The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (17 page)

ment firm. And even though Motown then sued him for two million dollars for alleged breach of contract, Roshkind returned to Motown as a consultant in 1983. As Flo would say, “on and on . . .”

Motown and Roshkind apparently tried to sweeten the deal Flo made with Roshkind in 1967 by buying her a Cadillac, a plum rose El Dorado, at approximately the same time. “The car was paid for, cash,” Flo said, “but I didn’t pay for it. I don’t know who paid for it. The only person I could think of that paid for the car was Motown. We even asked the dealer, and he wouldn’t tell.”

The possible gift of the Cadillac notwithstanding, the relationship between Flo and Motown at that point was touchy at best. Berry Gordy’s siblings and Mary Wilson attempted to heal the breach. “Berry had another brother, Fuller Gordy, who was very nice,” Flo said. “Gwen [Gordy] was also nice to me, but I’ll never forget . . . Mary [Wilson] was in town and she was going to this party over at Berry’s mansion house, so she said ‘Well, why don’t you go with me?’ I said, ‘No, no.’ She was talking to Fuller on the phone, and Fuller said,

‘Yeah, tell her she can come; I’ll be glad to see her.’

The mansion Flo referred to was Gordy’s palatial Detroit home. His growing wealth had been accompanied by steady improvement in his places of residence. When Motown was just beginning, he lived in an upstairs bedroom in one of the company’s original buildings. As Motown made him richer, he moved into a series of middle-class houses in better and better Detroit neighborhoods.

But these were tumbledown shacks compared with the luxurious mansion on Detroit’s Boston Boulevard that Gordy purchased in 1967. The three-story house, unprepossessing from the street, had cost a million dollars to build in 1927. It had a central vacuum system, a marble-floored, marble-columned ballroom, a gymnasium, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a luxurious billiard room, a two-lane bowling alley, a private theater linked to the main house by tunnels, and an entire authentic pub, imported intact from England. Every room in the house was decorated with gold leaf, frescoed ceilings, and elaborate chan-103

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deliers. Gordy hung oil portraits of his friends and family in the entrance hall, including an oil painting of himself as Napoleon Bonaparte.

“So I went to the party,” Flo said, “and I was sitting down, and I had on this long [hair] fall, and I felt somebody jerk it. I turned around—and Diane had pulled the fall. So I looked at her, and I told her don’t do it again. So she ran over and told Berry I was trying to start something with her. He came over and told me, ‘You have to leave; you weren’t invited anyway.’ . . . I remained sitting there, talking to Fuller. So Berry came back around and said to me, ‘I thought I told you to leave, but since you haven’t, I’ll have you thrown out.’ I’ll never forget that as long as I live, and I say he’s the most ridiculous man I ever met in my life. And Mary, she just broke down and just cried and cried; she said she just couldn’t believe that he said that to me. She heard him say it, and she cried and she cried. And she said, ‘If he’s putting you out, then I’m leaving too. I don’t want to be here either.’ Even his brother Fuller said the same thing.”

Not all the Motown parties Flo attended were downers for her. Later on, she attended a birthday party for one of Diana’s daughters at the same Detroit mansion. When Diana sang “Happy Birthday” as part of the celebration, Flo remarked to a nearby reporter, “She’s singing flat.” For a moment, the old Flo had returned.

Indeed, Flo the Fighter was far from completely dead. After a month of thinking about the wounds that Motown had inflicted on her and the sur-render agreement she had signed for Roshkind, she hired an attorney, Leonard Baun of the Detroit law firm of Okrent, Baun and Vulpe, to sue Motown, agreeing to pay him 20 percent of whatever he got from Motown for Flo.

“Oh, he was rarin’ to go, rarin’ to go, ready to sue Motown,” Flo said of Baun.

Motown made its first move one month later by giving Baun, as Florence‘s legal representative, the $75,689 that was being held by Motown in a joint Motown-Ballard account at Bank of the Commonwealth. On Baun’s advice, Florence signed papers creating Talent Management Inc. (TMI) to run her 104

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future career, with Baun as president and treasurer. Baun immediately spent $5,000 of her money for Talent Management stock for himself.

Motown then released to Baun stocks that it had held in Flo’s name. Baun used his own home address to apply for credit cards in Flo’s name and his name. He used $10,003.39 of the trust fund to buy 341 shares of diversified growth stock and 343 shares of Dreyfus fund stock (the fund founded in part by Flo’s former boyfriend’s father) in Flo’s name. And the next year, Baun paid himself $43,050.24 in attorney’s fees, an amount much higher than his 20

percent fee agreement would seem to justify.

After taking care of these details, Baun made it his task to find out what else Motown owed Flo. Motown promptly threw up a cloud of dense legalese.

The company’s attorneys simultaneously denied that Flo had any contracts with Motown and argued that if she did, they could not be released. The company also said that she could audit the company’s books at her own expense, but she didn’t have the money to pay for such an expensive undertaking.

Finally, Baun and Flo, working with fragmentary information provided by the records Motown chose to release and with Flo’s memory, concluded that the Supremes had grossed $1.6 million in 1967, out of which, in accordance with the Motown contract, hotel costs, traveling expenses, and recording expenses had all been paid. A Motown talent management subsidiary with which Flo had also signed a contract, again without benefit of an attorney’s advice or counsel, had received 15 percent of her earnings off the top.

Although Baun wanted to sue, he and Flo tried to work out a settlement, incorporating the money Motown already had given Flo and what she believed Motown still owed her. Cynics would say that the costs of a suit, which Baun had pushed for, would have increased his fees immensely, but his supporters would say that a suit would have been the only way to obtain information from Motown showing how much the company truly owed the founding member of an immensely successful group such as the Supremes.

Flo’s legal team was burdened with the additional need to determine Flo’s income for 1965 and 1966, years in which she had not received any royalties.

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Baun felt that Motown was so unforthcoming with information that he wrote Gordy directly about his problems in getting relevant information from the company. Unfortunately, all this did was incense Baun’s negotiating partner at Motown, Ralph Seltzer, who was angered that Baun had gone over his head.

Motown’s position was that it would not pay Flo anything other than the original fifteen thousand dollars, causing Baun to testify in a deposition related to the case that Motown was treating her “like a vassal.” He described their position as “We don’t owe you anything. We have paid you for what you have done up to now. That is the end of it.”

The company’s negotiating position was that Supremes records would not be big sellers in future years and that, simultaneously, determination of their future worth was not possible. Unfortunately, Baun accepted this argument. He was unable to foresee that Supremes tunes, in numerous forms, would remain big sellers for decades to come. In fact, Baun had little or no experience in entertainment law; he had spent his career as a personal injury lawyer.

Nearly as unforgivable was Baun’s inability to come up with a value for the name “Supremes,” the hottest recording group of all time. He said he knew it had goodwill value, “but to say how much it was worth or how hot it is, I didn’t know.” Much more accurately, one of Flo’s future attorneys, Gerald K.

Dent, called the “Supremes” name “a household word” and estimated its worth at one million dollars. Perhaps Baun was influenced by the unanimous denial by Motown executives that Florence had chosen the name “Supremes,”

although Diana Ross later admitted in writing that Flo had chosen the name and that in fact she had done so over Ross’s objections.

Considering Baun’s weak defense of his client’s interests, it’s no wonder that he and Motown were eventually able to agree on a settlement. The obvious alternative was for Flo to sue Motown, as Baun had originally suggested, but another factor was in play now, involving an ace that Motown had been storing up its sleeve. “Baun came back and told me,” Flo said, “‘Well, look, if I take it to court, Berry Gordy’s going to say that you drink.’

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“Me being young, I thought if the public read something about that, then they’d get the wrong impression,” Flo said. “So Leonard Baun says Motown’s offering a settlement for $160,000. . . . First he said $160,000, then he said $250,000. . . . But he did come over with some papers. OK, I trusted Leonard Baun, the attorney. I didn’t know what the papers meant. I just signed them, and that was it. So I guess what I signed was a settlement, OK.”

Like its predecessor, this new agreement prohibited Flo from using the name “Supremes” in her publicity and from suing Motown, Ross, Wilson, or Birdsong. It also closed the book on future royalties from past recordings, in effect cutting Flo off, in 1968, from all future revenue that would flow from the gold mine named “The Supremes.” To settle all of Flo’s claims against the company, Motown gave Baun a check for $160,000. He was also entrusted with the $300,000 worth of Flo’s assets that Motown, after paying all the Supremes’ expenses, had saved on her behalf.

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I don’t know why he appealed to me.

—Florence Ballard, on her husband,

Tommy Chapman

Just days after
signing her settlement with Motown, Flo married Thomas Chapman, who’d replaced Roger Pearson in her affections the year before. She had previously known the twenty-eight-year-old Chapman only as a fellow Motown employee. But as her relationship with Pearson ran down, she became romantically involved with the tall African American and began seeing him exclusively.

“I don’t know why he appealed to me,” Flo said of Tommy, and others have asked the same question. According to a woman who worked as a house-keeper for Flo and Tommy, their relationship had a violent side on at least one occasion. She said that once she “found Flo lying on the floor, with bruises on her legs. [Flo’s mother] Lurlee came down from upstairs and told Tommy,

‘If you hit her again, I’ll kill you.’”

Perhaps Pat Cosby has the best explanation for Flo’s attraction to Chapman. She noted that Tommy, although his position at Motown was much lower than Flo’s, had talked with Flo as her equal. “She didn’t have to be Flo Ballard of the Supremes with Tommy,” Cosby said. “She could just be Flo.

They had a man-and-woman relationship, not a man-and-one-of-the-107

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Supremes relationship,” which could easily have described her relationship with Roger Pearson.

Chapman proposed to Flo by phone from San Juan. After she accepted his proposal, he resigned from Motown and returned to Detroit. The couple then flew to Hawaii, where they were married in a civil ceremony on February 29, 1968. There were no guests. Mixing romance and business is never a good idea, and making preparations for a Hawaiian wedding and honeymoon while she was in the process of settling with Motown may have hindered Flo’s ability to think clearly during her struggle to wrest her financial assets from Motown’s grip.

Upon hearing of the impending marriage, according to Flo, Berry Gordy told Chapman that “he was making a big mistake because the marriage would never work.” Gordy also told him, “If the marriage doesn’t work, you can always come back and work for me.”

While calling Tommy “very nice,” former Marvelette Katherine Anderson Schaffner also said that at the time Tommy got involved with Flo, “Flo had problems with being out of the group, and Tommy thought there was money to be made.” Others have contended that whenever Flo had money to spend, Tommy was around, but when she ran out of money, he never seemed to be there. Whatever the truth of this formulation, the newly married couple did establish a commercial as well as marital relationship: Flo appointed Tommy her business manager for what she hoped would become a successful solo career.

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It felt great to be recording again.

—Florence Ballard

Flo had reason
to be optimistic about her post-Motown career. Her negotiations with Motown had been conducted while she, Leonard Baun, and Chapman were focused on a promising opportunity for the ex-Supreme: ABC

Records executives wanted Flo to sign with their company. They had insisted, however, that they could not offer her a contract unless she first settled with Motown.

While Flo may have been hoping that she could eventually resurrect her career without Motown’s help, recent history suggested otherwise. Former Motown superstars such as Mary Wells had left the company and then dropped out of sight. After David Ruffin of the Temptations was expelled from the group, he was reduced to attending Tempts concerts, singing along with them from the audience, and then trying to jump up onstage to physically retake his place with his former group. His former colleagues had to hire extra security guards to keep him offstage. Another Temptation, Paul Williams, had sunk even further. Williams had been present at Flo’s first audition with Milton Jenkins years before and had been the only person present at her second audition. In both cases he had encouraged her to continue her singing career and to form the Supremes as he continued his singing career and helped form 109

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