The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (5 page)

In any case, the Primettes were hardly in a mood to care about such things.

“We weren’t thinking about the money then,” Flo said. Less than four dollars each was relatively unimportant compared with having people admire them. “It was something new, something to do, rather than sit around the hot projects,” Flo said.

In the midst of this exciting time for Flo, tragedy struck. Her beloved father, Jesse Ballard, died in 1959 from cancer, at age fifty-four. It was a major blow to young Flo. “Diane Ross sang at his funeral,” Flo recalled, “and she said that was the last funeral she would ever sing at, because it shook her up too much.

“My father was lowered in the ground, and I cried and cried because he was gone forever,” Flo said. “A lot of nights I’d wake up and think that he was still there. Ever since then, I don’t like to go to funerals. If I do go, I never go to the cemetery, because I don’t want to see anybody lowered into the ground.”

With the insurance and Social Security money the family received as a result of her husband’s death, Flo’s mother moved them out of the Brewster Projects in late 1960, into a single-family house on Spokane, near Grand River, in a residential section of Detroit.

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Despite her sadness, Flo’s obsession with singing never faltered. She continued to sing out the window, with her brothers and sisters, in church, in the glee club, at school concerts, when she was all alone, and with the Primettes. “I would be in the classroom, and my mind would just jump straight out the window. Singing—that was on my mind, and I couldn’t shake it,” she said.

As Flo became better known in the neighborhood for her singing, she acquired her first boyfriend, an aspiring musician named Jesse Greer. Jesse had founded another singing group, the Peppermints, which was featured at Detroit’s Flame Show Bar and the Twenty Grand Lounge. Flo would show her devotion to Jesse by watching his group perform, and Jesse reciprocated by going to watch the Primettes’ rehearsals. He immediately noticed two weak-nesses in the group: he felt that Diane sang through her nose, and told her not to, and he told Mary to project her voice more.

Jesse also noted that Flo was not only the group’s natural leader but also the best singer of the four. He shared with the girls his opinion that if Flo sang more leads, the group would make it to the big time. He taught them some ballads, and the girls spent hours perfecting the intricate harmonies of the tunes he suggested. Eventually, however, Flo and Jesse Greer drifted apart.

After two years of singing locally, the Primettes began to tire of performing for next to nothing and going nowhere. They wanted to make a record, have all their friends hear it, sing it to adoring throngs at packed concerts, and ride around in limos. They wanted fame, and cutting a record was the only way to become big-time singers. As Mary put it, “No records, no career.”

They kept asking Jenkins to hook them up with a recording company, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. All Jenkins seemed to be able to do was get local gigs.

Then, in the summer of 1960, someone who knew someone saw the Primettes singing in a church recreation room and told Motown Records they looked promising. Motown songwriter Richard Morris asked them in to audition.

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Motown Record Company would soon alter American music and American attitudes permanently. It was the linchpin in the successful struggle launched by black musicians and black music executives to stop whites from stuffing their pockets with the millions of dollars that resulted from the sales of tunes written, sung, and often produced by blacks.

Motown was founded by Berry Gordy, one of eight children who inherited their highly entrepreneurial parents’ interest in business and in getting ahead. As a child and adolescent, Gordy had resisted helping his father in his plastering business, print shop, and grocery store. Nor did he join his mother in her insurance business and political activities. He insisted instead on picking out tunes on the piano in the Gordys’ basement and singing in talent shows, and he went his own way competitively by becoming a boxer, probably the most independent move he ever made.

Five feet six inches tall, and thin, Gordy started as a flyweight; he worked and grew his way to bantamweight and finally featherweight (126 pounds).

He then dropped out of high school and turned pro, slugging it out all over America for two years until he realized that no matter how well he did, light-weight boxing champs in the United States are neither rich nor famous.

Gordy wanted to be both. Besides, one of his pals at the gym was Jackie Wilson, who had musical ambitions.

After spending two uneventful years as an army draftee, Gordy started his musical career by opening a jazz record store in Detroit with his army savings and some borrowed money. He loved jazz but there wasn’t enough of a local market for jazz recordings to support his store, and it went bankrupt within a year or two. From then on he vowed to concentrate on what music consumers liked when he was putting musical products on the market.

Noting the growing music scene in Detroit, which had already swept up Flo Ballard and her friends, Gordy started writing songs for Jackie Wilson, who had started to sing commercially. Four of the five songs he wrote—“Reet Petite,” “To Be Loved,” “I’ll Be Satisfied,” and “That’s Why”—were hits. The 16

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fifth song, “Lonely Teardrops” (1958), was not only a hit but a monster hit.

It was the story of a million teenage lives. Gordy had established himself as a songwriter, but he hadn’t yet achieved fame or fortune.

Gordy soon realized that he was no more going to get rich as a songwriter than as a boxer. On his wall he hung the $3.19 royalty check that was his entire payment for one of his hit records—just to remind him of this fact. While peddling songs to various singers, he had become aware that there were many vocalists in Detroit looking for not only songs to sing but also record contracts to make them rich. He took the hint and became a record producer, selling the master recordings he produced to record companies in New York City.

Still, Gordy’s profit margin remained razor thin. His major preoccupa-tion in those days was reflected in one of the hit records he wrote around this time: “Money (That’s What I Want).” (Gordy was not subtle, at least not in his songwriting.) Finally, his pal Smokey Robinson allegedly told him, “Why work for the man? Why not
you
be the man?” Gordy borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family’s financial co-operative and opened the Motown Record Company. (The source, or sources, of the other capital Gordy must have received has never been disclosed.) The company would both record the master records and manufacture the records themselves.

Gordy moved the relatives who were willing to work for him, plus a hand-ful of other young Detroiters he had recruited with promises and very small salaries, into a collection of seedy brick houses with front porches and shin-gled walls on both sides of a heavily traveled street in central Detroit. He used these houses as office buildings. The neighborhood had once been wealthy—

the street was named West Grand Boulevard—but by 1959 it was a slightly run-down, middle-class area near General Motors headquarters in Detroit.

Gordy converted the tiny rooms in the aging houses, including a basement toilet, into Motown’s recording studios.

Keenly aware of both his small budget and his talent for producing popular records, Gordy decided that the only way his small company would succeed before it ran out of money was to produce only hits. By “hits,” Gordy 17

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didn’t mean the Top 100; he meant the Top 10—and not on the Rhythm and Blues chart, the back of the bus of the record business, but the Pop, or popular music, chart, where white hits, or black records that became white hits, were listed. This was a startling goal, since some 80 percent of all records produced at the time neither became hits nor even recovered the money that had been spent to produce them. But Gordy was adamant. To emphasize his new policy, he hung a sign on the house that was his corporate headquarters, reading “Hitsville, USA.”

Gordy had strong feelings about what went into a hit song. He believed songs needed to tell stories rather than just spout a lot of sounds. He also believed lyrics should be written in the present tense, so that people on the street, rushing to and fro, could easily relate to them: “Not ‘My girl broke up with me’

but ‘My girl’s breaking up with me,’” Gordy told a Motown songwriter. He also produced his records so they would sound their best on the tinny car radios of the time, rather than on home stereo systems. Other record companies in Detroit did not concentrate as much on the car radio as Gordy did.

Gordy’s hit-making skills were impressive. On several occasions, he changed a few chords around in a song and moved it from loser to hit status.

And he was rough on songwriters. He rejected the first one hundred songs his bosom buddy Smokey Robinson wrote. Constrained by both his budget and his perfectionism, he released very few of the songs his producers taped and presented to him. When Florence and her pals were performing in local dives, Gordy was working his way toward what would become Motown’s astounding score in its glory days: one in three records the company released at its height was a hit. No other record company even came close to that statistic.

Florence remarked that by 1960 she “had heard a little bit about Motown and Berry Gordy. Someone—it may have been Diane’s father—said something wasn’t right about him.” What Mr. Ross may have heard was that Mary Wells and other artists were already criticizing Gordy for allegedly cheating them out of their royalties. Recalling this “something wasn’t right” remark in 1975, Flo added, “I know it’s true now, looking back; I know it’s true—it’s a fact.”

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Nevertheless, in the summer of 1960, Florence Ballard and her three friends took a bus over to the two-flat on West Grand Boulevard that served as Motown’s headquarters, recording studio, and offices and auditioned for Richard Morris, Motown producer Robert Bateman, and Gordy himself.

They sang “There Goes My Baby,” “Night Time Is the Right Time,” “The Twist,” and “There’s Something on Your Mind.” According to various observers, Diane’s lead vocal was unimpressive, Flo whispered to Mary about Motown’s shady reputation, and Mary stayed silent except when singing.

Gordy’s reaction, Flo said, was “We can’t give you a recording contract now. Come back after you finish school.” He was being diplomatic. Neither law nor custom required Motown to record only high school graduates, and the company would later do quite well with high school students as singing stars: three of the four Marvelettes were still in high school when their “Please Mr. Postman” went to #1 on the charts. Gordy himself hadn’t graduated from high school. And when the Primettes eventually began recording for Motown as the Supremes, three of them were still in high school.

Some have said that Gordy put off the Primettes because he already had a hot female group, the Marvelettes, and didn’t want his company typecast.

Others said he was somewhat wary of having four female minors around. Still others said the Primettes needed more experience and Gordy knew it. All are possible, but the most likely explanation is that Gordy and company didn’t like Diane’s singing style. Robert Bateman, one of the Motown producers present at the audition, expressed this view most succinctly: “Who wants a girl who sings through her nose?” he asked.

Richard Morris, however, thought the Primettes would be successful in the long run and was willing to take over their management to help them get the experience he thought they needed. He did this as a side job with Motown’s permission. The teens had a contract with Jenkins that should have made it impossible for Morris to manage them without Jenkins’s written consent, but they disregarded it. Although Florence later blamed it on ignorance, it was one of the only occasions during a very public life when she did something that 19

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truly lacked class. “We didn’t know anything about contracts,” Flo said. “We said, ‘Hell, we signed some papers, so?’ We wanted to make a record. . . . It was a written contract, but evidently it didn’t mean anything. . . . Anyway, Jenkins never bothered us for leaving. He just let us go.”

Jenkins still had the Primes, but later, seeing the shape of the future and also wanting to record, they too slipped out of his life and migrated to Motown. But Jenkins couldn’t have been
that
upset: after the Primettes became the Supremes, he married Flo’s sister Maxine. Maxine told Flo, however, that Jenkins was angry. “I would help him, whenever I could,” Flo said of her contacts with Jenkins after the group broke their contract with him, “but that was that.”

The Primettes’ cavalier attitude about contracts worked to their advantage at this point, but it would certainly work to their disadvantage later when they realized, too late, that Motown took its contracts a lot more seriously.

Morris, whose connections were better than Jenkins’s, arranged for the Primettes to do some background singing for vocalists Eddie Floyd and Wilson Pickett, both just starting their solo careers and recording at Detroit’s Flick

& Contour Studios. At the recording session, some secrets of economical record making were revealed: the Primettes, before being allowed to make their own very first recording on their very first day at the studio, were required to do the background singing without pay.

On one side of their own record, finally produced on the LuPine label, was “Tears of Sorrow,” on which Diane sang the lead, and on the flip side the ballad “Pretty Baby,” on which Mary led, although Flo’s voice overpowered the voices of the other three on both sides of the disc. The record, released in 1960, went nowhere. The “Tears of Sorrow” side was played on the radio only once. Flo guessed correctly that neither Morris, West, nor LuPine had the money or experience to push the record into the big time. It was hardly an auspicious beginning.