The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (26 page)

As for her feelings toward Diana Ross and Mary Wilson, Flo expressed ambivalence in 1975. After she and Ross had both left the Supremes, she said,

“Diane would come to town, and she wouldn’t even call to say hello or anything,” Flo said. “I thought it was kind of ridiculous, all three of us growing up together, then turning out to dislike each other so. I didn’t dislike her, because I said to myself if Diane had been in the predicament I was in, I would be right there to help her. And to this day, if she ever should fall into a bad predicament, I would still help her as much as I could. But I guess she felt different.”

She excused Ross’s refusals to mingle with fans, which were widely criticized, on the basis of exhaustion. While noting that Diane “has an ego, a big ego, a very big ego,” Flo added, “Diane always liked her privacy. I think we all do. People, the fans, don’t understand how artists feel. Diane possibly could have been very tired, so she just didn’t want to be bothered. And the fans will take it the wrong way.

“A lot of fans have come to me and said, ‘Diane is very nasty. She has a very nasty personality,’” Flo said. “And I would say, ‘Well, she’s just tired.’

And taking on all those leads, she had to be just worn out, because she had a lot of sleepless nights that she couldn’t rest, insomnia and this and that. She had quite a few problems.”

Flo did finally manage to reach Diana by telephone in 1975, a difficult task considering the vigilance of Diana’s staff. “She’s back to the Diane I knew when we were growing up,” she said. “I think the reason basically of her chang-165

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“We had a very long, very nice woman-to-woman talk,” Flo said. “She seemed more relaxed, more earthy. She’s making movies, and I had to give her credit. I went to see that one movie,
Lady Sings the Blues
, and I must say, I cried—I did! I guess because we grew up together, the three of us were so much like sisters. That scene in
Lady Sings the Blues
where people are throwing stuff through the windows of the bus took me back to Macon, Georgia, and I said, ‘Wow!’ She really did a fantastic acting job in that film. I give her all the credit in the world. I used to say to myself, ‘How could we have grown up together and then turn out to be not liking each other?’ I think we all have problems.”

In praising Ross, Flo even compared her assertiveness favorably with what she perceived as Mary Wilson’s passivity, saying, “As far as I’m concerned, I would rather deal with Diane than I would with, say, Mary. Because Diane is more of a straightforward person, she doesn’t bite her tongue, she will tell you how she feels, and she’ll tell anybody else how she feels.” However, Flo went on to praise Mary, noting, “Mary always kept in touch, Mary never forgot the kids around Christmas, she would always give them whatever she could, and Mary didn’t have that much.”

Flo not only got back in touch with Diana that year but also reacquainted herself with the glorious recordings that she, Diana, and Mary had made during their heyday.

“I didn’t realize how many albums we recorded until lately,” she said in 1975, “because I had forgotten about all of the albums—there were so many.

We were always recording, recording, recording. Then I heard some tune on the radio not too long ago and I said, ‘God—phew!—I forgot all about that one.’” When Flo heard one of those old tunes, she said, she turned the radio up. “It sounds good to me,” she said, “and the memories . . . and then I say to myself, ‘Boy, that record sold a lot of copies, and nearly every one they play was a million-seller.’

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“Sometimes I have regrets and wish I was back in the group, but a lot of times I say to myself, ‘Would it be worth it to go back into it and have the same thing happen again?’ Because basically, Mary Wilson, the only original Supreme now—she’s still singing, but she didn’t get what she deserved either, moneywise.

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When we reached the cemetery, it was just Flo’s
family, the pallbearers, The Four Tops, and me.

—Mary Wilson,
Dreamgirl: My Life as

a Supreme

On a winter day
in 1976, Flo visited her mother’s house, where her sister Linda was also living, and ate one ice cube after another right out of the freezer.

When her mother asked her why, Flo said, “I feel hot all the time.” Then she told Mrs. Ballard, “If anything happens to me, Mommy, take my kids.”

Flo returned home without incident, but her condition worsened during the night. Her daughter Nicole called Linda the next morning to tell her that something was seriously wrong.

Linda was anxious to reach her sister but couldn’t start her car until late morning. Nicole, growing increasingly frantic, also kept trying to reach her father, who was working as a chauffeur for a local minister. She finally contacted Chapman by phone a little after noon. Linda was also calling him. “After I kept pleading with him to do something,” Linda said, “he finally picked me up.” Linda later criticized Chapman for not coming home immediately.

“Tommy acted as if Flo being sick was interfering with his schedule,” she said.

When Linda and Tommy reached Flo’s house, Linda found her sister, who had protected her from a rock-throwing boy approximately a quarter of a cen-167

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tury before, lying on the floor, unable to move. “I had to use all my strength to pick her up off the floor and put her on the couch,” Linda said. “Tommy didn’t help me. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me, in a robotic voice, that she couldn’t move from the waist down.”

“If anything happens to me,” Flo said again, “Take care of my baby,”

apparently referring to Lisa, her youngest daughter.

Linda, who died in 2007, described Tommy’s attitude toward the seriously ill Flo as “nonchalant.” She told Flo that she was going to be all right and called an ambulance to take the former Supreme to Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital. Linda stayed with the children while Tommy went with Flo to the hospital, where doctors discovered she had a blood clot in a coronary artery.

Tommy said later that by 2:30 A.M. the doctors had told him they felt that Flo was “pulling through” and he could go home.

“Before I left the hospital, she was smiling and had just fallen off to sleep,”

Chapman said. “About 7:30 A.M., I received a call from the hospital asking me to get there as soon as possible. When I got there, I waited for about thirty minutes, and then the doctor came out and told me my wife was dead.”

Flo died on February 22, 1976. The cause on the death certificate was coronary artery thrombosis. She was thirty-two.

It was eight years to the day after Flo had signed the final agreement giving up her membership in the Supremes. This may not have been a coincidence. Studies have shown that even gravely ill people often hang on to life in order to die on a day that is meaningful to them.

The Wayne County medical examiner, Dr. Werner Spitz, indicated in news articles at the time that he’d been told that before Flo had been admitted to the emergency room, she had been drinking and taking two different medications, one to facilitate weight loss and the other to counteract high blood pressure.

The autopsy told a different story. According to assistant medical examiner James Mullaney, the physician who performed the procedure, there were no drugs in Flo’s system except a small amount of Seniquan, an antidepressant.

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Although Dr. Mullaney indicated he’d been told that Flo also had been taking Tenuate, an appetite suppressant, and Lasix, a drug used to treat excessive fluid accumulation and swelling, he discovered no traces of these drugs in her system and only “a trace” of alcohol.

What killed Flo, according to the autopsy, was a combination of heart disease, a blood clot, hypertension, and “obesity.” Elsewhere in the report, however, Dr. Mullaney described Flo as “somewhat obese,” and that was probably the right way to put it. A person of her height and weight—the autopsy states that the five foot seven Flow weighed 195 pounds at the time of her death—is certainly heavy but not morbidly obese.

I attended Flo’s funeral, which was held at the New Bethel Baptist Church.

The congregation was ministered to by the Reverend C. L. Franklin, father of Aretha Franklin. Before the funeral began, a group of about five thousand fans wearing everything from evening gowns to work clothes had gathered outside the church. When a limousine pulled up next to the church steps and Diana Ross jumped out, the fans booed. Diana’s mother, standing nearby, looked extremely unhappy.

It’s not clear if Diana had been invited. Tommy Chapman, Flo’s husband, had made the funeral arrangements, and he died in the 1980s. But Flo’s daughters and other relatives said that invitation or no invitation, Diana knew the family would welcome her. Inside the church, Diana marched down the center aisle and was seated next to Tommy in the front pew reserved for Flo’s family members. Taking Flo’s youngest girl, Lisa, from her father, Diana placed the child in her lap. The picture of the former “first Supreme” holding the little daughter of the deceased “lost Supreme” would be printed in newspapers across the country and around the world. It was the only image of the funeral most people saw, making the occasion an emblem of Diana’s starhood rather than a celebration of Florence’s life and a scene of mourning for her death.

Every act from Motown sent a floral arrangement. Diana’s said, “I Love You, Blondie.” Berry Gordy’s said, “Good Bye, Flo.”

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Just after Reverend Franklin completed the funeral ceremony, Diana jumped up and said, “Can I have the microphone please? Mary and I would like to have a silent prayer.”

According to Wilson, Diana had not told her she was planning to do this.

The two weren’t even on speaking terms. But Mary could hardly refuse to stand up beside Diana at her friend’s funeral. “I believe nothing disappears, and Flo will always be with us,” Diana said. When she handed the mike to Mary, all Mary could think of to say was “I loved her very much.”

As the mourners filed out of the church, the organist played “Someday We’ll Be Together”—a Supremes hit recorded and performed after Flo had been thrown out of the group—again and again. The crowd pushed toward Flo’s coffin, and the pallbearers—Duke Fakir, Obie Benson, Levi Stubbs, Lawrence Payton, Marv Johnson, and Thearon Hill—had to be escorted by attendants. The onlookers pressed forward with such energy that the attendants tried to slow them down by throwing into their midst the flower arrangements that had been sent by Flo’s competitors and employers. The crowd destroyed the arrangements.

“It was pandemonium,” Linda said. “The fans started jumping on top of the hearse, taking Flo’s flowers, trying to get something that belonged to her.”

When the burial party reached the cemetery, Detroit Memorial Park, only Flo’s family, the pallbearers, the Four Tops, and Mary Wilson were there.

Flo’s body was buried under a gravestone that read simply. “Florence Glenda Chapman, Beloved Wife and Mother, June 30, 1943–Feb. 22, 1976.”

The only indication on the gravestone that she had had a musical career was a carving of two musical notes between the dates of her birth and death.

Flo’s mother, Lurlee, was understandably absent at the burial. She had already lost five children at various stages of their lives. “I can’t stand to see another child buried,” Mrs. Ballard had told her family.

Also absent from the cemetery, however, was Diana. The only person other than Mary who had shared Flo’s greatest moments had skipped out on Flo’s final performance.

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My friends said, ‘Here comes Flo; close the doors.’

—Florence Ballard

Florence Ballard’s
talent propelled her from a world of poverty and insignificance into one of luxury and fame. Then she was cruelly tossed back.

In her last words to the author, shortly before her death, she summed up how that felt:

My friends said, “Here comes Flo; close the doors.” I wanted to forget who Florence Ballard was. All I wanted to do was live for my children.

My friends couldn’t understand that I was fighting something. “Help me get back on my feet so I won’t fall again,” I said, but my friends didn’t hear me. . . .

I’m not suffering. I’m not crying. I’m just tired. Everything I try goes the wrong way. . . .

I used to dream that if I won a lawsuit, I would have minks and diamonds. But when I got some money, all I tried to do was fill the house with happiness. If the kids could be happy, the money would be well spent. . . .

I can’t find myself in singing. Lord knows I tried. Everybody says I’m a big star, but everywhere I go, I’m stopped in my tracks. Where do you go when you’re a big star?

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I had done it. I had won the poker hand.

—Berry Gordy, in his 1994

autobiography,
To Be Loved: The

Music, the Magic, the Memories of

Motown

The Supremes officially
disbanded in 1977, although groups using that name, including “tribute” groups, are still performing. In 1983 a television special celebrating Motown’s twenty-fifth anniversary brought Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong onstage for a very brief reunion of the almost-original Supremes. Wilson recalled that during their performance of

“Someday We’ll Be Together,” when Wilson and Birdsong kept pace with Ross as she advanced onstage toward the audience, Ross turned and showed Wilson toward the back of the stage. A few seconds later, when Wilson tried to use the mike, Ross forced her hand down so she couldn’t use it. Motown edited this embarrassing footage from the televised show.