The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (23 page)

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ing various periods of time she lapses into an extreme state of withdrawal from society, into herself,” and manifested, at times, “paranoid tendencies.”

Flo began having trouble making the house payments. Tommy provided child support for their three daughters, but it wasn’t enough to cover the mortgage as well.

“At first I was told that the house was already paid for by Motown, by Berry Gordy,” Flo said. “Then I found out that it wasn’t paid for. So I kept trying to keep the house payments going. Tommy would bring money by for food and stuff like that, but when I said, ‘What about the house note?’ he said, ‘Well, you’re divorcing me, I don’t have any place to stay; I have to pay my rent.’” By now, Tommy didn’t have a job. “Invictus started laying off people in 1973, and he was one of them,” Flo said. “So I said, ‘I’ll borrow it from somewhere,’ but I never did. I asked Patmon, Young if they would help me to catch up on the back payments, which were $700 a month, and they said they couldn’t. When I got the notice that I was losing my house [also in 1973], that really did it. I said, ‘I can’t even keep my house.’”

Trying desperately to avoid eviction, Flo pawned her jewelry, but finally she was notified by the bank that foreclosure was imminent. According to Mary Wilson, “Flo then went to another recording artist, who agreed to lend her $700. When she went to the artist’s business office to pick up the money, she was told to sign an agreement outlining the method and amount of the repayment and several blank sheets of paper.” She wisely refused to sign but received no money from the artist.

“Why my house?” she cried to friends. “Why couldn’t I at least keep my house?” To Flo and the other Supremes, owning a home meant security. It was also a symbol of success. When the bank finally foreclosed, Flo and her three children moved into the small house occupied by Flo’s sister Maxine and Maxine’s five children.

Still, Tommy and Flo stayed together as best they could. “Tommy couldn’t move with me because there was no room for him.” Flo said. “And his own place was too small for us. It was just a little bitty apartment. He 139

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When the kids were asleep at night, Mary Wilson has written, Flo would make herself up, put on what was left of her finery, and drive around Detroit for hours, singing along to tapes in her car. Many nights she would drive by her old house, which had not been resold and was boarded up and vacant, and stare at it with longing.

Soon enough, that pleasure was denied her as well, when she lost her car.

She had traded her plum rose El Dorado for a gold Fleetwood but sold it

“because I couldn’t afford to buy beds and stuff like that for my children. And I said, ‘What’s the sense of me having a car and my children don’t have the right beds?’ Plus they didn’t have any toys, so I sold the car and bought them everything they wanted.”

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It’s much easier to keep a losing team together
than a winning team. Winners develop

personalities.

—Samuel Pearson, as quoted by

his son Roger

While Flo was
being stripped of her money and her physical and emotional health, the post-Ballard Supremes weren’t doing so well either. Flo Ballard and the Supremes had recorded ten #1 hits. The new “Diana Ross and the Supremes” scored only two: “Love Child” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.”

By contrast, the charts during that time, as far as other Motown artists were concerned, could have been ripped from
Billboard
of three or four years before. At one point, Marvin Gaye was at the top with “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and Stevie Wonder was just behind him with “For Once in My Life.” The Supremes were nowhere, however, sliding down the other side of the mountain of creativity and popularity that they had climbed with the help of Flo’s strong voice and boundless enthusiasm. Gordy’s feud with H-D-H hadn’t helped either.

Tensions among the new Supremes lineup skyrocketed as record after record failed to ignite. This was exactly the opposite of what Gordy and Ross wanted. Their plan was to make Diana a solo act, but everyone agreed that 141

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Diana could not walk away from a group that was struggling to stay alive. If she did, she would be seen as publicly deserting it in its moment of need. Nevertheless, Diana continued to distance herself from Mary and Cindy onstage.

“The Supremes were dying, and Motown was desperately trying to hide the fact,” Tony Turner wrote. Now-forgotten Supremes recordings such as

“The Composer” and “The Weight” failed to lift the group from the pits. The Supremes, formerly always perfectly coiffed and gowned for their stage appearances, started wearing whatever street clothes they happened to have on for their shows outside big cities. For the formerly stylish group, this was the equivalent of screaming, “Help us! Help us!” at the audience. These world-class vocalists had, unbelievably, returned to their “no-hit Supremes” status.

In the midst of all this, Motown’s publicity department got too far ahead of itself, and the buzz began about Diana leaving the group to go solo.
Look
magazine did the first major story on the subject, a cover story titled “The Supreme Supreme” in what would become the last issue of
Look
ever published.

Gordy scrambled for a solution. He had planned to start Diana’s solo career with a tune he thought would be a big success, “Someday We’ll Be Together,” a song that had been recorded by another group ten years earlier.

But realizing that the theme and the sound would be perfect as the Supremes’

break-up anthem, he had it released as the group’s finale.

Although Gordy had lost much of his genius for songwriting and record production since becoming the name of the game fifteen years previously, he was right about “Someday”’s hit potential. As the record headed hitward, eventually reaching #1, Gordy and Motown announced the upcoming “Farewell Concert of Diana Ross.” The famed singing trio, half-dead without Flo and almost totally dead without Cindy and Mary’s full participation, gathered all its remaining strength and launched Diana as a solo performer at their final show together on January 14, 1970, at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.

Intriguingly, David Ruffin’s later attempt to change the name of the Temptations to “David Ruffin and the Temptations” took a much different 143

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long history together at Motown.

Ruffin called a meeting of the group one day and said he wanted the Temptations to be known from then on as “David Ruffin and the Temptations.” According to Otis Williams, in his book
The Temptations,
Ruffin told his singing partners that he was the dominant lead singer, and it was time he got his due
.

“But this wasn’t just any group,” Williams wrote. “This was the Temptations, and no lead singer, no matter how great, would ever be set apart from the group.” He told Ruffin, “Oh no, you can forget [the name change idea]. . . . We are not changing to no ‘David Ruffin and the Temptations.’

It’s going to be ‘the Temptations,’ and that’s it.”

If Flo and Mary had been able to unite in this way against Diana early on, and if Gordy had been on their side, the history of the Supremes would have been much more like the history of the Temptations, and Flo might have been a singing star into the twenty-first century.

Ruffin’s motive for trying to rename the group was the same as Diana’s.

Williams said Ruffin’s mood was “a mix of arrogance and insecurity” and refers to “the desperation behind his cockiness.” Possibly in Ruffin’s case, and certainly in Ross’s, both had been convinced since youth that they must become superstars and spent their lives working toward this goal.

After Diana’s departure from the Supremes, Gordy replaced her with singer Jean Terrell, the sister of fighter Ernie Terrell, whom she had accompanied in the group Ernie Terrell and the Heavyweights. So the upheaval among the Supremes continued. But while Flo was undoubtedly interested in the fate of the group she had founded, she had more pressing concerns at this point in her life, as her own situation went from very bad to even worse.

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I almost forgot who I was or what I had been.

—Florence Ballard

As Flo’s career,
her legal offensive, and her marriage all crumbled in the early 1970s, she began to drink and walk at night, “not knowing where I was going. It was like I was in a daze, just walking. It was like I didn’t care anymore, I had given up.

“I began to go into a complete depression, where I would just withdraw from people completely, just stayed locked inside, wouldn’t come out. I just didn’t want to be seen or anything. . . . I guess I was drinking because I wanted to feel happy. But that only made it worse.”

Her brother Billy probably didn’t help Flo’s mental state when he began to tell her that Motown and Baun had been acting together against her. “He began to say it was a conspiracy,” Flo said. “Leonard Baun was like with Motown, and they were shuffling things back and forth. In other words, Motown was paying him money, saying the hell with her.”

Billy, Flo said, “felt like so many people were involved in it. I began to think that they were, too. Then I began to get scared, scared to go outside.

I don’t know why, I just had a fear. Nobody had threatened me or anything; 145

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I just had a fear . . . I got that way because I was out of the group, because I couldn’t understand what was going on, because I wanted to find out about my money and couldn’t.

“While drinking and walking, I kept saying, ‘The money’s gone, the house is gone, and the car is gone. I just don’t care anymore.’ And I didn’t. I thought about suicide and a whole bunch of things.”

Some of Flo’s thoughts were about the people who had her money, and were presumably enjoying it, while she sank further into misery each day.

“Leonard Baun had over $500,000 of my money. I don’t know how he got a hold of that money. And somebody still has those stocks, and someone is also cashing my royalty checks to this day,” she said. “But I don’t know who, and I haven’t been able to find out, so I guess I never will. The checks are being made out in my name, ‘Florence Ballard,’ and somebody’s cashing them. There was somebody working at Motown, before they left Detroit, who saw the checks nearly every week. They were made out in my name, stamped, and shipped off somewhere.” Motown insiders say some were shipped off to the West Grand Boulevard Company, an entity Gordy controlled.

In fact, it was perfectly legal for Motown to keep Flo’s share of Supremes royalties. She had signed away the rights to her royalties when she accepted the $160,000 settlement from Motown. By signing away her future royalties, Flo had denied herself a significant sum. Mary Wilson later told one author that she was earning $80,000 a year in Motown royalties.

During the summer of 1974, when all Flo could manage to do was think about her losses and walk in darkness, she suffered a further humiliation. Her sister gave her a birthday party at their brother’s house in Detroit. “I could never drink hard alcohol anyway, whisky and stuff like that,” Flo said. “I drank some vodka, and I just completely blacked out. But I decided I was going to walk the dog after the party, and I was picked up in this car, and I said, ‘Oh my God, what will I do now?’ And I had on my diamond rings. Two guys picked me up and pulled me into the car. We were in a vacant lot, and I just knew they were going to kill me.

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“One of the guys got out, and he was in back of the car, and the other one was standing on the passenger side. And they had taken the rings off, and they were looking at the rings. While one was standing there looking at the rings, I looked around for the other guy, and I could see him in back of the car. And he heard me lock that side. The other ran around to the driver’s side, and I hit that lock real fast. And I said, ‘What do I do now?’ I said, ‘I can’t go anywhere,’ and then I looked down and saw the keys were in the ignition. And I said, ‘I’ll be—’ and took off. One of the guys stood in front of the car, and I tried to drive him over; I tried to kill him, but he jumped out of the way. I don’t know where I was to this day. I got back to the house and called the police, and the police looked and said, ‘You must be some hell of a woman. You got their car.’ I got their car, and the police picked them up. They didn’t get the rings back, but I didn’t worry too much about the rings, because I said, ‘At least I’m alive.’

“One was on parole; he was just twenty-two. They denied everything, but the police said, ‘How can you deny that you picked this woman up when she has your car?’ And they said, “A friend had it.’ So the police said,

‘Where’s your friend?’ They couldn’t produce their friend. The police took both of them down and had them up in the lineup, and this one guy, about twenty-two, on parole, he couldn’t see me, but I could see him. . . . I recognized him.”

Flo, generous to a fault, forgave the man who had robbed her and might have killed her. She did not identify him to the police, and he was released.