The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (55 page)

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the record) and two middling hits in ’63. But it wasn’t Birdsong’s voice that won her the Supremes job; it was an eerily close facial resemblance to Ballard. Four years older than Florence, five years older than Diana and Mary, she also had a seasoned air of poise and maturity at a time when the Supremes were getting a bit long in the tooth for the teenage burning-yearning pulp.

Yet Gordy still was squeamish about putting Flo’s neck under the blade. With important engagements on tap, he envisioned nasty publicity if the change was made into a scandal—if her alcoholism became public knowledge, what would become of the Supremes’ undefiled image? And if Flo could not be convinced that she wanted out, and appeased—for real, not just in Ross’s inventions—would she raise a stink in the press and lacerate a seamless transition?

These were the kind of land mines Berger had warned Gordy about. But just as Flo made it easy for Gordy to want to fire her, she was making it easier all the time for him to actually do it. This was made clear when the Supremes were summoned to Gordy’s gigantic French-colonial manse in the
crème de la crème
of Detroit neighborhoods, the 5100 block on West Outer Drive, where all but the most upwardly mobile blacks were kept from owning property by banks’

egregious redlining practices. The girls weren’t invited there to partake of the Olympic-sized swimming pool or the bowling alley or movie theater in the house, but for a climactic showdown of the Ballard problem.

Flo, expecting be humiliated, brought along her mother so she wouldn’t be alone against the wrath of Gordy, though Lurlee had no idea about the severity of her daughter’s troubles.

Flo, however, did not fully realize how tenuous her hold on her job was—not until she entered the house and the first person she saw was Cindy Birdsong sitting silently in the den outside Gordy’s tureen of a living room. The two women knew each other in passing, from past contact on the touring circuit, and Flo was startled to see Cindy who, because Gordy was so furtive, had been told only that she was going to be added to the Supremes; if she was to replace any of them, she thought, it would be Diana when she went solo.

“Flo!” she gasped. “What’s going on?”

“Damned if I know, honey,” Flo said, but her confusion gave way to a pained look on her face, no doubt reflecting her understanding for the first time how much trouble she was in.

Even so, as she and her mother went into the living room and sat together on a settee, she wanted to believe the same thing Cindy did.

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After a few minutes, Gordy descended from a spiral staircase, with Diana on his arm, a sight that always made Flo’s jaw and gut tighten.

Mary came late, as she often did for meetings, but Gordy didn’t delay.

Dropping with Diana onto a bench next to his grand piano, he made an announcement. There would be a “change” in the group, he began.

“From now on, the group will be known as Diana Ross and the Su -

premes,” going on brightly that this was “great news.” Now, he said, there would be “two stars”—one being Diana, the other the group as a whole. With great excitement, he explained how this would translate into greater appearance fees. Everyone would share in a new Supremes windfall.

Flo, who’d heard rumors of just such an alteration for months, was somewhat relieved that this was Gordy’s big news, though she couldn’t help but glare at Diana, who, putting her acting lessons to use, acted surprised at the announcement, fooling no one. But if that was it, Flo could live with it. Now, though, Gordy cleared his throat. He had more to say.

“Now, about Blondie. . . .”

Mary, maybe hoping she would miss the whole meeting, arrived to hear him rattling off the litany of Flo’s offenses: her drinking, her weight, how she was undermining the Supremes, how the group depended on an image of class and squeaky-clean femininity—“three Cinderellas” for a generation of young women around the world. He brought up the unpardonable sin of Flo missing that show in New Orleans; things like that, he said, “get around” and lead promoters to shy away. Millions of dollars were at stake. Flo had “gone too far,” he said, and forfeited her right to be a Supreme.

As Wilson recalled it, Gordy treaded carefully, “sticking to the facts.

There were no insults or accusations; he knew better than to provoke Flo [because] she had a violent temper. He just wanted to get it over with.”

But get
what
over with? Because he was so circumspect—or so afraid of Flo—he never actually fired her. Instead, his wimp quotient peaking, he suggested that “it would be best if Florence left the group.” He then threw in her own iterations about wanting to quit, hoping—

as was Diana, who now seemed bored and looked mostly at her nails—that Flo would get the message and do it right now.

Hard as it is to believe, Flo would later assert that she was “totally shocked” at Gordy’s action, and that she—the sassy Supreme who had an answer for everything—could find no words to say in her own 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 286

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defense. She began to perspire heavily and felt sick to her stomach, and when those in the room looked at her all they saw was Ballard being, as Wilson put it, “cold and distant.” Finally, Lurlee spoke up for her. “Flo wants to be in this group,” she said. Knowing nothing of Flo’s old friend’s duplicity, she turned to Mary, who was nervously avoiding eye contact with Flo. “Mary,” she asked sadly, “don’t you want Flo in the group?”

Mary, close to tears, pulled herself together and recited by rote part of Gordy’s indoctrination. “Mrs. Ballard, Florence does not want to be in this group” came her reply in a shaky voice. That was the unkindest cut of all for Flo—later, according to Tony Tucker, she would recall the

“
et tu Mary”
response and rage, “Who told that black bitch
that
?” With tears in her eyes, Lurlee slumped on the settee and sighed,

“Well, if that’s how you want it.” Flo, still inert, remained silent—a minor miracle and a blessing for Gordy, who had prepared himself for the ultimate Ballard blowup. Surely it was an odd vibe in that room. Flo had always sworn that Gordy would have to “drag me” out of the group, that she’d never go quietly. Yet here she was, dazed and confused, as if narcotized. Perhaps it was a deep-seated fear of crossing Gordy, or that she was just feeling too ill to think straight; or that on some still-functioning level of acuity it was a new way to show defiance. Then again, on the opposite flank, she might have calculated that not protest-ing would be taken as contrition, and the whole thing would blow over.

Whatever the forces at work inside her head, her mystifying silence allowed Wilson an artificial justification for stepping on Ballard when she was down. Never mind that she had led Flo to believe she would stand by her if it ever came to this. With supreme disingenuousness, she would years later actually blame Flo for not standing up for herself.

“Flo was waiting for me to rescue her,” she wrote in
Dreamgirl
, “[but]

refused to defend herself,” which she construed to mean that “[s]he wanted out more than anything, and she knew that I knew it.” What’s more, she noticed that Flo “seemed satisfied with the outcome.” What she did not say was that she apparently never asked Flo if these impressions were true.

But again, just what was the “outcome”? With all the emotional bloodletting going on, Gordy played Flo’s submission as a catharsis.

Trying to sound sincere, he asked Flo if she was all right, then bent over and hugged her before walking the two Ballard women out to Flo’s car, with an arm draped around each. As they left the living room, they crossed before a very puzzled and uncomfortable Cindy Birdsong. Hav-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 287

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ing heard only now the truth of why Gordy had recruited her, she felt terribly guilty, and worried that Flo would think she had a part in her being humiliated like this. Birdsong would admit in retrospect, “I wondered what I had gotten myself into.”

Once Flo was out the door, Diana—who at that moment Mary described as “giddy”—came running over to Cindy, grabbed her hands, and began gleefully jumping up and down like a schoolgirl just named prom queen—a show of
schadenfreude
Birdsong could not make sense of, given Lurlee Ballard’s tears and the dank sadness in the room.

Ross, as would Gordy, took the easy way out of reliving the emotional tension of that day—by simply making it disappear from her memoirs, in which she tossed off Flo’s ouster in one factually inaccurate sentence: “At the beginning of 1967, by mutual consent, Florence left the group.” At other times through the years she would tow the Motown party line that Flo had “left” out of a desire to get married and settle down and raise a family.

But Flo was not out, not yet. She didn’t quit that day, nor would she ever. When Gordy returned to the living room, he called in Birdsong and spoke of “getting Cindy ready”—Mary, he said, would tutor her on the routines, Diana on the makeup and stage wear—and it was generally assumed that Flo at some time or other in the near future would fall on her sword, that is, after removing it from her back where Mary had planted it. But when this didn’t happen by a month later, the notion had congealed around Motown that Flo was on some sort of

“probation” or “trial.”

Never during that time did Flo speak of going away; indeed, it was as if she had outwitted “Napoleon” by keeping quiet at the mansion.

Telling Tony Tucker of the scene at the house, she was as brazen as ever, saying, “I’m
not
gonna quit! If they want me out, they’ll have to throw me out!”—and that if Gordy did, “I’m going to create a big mess and nobody in the world is going to like it.” Neither did she reel in her verbal lashings of Diana and Berry. It actually seemed as if they might come to blows. When Gordy, one time, stuck an open palm near her face in anger, she screamed, “If you raise your hand to me, you’re gonna pull back a bloody stump!” Another time she raged at him, “I’ll cut you too short to shit!” He, in turn, stopped calling her by her name, or Blondie. Instead, he would ask, “Where’s that Ballard bitch?” How could Gordy have made it more awkward? Or more trying for the group? In truth, Flo, when she wasn’t stewed, was too smart to think she was in the clear, or on any sort of trial. She knew Gordy had 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 288

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to ease Birdsong in. “He just wants to cover his dirty work over with roses for the public,” she told intimates. In the meantime, Flo was the walking dead. But she’d be nobody’s corpse. Since Gordy still needed her for now, she had a free pass. She’d be damned if she’d use it to be a good little girl now.

Even more untidily, Gordy actually tried to make the Birdsong-for-Ballard move, but it failed to take, because of his own mistakes. It went down when the Supremes flew to L.A. for the April 19 Hollywood Bowl show, a charity affair for the United Negro College Fund that included other acts like Johnny Rivers, the Fifth Dimension, and Buffalo Springfield, and Gordy told Flo to stay home to “rest.” Not that many in the Bowl knew it; because the stage there was situated far from the rows of seats in the audience, and because Birdsong was a ringer for her, those who knew who Ballard was assumed it was her. Even most of the newspaper critics were duped. One who did know, writing in the
Los
Angeles Times
, touted Birdsong as a “strong sub” with whom Ross and Wilson “blend[ed] effectively.”
That
must have caused a few double-takes when the spectators who’d been there read it the next day.

Gordy, naturally, wanted the transition to proceed this way, with no muss, no fuss, and barely a notice. While the name change to Diana Ross and the Supremes was obviously planned to grease the way for Diana to go solo, a secondary consideration was to overshadow any negative fallout from—or even any mention of—Ballard’s being cashiered.

The name change was scheduled for a late June rollout in Vegas when the girls would return to the Flamingo Hotel, and on vinyl with their next single, to be released a month later. Ideally, Birdsong would be comfortably phased in by then, having, according to the plan, already performed with the group on the May 7
Ed Sullivan Show
and at the Copa May 11–24.

However, Gordy earned himself more heartburn by signing Birdsong as he did, with no caution paid to her contract with the Blue Belles.

As was common then, she didn’t know much about her legal ob ligations, and Gordy may not have cared about these himself when he signed her to Motown. But when word got out in the trade papers, and her active role as a Supreme was confirmed at the Hollywood Bowl, the Blue Belles’

lawyer rang up Motown’s lawyers, waiving Birdsong’s original contract and an injunction, which took effect during negotiations to buy out that contract—thereby effectively putting her in limbo for weeks.

Gordy couldn’t throw Marlene Barrow or Barbara Randolph into the high-level engagements only to have to make a
second
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Birdsong was free; how’d
that
be for a quiet transition? With no choice, he had to turn again to the foil he’d just
replaced
. And hope like hell he would get through it.

Because Flo knew the score, that she had not been taken back out of regret or because Gordy had second thoughts about letting her go, she was under no illusion that she could prove him wrong.
She
was the stand-in now, and doing Gordy a favor by carrying out that role. Thus, while it might have seemed logical that this new “reprieve” called for a change in behavior so as to go out on a high note, she didn’t appreciate the constant haranguing from Gordy that one more slip-up and “You’re out. You retire peacefully, that’s it.”