The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (6 page)

By 1975, Flo had forgotten “Tears of Sorrow.” She had also given away her only copy of that record. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I can’t keep a 20

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record. I used to have stacks and stacks of albums, Supremes and all. But people would come by and say, ‘May I have your album?’ and I’d give them the album. They wanted them autographed too. So I ended up without any albums.”

Although Morris never put out a hit by the Primettes, he did get the group better gigs than Jenkins did. The Primettes were invariably the opening act; however, they opened at prestigious local venues such as the Graystone Ballroom.

Diane became more and more headstrong as the group gained popularity, but the older Betty McGlown, working with Morris, was able to hold her in check on most occasions. One of the restrictions that angered Diane most was Morris’s refusal to allow any of the young women to mingle with the customers.

Morris was well aware that they were attractive, naive, and underage—catnip to their male fans—but Diane often defied him. A few years later it would be Diane, ironically, who would sneer at Florence for mingling with people.

In July 1960 Betty announced she was leaving the group to get married.

Flo and her remaining two costars were shattered by the news and tried to convince her to stay with them. But it had long been obvious to the others that Betty saw the group as only a pastime, unlike Ballard, Ross, and Wilson, who saw the group as life itself. Although all four remained friendly, Flo, Mary, and Diane were devastated by Betty’s defection, partly because they believed that a successful group needed four members.

It was in 1960, while the Primettes were recovering from this disappointment, that Flo endured one of the worst experiences of her life. As Mary Wilson wrote in
Dreamgirl
, she and Diane first realized that something was wrong when Flo, whose ear might as well have been attached to her home telephone receiver, stopped returning their calls and her mother told them that Flo didn’t want to sing with them anymore. Mary and Diane couldn’t believe that the founder and organizer of the group—someone they knew valued singing above almost all else—had abandoned her singing career. But they were well aware that Flo did value one thing above singing—family—and that Flo’s 21

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mother had been worried for months about the group’s taking time from Flo’s schoolwork and blighting her future.

For weeks the group neither rehearsed nor performed. When Flo finally answered one of their daily phone calls and then met with Mary and Diane, after two months of isolation at home, they realized something terrible had occurred. She was exhausted and unkempt and refused eye contact. When she opened her mouth, she began to talk, then began to cry, and then began talking again. She finally blurted out the full story.

According to Mary Wilson, one pleasant summer evening during 1960, Flo had attended a sock hop at the Graystone Ballroom. Flo’s mother didn’t usually let any of her daughters go out alone, but this event seemed safe enough. No alcohol was served, and Flo’s brother Billy was going with her.

During the evening, however, Flo became separated from Billy. As the sock hop wound down, she stood near the door of the ballroom, hoping to find Billy and go home with him. When she heard someone call her name from a car outside, she thought it was her brother and ran to the car. It wasn’t Billy in the car, but she recognized the young man as someone she knew. She got in.

Instead of driving her home, the man parked the car on an empty street.

Pulling out a knife, he held it to her throat. Then he ripped off her panties and raped her. Until that night, she had been a virgin.

“Why did he do it? Why did he do it?” Flo asked Mary and Diane. “I trusted him. I thought he was my friend. Why did he do it?

“He hurt me,” she said. If she was depressed about anything more than the rape itself, it was that the rapist blamed the rape on her because of the way she walked and dressed.

When I interviewed Flo in 1975, she said of that time, “I had some pretty blue days. I used to sit and cry to myself, although I can’t remember why,”

as though she had suppressed her memory of the entire event. Her version of events was that when she was sixteen, her brother Cornell made her quit singing so she could concentrate on her schoolwork. “I sat on the porch and cried and cried,” Flo said. A short while later, though, according to Flo, she 22

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turned seventeen, and her mother told her she had a birthday present for her.

“I said, ‘What?’ [sullenly], because no birthday present interested me at the time. I was just hurt. And she said, ‘You can go back and sing.’”

The rape may have been too private for Flo to discuss with me during our interviews, but her niece Katherine (the daughter of Flo’s eldest sister) told me flat out that the rapist was the young man who later became the Detroit Pistons center Reginald Harding.

Reginald Harding’s life story, from high school talent to early fame to pre-mature death, eerily parallels Florence Ballard’s. From his early youth, Harding wanted to be a basketball player. He was certainly built for it. When he entered Eastern High School in Detroit (now Martin Luther King, Jr. High School), he was six feet ten inches. It soon became obvious what he was going to do with his life.

An outstanding center at Eastern, Harding led the team to the Detroit city championship. But always Harding’s growing fame and infamy would be mixed together. He was arrested in upstate Michigan in the summer of 1959

for stealing a pickup truck and was sentenced to probation. Then, perhaps more significantly, he was arrested at age eighteen for “carnal knowledge” of a minor in Detroit in 1960, the same year Flo Ballard was raped. The alleged victim was a fifteen-year-old whose first name was Jean, according to court records. At the time of his arrest for statutory rape, Harding was considered the best prep basketball player in the state. He admitted to associating with the girl but denied her charges and was acquitted.

Harding was drafted by the Pistons in 1962 and played spectacularly through 1964, but his career started to falter as he became increasingly engaged in criminal activities. In September 1972, shortly after he was released from Jackson Prison in Michigan after serving a two-year term for probation violation, he was shot by a friend following an altercation in front of an inner-city Detroit house. Harding died of his wounds at Detroit General Hospital.

He was thirty years old.

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In
The True Story of Florence Ballard
, Flo’s sister Maxine Ballard did not explicitly name Reginald Harding as Flo’s rapist but hinted at him, stating that the rapist was “well-known (a popular basketball player at the high school)” who was never arrested or tried for the crime. Flo and Maxine’s sister Pat said that in 2006 Maxine told her that the rapist was Harding. While none of Flo’s relatives would divulge the reason for their certainty, clearly this information could only have come originally from Flo.

Whoever the assailant, Flo would suffer from the rape for the rest of her life. Mary Wilson said that the rape “ate away at Flo’s insides. She couldn’t handle it. She needed professional help but never got it. She had no counsel-ing and never talked to anyone about it again” after revealing it to Mary and Diane. “She changed from an aggressive person to an angry person. She was scared for the rest of her life, and her life was not nearly as productive” as it would have been otherwise. Nonetheless, Flo returned to the group following the rape, and she and her two remaining partners tapped tall, pretty Barbara Martin, a friend of a friend, as the new fourth Primette.

Trying to jumpstart their careers, the Primettes hung around the lobby at Motown headquarters every day after school, pestering producers, writers, singers—and anyone else who walked by—for the opportunity to record. The only reason they were allowed to stay in the lobby at all was that they were managed on the side by Motown employee Morris, they knew the reception-ist, and they flirted with the male Motowners who sauntered by.

Eventually, their pleas were heard, and they were allowed to work as occasional informal backgrounders for big Motown stars such as Marvin Gaye and Marv Johnson. As background singers, the quartet earned $78 a week each.

Flo was also babysitting regularly, for $20 a week. “I never even got an allowance at home, maybe a nickel, maybe some bubblegum or a candy bar, but that was it. I felt great when I got the money. The first thing I did was to go home and give my mother some,” she said. Mary got a job in a record store. Diane landed a job as Gordy’s secretary, which she held for a short while.

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This led to a lot of talk, but at this point Diane was more interested in making Gordy pay attention to the group than to her.

Flo’s situation started to change. Rarely successful at making her own clothes, Flo was now able to buy some of the clothes she wanted. Her appearance changed too. When she started background singing, she would walk from her home all the way to Motown headquarters, a substantial distance. “Whatever fat I had wasn’t there for long after that walk,” Flo said. After a while the money and prestige wrought deeper changes. “I began to get my hair curled, whereas before I would just pull it back and that was it. I began to wear more makeup, and I dressed different. I walked better. I was somebody.”

The rape may have been a factor in Flo’s decision to quit school in the eleventh grade, but she had also founded the Primettes, considered them her group, and was more distracted and consumed by the group than were its other members. Her ability to pay attention at school had suffered in proportion.

Diane, Mary, and Barbara would all graduate, and although Berry Gordy had dropped out, he went on to earn a high school equivalency degree and later razzed Flo about her status as a high school dropout.

Flo’s eldest brother, Cornell, was furious when he heard she had dropped out of school. Cornell had taken the role of father in the family when Jesse had died, and Flo was scared of him. “I didn’t want to face him, I didn’t want to see him,” after quitting school, she said. “But he finally caught me.”

Cornell grabbed her and said, “I told you to finish school, didn’t I?” Flo related.

“I was looking at him and shaking, and I said, ‘Well, I done quit now.’”

“I know it,” he said. “If Momma had listened to me she wouldn’t have let you go on back and sing; you would have finished school.”

When Flo’s star started to rise, however, Cornell cooled off.

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Flo . . . had the voice we needed.

—Katherine Anderson Schaffner,

former Marvelette, speaking of

Flo’s stint with the Marvelettes

The Primettes spent
their first year at Motown vocalizing and hand clapping anonymously behind big-name stars. By 1960, though, Gordy could no longer use the excuse that they were still in school to turn aside their pleas to make their own record, since, according to his criteria, they had all “finished”

high school. They spent months recording songs that Gordy usually ruled were not worth releasing. Among them was “After All,” a tune produced by Smokey Robinson and recorded by the Primettes on October 1, 1960.

Then Motown composer Freddie Gorman, who knew the Primettes from his days as a mail carrier at the Brewster Projects, wrote “I Want a Guy” for Florence and her pals. Gordy recorded this song on the Tamla label, a significant choice for an all-black group in an almost all-black company. He could have dedicated Motown to recording “The Sound of Black America” but chose to call the Motown Sound “The Sound of Young America” instead. The collapse of Gordy’s jazz record store had shown him the pitfalls of restricting his audience, and the name “Tamla” symbolized his newfound desire to appeal 25

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to whites as well as blacks: it was inspired by the movie
Tammy and the Bach-elor
, which starred Gordy’s favorite actress, Debbie Reynolds.

Gordy recorded songs on many labels other than Motown and Tamla, including Gordy, Hitsville, Mowest, Rare Earth, Soul, Prodigal, Miracle, and VIP. He was well aware that disc jockeys, often accused of accepting payola from record companies for airing their records, felt more at ease playing records with different label names, even though they knew the labels were produced by one company. Motown may have exceeded any other record company of the era in the number of different labels it slapped on its discs.

The big decision involving “I Want a Guy,” however, wasn’t in choosing the label under which to produce it; it was in choosing the singer who would sing the lead on it, and Motown executives chose Diane. She also led on the flip-side tune, “Never Again.” In spite of awarding her these two leads, Motown executives at the time still saw each member of the group as a possible lead singer, and many were divided over Diane’s voice—what some found untrained and thin, others found unique. Flo and Mary were particularly unimpressed. Mary once said, “Whenever Diane would insist on a lead and then sing it, we would sort of look at each other and try not to laugh.

She had this weird little whiny sound.”

The group certainly didn’t hit the big time with this record, which went nowhere. But Flo remained characteristically optimistic, noting that the songs

“were both flops, but they were good flops.”

Gordy’s next move was to assign the group to his top producer, Smokey Robinson, who had come up with instant hits for other early Motown groups.

Gordy himself and another company heavy, Barney Ales, Motown’s vice president of sales, wrote the raucous dance number “Buttered Popcorn.” This time Flo was given the lead—Ales had heard and liked her voice. On the other side was “Who’s Loving You?,” a version of a Miracles tune.