The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (53 page)

But Gordy would not release a single from the album, wisely, no doubt realizing that while the tracks were well done and more than adequate as examples of the Supremes’ versatility in the bombastic, string-swelled, big-band idiom, overall it was shlock—a judgment confirmed when the album rose no higher than No. 20, mainly on the strength of the Supremes’ brand—though with not a shred of logic it hit No. 3 on the R&B charts. (It would also become a lingering curiosity through the years, with all but two of the unreleased tracks—which were used on
Diana Ross and the Supremes’ 25th Anniversary
album in 1986—

appearing on
The Rodgers & Hart Songbook
a year later; and all twenty-five tracks on
The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart: The Complete Recordings
in 2002.)

Having seen “People” snatched from her, Ballard, upon being double-crossed on the album, lost another little piece of sanity at a time when she seemed to have calmed down a bit, perhaps because the time off the road cut down on the time she had to spend with Diana, whom she could avoid at home since background vocals were usually cut separately from the lead.

“She was never as happy as when she’d come home from a tour,” recalls Ray Gibson. “She would decompress; you could see her change before your eyes. She’d lose the anger and tension. She could just be with the family, go and record, and come home. The funny thing is that Diana was right across the street but they never crossed paths; she may as well have been thousands of miles away.” There was something, or someone, else that kept her happy to be home. Recently she had taken up with a tall, mustached fellow who was one of Gordy’s drivers, Tommy Chapman, another pairing in the never-ending procession of canoodling within the Motown “family.” (A further one was Flo’s cousin Winnie Brown, a Supremes’ hair stylist, who was fooling around with the married Paul Williams.) It seemed to many around the shop that this was a step down in class for Flo. But after a brief fling with Obie Benson ended when he turned his affections to Mary, Flo fell hard for the driver who had been pursuing her for 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 273

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months before. On the Supremes’ Far East tour, she gave in and took him into her bed. Chapman had nerve, for sure. But he was also the only one she could find who encouraged her skirmishes with Ross, in effect taking sides against his own boss. When she’d go on about Diana, Chapman would nod like a metronome and say, “Yeah, she’s a bitch,” at regular intervals. He’d then tell her to “ignore the bitch,” that Flo’s day would come, that Berry would come begging her to stay in the group and maybe let
her
have a solo career.

It was either a grand match of soulmates or a grand illusion, a con played by a low-level bunco salesman seeing an easy mark in a sad, vulnerable woman slowly losing her mind. Wilson believed it was the first.

Flo, she said, “seemed happier” with Chapman, who she thought was

“very nice” and “seemed to empathize with Flo, and he loved her.” Just that Flo could love a man, any man, was a welcome event for everyone in the small ring of people who knew of Flo’s rape and its lasting scars. Although Flo had no trouble having meaningless, recreational sex, she had a deep aversion to letting herself get close to anything like love. Now, that guard was being let down. “Knowing how difficult it was for Flo to be intimate with a man,” said Mary, “I was happy that she had Tommy.” Happy for Flo, and happy for the Supremes, since

“[w]henever Tommy was around, she stopped obsessing about Berry and Diane.”

Ray Gibson, though, had his doubts. “Thomas Lorenzo Chapman,” he says, stretching the syllables with a pained laugh before turning his mind back in time.

I always thought Tommy was a nice guy, but he just didn’t get it. It was really strange, because everybody was telling Florence,

“Don’t get involved with him,” but she was in love with Tommy and you wanted it to work out for them. But then you’d see his temper and how he was already telling her what to do, and you’d go, “Uh-oh.” Because he was presenting himself as her manager, which he later became. And if you knew Tommy, you’d know the last thing he was qualified to do was be anybody’s manager. I don’t think he could manage himself.

It didn’t seem to be the healthiest relationship. But Florence had come to feel she was all alone. Diana and Mary weren’t there for her. Berry Gordy wasn’t. Her family was, but she needed someone in the outside world who took her side.

And here came Tommy, all dashing and full of big talk and 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 274

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smooth ways, and before you knew it they were inseparable and talking about getting married! It was crazy.

That, it seems to me, was more indicative of something unhealthy; it was out of touch with reality, something that could only make things worse. It didn’t
feel
like real love. To me it was like addiction. I think they were both addicted to each other, for their own separate reasons: Florence needed to be loved and Tommy to find a pot of gold.

Flo was so hooked on Chapman that when she would go on the road, and he didn’t come along as a driver, she’d mope around moaning, “I miss Tommy so much.” That, added to the stress of tight scheduling and rarely a moment before a plane, a PR appearance, or a show, led her to her real best friend—the bottle. Wilson in her memoirs cut Flo some slack, claiming that she “never drank before a show”—a conclusion disputed by others, Shelly Berger for one—and that even with the grind and often no more than two hours’ sleep, “we were never less than perfectly gracious and beautiful”—a point disputed by no one.

In fact, Flo seemed proud that she could get sloshed in the folds of the itineraries, usually at post-show parties and wee-hours nightclub forays, and not act like a falling-down drunk. She could steel herself, act out the role of a carefree but classy Supreme, and get back to the hotel intact; then pour herself into a stupor, crash, and still be able to wake up the next morning and make it to the next function, laughing to herself that she could do the drill while hungover. She surely had an impressive constitution, and it threw a good many Motown people off the scent.

When Ross and Wilson, for example, gently pressed her about her drinking, and practiced little artifices trying to rein her in—pointedly declining any booze when they were with her, or milking one drink for hours—Flo would be hip to what they were doing. “Flo wasn’t dumb,” Wilson said. “She was touched by our efforts.” Making sure to ease their fears, she would tell them, “Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.” And she no doubt believed that.

She was indeed not dumb. If she believed she would be okay, she didn’t con herself that it would be easy to get there. According to Gladys Horton, with whom she had remained close, Flo bared her inner torment to her just as she had years before about her rape. Saying she was “miserable,” she ’fessed up that she was bringing it on herself because “I’m an alcoholic behind all of this,” though the main reason 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 275

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for her drinking, she said, was her fear of flying. “I got to get stoned to get on those planes,” as she put it.

Brutal as that mea culpa was, Horton was bowled over when Flo dropped another bomb. “She told me she was ready to quit,” said Horton. “I was shocked. I thought she had it so good.” This was a clear signal that, for all her “And I tell you I’m not going” bravado—the virtual epitaph of the resurgent “Flo” character in the
Dreamgirls
play and movie scripts—Ballard was clear-headed enough most days to know how worn out she was by her battles with Ross and Gordy; and how much her sanity was being battered. Fighting it out didn’t always seem like the best idea to her; going home and lying around the house with Tommy and a bottle for a year or so, now
that
seemed like a pretty fair trade-off. Still, it wasn’t only her pride that kept her battling; it was a sense of duty only she could see, that the honor of the Supremes was being ravaged by crass commercial pimping, and by God she was gong to defend it.

RAY GIBSON: All the talk about Diana leaving hit her hard, but not because she was jealous of Diana. It was that she could see Diana and Berry making decisions based on what was best for
them
, not the Supremes. They didn’t care that the Supremes would be broken up, and Florence didn’t think that was fair. In her mind, it was like her responsibility to keep the group together. As it happened, they
did
stay together longer than anyone thought. Now that may be a stretch, that it was Florence’s doing, but that’s how she looked at it.

So incorruptible did she consider herself on this count that she believed in the reverse of the old saw about might making right; for her, right would make might. Once, when Mary tried to caution her about constantly giving lip to Ross and Gordy, Flo indignantly replied, “I’m fightin’ both of them, and I’ll win.”

“You won’t win, Flo,” Mary sighed. “No one ever wins.” At the same time, she was so eager to fight the good fight that she seemed blind to the trap Gordy had set, leaving him no choice but to cut her out. Then again, a frank truth about Ballard was that another of her motivations for continuing to make war was less than altruistic.

Quite plainly, she had come to love the money, and with it the furs, the El Dorados in the driveway, the shopping sprees, the shoes. As Gibson readily notes, “Florence knew if she left, she’d lose all that. She was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 276

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honest about it. She’d say things like, ‘As long as the money’s the same for all of us, it’s fine for Diane to sing all the leads.’ Or, ‘Berry said we’re all gonna be millionaires, that’s what I’m in it for.’”

“So she was caught in so many contradictory thoughts and impulses. And when it all came out of the blender, what was left was that she felt betrayed by everybody—especially Mary. Florence always said,

‘At least one thing I know about Diana—Diana will be straight with you, I know where she’s coming from. But Mary, she’ll tell you one thing and then do another.’ That hurt her a lot.” To the Motown brass, Ballard wasn’t all that complicated. “Florence was a drunkard” was all Shelly Berger could see at this point. “I don’t know at what point you become an alcoholic, or why. But I know I can’t stop someone from drinking if that’s what they want to do.

“Florence was drinking heavier all the time. She and Paul Williams had the same problem. In ’67 I became the Temptations’ manager and lived through it with him, too. For some people the more the pressure becomes the less they can handle it, it eats them alive. It was just amazing, the change in them. When Paul started out he never drank a drop. Then he got to the point where he was drinking a fifth of Courvoisier a day.

“It hurts you to see people you really love killing themselves like that. But, like with Florence, you just can’t stop them. Sometimes, they just want to kill themselves. You have to remember, too, that it wasn’t like it is today. There were no ‘designer’ Betty Ford Clinics. It made you very sad and frustrated, but we weren’t these people’s keepers.” Gordy, of course, passed down that laissez-faire approach to his acts’ personal foibles, his credo being: Just don’t do it on company time.

And he dealt with the subject of Ballard’s drinking with a few diffident sentences in
To Be Loved
, shouldering no blame for her descent—and, incredibly, claiming he hadn’t known she was drinking so much because Ross and Wilson kept it from him, as if he didn’t keep tabs on all of his performers. His response when they told him? “Everybody knew how I felt about drinking and drugs,” he wrote airily. “They had heard me say many times: ‘It’s easier to stay out than to get out.’” If empty bromides like that were all Gordy could offer Flo, even he admitted it was woefully inadequate: “It seemed the harsher the warning, the more flagrant Flo’s behavior became.” Gordy did try some preventive measures to turn Flo’s spigot off.

When they went on the road, he would give orders to the management of the hotels where they stayed not to send liquor to her room. Flo, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 277

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though, was too smart and cunning for that. She would simply have lackeys smuggle booze up. Once, in New York, she was going to send Tony Tucker to the liquor store for a fifth of Bacardi. Realizing he was too young to purchase alcohol, she instead had him ask his mother to do it, on the pretext she would be giving it to a friend as a gift. Naturally, the Bacardi never left her room.

Beyond these half-hearted attempts, no one at Motown appeared compelled to make an effort to understand
why
Ballard was in such a sad state. Four decades later, Eddie Holland regrets that: When I look at it, I think that if someone had done a little bit more, had a little bit more time for Florence, maybe things would have turned out different. Somebody had to be more attentive to her, to stop all that. But she really needed a psychologist, a psychiatrist. What I knew about Florence was that she loved to sing, that she never came in to sing drunk or anything like that. But it wasn’t enough. She was really frightened, a frightened little girl. It was like she had a lot of demons she was running from.

If it occurred to anyone who knew her that Flo’s excesses were a plea for help, it was a fleeting thought. Of course, that conclusion would become common much later. But even then, Ross, like many at Motown, took the cop-out route; in
Secrets of a Sparrow
she assented that Ballard was “not well” and had “serious emotional problems”—but insists “we didn’t know that then,” no matter that she had cried with Flo after her rape. The Flo as she saw her back then was an “angry woman who drank too much and wouldn’t take responsibility for herself,” who

“blamed everyone else for the things that were not working out in her life”; but playing dumb about why that was, she cut herself the break that “I never knew why it happened. I never understood her. Florence’s life was always shrouded in mystery to me.” Ross went on like this, with a rather breezy cruelty, for more than a few discomfiting passages when, attempting to be “frank,” she eviscer-ates Ballard with no mercy, while begging off any “responsibility” for having, or needing, to understand her “problems”—or, worse, helping to cause them with her own insensitivity. Her words are more than frank; they’re actually hurtful because they’re meant to allow Ross to duck any blame. Consider this remarkably self-serving and intentionally myopic—or even flatly dishonest—memory stream: 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 278