The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (18 page)

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the Tempts. But after decreasing his role in the Tempts due to illness, Williams committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1971 while sitting in a parked car only two blocks from Motown’s Detroit headquarters.

Flo and Tommy had stressed to Baun that Flo “wanted to go into the performing artist field as an individual,” Baun would later testify. He said that he, Flo, and the rest of her team were worried by the “fact that Motown was a very powerful factor in the performing artist field . . . and if we could not terminate the relationship on a more or less friendly basis, [Motown] might take, in some manner, adverse steps to actually impede her career.” When Baun was asked, in a court deposition, “You mean like blackball her?” he replied,

“It was obvious that Motown did have a lot of influence—that many of the established agencies booked for the performing artists who had contracts with Motown. . . . Mr. [Louis] Zito [an aide to Flo in her attempt to establish herself as an independent artist] told me that he had direct conversations with people in New York who felt that they did not . . . want to touch Flo because she was hot, because of what was, more or less, publicly known—that fric-tion had developed between Ms. Ballard and Motown’s organization.”

Two booking agency employees had both told Baun that “they had apprehensions in trying to get bookings for Florence,” Baun later testified. “They had received no threats. No one ever told me that, nor did anyone ever say that Motown had gone out of its way to impede Ms. Ballard’s ability to perform as an individual. This was in the back of our minds that they [Motown]

might try.”

When Baun was asked if this was discussed with Motown during settlement negotiations, he responded, “Oh, yes, we talked about it, naturally. They always laughed it off and said, ‘We wouldn’t do anything to harm Florence.

She is our friend.’”

Flo would have disagreed with this statement. She certainly didn’t trust Gordy or Motown at this point and knew better than most the power that they wielded within the industry. And she wasn’t the only one who viewed 111

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changing labels as risky. She alleged in 1975 that ABC president Larry Newton had told her, in her words, “‘You know, it’s not good to switch recording companies, because once you record for one company and go to another, it’s not too good.’”

Uncertainties there may have been, but the ABC offer was genuine. Fate had given Flo another chance. Motown had given her a somewhat substantial sum and by arriving at a new settlement agreement had made it possible for Flo to sign with ABC Records, which she promptly did.

ABC at the time was a growing and popular record company, but, with the exception of Ray Charles, it had little or no experience with black artists.

Among the popular groups on the label were the Mamas and the Papas and Three Dog Night. Even though Flo wasn’t allowed to use the name “Supremes”

in any future publicity, ABC clearly wanted her fame as a former Supreme, along with her marvelous voice, to diversify and strengthen its roster. What Flo wanted was a hard-charging record company to jump-start what she hoped would be a new career as a solo artist with a well-recorded, well-promoted hit.

“I said, ‘OK, great,’” Flo said of the ABC offer. She flew to New York to sign the contract, along with Baun, Chapman, and former Motown public relations man Alan Abrams. Abrams had represented the Supremes when Flo was a member of the group, but he had been discharged by Motown on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1966. Abrams said Motown executive Michael Roshkind, who fired him and was aware of the day’s historic significance, had told him, “Consider yourself bombed.” According to stories in the
Detroit
Free Press
, Abrams was dismissed not for any fault of his own but because, partly owing to his own assiduous public relations work, the Supremes had become so successful that Motown then wanted the group to be represented by a nationally known PR firm.

Although an inveterate optimist, Abrams said he was discouraged about Flo’s solo campaign from the beginning. He noted that constant indecision and missteps plagued the effort. Its symbolic start, he said, Flo’s trip to New 112

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York City, set the tone for all that happened later. At a March 6, 1968, meeting with ABC president Larry Newton in a restaurant, where Flo was to sign her ABC contract, the businessmen and public relations people at the table paid more attention to a nearby table where a group of coeds from Vassar or Smith were interviewing ageless superstar Myrna Loy, Abrams said. (Ironically, Ms. Loy was always a champion of African American actors and their right to be treated with dignity.)

Nevertheless, Flo signed the exclusive recording contract with ABC. The contract covered the two following years but allowed either party to drop out without penalty after year one.

In the spring of 1968, when all seemed possible, Flo recorded some sessions at ABC’s New York studios. “It felt great to be recording again,” she said; “it really felt great. I really liked it a lot.” She noted that ABC had hired

“these three girls to do background; they were really good too, very good. And the music, they had gotten a band, session men, musicians who play for records.”

The sessions were produced by George Kerr and resulted in two songs for ABC: “It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It (It’s What I Say That Matters),” a Motown sound–type of tune, and Flo’s version of the Little Anthony and the Imperials’ song “Goin’ out of My Head.”

“I liked the tunes, sure did, and my voice hadn’t declined. The records sound great to me, and to a lot of people,” Flo said.

She had a major complaint, however. “The company released the record, but they just wouldn’t push it.”

This is the kind of situation in which an experienced business manager was needed, and there is no question that one could have been found to take the post from Flo’s husband. Any seasoned manager would have dealt swiftly with a record company that underpublicized Florence Ballard, if by no other means than threatening to denounce the company in the media for ignoring Flo’s potential as a very recent Supreme and threatening to immediately take her elsewhere. But Tommy Chapman was out of his depth in this role, even 113

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though Flo and Baun had incorporated him as Talent Management, Inc., with Flo as his sole client. His only business experience up to that time had been as a low-level Motown employee.

In one of the most pathetic episodes in Flo’s career of dramatic ups and downs, Tommy’s reaction to ABC’s failure to publicize her new tunes was to carry around a box full of her recordings to place in record shops and give to DJs. WCHB in Detroit began to play it, but the record never moved up the charts.

After the failure of these first two tunes, ABC brought in Robert Bateman, the experienced former Motown producer who had been present at the Supremes’ first Motown audition and who had noticed Diana Ross’s habit of singing through her nose. Flo once again journeyed to ABC’s New York studios, and she and Bateman went right to work. Flo sang fourteen tunes, which Bateman recorded.

ABC then released two of the tunes on a second 45. On one side was the song “Love Ain’t Love,” written by vibrant disco songsmith Van McCoy. On the flip side was a tune Bateman had written for Flo, “Forever Faithful.” For many of Flo’s fans, this poignant song became the symbol of her long decline, partly because its name seemed to refer to Flo’s refusal to denounce Gordy and Ross when the topic of her dismissal from the Supremes was newsworthy and when a denunciation might have helped increase her celebrity.

The records were released, but, in Flo’s words, “That was it. Anybody can put out a record.” What she meant was unless a record is pushed, no one will play it. Although “Love Ain’t Love,” in Author Randall Wilson’s words,

“revealed the power and range of Flo’s voice,” without a major publicity effort from ABC, few DJs loved it enough to play it.

After the unsuccessful release of “Love Ain’t Love” / “Forever Faithful,”

the company dropped its renewal option on Flo’s two-year contract with the company and effectively washed its hands of her. If Motown had done the same with Flo, Mary, and Diane immediately after the failure of “Who’s Loving You? / Buttered Popcorn” in 1962, the Supremes would be remembered 114

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today only by a few musicologists as the third pop group of that name to go under forever.

As for the album for which Flo had recorded the rest of the fourteen songs,
You Don’t Have To
, ABC simply dropped it. “I began to get the message,” Flo said. “‘Flo, your recording contract with ABC is not going nowhere.’” In any case, she said, “It was a yearlong contract [with a one-year renewal option], because I said I wouldn’t get tied up no more for a lot of years. It was fine with [ABC president Larry] Newton, because he wasn’t interested anyway, evidently.”

Despite Flo’s fame in Detroit as a former Supreme, many DJs outside Detroit were not familiar enough with the name “Florence Ballard” to give her first record the play she deserved. Many of them might have been encouraged to do so by a wave of publicity about the record from Detroit, remind-ing them that she was a former Supreme, but the
Detroit Free Press
and the
Detroit News
were in the middle of a long strike. In those pre-Internet days, this meant that very little news of any kind was emanating from the Motor City. The records died, virtually stillborn.

Flo and her entourage tried to boost the records’ sales through concerts and touring, but Chapman’s lack of experience hurt Flo here as well. The sites at which the new, solo Flo would be allowed to perform were poorly chosen.

In the summer of 1968, for instance, Flo was booked to play at the Wonder Garden in Atlantic City. Tony Turner wrote in his book
All That Glittered: My Life with the Supremes
that it was shocking to see her there, where prostitutes and pimps made up the bulk of the audience. While waiting to perform at this high-class joint, Flo was staying at the Hotel Traymore. A long time before, the Traymore had been the place to stay in Atlantic City, but now it smelled musty, the drapes were in shreds, and roaches crawled up and down the walls.

When Turner asked Flo what she was going to sing, she said she didn’t know. Turner, who had known the Supremes when they were at the top and 115

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wrote a book about his time with them, couldn’t believe her answer. A diva coming unprepared to a scheduled performance? Then he discovered that although Flo had arrived with costumes, staging, and a whole show put together, the band at the Wonder Garden couldn’t read music. Flo was forced to wait to decide which songs she would sing while a representative of the house band wrote down on a brown paper bag a list of the songs everyone in the band knew and she figured out which of those songs
she
knew. Management insisted that Flo not start her show until the place was full, and there were no dressing rooms, forcing Flo to arrive at the club fully dressed and wait in the manager’s office until it was time to go on. Onstage, she was lit only by individual red and white light bulbs. An attendant clicked them on when she went onstage and clicked them off when she left the stage. According to Turner, after the show, a hooker came backstage with a bottle of cheap champagne, blurted out, “Flo, you deserve better,” and burst into tears.

Responding to Turner’s account, Abrams argued that before gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, every hotel there could be termed a fleabag. He also said that the team finally decided to stop Flo’s touring when she became too pregnant to continue.

Flo and Tommy were in fact expecting twins. Some women might not have wanted to have children at that point in their careers, but as Pat Cosby noted, “Having children was part of the woman Flo wanted to be.” In any case, Flo could easily have returned to her career a short while after giving birth—had there been a career to return to.

There was not. Flo appeared on a few local television shows on the East Coast in an attempt to keep her career going. She also performed with Wilson Pickett, for whom she and the other Supremes had sung background before migrating to Motown. In September 1968, she joined Bill Cosby in a performance at the Ambassador Theatre in Chicago. Her spirits were lifted by the enthusiastic public response she received when she and Tommy rode with comedian Godfrey Cambridge in the largest African American parade 116

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in the United States, Chicago’s annual Bud Billiken Parade. She also made a big splash at an inaugural function for President Nixon on January 20, 1969.

But that was pretty much it. Flo’s attempt to boost sales of her records through public performances and appearances had failed.

Baun blamed ABC for failing to coach and handle Flo correctly and find the right songs for her to record. Otis Williams of the Temptations said that

“although there was no question that Flo had the voice to make it as a solo, the problem was that she didn’t get the right material or the right direction.”

However, in a world where publicity is all, or almost all, Flo’s attempt at a solo career failed mainly because, according to the terms of her settlement agreement with Motown, Flo couldn’t use the name “Supremes“ to publicize her new records. Therefore, the release of each record became a test of how many people recognized her name when it wasn’t linked with “Supremes.”

Flo might well have overcome this disadvantage if she had been able to re-create the Supremes sound on her records, but without two other female vocalists singing beside her in the roles she and Mary Wilson had so successfully filled, she couldn’t do that. Some purist fans could argue that she would have also needed the Motown house musicians and the Motown studios, but it’s possible that ABC could have saved Flo by rounding up background singers and starting a new group with a name reminiscent of the Supremes. Perhaps the Majestics? The Queens of Pop? The Primettes? The Dreamettes? There is not the slightest indication that such a scheme was ever considered.