The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (24 page)

Soon thereafter, she was mugged again. “One day I was walking to the store just around the corner to buy some beer,” she said. “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I was walking down Santa Rosa—it was a pleasant cool day—all of a sudden somebody snatched my purse, and I was so shocked, I just dropped the beer. I thought maybe I should chase him, but he was gone so fast, I couldn’t even see what he looked like. He was just short and black, looked like he had on gym shoes, so I guess that’s why I didn’t hear him. He was really flying. I came back home and called the police, but they couldn’t 148

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find anything; and then about a week later they found my wallet on Buena Vista.” Buena Vista was where Flo’s house had been before she lost it.

“I had some identification with the Buena Vista street number on it, so whoever took it brought it back and threw it on that street,” Flo said. “They took my marriage license, children’s birth certificates, and voter’s registration card. What they wanted with that, I’ll never know. Maybe they just threw it away. The guy at the store found the door key in the alley, but we had changed the locks on the doors.”

Flo found her lot increasingly dreary. Living in reduced circumstances “was very hard to accept,” she said, “because I was used to shopping and buying the things I wanted. . . . I was used to living in a higher bracket of life.

“It seemed like things just began to crumble. I couldn’t afford to buy any clothes for my children or buy anything new for myself, but the main part was I wasn’t hardly able to pay my bills sometimes. That was really getting to me.”

Squeezed in upstairs in Maxine’s house with her three children while her finances crumbled, Flo finally suffered a mental breakdown. She was admitted to the psychiatric department of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit in November 1974.

Although Flo’s sister Geraldine took care of her family while Flo was hospitalized, “my kids suffered a lot,” Flo said. “Even before I went into the hospital, they had worried looks on their faces. . . . They would wake up and see me crying, depressed, a lot of things.”

Geraldine, Flo said, “had eight children, and with my three it was a packed house. My sister took very good care of them . . . but they were out of school, they were in a different environment, they didn’t have me there, they didn’t have their father there. I worried a lot about them in the hospital, and the doctor said, ‘You really shouldn’t worry, because you’re going to have to get yourself together so you can always keep the children happy.’ After that I didn’t worry too much.

“I came out of the hospital and at that time I could no longer stay at my sister [Maxine’s] house. It was too crowded. So I still didn’t have anyplace else 149

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c to go. Mary Wilson’s mother had been talking to my mother and was asking about me and was told I didn’t have any place to stay. So Mrs. Wilson said, “I didn’t know that. Let her come here and stay.” (Mrs. Wilson lived in Mary’s house in Detroit.) “Then Mary called long-distance one day and told me to stay there as long as I wanted to—it was OK—which I thought was fantastic.”

Living in the Wilsons’ house was indeed a relief to Florence, but she needed to move again shortly in order to get her children back into the school they had been attending. “The kids were out of school . . . and I was worrying about that, worrying about that.”

After about three weeks, the downstairs flat in her sister Pat’s house became vacant, and Flo and her kids moved into it. They were soon joined by Flo’s sister Linda and Flo’s mother. The children returned to school, but she still worried about them. “They had to walk miles, looked like, all the way from Stoepel to Margarita, all the way down Livernois; that’s like walking from Six Mile to Seven Mile,” she said. “I had my foot in a cast from slipping on the ice, and I would stand in the window and cry every morning, it seemed like, because they looked so little and so alone in that long distance. And every day I’d just sit and worry until they got home.”

The final straw came when Tommy finally stopped sending child support money. After that, “One day I was in the living room just lying on the sofa and my sister Maxine came over,” Flo said. “She had been talking to my mother. Maxine said, ‘Blondie, you need help. You’re going to have to go on ADC or something. You can’t go on like this.’”

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) was the major welfare program of the day. Although reluctant, Flo applied to the program. She soon began receiving $135 every two weeks. Although the money helped, it left her with a deep sense of shame.

“I’d always been independent, ever since the age of fifteen. I’d always worked at babysitting and stuff like that, and then I got involved in singing.

I was always doing something to make money for myself. Being on ADC after making all that money was a hard blow. I began to feel like I was just a lazy 150

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woman who didn’t want to do anything. I felt ashamed. I also felt, I was a Supreme once,
a Supreme
on ADC!

“Sometimes when I cashed an ADC food order at the store, people would mention it,” Flo said. “Sometimes people would put their heads down like they felt sorry for me. And that made me feel even worse. . . . I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. For a long, long time I just dreaded cashing those checks; I just hated it. . . . I felt like a nobody. I almost forgot who I was or what I had been.”

At this time in her life, Flo said, “I couldn’t stand to hear music. It upset me because I was there at one time, and wasn’t singing anymore. . . . Whenever I heard music, I would get anxious and nervous. I would just get a funny feeling inside. Especially if I heard a Supremes tune that I sang on, I would just get humble inside, like bottles dropping off. I couldn’t stand to hear a song by the Supremes; I just couldn’t. So I just didn’t play any records or the radio, just the TV.”

One day, even television betrayed Flo. She suddenly realized she was watching a film clip of the Supremes, with Cindy Birdsong in her place, performing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. “I just turned the TV off. I couldn’t stand to watch it.” After that, she said, “Whenever they came on TV I would turn it off, or if they played anywhere in Detroit, I wouldn’t go and see it. I just couldn’t stand it.”

Soon she found herself drinking more frequently than before. Her drink of choice was beer. Drinking more often “was bad because I was drinking under pressure,” she said. “I was depressed. If I’m happy and I drink beer, that’s fine. If I’m depressed and I drink beer, it gets all distorted. Just one can, and it seems like I’m drunk. And I found out that that’s no cure for any kind of heartache.”

In this state, Florence soon began to express frustration with what she saw as Patmon, Young’s ineffectual work on her behalf. “I would call Patmon’s office, and they would say ‘he’s not in’; so I would ask to speak to Attorney Tate, and they’d say ‘he’s not in.’ Anybody I asked to speak to, nobody was in.”

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c She added, “There were a lot of questions in my mind, but I couldn’t get any answers. I had hired Patmon, Young, and Kirk to get this information and to sue Berry Gordy, but it seemed like Patmon, Young, and Kirk was in a way affiliated with Motown, and I didn’t know this.”

In fact Patmon, Young had no connection with Motown. Florence was apparently confused by the firm’s handling of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s suit against Motown in 1968. After H-D-H had left the company and Gordy sued them for breach of contract, Patmon, Young had been the firm that countersued Motown on behalf of H-D-H. In 1972 both suits were settled out of court.

Given her despair and frustration, it’s lucky Flo wasn’t listening to the radio around this time. The last Supremes hit in which she had sung was being played night and day. It was titled, ironically, “Reflections” and included the line “Reflections of the way life used to be.”

In an ideal world, Flo might have been able to pull herself out of her downward spiral. She certainly had a large, supportive family and many friends who might have helped her. But her heart was broken.

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You’re not an alcoholic; you’re just under a lot of
pressure and strain.

—One of Flo’s doctors, in response

to her request for treatment for

alcoholism

A ray of hope
pierced Flo’s deep depression when the
Detroit Free Press
, on January 17, 1975, printed the story “Ex-Supreme Broke, on ADC,” which told a mass audience what Florence and some of her relatives already knew too well. The story began

Not so long ago, Florence Ballard Chapman was the toast of three continents as one of the original Supremes.

Now she says most of her neighbors don’t know who she is.

Not so long ago, Florence Ballard Chapman drove a plum rose El Dorado, then graduated to a golden Fleetwood.

Now she walks, she says, but only a few steps at a time, because she broke her ankle last month.

Not so long ago, Florence Ballard Chapman was an expectant young mother. She lived in a substantial house on Buena Vista and she thought she had enough money to last the rest of her life.

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Now, she says, she’s broke. Her old house, which she says was taken from her by foreclosure, is boarded up. She and her husband are separated. She receives payments as aid to dependent children.

The day the story appeared, “my phone was just flying off the hook, and my stomach was crawling,” Flo said. “Every time the phone would ring, I would get nervous. There was so much excitement, and I wasn’t used to it.

I’d been out of it for so many years, away from reporters and publicity. . . .

It lasted for weeks. A lot of reporters were calling, from California, New York, from everywhere, from all over; a lot of them were saying they were sorry for what had happened—they didn’t know. A lot of people said they thought I was wealthy—I had lots of money and I was doing great. Then some people here in Detroit called and were saying, ‘We didn’t even know you still lived in Detroit.’ The majority of the people who called me said it was a shame, that I got a rotten deal, that Berry Gordy was really wrong for what he did to me, and that they just didn’t know my predicament, and that they were sorry. I did not get one bad phone call. I am well liked, always was.”

One caller in the first frantic days after the story was published offered Flo a job in a nursery school. She avoided returning his call for a week, and when she finally did, he told her that the job had already been filled.

“He acted like he was kind of mad, like ‘You know, you’re on ADC, but you mustn’t be too concerned about getting off it ’cause you didn’t call.’ So I said, ‘Hmm, well, sorry.’ He’d wanted to pay me something like eighty dollars every two weeks, but I don’t know if it was full-time work or not. And I said, ‘Hmm, I’m getting a little bit more than that in my check.’”

Another reader “called me from the Riverboat Club in New York and said I could sing in his club for five hundred dollars for three weeks, but I’d have to pay my own expenses.” Aware of the cost of hotels in New York City, Flo said “Uh-uh.”

Tantalizingly, Jack Ashford, a former Motown musician who was working with former Motown executive Barney Ales at Ales’s new record company, 155

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c asked Flo if she wanted to record. For some reason it didn’t come to anything.

“We were supposed to get together to hear some tunes that he had written,”

Flo said, “but we never did.”

In June, Michigan congressman John Conyers’s office called Flo one morning, inquiring if she would sing at a Joanne Little benefit concert scheduled for later that month in Detroit’s Ford Auditorium. Little, a black prison inmate, had been accused of killing a corrections officer she said had raped her. She was on trial in North Carolina.

“I said, ‘No, I’m sick,’” Flo said, “but then I thought, ‘I’m tired of saying I’m sick.’ I called back and said ‘I’ll do it.’ The song they wanted me to sing was ‘I Am Woman,’ a Helen Reddy song, so I got the record and learned the tune.”

Flo said she was worried—“I didn’t even know if I could sing; I didn’t even know if I had a voice or not. I couldn’t hear myself, and I was scared to death—wow, was I scared—because I hadn’t been up onstage for so long.”

She was even afraid she would forget the words of the song. An onlooker described her as “very quiet” before her performance, an uncharacteristic moment for the formerly talkative Supreme.

The Deadly Nightshade, Flo’s assigned backup group, greeted her with wild enthusiasm. The group idolized the Supremes. Some wires must have been crossed, however, because the Deadly Nightshade was not familiar with

“I Am Woman.” But the group, realizing the consequences for Flo’s morale if her first public appearance in years was a failure, held a practice session backstage and learned the tune.

Despite her worries, Flo performed well in front of a packed house, which included Gloria Steinem and fellow Detroiter Lily Tomlin. “The people were so warm,” she said. “They were so great; they stood up like they were just so happy to see me up there, and then I began to relax.” She was rewarded with a standing ovation.

Pamela Brandt of the Deadly Nightshade continues the story in Gillian G. Gaar’s book
She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock ‘n’ Roll
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The crowd really, really loved her. It was obvious that she was who they were waiting for. Then she walked off the stage and was standing on the side, and it was obvious that she wanted to come back on, but she was real insecure. So I ran over and said, “Come on, you have to come back! They’re dying for you!” and grabbed her hand and started dragging her back. As soon as she got one foot on the stage the audience erupted anew. She was bowing, and then she straightened her shoulders, got completely secure again, and strutted across the stage in front of us. And as she passed us, she threw back her head and whispered, “By any chance, would you happen to know