The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (16 page)

and pop that Gordy was after, with Smokey’s jocose confession about love and marriage—“My momma told me / You better shop around”—

delivering the lyrical punch line.

The Miracles’ “Shop Around” was a victory for Gordy’s canine-like ears. Originally, he had released the tune on Tamla with, inexplicably, Claudette Robinson on lead. But Gordy, fretting that he’d produced it at too slow a tempo, called a disbelieving Robinson into the studio at 3 A.M. one night to re-cut it, with Smokey on lead. He then pulled the original and released the “Shop Around” redux, putting the entire clout of Motown, such as it was, behind it. This included a new nationwide distribution network that had replaced Bob West’s tainted B&H company; for that, Gordy had hired a white outsider, Barney Ales, as head of promotions at a salary of $135 a week, or $90 more than Loucye Gordy was making as Motown’s top-paid employee. While some around the shop frowned on Gordy going biracial with Motown so soon (he’d also tabbed a white public relations man, Al Abrams), reasoning that such a move would dilute the concept of self-sustaining black capitalism, Gordy contrarily believed that talented and gung-ho 74

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whites answering the black masters made the point even better. And, surely, Ales earned his pay, and then some, by lobbying and cajoling distributors into moving “Shop Around.” At the turn of the new year, it hit the Top Forty in high gear, ran to No. 2 on the pop charts and No. 1 on the R&B charts, and became Motown’s first million-selling record—at least as certified by Motown, Gordy again having blown off the RIAA and its gold records to keep his account books from the prying eyes of outsiders.

That record was the turning point. It was R&B and pop for a new, young generation and upgraded Motown’s national image, both creatively and as a business nexus. It also made Smokey Robinson’s bones—in 1961, he became Gordy’s LBJ, vice-president of Motown Records, Inc., and Gordy’s protégé in the control booth, entrusted to get off the ground the career of Mary Wells and other high-expectation Motown finds.

Around Detroit, it seemed folly to try and buck Motown’s ambition. When Gwen Gordy realized that Anna Records could not compete with her brother for talent (not incidentally, she had also broken up with Billy Davis), she closed Anna and shunted its worthiest acts to Motown. After marrying a new beau, Gwen had given it a go with another label, called Tri-Phi, that she formed with her new husband, Harvey Fuqua, former lead singer of the R&B group the Moonglows.

Within months, Tri-Phi was bought out by Berry, who took for Motown such artists as David Ruffin, Lamont Dozier (who had been recording under the pseudonym Lamont Anthony), the Spinners, Junior Walker, Johnny Bristol, and Fuqua himself as a producer and writer.

So, too, did he take in a 21-year-old, less-regarded singer, Marvin Pentz Gay Jr., who when he couldn’t get singing gigs played sessions as a drummer. Gay had been in the Moonglows but was without a record contract until he caught the eye of Anna Gordy. When they began a romance, Gordy did her a favor and signed him as a session drummer. In 1961, Anna married him, meaning he had not one but
two
Motown brothers-in-law. Soon, using the name “Marvin Gaye,” he was recording songs in Studio A that would pepper the charts. For Marvin Gaye, it was a case of Motown by marriage; for Berry Gordy, it was but one more example of luck and timing he now couldn’t seem to avoid.

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Flo Ballard also had reason to sashay a bit that fruitful autumn of 1960.

Betty McGlown’s exit aside, the Primettes were on a roll. With Ross and Wilson, Ballard had taken up a vigil most days after school to West Grand Boulevard, the object being to force-fit themselves into the Motown “family.” Sometimes they even found their way into studio sessions to add some sweetening background vocals or hand-clapping, excited to no end by chores that were mundane around Motown.

“It was something we all did,” recalls Janie Bradford. “If you were a warm body at Motown, you could be called in to clap hands or swell up a chorus. Basically, it was who the producers saw out in the hall. It was funny that those girls thought it was because of all their talent. But I’ll give them this: They sure as hell made sure to be out there so they
would
be the ones called in.”

That didn’t apply only to the studio. The Motown crowd congregated for meals in a dining room where huge pots of chili, spaghetti, and hot dogs would be served up by Gordy’s cook, a woman named Lilly Hart. It wouldn’t take long for someone in the room to wave the girls in and include them in the repartee of dirty jokes and put-down one-liners—a milieu that was a natural fit for Flo, with her sarcasm and cocksure demeanor.

Feeling like part of the “in” crowd, Flo could now often be found making the scene at the clubs and talent shows around town. Shortly after Maxine had gotten divorced from her serviceman husband and married a recovered but still somewhat sickly Milton Jenkins, Flo attended a show at the Graystone Ballroom, escorted on the bus, at Lurlee’s insistence, by her older brother Billy. There, she bumped into a boy she knew from Northeastern High School whom Maxine says was a popular basketball player and something of a hunk. After the show, Flo drifted outside to the parking lot, out of Billy’s sight (reminiscent of when her little brother Roy had strayed from his sisters’ view, with tragic consequences) and saw the boy in his car. When he opened the passenger side door and beckoned her in, she hedged for a moment, her instincts and the Ballard family ethos holding her back.

“Get in, Flo,” he told her. “I’ll drive you home.” It was late, Billy was nowhere to be seen, and she knew Lurlee would be furious if she got home after the time they’d agreed on. And so she got in, next to a boy she barely knew. Unclear is whether she willingly agreed to go for a ride and do some making out. In any case, after fifteen minutes on the road they wound up nowhere near Brewster-Douglass but instead on a side street in an isolated area. If there was consensual petting, it soon got out of hand. “I’m going to have sex with 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 77

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you,” he spat, and began tearing at her clothes. She demanded, “Take me home right now!” When he didn’t stop, she fought back, scratching at his face. He then reached under the seat and came up clutching a knife.

Pressing it to her throat, he ordered her into the back seat. Hurling himself on top of her, he tore off her panties and fondled her, slobber-ing all over her exposed skin. Terrified, she tried to somehow reason with him, revealing that for all her sass and assumed experience, he had her all wrong—“Please, no, I’ve never had sex. I’m a virgin.” But even if he believed her, there’d be no chivalry. Half-crazed, and apparently enjoying an act of cowardly conquest, he didn’t stop until he’d raped her. Pulling up his pants, he left her in the back to dress herself as he started up the car. Only then did he drive her to the projects, saying not a word while she quietly sobbed. Opening the door for her, he was bizarrely cheerful.

“Why are you so upset?” he asked, seeming to consider the interlude a kind of acceptable young male sport.

Holding her ripped blouse at the neck with both hands, she ran into the apartment and blurted out the horrific details to Lurlee and Maxine, but was reluctant to report the crime or even to tell anyone outside the family. “Her feeling,” said Maxine, was that “the boy was well known and she felt like no one would believe her.” It was not an uncommon reaction among rape victims, especially at that time and place. This was a period when such assaults went unreported in great numbers—and in the ghetto, according to Maxine, “young black girls were raped daily” and “sometimes [by men] in their own families.” Women, and particularly girls violated by male teenagers carrying out rites of sexual passage, were expected to let it slide and move on.

Living within those cast-iron cultural and sexual strictures, Flo bore the shame silently; no authorities were ever notified. However, there was another option—ghetto justice, which could be meted out from family to family. And Maxine makes it clear that Flo was avenged, no surprise for a girl who had so many brothers, including one who took the blame for what had happened because he lost her in the crowd that bleak night.

A few days after, the rapist was beaten into a bloody pulp after school. No one who saw it ever ratted out his attackers.

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Flo didn’t feel avenged. Sick to her stomach and petrified it would happen again, she refused to leave the apartment for two weeks. She missed so much school that she fell behind in her schoolwork. She also missed several Primettes rehearsals. Hearing not a word from her, Ross and Wilson would either call the apartment or knock on the door, only to have Lurlee answer and insist, skittishly and without explanation, that Flo didn’t want to talk to or sing with them anymore.

Diane and Mary didn’t know what to make of it. At this point, the group was teetering. Losing McGlown was annoying, but she was re-placeable; losing Flo would be fatal. Confused and concerned, they were also resentful of her continued absence—for Diane, it was mostly the latter—and were relieved when Flo finally called Mary and said she needed to speak with them.

They met the next day at the Brewster recreation center, and Flo’s appearance was shocking. She was gaunt, her color washed-out, her clothes unkempt; the glint in her eyes was glazed over in what Wilson recalled as a “faraway look that was frightening.” Unsteadily, she began telling them what had happened the night she went to the Graystone.

“This had better be good,” Diane said snarkily, not knowing how insensitive that remark would be once Flo relived the gruesome details, the knife being held to her throat, and how, she said, the unnamed guy had “hurt me.” When she concluded, all three of them were in tears and Flo was wailing, “Why did he do it? I trusted him, I thought he was my friend. Why’d he do it?”

Diane and Mary were of course shaken by the revelations. Though they were too young to comprehend it all, Wilson, years later, told of a certain visceral reaction, the jolt of suddenly needing to make sense of life outside the fringe of a fairy tale and of finding the world “a darker, uglier place.” While they tried to pull Flo back into their lighter, prettier dream by redirecting her thoughts on the group—something Flo, encouraged by Lurlee, agreed she needed to do as a kind of therapy—

no one would ever fully bring her back from the dark place she’d been on that dreadful night.

In a sense, all of them lost some innocence along with her, Flo by far the most. Wilson would describe the post-rape Florence Ballard in her memoirs as “skeptical, cynical,” and “afraid of everyone and everything.” Ross, in hers, wrote that Ballard “was not easy. She had a strong personality, just like her voice. Everything about her was big. When she was happy, it was contagious. When she was unhappy, everybody around her felt miserable. She was terribly moody, constantly up and 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 79

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down. . . . We never knew if we did something to offend her and she wouldn’t tell us. So she’d be in some dark mood, and then, miraculously and suddenly, it was over.”

Most remarkable about Ross’s disquisition about Flo, however, were her observations that Ballard “was hard to figure out,” that “we could never really understand what drove her to her moods,” and that “we were frustrated because we were none the wiser about what had caused the emotional roller-coaster. She was secretive about her feelings, so she was the only one everybody tried to appease.” Could Ross, blinkered by her years of separation from Ballard, have been so narcissistic that she actually
forgot
about Flo being attacked? Indeed, there is no mention of the rape in the Ross tome. How this could be even remotely possible is a mystery. Is it imaginable, for example, that she could have forgotten that she herself had been moved to tears and fear by Flo’s rape? Alternatively, if Ross believed she was protecting Ballard’s memory from shame, or her privacy, is it conceivable that she didn’t know the incident had long been public knowledge?

Few others who knew Flo would have failed to understand, as time crept on, what so tormented her. Yet, for a few years the secret of that night would be kept so tenaciously that even some in the Ballard family circle had scant opportunity to know the details.

RAY GIBSON: My cousin always had that side of her, which became more pronounced during those quiet, introspective times when you left her alone. I didn’t know why she would get so lost in herself as she got older—why would I? I was just a kid, so obviously Florence didn’t tell me what had happened to her until years later. I mean, it took years before she could tell anybody, really, because she wasn’t ready, and because she couldn’t find anyone that she trusted enough. It just never got resolved the way it should have. She needed to address it early on, before it could fester. Because it just ate away at her, and I think she found out that all the fame in the world can’t make something like that go away.

She just wasn’t the same person after a while. She’d try to be the old Florence but it was like play-acting, know what I’m saying? She’d act how she thought Florence was supposed to act. But you could see she was suffering; her eyes, they never had that old sparkle. I don’t blame Florence for not getting help. It was the attitude of the times. Women weren’t supposed 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 80

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to have feelings about such things. Those attitudes changed when many women’s lives were ruined—like Florence’s. But I’ll say this: Florence was also proud—too proud. She was stubborn; she thought she could get away from it. Just as long as she could sing, she felt everything would turn out all right.