The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (4 page)

Flo’s warm family, and her secure place in it, made her happy, generous, and gregarious. It also made her determined to hold on to whatever she gained in life, partly because she felt loved and valuable and believed she deserved whatever good came her way. But being a middle child in a large family, she also learned early on that she had to speak up to get the attention she firmly believed she deserved and that she had to continue to speak up about her grievances at all costs if she wanted to avoid being overwhelmed by the needs and ambitions of others.

Flo was also particularly protective of her relatives. She aided them in the earliest days of their lives and would continue to aid them financially and otherwise later, when her income began to grow. Flo recalled that when she was still a child, “I was holding my baby sister Linda in my arms. She was about nine months old, and I was about ten. I was sitting on the porch, just rock-ing her, because I love babies, when a little white boy walked up and threw a rock that just missed her head. So I laid her in her crib, and I took off after him. He got inside his fence and told his father, ‘That black girl is after me!

And she’s trying to beat me up!’ His father came out and said, ‘You better leave him alone, you little black boy.’ He thought I was a boy because I always wore blue jeans then—my mother called me tomboyish—and my hair was pinned up. So I walked back home and told my mother. She said she thought the boy’s father should have chastised him for throwing that rock. Then the 7

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c father came over and started cursing us and carrying on and talking like he was really going to beat my butt. Another white guy, Paul Ayers, who lived next to us, heard him and came over from next door and told him, ‘Look, cool it. You don’t talk to people like that.’ The father started calling Ayers

‘you nigger lover’ and this and that. He kept on running his mouth, so Paul hit him and knocked him out. He got up after a while and went home, and we had no more problems out of him.”

During the 1950s the Ballards moved to the Brewster Projects, a gleam-ing new public housing project that was a fine place to live at the time. Flo recalled the family’s bright and shining two-story row house, complete with four bedrooms, varnished floors, a basement, and a modern kitchen. But she didn’t remember the Brewster Projects just because it was the best place she had ever lived. It was there that she met Mary Wilson and Diane Ross, and it was there that her public life began.

Like Flo, young Mary Wilson loved to sing. They both sang in church choirs and once performed at the same school talent show. After congratulat-ing each other, the two girls started walking to school together. They attended the same elementary and junior high schools but would go on to different high schools, Mary to Northeastern and Flo to Northwestern.

“Mary was a skinny, homely little girl. I guess I must have been too,” Flo said. In truth, earlier in her life, Flo had indeed been a skinny, homely little girl, but soon after she and Mary became friends, in 1958, Flo began to grow up. She became a tall young woman with long legs and auburn hair. She also had a big bust, large and sensuous lips, and an attractively pointed chin.

Flo, who was very interested in the dress and appearance of everyone she knew—male or female—throughout her life, added that Mary “had only one sister and one brother, so her mother was able to buy more clothes for her, and Mary was always sharp; boy, Mary was always sharp.”

Mary was different from Flo in other ways as well. Born in Mississippi, she had been sent north to be raised by her aunt and uncle in Detroit while her parents and their other children stayed down south. The aunt who raised 8

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her, Mary said, believed that children should be seen but not heard. When Mary was eleven, her mother moved to Detroit with two younger children, and Mary moved in with her relocated mother, brother, and sister. Living with stern relatives who were not her parents for the first decade of her life, and then having to join an already established family at age eleven, prepared Mary to survive the subsequent massive changes in her life and also taught her to remain quiet and keep many of her thoughts to herself, no matter what the provocation. “I learned to keep my mouth shut,” she said. She contrasted strongly with the outspoken Flo.

The singing classes that Flo and Mary took in school educated their voices.

(One of the reasons Detroit produced so many singers in the 1950s and ’60s was because of the extensive music program its public schools offered.) “You’re supposed to sing from your stomach,” Flo said, “not from your throat. And in order to breathe from your stomach, you have to breathe in, and as you’re singing, you breathe out. Mr. Silvers, my vocal teacher in high school, always used to tell me, ‘Drop your jaws.’ You drop your jaws all the way down, and I swear I had earaches for weeks and weeks. It felt like knots were under my ears from dropping my jaws. When you drop your jaws, your tongue goes down to the bottom part of your mouth, it folds under, and then you sing.”

Flo may have complained about her teacher, but those earaches would soon pay off.

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Yeah, I know a girl that can sing:

Mary, Mary Wilson.

—Florence Ballard, 1959

The Detroit of
the late 1950s and early 1960s wanted live entertainment and had the money to pay for it. The city boasted a pool of talented young singers and musicians, including the teenage Flo Ballard. A number of entrepreneurs soon appeared, hoping to unite the singers and the audiences and profit in the process.

Milton Jenkins was one such entrepreneur. Born into a family of thirteen children in Birmingham, Alabama, Jenkins had gone north to make his fortune in the music business and had situated himself in its Michigan epicenter, a residential hotel across the street from Detroit’s Flame Show Bar. In many ways, Jenkins was a model entertainment impresario, with the requisite interest in flash and dash. He invested every dollar he could spare to make his groups look good and drove them to their gigs in his own Cadillac. When he met Flo, his major group was a male trio called the Primes. Jenkins was optimistic about them, but girl groups were also becoming popular, so Jenkins figured he’d recruit a sister group. Naturally, they’d be called the Primettes.

Many of Jenkins’s contemporaries formed and managed a few groups that faded away after short careers. But something inspired Milton Jenkins. By 9

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creating the Primes, which became the Temptations, and the Primettes, which became the Supremes, Jenkins helped create and was the first manager of not just one but two of history’s most popular singing groups.

Jenkins began looking around for some young female singers. Flo’s sister Maxine told Jenkins that Flo could really sing. Jenkins wanted to hear Flo, so in early 1959 he invited her over to his residential hotel, which was not too far from the Brewster Projects, to sing for him and two of the Primes, Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams. (All three Primes, including Kell Osborne, lived with Jenkins in his apartment.)

Maxine took Flo over there, and, as Flo said simply, “I stood there and sang one of the songs from the ’50s.” But there was much more to it than that. Flo knew instinctively that this was an important moment. If Jenkins rejected her and found other girls for his group, or if he abandoned the whole idea of a girl group, her career might be over forever.

Flo rose to the challenge. What Jenkins saw and heard that day was what people in the music business call “the real deal.” As a witness to one of Flo’s early performances told author J. Randy Taraborrelli, “She gave it her all, hitting the high notes, holding them with perfect pitch, selling the song . . . giving the total entertainer’s package.” Jenkins was impressed. He immediately asked her if she knew any other young women who could sing. “I said, ‘No,’”

Flo remembered, “then ‘Yeah, I know a girl that can sing: Mary, Mary Wilson.’” Jenkins asked Flo to bring Mary back with her. If Mary sang as well as Flo did, Jenkins said, the two would be the nucleus of a new singing group.

Mary remembers Flo running up to her in a school hallway, out of breath, and telling her about this astounding offer. According to Mary, while Flo panted out the details, she gripped Mary’s arm very tightly, so tightly it almost hurt. There was no suspenseful period of consideration. As soon as Mary heard the word “singing,” she said yes.

When Flo and Mary returned to Jenkins’s apartment, Paul Williams was the only one there. Williams asked them if they knew any songs, Flo began 11

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singing “Night Time Is the Right Time,” and Mary joined in. Williams liked what he heard, and the Primettes were born.

In the musical hothouse that was Detroit, when Flo and Mary returned to the Brewster Projects, they were greeted by the sounds of numerous other groups singing on street corners. At least in the minds of the youngsters who hoped to be its future participants, Detroit’s music world was booming.

Maybe it wasn’t just wishful thinking. Pat Cosby insisted that in the Detroit of that era “even the smallest clubs featured topflight entertainment.”

Flo and Mary soon recruited another member for the group, Betty McGlown (who later married and became Betty Travis), after auditioning several other young women who didn’t make the grade. McGlown didn’t live in the same neighborhood as Flo and Mary but had heard through the grapevine that they were looking for singers. A few days later, Paul Williams heard the young Diane Ross singing on some porch steps with some friends, told her about the group in formation, and brought her over to meet Flo, Mary, and Betty.

Although Diane lived in the same neighborhood as Flo and Mary, she went to different schools. An interest in fashion design would lead her to Detroit’s Cass Technical High School. Her experience with music until that time had not been as successful as had the other girls’. Diane took a singing class at her school, but she dropped out when it became evident she would get a D. While she never had another singing class, she was by all accounts driven to succeed at whatever she did, and as her life came into focus, she decided she would succeed at singing.

Thus Florence Ballard founded the Primettes, later renamed the Supremes.

Flo would call the creation of the world’s most successful female singing group the major achievement of her life, and in the beginning, she was indeed its undisputed leader. She was older than Mary and Diane and sang with a full, warm, gospel-tinged voice that was stronger than theirs. “It was Flo’s voice that put us over,” Mary said.

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“Every evening after school, we’d be rehearsing,” Flo said. “Not making any money—just rehearsing.” Soon, Williams taught the quartet “The Twist,”

on which Flo took the lead, and “There Goes My Baby,” which Diane led.

He also taught them the first of the onstage routines the Supremes would make legendary over the years.

But before the group began performing in public, Flo’s parents had second thoughts. They wanted her to be successful in life, and to them that meant being successful in school. Singing, rehearsing, and performing with her friends would hardly help her get good grades. Diane and Mary visited Flo’s house many times to convince her parents that they’d make sure she studied and did her homework if the Ballards would allow her to sing with them.

Eventually, they were successful. Ironically, Diane later criticized Flo’s parents for selfishly wanting Flo to be a singer more than Flo herself wanted it.

The group began to perform at Detroit clubs and cabarets, church recreation rooms, and union halls, singing such standards as “There Goes My Baby”

and “Night Time Is the Right Time.” Although Flo’s strong, deep voice was the dominant one, the lead passed democratically from one girl to the other, depending on who the group decided would be the best in that role for each song. At most of the small venues they played, the house supplied the food—

sandwiches, hot sausages, fried chicken—and the patrons brought their own liquor. The Primettes were too young to sing legally in a club that had a liquor license. Betty McGlown was the old lady of the group, at seventeen; Flo was fifteen; and Diane and Mary were fourteen.

The teens dressed their age. Diane and her mother made balloon dresses for the group—big-skirted orange dresses that would puff out over the body and then be reeled back in by elastic around the legs. Their alternate outfits were stretched-out red or white sweaters bearing the letter “P” for Primettes, white pleated skirts, sweat socks, and white gym shoes, which eventually turned gray from wear.

In Flo’s words, the Primettes were “sharp” and “out of sight” of any competitors. “They were throwing money at us.” She was telling the literal truth.

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“The audience would be drinking,” and, according to Flo, “they’d say, ‘What the hell, they sound good; let’s give ’em all our money!’ They’d put money down on the stage at our feet. Don’t think we didn’t pick it up. The next day, they’d wake up sober and say, ‘Where the hell did all our money go?’”

Neither Flo nor the other Primettes can be blamed for picking up all the money thrown at them. Their pay, which Jenkins gave them, was fifteen dollars for the group for each performance, plus tips. What the club owners and church recreation people paid Jenkins is lost in the mists of rock ’n’ roll history, but considering the venues the group played, it’s unlikely he made much if anything on them. (Jenkins died in 1970.) And he did buy their clothes, or the material with which Diane and her mother made their clothes. Like Motown in later years, he probably felt justified charging such expenses to the group’s account.