The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (54 page)

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[W]e were also 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 one everybody tried to appease. . . . With Florence, there always seemed to be a problem; nothing was ever right no matter how hard we tried to please her. . . . Mary and I both cared for her, and we wanted her to be happy. I wanted everyone to be happy. . . . When we were getting lots of press that started to mention only my name, it was difficult for her. The articles would refer to “the skinny little girl who . . . ,” and that hurt her very much. She started acting out in a big way.

Of course, it would have been a revelation for Ballard had she known she was the one being appeased, not Diana. But in the cloister in which Ross lived, it was really pretty simple to make sense of Flo’s descent: By merely inverting reality, she could pretend it had nothing, absolutely nothing
,
to do with Diana Ross. “We wanted to be able to enjoy it all,” she wrote, “but Florence . . . ruined it for everyone. . . .

[W]hatever energy we had was being drained by Florence’s moods. . . .

She was constantly letting us down.”

It was the Motown mantra when it came to Ballard. As Brian Holland pronounces, “What happened to Florence was sad and touching to me, but all she did, she did to herself.” That is the easiest conclusion, and also an inarguable one. Even her staunchest defenders have only shades of disagreement with it.

RAY GIBSON: A lot of people played a part in it, but it all came down to Florence herself. My cousin had a big heart. But she could be very stubborn and not do what was right for her, and as a result she made some very bad choices. She thought she was strong enough to live with her mistakes, but she was wrong.

With the drinking, I was still young enough to grasp the entirety of it. She would never drink around me. But I knew she wasn’t right. She didn’t look or sound or act like Florence to me. She just had so much pain, felt so betrayed, that she just sort of gave up.

She was pulling away from reality.

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Part of that reality was that if Gordy had little to say about her booz-ing, he never seemed to have enough to say about her weight. Even his rare compliments were like rabbit punches, damning with the faintest of praise.

“You know, for a fat girl,” he told her one day, “you don’t sweat too much.”

Flo took as many of these foul-natured jibes as best she could, silently responding by eating more, blimping up to a robust size 12

early in 1967.

“She
was
too big,” Ray Gibson says. “They were right. She was up to around 150 pounds and didn’t look good. But the problem was, she couldn’t do anything right for them. I remember when she got sick again and she must have lost about 30 pounds. And then they said she was too
thin
. She couldn’t win. So she ballooned up again.” The yo-yo dieting, indeed, contributed to her brittle state, physically and mentally. Trying to shed pounds in a hurry, Flo had begun to take diet pills prescribed by her doctor, who also prescribed Valium to reduce her anxiety. Tony Tucker said he would see her shoveling clumps of pills into her mouth at once and washing them down with a swig of rum or bourbon. Assuring him, she said the pills were vitamins.

But, as Gibson noted, whatever weight Flo lost never elicited a positive reaction from Gordy. Again, he may well have used the issue to set up her eventual ouster, knowing all along he would provoke her into fits of anger that he could hold against her. If so, he got more than he bargained for when he spotted Flo one night at the Twenty Grand with Tommy Chapman, a Martini in her hand, feeling no pain. She’d dropped a few pounds and people were telling her how great she looked.

Then, for some reason, Gordy thought it would be a good time to rag her again.

After a perfunctory greeting, he told her, with a nastiness that could only have been intentional, “Diana’s right. You have to do something about your weight, Florence. You are much too fat.” Wincing, Flo produced the most memorable Motown moment at the Twenty Grand since Sharon Holland’s almost-cat-fight with Diana.

Turning her face to his, she gave her retort.

“Fuck you! I don’t give a damn about what you or that bitch thinks!” As quickly as Gordy used to throw a left jab, her right arm jerked and before he could react his face was covered in gin and vermouth.

Blinded temporarily, he blinked his stinging eyes, his beard now a dripping sponge. When he could see again, her stool was empty, vacated 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 280

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when Flo scooped up her sable coat and made for the door with Chapman, the both of them laughing like hyenas.

That was, for many, the exact moment they knew Florence Ballard was a goner. It
had
to be. Gordy could not possibly tolerate a breach of his authority like that—at least by anyone other than Diana Ross. Yet, remarkably, he did not fire her, or Tommy, on the spot; nor did he weeks later, for a couple good reasons. One being that the Supremes were about to go back on the road with major gigs set for the spring: at the Deuville and Eden Roc Hotels in Miami Beach, the Hollywood Bowl, back at the Copa, at Symphony Hall in D.C., and the Cocoanut Grove in L.A; as well, there were impending appearances on
Ed Sullivan
May 7 and 21 (the latter broadcast from Expo 67 in Montreal), and
The Tonight Show
May 22.

It would be a mistake to shake up the Supremes now—or ever, it could be argued, as Shelly Berger did. “Mr. Gordy was sold on the idea that Florence had to go,” he recalls, “and I have to tell you, I was against it. I was against any changes in the act because from my experience any time an established act had been changed, the act had fallen apart. And now, it was written in stone that both Florence would go and Diana would go solo. So I was totally panic-stricken.” The case about the fatal nature of change was arguable; group acts like Billy Ward and the Dominos and the Drifters had lost lead singers without commercial loss—sometimes becoming even more popular. At Motown as well, both the Marvelettes and the Vandellas had replaced members without harm. However, Gordy was looking far beyond Ballard and the small change of a remade Supremes. Nearly his entire purview was tied to the windfall that would accrue to Ross on her own.

Still, Berger tried his best to get him to hold off on casting Flo adrift.

“I made out a list of reasons why it would be a mistake,” he says.

“And he looked at the list and said, ‘Shelly, this is incredible. You’re right on the money.’ Then, in the next breath, he said, ‘She’s gotta go.’” Before Diana and Mary were made aware of the decision, Gordy believed they needed a proper indoctrination. After endless recitations to each, such as “Flo is making you look bad” and “She’s taking you down with her,” he revealed that he was going to fire her, but they were pledged not to let on to anyone—most of all Flo—while a new third Supreme was being recruited. They both complied, with far different emotions. Diana, nowhere near as grateful to Flo as she may have been after her “breakdown,” had actually given Gordy the talking points 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 281

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about Flo’s effect on the group, having spouted them often during their pillow talk; thus she was so giddy about the change she could hardly contain herself. Mary, on the other hand, was sick with guilt that she had to keep the secret from her old friend, yet she, too, had come to conclude that Flo’s work had become sloppy and was tarnishing the technical precision and pristine surface glitter of the Supremes.

That was the result of Flo’s many missed rehearsals, through either illness or hangovers, necessitating that the girls wing it on stage and, at times, making them look somewhat ragged—in fact, Marlene Barrow and Barbara Randolph, kept on standby in case Flo had to miss a show, knew the latest Supremes routines better than Flo did. Unfortunately, one such messy performance came in full view of the whole world, or so it seemed, when they did the January 22
Ed Sullivan Show.
Keeping time to the beat as they sang “You Can’t Hurry Love,” each of them gradually branched off and did pretty much their own moves. Seeing that, Gordy flew into a rage.

The
Sullivan
show, in fact, seemed to bring out the worst in the Supremes. While they always sang in full and perfect throat, and their gowns always glittered against the pastel sets—still effortlessly playing off the cool chic of high glamour and pimple-cream angst—something about the heightened pressure and demands of performing before a live nationwide audience tripped the wire of sanity. For Flo and Mary, in fact, the sore was still festering from the
Sullivan
show on February 22, 1966, when at the end of “My World Is Empty Without You” Diana, situated between Wilson and Ballard, raised her arms upward at a “V” angle so that her hands obscured their faces; Mary and Flo thought it was intentional, having noticed that Diana had thrown her head back so she could see the monitor hanging overhead, and thus see her handiwork. What’s more, it would become something of a habit on their TV appearances.

Another, more ominous, snafu developed on the
Sullivan
show of September 25, 1966, when during a rehearsal one of Flo’s earrings came loose and wound up on the floor and Diana, almost certainly by accident, stepped on it. As she and Diana gazed down at the crushed pearl and metal, Flo’s eyes got wild. She charged like a puma up to Diana, tore off
her
earrings, and her wig, and began yanking her by her real hair across the stage like a Raggedy-Ann doll. Fearing for her life, Diana screamed “Help me!” over and over. It took two bodyguards to pry Flo off her. Thereafter, Diana was physically afraid of what Flo might do to her if she snapped.

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When the Supremes would return to the
Sullivan
stage on May 7, 1967, they would be even more of a powder keg, with the potential for Flo setting a match to it exponentially greater.

The train wreck that was Florence Ballard could not be hidden anymore. Alternating between open contempt for Ross and Gordy and the altruistic mission, in her view, as savior of the group’s pride and identity, each day—each
hour
at times—could bring a different Flo.

Shelly Berger saw up front what effect this had on the act when he accompanied them to Miami Beach in mid-March for their engagements at the Deauville and Eden Roc hotels. Those shows went on without a hitch, but with Ballard progressively drinking harder, disaster awaited them as they trekked from Miami to play several college dates across the South. It was, Berger says, like a trip through Hades: We started in Atlanta, then went to the University of Tennessee in Murfeesboro and on through Memphis and down to New Orleans at Loyola College. In Murfeesboro, the Holiday Inn kitchen closed at 10 PM, but there was a pizza place across the street. Diana said, “Come on, let’s get a pizza and take it back to the hotel.” So we went over there and as I was ordering, she was standing at a juke box and a bunch of Bubbas were spouting off. Diana came over to me and said, “Did you hear somebody say ‘nigger’?”

I hadn’t, but a minute later a guy kind of snuck over and told me matter-of-factly, “There’s six guys at that table over there who’re coming to beat you up. Just don’t fight with them, because they’ll kill you.”

At that point, Diana Ross became Joe Louis. “Oh
yeah
?” she said, and damn if she wasn’t going to go fight six rednecks with tire irons! I had to get her the hell out of there. I grabbed her by the arm and flew out the door like Jesse Owens just as they were coming to get us.

And that was the
fun
part of the trip. Because Florence was drunk all the time. In Memphis, we had to go on a half-hour late just getting Florence in some kind of condition to stand up on stage. Then, in New Orleans, it was just a nightmare. Florence couldn’t even make the show. Diana and Mary went on as 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 283

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a duo. We were relieved the audience was forgiving because if they demanded refunds we would have had to give them and lose a lot of money.

Everyone was just in a foul mood on the flight home. We all knew this couldn’t go on much longer with Florence. And then, as I was sitting with Diana, a stewardess handed a note to Diana. It was from Florence and it read: “I just can’t do this anymore. I have to leave the group.” Not too many people know that story.

Wilson recalled that fateful journey a bit differently. Leaving Memphis, she said, Flo hadn’t come down from her room for the ride to the airport for the flight to New Orleans. The road manager, Don Foster, was sent to fetch her and found her sitting upright and fully dressed in her bed, clearly inebriated and refusing to move. He managed to get her up, threw some water on her face, and half-carried her to the limo. On the flight, Flo began raving semi-coherently that Gordy wanted her out of the group but for that to happen, “they’re gonna have to put me out,” though Wilson recalls nothing about a note from Flo asking out.

On the ground in New Orleans, she said she called Gordy in Detroit, who ordered that Flo be put on a plane home at once, leaving Diana and Mary to go on alone.

“Diane was furious [but] I was sad and disappointed,” she related.

“Flo was digging herself into a hole she would never get out of.” Ross looked back at that night as if she were still stigmatized by it.

“Mary and I were frantic; we ended up having to go on without her. We abandoned the regular choreography, and, after grabbing the hand mikes, we walked around the stage and sang, just the two of us.” Any concern she and Mary might have had for Flo, personally, as she was falling into an abyss, was left unsaid.

Whether or not Flo did write that note, Gordy had heard from enough people, who swore she had used similar language, to use that as a rationale to dismiss her—which he was ready to do, having decided on her replacement. This was Cindy Birdsong, an obscure background soprano with Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, a black girl-group quartet from Philadelphia that had a No. 15 pop hit in ’62, “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” (though a different group had actually sung on 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 284