The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (2 page)
Read The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard Online
Authors: Peter Benjaminson
Tags: #Supremes (Musical Group), #Soul & R 'N B, #Cultural Heritage, #Singers, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Women Singers - United States, #Ballard; Florence, #Pop Vocal, #Music, #Biography & Autobiography, #Genres & Styles, #Composers & Musicians, #Women
That’s what
YOU
think.
—Florence Ballard
C
ontents
b
Introduction: Founder and Soul Sister
Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom, Ba-by, Ba-by”
10
The Corner of Hollywood and Woodward
18
Paranoid, Isolated, and Homeless
Afterword: The
Dreamgirls
Resurrections
Appendix 1: Florence Ballard, Primettes,
Appendix 2: Excerpts from Florence
Ballard’s Legal Case Against Motown
This book is
based largely on the author’s exclusive audio-taped interview with Florence Ballard, which was conducted over several weeks in 1975. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Florence Ballard are from that interview. While every attempt was made to verify the accuracy of Flo’s statements, it should be noted that many of them express her personal opinions and feelings, which are by nature subjective and unverifiable.
P
reface
Flo and Me
I was lounging
in the City Room of the
Detroit Free Press
one cold morning in early 1975 when Assistant City Editor John Oppedahl approached me.
He was wearing a half-smile that indicated he had recently heard something newsworthy. “I was just told that Florence Ballard is on welfare,” he said.
“Wanna check it out?” I leaped to my feet. “What!?” I shouted. “A Supreme on welfare!?” At twenty-nine, I was extremely excitable. “Gimme a car and I’ll stake out her house until I find her,” I said, pounding my desk for emphasis. Oppedahl’s half-smile became a grin. He was pleased when his reporters got into their stories.
I drove a
Free Press
staff car, a monstrously powerful Chevy Impala, to the small two-bedroom duplex in Northwest Detroit where John had told me Flo was living. I parked in front of the house, strode purposefully up to the door, and knocked on it. No one was home. I went back to the car and waited.
Within forty minutes, Flo and her daughters came walking up the sidewalk.
Flo, sporting a neatly trimmed Afro, was wearing a hooded woolen overcoat over a white sweater and a dark pantsuit. She was carrying a bag of groceries.
The girls were wearing colorful dresses under their coats and were obviously clean and well cared for. Flo was somewhat startled to see a large, determined-looking man in a suit and topcoat get out of the idling car and approach her, but after I identified myself, she invited me inside.
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b P
reface
Although Flo outlined her predicament on that first visit, she didn’t seem particularly interested in talking. After I wrote an article about her situation that appeared first in the
Free Press
and then nation- and worldwide, a friend called her and asked, “Why did you tell people you were on welfare? That’s a shame.” Her reply: “I couldn’t very well deny it, because it’s the truth, and he knew it.”
Flo was pleasantly astounded, however, by the media frenzy and the number of friendly calls the story inspired. So she invited me back to her house to record her life story in her own words. I visited her after work and on week-ends over several weeks in 1975 and recorded more than eight hours of tape.
At the time of my visits, when her career was long over, Flo was more statuesque than heavy, with clear skin and a ready laugh. She always dressed casually but neatly. On each occasion, she served me glass after glass of Kool-Aid and talked in a low, pleasant, but somewhat depressed drawl about the ups and downs of her life. The sound of ice cubes tinkling in the Kool-Aid can be heard on the tapes, as well as the sound of her daughters occasionally running through the room, giggling and chasing each other.
I was thrilled to be in contact with such a major celebrity; a poster of the Supremes, including Flo, had decorated my college dorm room for years. We laughed and joked occasionally as she told the happy parts of her story. She recounted the sad parts unhappily, obviously reliving some difficult emotions.
It became clear after her death one year later, as those who had been close to Flo began to tell their own stories, that she had left out the very worst parts, either because they embarrassed her or because pain had caused her to suppress some of her memories.
Soon after Flo’s death I tried to interest various publications and publish-ers in her life story; however, public awareness of and interest in her career had declined rapidly after she left the Supremes. Her death revived that awareness briefly, but the decline resumed immediately after her funeral. The success of the Broadway musical
Dreamgirls
, which opened in 1981, caught me napping but inspired Mary Wilson of the Supremes to write her book
Dream-xv
P
reface
c
girl: My Life as a Supreme
. I thought Mary’s book had satisfied the newly awak-ened public interest in both her career and Flo’s. But then the opening of the
Dreamgirls
movie, twenty-five years later, released a fresh whirlwind of fasci-nation in the life and career of the Lost Supreme, whose full story had not yet been told.
Although some of the early portions of my interviews with Flo have been paraphrased and, to a very limited extent, quoted in some publications, most of their content has not been revealed until now. Nor has the newest information on Flo, which I obtained through original research, based on clues in the interviews. I hope you enjoy this joint effort by Flo and me to tell her side of the story.
A
cknowledgments
Thanks to
Randall Wilson, author of the excellent
Forever Faithful!: A Study
of Florence Ballard and the Supremes
, who cooperated in the writing of
The Lost
Supreme
. A tip of the hat to Flo’s sister Maxine Ballard, who published
The
True Story of Florence Ballard
in 2007. Kudos and thanks to Mary Wilson, whose 1986 book
Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme
began the telling of the Florence Ballard saga.
Thanks to one of my outstanding early editors and one of my oldest friends, John Oppedahl, who assigned the Ballard story to me in 1975 and who has been supporting my pursuit of this and other great stories ever since; to Alan Abrams, who has been supporting my Ballard and Motown efforts since 1977; and to entertainment attorney Jim Lopes, who put it all together.
Additional thanks to the late professor James W. Carey of Columbia University School of Journalism; to the staffs of the Inn on Ferry Street and the Detroit Public Library; to Ruth Miles, the extraordinarily helpful and long-serving Detroit
Free Press
librarian; to
Free Press
and Detroit
News
staffers Judy Diebolt, Peter Gavrilovich, Bill McGraw, and John Smyntek; to the late Neal Shine, the late Linda Ballard, and to Kurt Luedtke; to Dr. Richard “Duke”
Hagerty and Dr. Ronald Schwartz; to ace investigator Ed McGrath; to Clau-dia Menza; to Brian and Melissa Burdick, and to the Skurow brothers, Andrew and Matt.
Thanks also to my friends at my investigative day job, who have been uniformly supportive: Ailsa, Alin, Beatriz, Betty, Carlos, Charlie, Dawn, Emily, Favio, Gerard, Howard, Julie, Julio, Larry, Leo, Lety, Madalyn, Magali, Maria, Mark, Maxima, Milton, Nancy, Pam, Phil, Pilar, Ronald, Selena, Shaela, Suk, xvii
xviii
b A
cknowledgments
Vincent, Wei, and Yvonne, as well as my also uniformly supportive friends at my previous job, including Annie, Barry, Boomie, Dan, Ed, Goethy, Ming, Pacey, Roger, Salhuddin, Tom, and Vanessa. If I’ve left out anybody, I promise I’ll mention you in my next book.
A tremendous shout-out to my current editors, Yuval Taylor and Lisa Reardon, two of the most thorough, professional, persistent, and indefatiga-ble editors I have ever encountered.
And a massive, eternal shout-out to my informal editor in all areas of life, my wife, Susan Harrigan, and to our greatest-ever joint production, Annie Benjaminson, and her husband, ace researcher Greg Naarden.
—Peter Benjaminson, New York City, 2007
I
ntroduction
Founder and Soul Sister
Florence Glenda Ballard
was the founding member of the Supremes, the most successful female singing group in history. An international singing star by the age of twenty-one, she performed with the other two original Supremes, Mary Wilson and Diane* Ross, before and during their glory years, 1964–1967.
Of the fourteen records they recorded during those years, five in a row and ten altogether rose to #1 on the Pop charts. In 1965 and 1966, five of the nine singles they recorded hit #1.
Only the Beatles, the world’s other top group at that time, would exceed the Supremes’ record, but to maintain their status, the lads from Liverpool had to duke it out with the young women from Motown month after month.
While the Fab Four’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Love Me Do,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “Penny Lane” climbed the charts to #1, pop perfections such as
“Where Did Our Love Go?,” “Baby Love,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and
“You Keep Me Hangin’ On” were right there alongside them.
The trio of singers Florence Ballard brought together was indisputably the most popular group the famed Motown Records Company ever produced.
____
*The name “Diana” was inscribed on Diane’s birth certificate by mistake. Her parents had intended to call her “Diane” and did so throughout their lives, as did everyone who knew her.
But Diane considered the name “Diana” more glamorous and adopted that name later in her career.
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b I
ntroduction
As late as 2006, a drawing of Ballard, Ross, and Wilson—the original Supremes—graced the cover of the Motown History Museum brochure. A banner commemorating “Stop! In the Name of Love” hung on the Detroit museum itself, a memorial to one of Motown’s most popular songs.
The Supremes may have made seamless music together, but its members were not at all alike. In the beginning, at least, Flo was the spunky, funny one. Something of a comedienne onstage, she was, said Marvin Gaye, “a beautiful person—loving and warm. . . . She was down-to-earth, she loved to laugh, and everyone loved her.” Ex-boyfriend Roger Pearson called her “a great lady, a very proud person, and a person with a lot of dignity. I never heard her say one unkind word about anyone else.” Flo’s friend and the widow of Motown producer Hank Cosby, Pat Cosby, said, “Flo always greeted me with a smile, and that smile represented who she was.”
Flo Ballard had auburn hair and such light skin that her friends called her “Blondie.” Beautiful, tall, and statuesque, she was never during her performing years as heavy as the wonderfully talented women who portrayed her in the Broadway and movie versions of
Dreamgirls.
Mary Wilson was actually the quiet one. Serious and responsible, Mary was determined to survive, and if possible prosper, in what she correctly perceived to be an environment filled with traps and pitfalls.
Diane Ross was a skilled, hard-working, very slender and attractive woman who was, by nearly all accounts, the most determined of the Supremes. Blessed with talent and drive, she was resolved not just to be successful but to be mag-nificently successful.