The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (16 page)

The issue of Flo’s weight and the varying reaction it engendered had already appeared in joke form in the Supremes’ stage patter. Under the thin veneer of humor, the women played out their very real personal conflicts in front of audiences that dimly understood what was happening.

Soon, however, Gordy began teasing Flo about something other than her weight. “He’d say, ‘Florence, you drink too much,’” according to Flo. Her initial reaction was “In other words, I guess I was supposed to say I was an alcoholic, from drinking two or three beers [a day].”

Flo acknowledged that the Supremes drank casually in nightclubs, even when they were performing. “That was not unusual,” she said. “Mary, Diane, all of us had drinks before we went onstage, or any time we felt like it.” But she was also aware that she was sinking into depression as it became increasingly obvious to her that an effort was under way to eject her from the group, noting, “To be depressed and to drink with depression can cause a whole bunch of turmoil, especially when you are actually angered, as I was toward Berry, and I just began to lose all respect for him, because I’ll never forget how he used to sit in the audience with his sunglasses on, and he had his hair in a process, you know, straightened, and he just didn’t look like what he was supposed to be. And I just didn’t have any respect for him at all, and I still don’t.

Flo’s anger at Gordy and his effort to push her out of the group she had founded caused her to push her drinking, and her aggressive behavior, to a new level. Mary Wilson wrote, “Diane and I could drink without suffering any ill effects, but Flo’s tolerance for alcohol was almost nil. After just one beer, she would be unsteady; any more than that, and she was clearly intoxicated.”

On Flo’s last night performing as a Supreme, she recalled, “At this particular incident at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, I had had me a few drinks. . . .

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And they kept calling me fat so much until I went on stage and I poked my stomach out as far as I could.” Alcohol had undoubtedly clouded Flo’s judg-ment, and this time, it would seem, she’d had gone too far, giving Gordy the excuse he’d been looking for to cut her out of the group.

Gordy “called me up the next morning and he said, ‘You’re fired.’ And I said, ‘I’m what?’ And he said, ‘You’re fired.’ I said, ‘I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re not going onstage tonight.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am; who’s going to stop me?’

He said, ‘I will. I’ll have you thrown off if you go on.’ So it went on and on and on. I told him, ‘I’m going onstage, and that’s the end of that,’ and hung up. And then his sister, Gwen Gordy, called and said, ‘I guess you know that my brother can’t make you leave the group, because you have a contract.’ So it went on and on and on until finally I said to myself, ‘Oh, well, what the hell, I’ll be miserable as hell out here anyways as long as he’s around, so I just might as well leave.’ So I left. They had Cindy already there. I don’t know how long she had been there, but they had had her there, and I flew on back to Detroit.”

With that, what
Variety
had referred to as the “superb distinctive blend”

of Ballard, Wilson, and Ross was over. Florence Ballard was only twenty-four years old.

Although to some extent Flo may have brought on the expulsion herself, the effect on her was crushing. Being kicked out of the Supremes “stole her spirit and stole her energy,” Roger Pearson said. “Flo felt something important had been stolen from her.” Millions of Supremes fans believe there was something magical about the Supremes that the breakup ended forever. “Their three personalities formed a fourth, the Supremes,” Pearson said. Florence’s later decline, he insisted, was due to her inability to handle the impact of this betrayal, not any inability to handle fame.

Flo’s expulsion from the Supremes in the summer of 1967 was immediately followed by the renaming of the group “Diana Ross and the Supremes.”

The meaning and the symbolism were obvious. With her major rival for lead singer finally out of the way, Diana Ross could take over the Supremes in name and in actuality. But the renaming meant more than that. Putting Diana’s 97

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name out front was an invitation to the public to view her as separate from the other Supremes. It was the first step toward Gordy’s ultimate goal of moving Ross out of the group and into solo stardom.

Record producer Weldon McDougal III, a Motown employee at the time, insists that the only reason Birdsong was chosen to replace Flo “was because she could wear the same size gowns Flo wore. They didn’t want to make the gowns all over again.” McDougal is exaggerating—this was
one
of the reasons Birdsong was selected—but it puts to rest the oft-repeated argument that Flo was fired because of her weight. Her occasional sullenness, her occasional protests, her occasional drinking, Gordy’s attitude toward her, and his desire to make Diana a solo superstar were the real causes.

And, as Flo noted, Motown had her replacement waiting in the wings.

Born Cynthia Ann Birdsong in 1939, Cindy Birdsong was, like Flo, a founding member of her group. Together with her friend Patricia Louise Holt, Birdsong created a four-member girl group called the Ordettes in 1958. When two of the original Ordettes left the group in 1959, Holt and Birdsong brought in singers Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash. The young women sang locally for two years until they auditioned for Blue Note Records. After they signed with Blue Note, they changed their name and spent another two years singing before they started producing hits. Does any of this sound familiar?

Alfred Lion, president of Blue Note, had been about to reject the group because he didn’t think Holt, the lead singer, was pretty enough to carry the group to stardom. He changed his mind, though, when Holt opened her mouth and the voice of a torch diva came out, a voice very much like Flo’s. Disliking the name “Ordettes,” he signed them to his label on the condition that the name of the group be changed to the “Bluebelles.” He also decided to con-quer what he perceived as Holt’s appearance problem by changing her name too. She became Patti LaBelle—Patti the Beautiful. Lion had to alter his course slightly when he started hearing unpleasant words from the manager of a group that was already named “Bluebelles,” so he changed the name of the group to

“Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles.”

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Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles remained more tied to their African American roots than did the Supremes and scored hits with “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” and “Down the Aisle.” The group then moved to Atlantic Records in 1966 and anticipated Diana Ross’s role in
The Wiz
by recording a hit version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” the Judy Garland song from
The Wiz
predecessor
The Wizard of Oz
. Patti LaBelle’s resemblance to Flo became much more up close and personal when she became engaged to Otis Williams, Flo’s former boyfriend. Their conflicting tour schedules caused Williams and LaBelle to eventually break their engagement, just as similar factors had broken up Williams and Flo. LaBelle suffered another blow when Birdsong left the group to take Flo’s place in the Supremes, just as Wilson and Birdsong of the new Supremes were hurt shortly thereafter when Diana Ross left for solo stardom. The coincidences just kept on coming until Patti LaBelle left the group to begin her long-running, successful solo career.

Motown’s official announcement said that Flo had left the group owing to exhaustion and a desire to settle down. A story in the
Detroit Free Press
in August 1967 said that Florence was leaving the group for only a month. A
Detroit News
story based on an interview with Ross and Wilson indicated that the issue had been one of time off for the women and that the two remaining Supremes had told Motown that they needed one week off every six weeks, or two weeks off every three months. A story in yet a third publication said that Flo was leaving the group to go into the antiques business. This cloud of deception would not be dispersed until Flo sued Motown three years later.

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You’re not supposed to ever say that you were a
Supreme, or had anything to do with the Supremes
whatsoever. . . . In other words, you’re nothing.

—Florence Ballard

Florence
left Las Vegas, returned to Detroit, and met with Motown vice president Michael Roshkind on July 27, 1967, a week after she had been fired as a Supreme. Roshkind offered her a release to sign. “I read a little bit of it that said you’re not supposed to ever say that you were a Supreme, or had anything to do with the Supremes whatsoever. You can never call yourself an ex-Supreme.”

For Flo, being stripped of her identity as a Supreme was of totemic importance. “It has been disputed and disputed and disputed who thought up the name ‘Supremes,’” Flo said. “But I chose the name ‘Supremes’ . . . and Berry Gordy took the name from me. And he tried to take the ‘Jackson Five’ name too. How can you take the ‘Jackson Five’ name when that’s their last name, Jackson?” Later, Mary Wilson would also become determined to retain her right to the name. In fact, Wilson sued Gordy and Motown for that right in 1977.

Diana would appear to be less reverent toward the name “The Supremes,” first by putting her own name in front of it and then by leaving it behind entirely.

Now Motown’s agreement stipulated that Flo, who had founded the Supremes and chosen its name, would not be allowed to use that name to 99

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help her own career. The agreement also said she would not receive any future royalties from Motown, even on hits she already had recorded.

“In other words, you’re nothing,” Florence said, “and Michael Roshkind’s saying if you don’t sign the paper, Berry Gordy won’t have anything else to do with you. I told Michael Roshkind I really didn’t give a damn whether Berry Gordy had anything to do with me or not. . . . Then I started crying and I signed the paper. I didn’t even finish reading it.

“Anyway, it said all you are worth is $15,000. [The agreement offered her $2,500 per year for the next six years, a total of $15,000.] I told them they could take it and stick it up their ass; that’s exactly what I said.”

Flo’s friends have repeatedly expressed amazement that Flo would sign such an agreement, which has disappeared from the Wayne County (Detroit) Circuit Court records that otherwise detail Flo’s various legal struggles. Flo’s personal history, however, beginning with her discarded agreement with Milton Jenkins, had encouraged her to believe her signature on a document committed her to nothing.

A second interpretation of Flo’s apparent willingness to sign such a career-killing agreement is that she had changed. The enthusiastic, optimistic, song-belting, fighting Flo Ballard had lost ground to a newly emerging aspect of her personality: Flo the Fatalist, who pretended to be above it all but found it normal for her situation to go from bad to worse. This characteristic—

feigned, short-term indifference coupled with long-term fatalism—also came to the fore when she did not speak up loudly to contradict the official version of why she was leaving the group: that she needed to rest. Had she done so, sympathy from her many fans might well have led to her immediate return to the Supremes or, more likely, an immediate placement in another group, either Motown or non-Motown.

Mary Wilson has described Roshkind sarcastically as “Motown’s newest expert in public relations”; but assuming he was wearing his executive hat rather than his public relations hat that day, he did a good job for his corporate masters. He also did a good job for Diana Ross: not surprisingly, 101

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Roshkind’s chief task at Motown at the time was to guide and shepherd her career.

This agreement Flo signed would be the basis of many of her problems after she left the Supremes. As always, up to that point, Flo had no legal counsel advising her either before or during her meeting with Roshkind.

And just what kind of man was she facing? Four years after convincing Flo to sign the Motown release, Roshkind, according to the U.S. government, entered into an agreement with a company called California International Marketing Company (CIMCO) giving CIMCO the right to market a Motown oldies-but-goodies album titled
Motown 1964
, which included several songs featuring Flo. Without bothering to inform Motown, Roshkind suggested to CIMCO that all future disputes between Motown and CIMCO

would be swiftly settled if CIMCO hired Roshkind’s girlfriend, Dorothy Loeb, for promotional and public relations purposes in the selling of those albums, and paid her twenty cents for each album sold. On this basis, CIMCO

paid Ms. Loeb $136,000 in 1972 and $99,300 in 1973. In court papers, the Feds said that Ms. Loeb never provided any public relations or promotional services for CIMCO. She did, however, marry Roshkind in 1973.

Roshkind did not report these payments on his tax returns. As a result, Roshkind, who by then was vice chairman of Motown Industries, was sentenced in 1978 to six months in jail for tax evasion. At his sentencing, he admitted guilt “without reservations and without qualifications.” The judge sentenced him to serve his six months on furlough: he would be allowed to work at his regular job during the day and report to jail in the evenings. The judge also required that after Roshkind served his six-month “jail term,” he serve twelve months in a community treatment center, leaving only for his employment and for three hours after each day’s work. In addition, he required Roshkind to pay back taxes and penalties plus interest totaling about $250,000.

Still, Roshkind remained a respected figure in the music business in Hollywood. He left Motown Industries in 1980 and founded his own entertain-102

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