The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (3 page)

There is little disagreement that Florence Ballard had the strongest and most soulful voice of the three Supremes. She could have competed seriously with fellow Detroiter Aretha Franklin, who sang for Atlantic Records. Flo’s voice was deep and powerful but had sadness in it too. “Flo was caught between poverty and opulence,” said Pearson. “She was only two years out of the projects and into a whole new reality of opulence when she became a star.”

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It was perhaps this in-between status that allowed Flo to sing both melan-choly and cheerful songs with tremendous passion and believability.

During their peak years, the Supremes were a worldwide phenomenon, and the impact of their presence had to be witnessed to be believed. Flo remembered, for example, the reception of the three women when they performed in December 1966 on the island of Barbados.

“We were singing on this barge, or dock, this thing right on the water,”

Florence said. “They estimated the crowd to be over 100,000 people. So we were singing, and all the plugs and microphones were down where the audience was. These three sailors, I’ll never forget, they’d been drinking, so one started it all; and you know how it is in a crowd: all you’ve got to do is push, and then it’s just pushing and pushing and pushing. So we were up there trying to sing, and I see the sailor shove a Barbadian. The Barbadian shoved him. Then they started coming toward us; they started jumping up on the stage.

“We went to run, but there was no place to run. If you went around to the back, there was nothing but water, nothing but the ocean. And we said,

‘God, what are we going to do?’ They wanted our gowns, a piece of those gowns or the whole gown. They were going to rip it all off. Luckily these guys had these fishing boats, and Berry called them. We got about two of the fishing boats, and we jumped in just in time. They had motors in them, and I was glad of that. Just after we jumped in the boats, they were onstage; they were after us, they were flying, they wanted souvenirs. They missed us by an inch. If they had gotten a hold of us, we would have been naked. The fishing boats took us straight on across the water to the hotel. . . . Berry was the first one in the boat.”

“Berry” was the man who was at first Flo’s major booster and later her nemesis, Motown Records president Berry Gordy.

Flo Ballard’s story has a hopeful beginning, a bright triumph, and a tragic end. Within her short lifetime, she moved from the fringes of American xxii

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society to its epicenter. Soon after establishing herself there, however, she was catapulted back to the fringes. Despite traveling around the world in luxury, chatting with royalty and heads of state, and being cheered and pursued by millions, Florence Glenda Ballard died, at the age of thirty-two, barely recovered from years of poverty and despair. The purpose of this book is to explain how that happened.

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“I remember singing,”
Florence Ballard said.

“I was five years old. I remember singing in churches, at home, and in front of relatives. I even opened a window in the winter and sang out the window, mostly Christmas songs, because it was winter.”

Flo was happy. Born on June 30, 1943, in Detroit, Michigan, she was one among many poor black Detroiters, poor enough to be forced to share a bed with four of her sisters and to resign herself to walking to school with holes in her shoes. “I walked real flat so no one could see the holes,” she later told
Look
magazine. Still, many black Detroiters were optimistic in the late 1940s and the 1950s as they waited for new worlds to open to them. World War II had brought many blacks—including Flo’s father—north to work on auto assembly lines and at other jobs at wages much higher than those their fathers and mothers had earned at hardscrabble labor in the Deep South. The winning of World War II and the consequent expansion of the peacetime auto industry offered the promise of even greater prosperity, in a city free of the South’s segregationist laws and, to some extent, its segregationist ways.

Detroit was even a nice place to live. Its downtown has revived somewhat since it emptied out in the 1980s and now boasts two new stadiums, new 1

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hotels and condominiums, and a thriving Greektown entertainment district with a new casino. Detroit’s neighborhoods have held their own since the 1970s, but the city is still troubled by crime and poverty. Dutch elm disease, the rise of foreign auto industries, the riots of 1967, and ongoing suburban-ization made the years from 1967 into the 1990s Detroit’s declining years, but all looked bright and open when Flo was young. With its two million people in 1950, Detroit was a metropolis of tree-lined streets that was voted

“America’s Most Beautiful City” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Flo’s mother was born Lurlee Wilson in Rosetta, Mississippi. Her father was born Jesse Lambert in Bessemer, Alabama. According to Flo, her paternal grand-mother was shot in the back when Jesse was an infant, and he was adopted by a family named Ballard. Leaving his adoptive parents when he was thirteen, he hopped trains and hoboed around for a while. He would jump off the train after a day of riding the rails and go to sleep in the nearest graveyard. “He always used to tell us that the best place and the safest place to sleep was in a graveyard,” Flo remembered. “You can imagine what I said! Have I ever slept in a graveyard? Are you joking? No way! I don’t even look at them.”

“While he was hoboing,” Flo said, “he met my mother, when she was about fourteen. They got married, and she started having babies and never stopped.” The couple moved to Detroit in 1929 and eventually had thirteen children, of which Flo was the eighth.

Like any other father with so many children, Jesse Ballard was forced to be a stern disciplinarian at times. On one occasion, according to Flo, “I was about an hour late coming home, and Mary [Wilson] and I were supposed to go to a record hop. I rushed into the house and was getting ready to change clothes. My father said, ‘No, you can’t go—you’ve been late coming home from school; you have to stay home.’ That did it. I went upstairs and tore the sheet off the bed and started tearing up other things. He came up there and whipped my butt, and that ended that forever.”

On another occasion, she recalled, “I threw a pipe at my sister. It hit the porch, ricocheted, and knocked the kitchen window out, and he knocked the 3

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c hell out of me.” Apparently he didn’t spank her too hard. “I was spoiled,” she said. “He spoiled me. I was the baby girl at one time until Linda and Pat were born, and now Linda’s the baby girl, but I always felt I was closer to him than anyone. When I was four years old, I used to crawl up in the bed with him.

I didn’t want to sleep with anyone else; I wanted to sleep with my father.”

Her major memory involving her father was falling repeatedly out of her own bed and being gently lifted back into it by her loving dad. Flo’s sister Maxine wrote in her self-published book,
The True Story of Florence Ballard
, that Jesse Ballard had a problem with alcohol, but Flo never mentioned it.

Jesse Ballard spent most of his life working at General Motors. He had started working there at age twenty or twenty-one. “He’d always have on his black pants and his red-and-white checked shirt or his black-and-white checked shirt. It was either one or the other. He’d go to work and come home to his family and then just sit until the next day,” Flo said. But while he sat, he often played the blues on his old, boxlike string guitar. And Flo sat on his knee and listened. Sometimes, she sang.

After thirty years on the line, according to Flo, GM gave her dad a gold watch. “That was great—wow!—a gold watch,” Flo said sarcastically.

The Ballard family would live in various places in Detroit, one of them a building that Flo called a “shelter for the poor” on East McDougall* in Black Bottom, then a teeming, mostly black ghetto on the lower east side of Detroit.

(These days the neighborhood is host to a successful racially and economically diverse low-rise housing project.) The family stayed there when Flo was eight or nine.

“The only people who stayed in that shelter were people with large families or people who were poor and couldn’t afford to do any better,” Flo said.

“We slept here and there,” in the small space they shared on McDougall.

“There were five girls in one bed, five sisters, and maybe three brothers in ____

*Most Detroit streets and avenues are referred to by their name only, without the addition of the word “Street” or “Avenue.”

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another bed.” Although Jesse Ballard received a relatively large salary working on the assembly line, with so many kids at home it couldn’t be stretched far enough to keep the family out of a shelter.

“My mother once told me, ‘If they had had all these things on the market when I was younger, to prevent pregnancy, I wouldn’t have had all these children,’” Flo said. “But I think my mother wanted a lot of children.”

A large family suited Flo, who enjoyed her brothers and sisters. Her sister Bertie, the Ballards’ first child, was twenty years older than Flo. Then came her eldest brother, Cornell, followed by Jesse Jr., Gilbert, Geraldine, Barbara, Maxine, Flo, Billy, Calvin, Pat, Linda, and Roy. But tragedy as well had struck the Ballard family. Before Flo was born, her mother had given birth to twins who had died at the age of five months and a girl who had died in infancy. And Flo’s youngest brother, Roy, was killed by a drunk driver at the age of three.

Late at night, Flo and the other kids would run around pretending they were ghosts and scaring one another. “I woke up one night and Billy and Calvin had this sheet over their head, and they were saying they were ghosts,”

Flo remembered. “I said, ‘If you’re a ghost, then I can run right through you.’

So I went running right into them and trampled them to death. I’ll never forget that.”

Flo wasn’t the only artist in the family. Each of the brothers and sisters was a musician in his or her own way. Family jam sessions were common.

Billy would demand the lead almost all of the time. “He couldn’t really sing, but he’d be thinking he was really singing. That cracked us up,” Florence said.

When relatives came over, they’d often give the kids a dime to sing.

From an early age, Flo clearly saw herself as a solo performer as well as a member of a singing group. “My favorite song was ‘Silent Night,’” she said.

“Seemed like every winter I was pulling up the window and singing that. My voice was real high-pitched, and people used to tell me, ‘I heard you singing last night, and you sounded pretty,’ and that made me lift the window up even more.”

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c Flo’s parents, although not regular churchgoers themselves, pushed their children into organized religion via a storefront Baptist church on Detroit’s East Side. A man Flo remembered as Rev. Williams would come by in his old black station wagon every Sunday and, to Flo’s amazement, not only drive Flo and her siblings to church but also pay them, in small change or in candy and ice cream, for attending services. Attracted by such fine treatment, Flo was baptized, sang in the choir, attended services, and was singing by herself in front of church audiences by the time she was five years old.

The building where the family lived on East McDougall was four stories high. “I used to slide out the window and sit on the fire escape. It was always hot in there,” Flo said. From her perch she could observe one teenage boy after another hopping over the little cement wall after the 10:00 P.M. curfew.

“I used to turn handflips against the same wall. . . . I was nice and skinny and carefree,” Flo said.

“One day,” Flo said, “we were all together playing, and I got lice in my head. I didn’t know what lice were. My mother took me in the house, and she said, ‘I see something in your hair,’ because she used to comb my hair all the time. I said ‘What!?’ And she said, ‘You’ve got lice in your head.’ I said,

‘Lice!?’ and started trembling and got real nervous. I could see her picking these things out and putting them on paper. Then she filled my head up with some kind of DDT or some stuff. I said, ‘Where do they come from?’ And she said, ‘White people have them in their hair.’ The kind of white people we lived around weren’t so clean. I had caught lice from the white children I played with. Mother went next door and told the lady about it, so then that lady checked her kids’ heads, and she found out that they had lice too.”

Soon after Flo’s sister Pat’s birth, the family moved, first to another housing project on Ethel in southwest Detroit, then to still another project on Eight Mile Road, the northern border of Detroit that Eminem later made famous.

Flo’s description of the Eight Mile Road project as “cardboardlike” probably made an incident that occurred there seem more threatening than it was.

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An old stove sat in the living room, which Flo’s father fed with wood and coal every day. “We didn’t have a furnace, just an old stove sitting in the living room that went all the way up to the ceiling. Every day my father would be putting coal and wood in it. . . . I walked past that stove one day, and my sleeve got caught on the stove door—and I jerked, and I burned my whole arm. I’ll never forget that stove as long as I live.” Nevertheless, she enjoyed her new home, partly because her family, which she considered stupendously large, was surrounded by even larger ones. A family across from her, the Moores, boasted sixteen children, putting Flo’s family of thirteen kids into some sort of perspective.