were very nice, and I enjoyed it. One little guy ran up to the stage and he said, ‘Oh, Florence, I just love you, baby.’ It 95

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was fantastic. So I must have had something on the ball that wasn’t fat. I’ll never forget Berry Gordy saying, ‘Wow, these guys are going crazy over you here, you’re really on the ball.’ He said it in a very nice way, but they were after me.”