The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (27 page)

In 2000, twenty-four years after Flo’s death, Diana Ross organized a

“Return to Love” tour of the Supremes, inviting the only other living original Supreme, Mary Wilson, as well as Cindy Birdsong, to join her on the tour.

Although Ross’s take from the concert would have been an estimated $15 to $20 million, she bridled when Wilson refused a $3 million offer. (Birdsong 173

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indicated that she would have been happy with the $1 million she was offered.) Wilson had asked for a modest $4 million and also suggested the top ticket price be lowered from $250 a ticket so that more people could afford to see the show. Ross then cut off negotiations with Wilson and Birdsong and signed up two other ex-Supremes, Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence, for the tour. Predictably, the tour’s Detroit venue was half empty, and the Detroit performance became the last of the tour.

Mary Wilson, sixty-four as of the printing of this book, lives in Las Vegas and is still performing solo. After Diana Ross left the Supremes in 1970, Wilson doggedly kept the group going through numerous personnel changes until it finally disbanded seven years later. She followed up her bestselling 1986

book,
Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme
with
Supreme Faith: Someday We’ll Be
Together
in 1990. She has also worked in musicals and in off-Broadway plays.

After leaving the Supremes, Diana Ross, also sixty-four as of the printing of this book, went on to become a major single act, superstar, and diva and in 1981 left Motown entirely. The
Guinness Book of World Records
has since proclaimed her the most successful female singer of all time. She is still performing solo. Although she lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, for years, in late 2006 she moved to Los Angeles.

As for the musical legacy of the third original Supreme, some small progress was made over many years to resuscitate Florence Ballard’s music and reputation. After her fans crusaded for the release of the songs Flo had recorded for ABC but that remained unheard, Spectrum Music of England, a company owned by Universal Music, which had absorbed Motown, finally put out the album in 2001 as a CD titled
The Supreme Florence Ballard
. It includes fourteen songs Flo recorded as a solo artist for ABC: “Like You Babe,”

“Yesterday,” “Yours Until Tomorrow,” “It’s Not Unusual,” “The Impossible Dream,” “It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It (It’s What I Say That Matters),”

“Stay in Love,” “Walk on By,” “Goin’ out of My Head,” “You Bring out the Sweetness in Me,” “Everything Wonderful,” “Love Ain’t Love,” “Forever Faithful,” and “My Heart.” Also included are four Supremes songs in which Flo 175

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Berry Gordy, now seventy-eight, sold Motown to MCA Incorporated in 1988 for $61 million. He exulted in this, writing in his autobiography, “from eight hundred dollars to $61 million, I had done it. I had won the poker hand.” He now lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on a twelve-part television series about Motown.

The attorney who walked away with the bulk of Flo’s Motown settlement money, Leonard Baun, died in 1983, at age sixty. After his death, the Michigan State Bar destroyed the records of the disbarment proceedings against him, a favor they perform for all deceased members of the Bar.

Flo’s husband, Tommy Chapman, survived his wife by nine years. After her death in 1976, even though Chapman was living in Detroit, his three daughters were taken in by Flo’s sister Linda. In 1982, according to Linda, when Flo’s mother, Lurlee, lay on her deathbed, she called Linda in and told her the kids should go to Tommy. Then she apparently reconsidered. She called Linda back in and told her Linda should keep the kids “because he [Tommy]

just can’t do it.”

In a 1984 newspaper article about Chapman in the
Daily Reveille
, published in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Chapman was working as a bus driver, he boasted about his experience as a manager of musical acts. “I was in the music business long before Motown even thought about it,” he asserted.

In fact, he attempted to get back into that business after Flo’s death. His longtime lady friend in Baton Rouge, Florence Lollis, one of Chapman’s fellow bus drivers, said that Chapman had organized a blues band there called “Flo and the Young and the Restless,” with Flo Lollis as the vocalist, in an attempt to restart his musical career. Lollis said, however, that she wasn’t enthusiastic about a musical career and had participated in the band just “to make him happy.”

Friends of Chapman said he came home from work one night, said he didn’t feel well, and went into the bedroom to take a nap. He then died in his sleep. According to the records of the bus company that employed Chap-176

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man, he died of a heart attack on May 11, 1985, while off-duty and is buried in Baton Rouge. He was forty-five at the time of his death.

Lollis said Chapman was preoccupied during the last years of his life by the end of his wife’s career and her death, the poverty in which he felt his three daughters were living, and the wrongs he felt Motown had perpetrated on his wife and on himself. Chapman “really wanted to hold on to the past,”

she said. One of the reasons they broke up, a few months before his death, she said, was the stress he suffered from his memories of the past and the need he felt to keep sending money to his children, who he believed should have received more money from Motown.

Most of Florence Ballard’s family remains in Detroit, including her three daughters. Michelle Chapman lives in a small Detroit house adorned with portraits of her mother. Her twin sister, Nicole Chapman, strongly resembles her mother and speaks of her fondly. Flo’s youngest daughter, Lisa Chapman, was almost overcome by grief while appearing on behalf of her late mother when the Supremes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

All three of Florence Ballard’s children are on welfare.

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The
Dreamgirls
Resurrections

I tell you I’m not going.

—Effie Melody White

Florence Ballard
has been resurrected twice: once by the Broadway musical
Dreamgirls
, which opened in 1981, and more recently by the
Dreamgirls
movie, which premiered in late 2006. Both represent the Flo Ballard story as millions of people probably wish it had happened.

The
Dreamgirls
movie is about the rise of an all-female singing group, the

“Dreamettes”—later the “Dreams” (read “Primettes”/“Supremes”)—in Detroit during the 1960s. Actress Jennifer Hudson, playing Effie Melody White, the Flo Ballard character, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the Lost Supreme. The group is managed by a former car salesman named Curtis. (The Supremes were managed by a former auto worker named Berry.) Curtis replaces lead singer Effie with Deena (Diana) in order to attract a white as well as black audience for the group. So far, pretty close.

Unreality enters when Effie becomes pregnant with Curtis’s child. The movie pole-vaults into another, even more fictional universe when Deena resists Curtis’s offer to be group lead, saying she can’t sing as well as Effie.

The climax of the movie occurs with the number “I Tell You I’m Not Going,” which is about Effie’s expulsion from the Dreams. During that number, Effie is confronted by her brother, Clarence Conrad, also known as C.C.

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(just as Flo was confronted by her brother Cornell earlier in her life, after she had dropped out of school). Fiction returns for the finale when Effie’s solo career starts slowly but then, with an assist from Deena, seems to take off.

(Fans have surely realized that in almost every case, the musical and film character’s name starts with the same letter as the real person’s name, or with the letter before it in the alphabet, or sounds almost exactly like it, as in the substitution of the fictional “Jolly Jenkins” for the real Cholly Atkins.) Mary Wilson was a fan of the
Dreamgirls
musical and movie. Diana Ross said in early 2007 that she never saw the theatrical production and joked that if she saw the movie, she’d do so with her lawyers. Apparently she did not realize how gently the movie treated her.

That the Ballard/Supremes/Motown story, which took place in the 1960s and ’70s, has resulted in numerous newspaper, magazine, and television stories, fiction and nonfiction books, a Broadway musical, and a movie is an obvious tribute to the story’s staying power. It’s also a testimonial to the story’s roots in the dark side of the American Dream, the unfairness of the recording industry, the fight against that unfairness, and the attempt to meld black and white Americans into one people.

Although the original Supremes stopped singing together in 1967, the multiple retelling of their story since then continues to add to their status as icons. The Supremes’ own performances, the performances of the actors playing them in both
Dreamgirls
productions, and the performances of many other stage and screen actors whose appearance and presence refers to the Supremes have made the image of three glamorous black women—Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, and Mary Wilson—cooing into a microphone almost as much a symbol of American culture as Coca-Cola.

Imitators continue to use this iconic power to attract the unwary. According to a 2006
Detroit News
blog:

They’re coming . . . three women billing themselves as “The Supremes,” playing a special “Christmas” show on Dec. 1 at the Ford Community & Per-179

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forming Arts Center. . . . But don’t get too excited, Diana and Mary haven’t kissed and made up. . . . Close up that wallet. . . . This group, fronted by

’70–’80s “Supreme” Kaaren Ragland, didn’t record for Motown Records.

This
group didn’t, but the original Supremes—Florence Ballard, Diane Ross, and Mary Wilson—did. And if you listen, you can hear them now.

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ppendix 1

Florence Ballard, Primettes, and

Supremes Discography

Singles

The Primettes (1959–1960): Florence Ballard, Betty McGlown, Diane Ross,
Mary Wilson

Title

Label

Release Date

“Tears of Sorrow” / “Pretty Baby”

Lupine 120

1960

The Primettes (1960–1961): Florence Ballard, Barbara Martin, Diane Ross,
Mary Wilson

No singles

The Supremes (1961–1962): Florence Ballard, Barbara Martin, Diane Ross,
Mary Wilson

Title

Label

Release Date

“I Want a Guy” / “Never Again”

Tamla 54038

03/09/1961

“Buttered Popcorn” / “Who’s Loving You?”

Tamla 54045

07/21/1961

The Supremes (1962–1967): Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson
Title

Label

Release Date

“Your Heart Belongs to Me” /

“He’s Seventeen”

Motown 1027

05/08/1962

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“Let Me Go the Right Way” /

“Time Changes Things”

Motown 1034

11/05/1962

“My Heart Can’t Take It No More”/

“You Bring Back Memories”

Motown 1040

02/02/1963

“A Breathtaking Guy” / “Rock & Roll

Banjo Band”

Motown 1044

06/12/1963

“When the Lovelight Starts Shining

Through His Eyes” / “Standing at the

Crossroads of Love”

Motown 1051

10/31/1963

“Run, Run, Run” / “I’m Giving You

Your Freedom”

Motown 1054

02/07/1964

“Where Did Our Love Go?”
(1st #1 Hit)
/

“He Means the World to Me”

Motown 1054

06/17/1964

“Baby Love”
(2nd Consecutive #1 Hit) /

“Ask Any Girl”

Motown 1066

09/17/1964

“Come See about Me”
(3rd Consecutive

#1 Hit)
/ Always in My Heart”

Motown 1068

10/27/1964

“Stop! In the Name of Love”
(4th

Consecutive #1 Hit)
/ “I’m in Love

Again”

Motown 1074

02/08/1965

“Back in My Arms Again”
(5th Consecutive

#1 Hit)
/ “Whisper You Love Me Boy”

Motown 1075

04/15/1965

“Nothing but Heartaches” / “He Holds

His Own”

Motown 1080

07/16/1965

“I Hear a Symphony”
(6th #1 Hit)
/

“Who Could Ever Doubt My Love”

Motown 1083

10/06/1965

“Children’s Christmas Song” / “Twinkle

Twinkle Little Me”

Motown 1085

11/18/1965

“My World Is Empty without You” /

“Everything’s Good about You”

Motown 1089

12/29/1965

“Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart” /

“He’s All I Got”

Motown 1094

04/08/1966

“You Can’t Hurry Love”
(7th #1 Hit)
/

“Put Yourself in My Place”

Motown 1097

07/25/1966

“You Keep Me Hangin’ On”
(8th #1 Hit)
/

“Remove This Doubt”

Motown 1101

10/12/1966

“Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone”

(9th #1 Hit)
/ “There’s No Stopping

Us Now”

Motown 1103

01/11/1967

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“The Happening”
(10th #1 Hit)
/