The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (8 page)

While the Supremes couldn’t get a hit, they showed spunk by harassing Motown’s producers incessantly. “We were still sitting there fussing at the producers,” Flo said. “‘We were the first group here! And we haven’t got a hit record yet!’ We wanted a hit so bad we didn’t know what to do.”

Four other sides written for the group in 1962 and 1963 by Robinson, with Diane as lead, failed to bust the group out of the no-hit ghetto in which they found themselves. The dreamy “Your Heart Belongs to Me” barely pushed its way into the Top 100, and “Let Me Go the Right Way” couldn’t move past #90. “My Heart Can’t Take It No More” didn’t do any better. The wistful “A Breathtaking Guy,” originally titled “A Breathtaking, First Sight Soul Shaking, One Night Love Making, Next Day Heartbreaking Guy,” made #75, but numbers that low were not going to jumpstart the Supremes’ career. They and others noted, however, that their numbers were improving.

During this same period, Motown was producing hits like “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” by Marvin Gaye and “Playboy” by the Marvelettes. In 1962

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it produced “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes; “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers” by Mary Wells; and “Do You Love Me?” by the Contours. In 1963 it released “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Mickey’s Monkey” by the Miracles; “Laughing Boy”

by Mary Wells; “Pride and Joy” by Marvin Gaye; “Fingertips—Part 2” by Little Stevie Wonder; and “(Love is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Quicksand” by Martha and the Vandellas. (“Heat Wave” and “Quicksand” are excellent examples of Motown’s often successful attempts to produce two songs, and twice the profit, from one. Except for some of the words, the songs were almost identical.)

Flo, Diane, and Mary, on the other hand, were being mocked as the “No-Hit Supremes” by the crueler spirits among their colleagues. Even when they were able to arrange for relatively high-level gigs in Detroit, the freshness of their youth, which many found appealing, hurt them on at least one occasion. A Temptations-Supremes show at Detroit’s Twenty Grand Nightclub, a show that Flo called “hot” and “fantastic,” lasted for only one week in February 1965 because, while Flo was nearing twenty-two, Diane and Mary were each a month short of twenty-one, the age required for performing in a club with a liquor license.

“The Temptations were dressed in white suits, and we were dressed in white gowns, and at the end of the show we’d do a song together,” Flo remembered. “We did the first half of each show, and they did the second because they were a big act and we were nowhere that big.”

Then, somehow, the Detroit Police found out what was happening. When the police arrived at the club one night shortly before the performance started, Flo at first thought there was hope for continuing because she had worked as a baby-sitter for one of the children of the lead police officer involved, Doris Jackson. But Officer Jackson could not be moved. “We were pleading with Doris Jackson,” Flo said. “We were telling her, ‘Well, look, they’ll be twenty-one next month,’ and she said, ‘I can’t help it. They’re not twenty-one now.’”

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The police ordered the Supremes to stop performing halfway through the two-week engagement.

What made the whole scene even more galling for Flo was that “The manager wasn’t too upset; the Temptations just kept on anyway—they carried the show on. But we were real hurt, because we wanted to get up there. . . . The next week we just recorded, that was all, no shows. It was embarrassing.”

But that November, the young women piled into a bus and five cars with many other Motown acts to tour much of America as the Motortown Revue.

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They didn’t serve black people in the front. . . . You
don’t come in; they give you your food to take with
you. . . . You better carry it out, or you get shot.

—Florence Ballard, remembering

the Motortown Revue Tour

The Motortown Revues
were unique to Motown. No other record company had found it necessary or desirable to send all its artists on tour together.

But because Motown was not only a struggling young company but also a company with many all-black acts, Gordy worried that sending each act out on its own might be financial suicide.

The fact was that the big talent agencies that arranged concert tours in the early 1960s weren’t very interested in dealing with black acts at all, and certainly not with one black act at a time. When Motown put all its acts together, however, the package involved so much potential profit for the agents that even the most prejudiced among them were willing to book the Motortown Revues into clubs and theaters.

The Motortown Revues were massive. The 1962 Revue that Flo and the other Supremes joined included forty-five performers. “It was too many people and too many miles and showed a lack of experience putting all those people 37

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out there,” the Motown executive who managed that tour said. But the Revues introduced a lot of Motown acts to a lot of fans.

And what an introduction. As
Rolling Stone
noted later, “There’d be the bongos, and Little Stevie Wonder would come on and open the show; and then it would go on nonstop with the Marvelettes and the Contours—who had ‘Do You Love Me?’—and Mary Wells and the Temptations and all the others and wind up with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Stevie’d do that showstopper where he’d get down on one knee and then flat on the floor, singing ‘a little bit softer now . . . a little bit softer now’ right down to where he was hardly whispering, and then he’d start to crank it up ‘a little bit louder now . . . a little bit louder now . . .’ until he was back up jumping and pump-ing full steam and the roof would fall in.”

The Revues served other functions: eliminating the acts that couldn’t cut it and illuminating the superstars in the group. In this sense, they operated very much like farm teams in baseball. Sometimes the touring artists weren’t as well prepared as they might have been. Occasionally, performers would have only a day or two to learn a whole new act, or they’d have to wear hand-me-down costumes that were too tight and came apart at embarrassing moments.

For the performers who were high school dropouts living in housing projects when they joined Motown, for those who’d rarely been beyond the Detroit city limits, for those who had been born in the North and had never been in the South, traveling around America, even by bus, was a thrilling yet shocking experience. As for Flo, the Motortown Revue took her to the South for the first time and showed her the ugly face of true segregation.

But the Motortown Revues were above all grueling. Sometimes they involved six shows a day and seventeen one-nighters in a row. On November 2, 1962, the artists performed in Boston; on November 3 in New Haven; the next day, in Buffalo; and on the next days in Raleigh; Charleston; Augusta; Savannah; Birmingham; Columbus, Georgia; Atlanta; Mobile; New Orleans; Jackson; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Durham, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; and Washington, D.C. Then the groups got a day off.

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Flo and her fellow Supremes never received any money above expenses for their work on the Motortown Revue, and the young women certainly weren’t dressed elaborately for the tour. For the one or two numbers the Supremes performed, “all we had was about three or four changes, which were just plain cotton suits,” Florence said. “Suits we paid $20, maybe $25 apiece for. Shirt and top or skirt and jacket. One dress we had, it was a white dress; it was a nice dress, summer dress, cotton, think we paid about $10 apiece for it. Oh boy,” she said sarcastically, “those were the days.”

All the groups were together on one bus and its trailing cars: among them Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder, and, basically just along for the ride, the Supremes. The lifestyle was communal beyond belief. This led, naturally, to romantic entanglements. Flo and Otis Williams of the Temptations were one such short-lived item.

The rigors of the Revue had its rewards, in the form of audiences eager for the groups that had already produced hit records. When the master of ceremonies introduced the Marvelettes, the audience, hooked on the group’s million-seller, “Please Mr. Postman,” went into hysterics. The Marvelettes’ name was prominent on the marquee. By contrast, the Supremes’ name was often unlisted altogether. The Supremes were frequently the first group or among the first groups to perform, giving them the status of a warm-up act rather than a “featured” act. Those preferred acts were introduced later, after the warm-up groups had prepped the audience.

Even under the stress of endless days on a bus, and the ego-reducing effects of performing for people who had never heard of her, Flo’s confidence remained undimmed. Only a small portion of the audience recognized any song the Supremes might perform, including “Who’s Loving You?” the flip side of “Buttered Popcorn,” but Flo continued to urge the group to put all its energy into each and every performance.

“We had records out; they just weren’t hits,” Flo said. “But regardless of that, we still went over. I think it was the way we carried ourselves, plus our good looks; plus we had talent. Maybe not a hit record, but we had talent, 40

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that’s for sure.” While Diane was in tears about the Supremes’ reception at the Apollo, which seemed to her to consist of merely polite applause, Flo saw the glass as half-full. “We didn’t have a hit when we were at the Apollo, but we still went over; we went over great,” Flo said.

Compared with the Marvelettes, “We were a better group,” Flo said. “We had better harmony.” She argued that “the Marvelettes couldn’t sing, not really.” She dismissed the Contours as “a screaming act. They could sing, but they needed material, and I don’t think too many producers wanted to write for them. . . . I don’t know what happened to them. One of them became a junkie. Some of them went into factories to work and just gave it up.” Flo never stopped criticizing the other groups—although never to their faces—

as well as boosting her own. But she was also realistic enough to admit that the Supremes badly needed a hit.

Whatever the varying abilities of the groups involved, on this tour they were all black and all together in the segregated South. “We were in Macon, Georgia, doing one-nighters,” Flo remembered. “We had finished the show, and we were all getting on the bus. It was pitch black. . . . Mary Wells was getting on the bus, and we hear something say, ‘Pow!’—like that. We said, ‘That might be a firecracker. Who’s popping firecrackers?’ Then all of a sudden the bus driver says, ‘Hey, everybody hit the floor, quick!’ Somebody was shooting at us. Why? Because we was black! A bus full of black artists. The only white one on the bus was the bus driver, and he was scared. No one was hit. So we got to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that morning; we were all asleep on the bus.

The bus driver got off, and he happened to be walking and he looked at the front of the bus, bullet holes was all in the front of the bus. He woke us up and he said, ‘Look! Told you those was bullets!’ Somebody could have got hit.”

Although the tours played to mixed audiences—a harbinger of Motown’s future success in a world in which whites were the major record buyers—the white and black people in the audience were never allowed to mingle. Either the blacks were required to sit upstairs and the whites downstairs or the 41

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blacks had to sit on one side of the theater and the whites on the other.

Restrooms were segregated by color as well as gender.

In fact, finding restrooms they could use was a continuing and annoying problem. The members of the Miracles “went up to a gas station and asked the guy could they use the bathroom,” Florence remembered. He said, ‘Hell, no,’ and got a shotgun out. And all of them came flying back to the bus. So we had to get in a deep, dark spot and the girls took their turn in the back of the bus, and then the guys took their turn in the back of the bus, because there was nowhere to stop.”

Restaurants were also a major problem. If the touring artists couldn’t find a blacks-only restaurant on a particular day, they were out of luck. They sometimes tried to make light of it. Comedian Bill Murray would occasionally go up to a whites-only restaurant and try to order a sandwich. When the expected response was uttered—“We don’t serve black people”—he’d retort with “I don’t eat ’em either.”

Apart from suffering from segregationist laws in the South, some Motown performers had occasional similar problems even in the North. A white Motown public relations employee, Alan Abrams, often accompanied Smokey Robinson and the other Miracles on tour. Abrams and the group would usually stay in the same hotel. On one tour, though, when the group was performing in Chicago, Abrams arrived late and took a room by himself in a Hyde Park hotel. Robinson dropped over to talk to him. After Robinson left, the hotel manager called Abrams and told him he’d have to leave the hotel because it was against the rules to have black visitors.

In the South the Motown performers were barnstorming through a largely segregated area at a time when civil rights leaders were fighting to have equal rights for blacks made law, when civil rights marchers were met with police dogs and fire hoses, and when troops were needed to force the admission of black students to southern high schools and universities. The Motown performers tried to figure out far in advance what hotels would house them and 42

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what restaurants would feed them. But their day might begin with a visit to a restaurant where they would be refused service in the front. “They didn’t serve black people in the front,” Florence recalled. “They’ve got a little place around the back; you go around in the back, and they’ve got a window. You don’t come in; they give you your food to take with you. . . . You better carry it out, or you get shot!”