The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (22 page)

In other words, unless Flo returned to Motown the $160,000 settlement Motown had given to Baun, she could not seek what she was rightfully due from Motown. There was no way she could do this, as everyone involved knew, because her lawyer, Baun, had apparently embezzled most of the $160,000.

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F
riend or
F
oe?

I Am the Master of My Fate. I Am the

Captain of My Soul.

—from “Invictus,” by William

Ernest Henley

Flo wasn’t the
only former Motown friend to turn foe.

After Tommy Chapman’s disastrous handling of Flo’s solo career, he went on to work at three Detroit food stores: Land O’Lakes, Bonnie’s Bakeries, and finally, Borman’s. “That was a good job; he worked there a good while,” Flo said of his Borman’s employment. But a new opportunity in the music business opened up in 1971, when attorneys at Patmon, Young, and Kirk “got Tommy a job at Invictus Records,” a company set up by Motown’s best songwriters, Holland-Dozier-Holland (H-D-H), after they left Motown in the late 1960s. “He was supposed to travel with groups such as Chairmen of the Board as a sort of road manager,” Flo said.

“I told Tommy it was ridiculous to go to Invictus, because he was making more money at Borman’s.” Flo said. “Invictus was paying him maybe $185

every two weeks, which is nothing, and he was making close to $200 a week at Borman’s.”

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Tommy’s move to Invictus spiked Flo’s growing paranoia that people—

perhaps including Tommy—were in league against her, especially after she met a man who, as she said, “told me that Invictus was actually Motown. So I said, ‘Well how could that be?’ Then this girl in Honey Cone, Edna Wright, said, ‘I’m singing with Invictus, but my contract is with Motown.’ And I couldn’t put all that together, and then afterwards I found out that the majority of employees they had at Invictus were ex-Motown employees.”

Flo was wrong about Invictus being part of Motown. H-D-H had written twenty-six Top 10 pop songs for Motown from 1963 to 1967. But they were much less productive than usual in 1967 and soon left Motown. In 1970

they founded the Invictus and Hot Wax record labels and arranged to have them distributed by Capitol and Buddah* Records.

Founding these companies took a lot of work on H-D-H’s part, most of it unreimbursed. They went to all this trouble because they wanted a share of the lucrative publishing royalties on the songs they wrote, which Gordy was not about to give them. Underlying this royalty dispute, however, was H-D-H’s belief that
they
were the reason Motown was so successful. Even though they’d been well compensated, they had chafed under Gordy’s rule. They felt strongly about their new company and founded it as a declaration of freedom from Gordy’s overriding influence.

Shortly after H-D-H left Motown, Gordy sued them for $4 million for breaching their contract, hoping to get them back. They countersued for $22

million, claiming he had cheated them out of royalties and had taken advantage of their youth and inexperience to dupe them into signing inferior contracts. They asked the judge to void their contracts and give them the rights to their songs. What really stung Gordy was that H-D-H claimed credit for Motown’s success. In a fine gesture of contempt, they also asked the judge to appoint a “receiver”—a court-designated official—to replace Gordy as head of his own company. This may have been going too far, but their argument ____

*The spelling of the name of this company was later changed to “Buddha.”

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riend or
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wasn’t much off the mark. Before H-D-H started writing songs for Martha

& the Vandellas (“Heat Wave” and “Nowhere to Run”) and the Four Tops (“Baby I Need Your Loving” and “I Can’t Help Myself ”), these groups had had no hits whatsoever. And we know what happened when H-D-H met the Supremes.

Gordy and H-D-H eventually settled this dispute out of court. The court jockeying revealed, however, that Motown had paid H-D-H about $20 million in songwriting (though not publishing) royalties. To this day, whenever a song written by H-D-H is played on the radio, H-D-H receives three to six cents, as well as sharing in the royalties on the sale of records, tapes, and CDs, which puts into perspective the small sum that Motown had paid Flo.

The Invictus-Motown brawl also produced a deposition by Michael Lushka, Motown’s former executive vice president of marketing and sales, in which he said that between 1974 and 1977, he had picked up bags of cash from Motown’s independent record distributors and delivered them in briefcases to top Motown officials in Los Angeles. He said Gordy was not one of these executives. In exchange for the cash, Lushka said, the distributors received free promotional records that were exempt from royalties.

“I’d go out two or three times a year and probably bring in, you know, a minimum of a half-million dollars for the year,” Lushka testified. He said Motown used the cash to promote its products and that some of this promotional effort involved paying radio stations to play Motown records. Paying radio stations to play records, also known as payola, is illegal. If, for that and possibly other reasons, the executives who allegedly received the briefcases full of cash didn’t declare it on their income tax returns, they were also violating federal income tax statutes. Motown’s lawyers denied all the charges in court, pointing out that no evidence to support Lushka’s story had ever been presented.

Flo’s lawyers may have reasoned that although her husband’s move to Invictus didn’t make sense financially, it certainly made sense psychologically.

By taking a job with Invictus, Gordy’s personal chauffeur and “lackey,” as Flo put it, had become an employee of the company that was also accused of steal-132

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ing Gordy’s best songs. Not only that, H-D-H’s desertion of Motown and formation of Invictus had weakened the new incarnation of the Supremes in particular. And the Supremes had also been weakened by the loss of Tommy’s wife, Flo Ballard. Gordy was now facing what may have appeared to him to be an organized cabal: Flo and H-D-H, who could easily be seen as the missing muscle in his now declining company, plus Tommy Chapman.

At Invictus, H-D-H produced several hits, including “Give Me Just a Little More Time” by Chairmen of the Board, “Somebody’s Been Sleeping” by 100 Proof (Aged in Soul), and “Band of Gold” by Freda Payne. (Payne’s sister, Scherrie Payne, later became a Supreme as the group ran through a long series of post-Flo personnel changes.) Gordy suspected (but was never able to prove) that Holland-Dozier-Holland had written these tunes while still employed at Motown, had failed to give them to any Motown groups, and had then taken the tunes with them to their new company.

Significantly, however, Invictus produced only one #1 hit on the Pop charts, “Want Ads” by Honey Cone, limiting the company’s record sales. The rest were hits but on the less lucrative Rhythm and Blues charts, showing that H-D-H were less interested than Gordy was in selling to white record buyers or less motivated to do so without the hit-obsessed Gordy on their backs.

Also, perhaps reacting to Gordy’s insistence that Motown not release a song that Gordy did not think was perfect, Eddie Holland, after founding Invictus, let his writers and producers record whatever they liked, and if the resulting tune went nowhere, said only, “I told you so.”

Because H-D-H hadn’t learned other lessons Gordy had learned early on, including how to avoid the clutches of the big record companies, they were unable to prevent their bigger partners, Capitol and Buddah, from gobbling such a large slice of their revenue that Invictus found it very difficult to be consistently profitable.

While H-D-H hadn’t inherited Gordy’s ability to engage in penny-pinch-ing when it mattered, Dozier had inherited Gordy’s expansive grandiosity. He wanted the struggling Invictus to start producing movies and plays. The Hol-133

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oe?
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land brothers were reluctant to enter such risky and costly arenas while they were still having trouble making money from the records they produced.

Dozier then abandoned ship for ABC.

Ironically, the Holland brothers, disgusted with the difficulties posed by life on the outside, returned to Motown in 1975, and Gordy welcomed them back in spite of their legal squabbling. Gordy may have admired the great songwriters for the same reasons he admired Diana Ross: they did not bother to hide their ambition and fought strenuously for what they wanted. The Holland brothers remained at Motown for only a few years though, before becoming independent producers once again.

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P
aranoid,
I
solated, and

H
omeless

At various periods of time, Ms. Ballard has experienced distressful and abnormal amounts of fear and
apprehension regarding people, causing her to manifest,
at different times, paranoid tendencies.

—Attorney for Flo Ballard

Closing in on
thirty years old, Flo had been an ex-Supreme for five years now. She continued to fight for what she felt was due her, but the battle was taking a terrible toll mentally, physically, and financially. And with the birth of her third child, Lisa, on July 15, 1972, her responsibilities increased.

On April 3, 1973, less than eighteen months after the dismissal of Flo’s suit against Motown, a tragic incident would shock Flo and alter her legal team. Her attorney, Gerald Dent, was taking part in a hearing on a case unrelated to Flo’s when he received two phone calls that seemed to disturb him.

The contents of these calls were never revealed, but shortly thereafter Dent pulled a snub-nosed .38 revolver out of his briefcase. What he intended to do with it was not clear. Some have speculated that he was planning to display the revolver to demonstrate something having to do with the case. But the judge presiding over the case claimed that Dent first pointed the gun at 135

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his own head, then aimed it at the judge, then aimed it at the police officer on the witness stand. At least twenty gunshots were fired. The judge said that Dent had begun the firing. Five bullets, fired either by the police officer on the stand, who was wearing his firearm while testifying, or other police or court officers in the room, hit the thirty-six-year-old Dent. He died instantly.

Florence was even more shocked by this incident than was the general public. Nevertheless, she continued as a client of Patmon, Young, which assigned attorney Donald Tate to represent her in appealing the dismissal of her $8.7 million suit against Motown.

Flo and Patmon, Young were partly successful. The Michigan Court of Appeals, although upholding the dismissal of her economic case against Motown, ruled on May 23, 1973, that she could still sue in a lower court for the emotional distress she claimed the record company and others had inflicted upon her.

The “emotional distress” Flo claimed in her lawsuit was no ploy. The collapse of her recording career and the theft of almost all of her funds had sent her into a downward spiral from which it looked like she’d never recover. Since 1969 she had begun spending all her daylight hours in her house, taking care of her daughters, cleaning and shopping but doing little else except watching television. Her marriage had suffered.

“Me and Tommy had some disputes, and we separated and I filed for divorce,” Flo said. “Tommy countersued; he refused to let me get the divorce, because, he said, I wasn’t in my right mind. Which maybe I wasn’t. It just seemed like I was mad at the world. It seemed like I was mad at Tommy because he had worked for Berry. So I was putting the blame on him. I was saying, ‘You worked for Berry; you probably still do work for Berry.’ I don’t know, it was all crazy. I began to get to the point where I was paranoid. I didn’t trust anybody.”

Flo possibly was paranoid, but there’s some support for her view regarding Tommy’s activities. Shortly before the couple separated,
Detroit Free Press
entertainment editor Barbara Holliday had come over to interview Flo and 137

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c her husband for the paper’s Sunday magazine, and had found herself greeted with hostile words by Tommy each time she mentioned something even remotely negative about Berry Gordy. When, in a follow-up article, Holliday wrote that Tommy had deserted his family and implied that he had married Flo for her money, he sued the
Free Press
for a correction, an apology, and $10 million. The suit, filed in August 1969, was dismissed for lack of progress in October 1970. Whatever the
Free Press
said about Tommy, he and his wife had badly needed the press at that time to advance his wife’s struggling career.

He was her business manager, and a manager with his client’s interests at heart would have done anything to keep the Detroit media on her side.

Nevertheless, Flo and Tommy retained some affection for each other. After she filed for divorce in 1972 and he contested it, they “got together again,”

Flo said, “and started talking and decided to see if we could really make it.

So we tried it for a while; then finally I said, ‘Get out.’ I began to take my anger out on him. I felt so much anger and hate inside because of what had happened to me until I just took it out on him. He left again, and then he came back again. When he came back the first time he stayed three months.

That Christmas was one of the happiest the kids had had in a long, long time because he brought them everything that Christmas, everything they wanted.

We were really happy. Then, after Christmas, the pressure, the strain—I just took out my hate, my anger, my feelings all on him. And I guess nobody likes that. So he left again.”

Flo was not exaggerating the shift in her personality. In court papers her attorney noted that her plunge from fame and wealth to poverty and despair, with three young daughters to feed and an absent husband, “had caused a severe and painful personality change.” He wrote that her personality “has changed from a very congenial nature to one that causes her at different and various periods of time to be extremely nervous, highly irritable at the slightest and imaginary provocation.” Moreover, the lawyer wrote, Flo had gone from a person possessing “an outgoing, pleasant personality to one where dur-138