The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (60 page)

It was agreed that three checks signed by Harold Novick would be made out to Baun for deposit in Flo’s account, broken down this way: $134,809.40 from “Motown Record Corporation” for the balance of Flo’s escrow account—though no books had been opened for Baun to inspect, nor opened to an outside auditor; $5,000 from “Diana Ross and the Supremes” for the value of gowns Flo had been fitted for but was never given; and $20,195.06 from “Supremes Vocal Group” for unpaid royalties, which would supplant the $15,000 she’d previously agreed to.

Combined with the $75,689 December disbursement, this outcome meant that Motown, which had made untold millions from the group she founded, had dismissed Ballard for $235,693.46—a bargain indeed, at mere pennies on the dollar. Still, Baun believed it was the best he could do without taking Motown to court and with Flo in an understandable hurry to begin her solo career. A protracted legal battle with court-ordered audits and postponements could have taken years—

as HDH would find out—and cost Flo not only immense legal fees but her limited window of opportunity to be a “relevant” act.

When she and Baun went to the new Motown office in the Donovan Building on February 26 to sign the final papers, Mike Roshkind straggled in without his game face on. Trying to be sincere, he urged Flo “as a friend” not to take the money in a lump sum and instead let Motown pay it out over time. “Otherwise,” he said, “the government is going to kill you.” This of course was excellent advice—just as it had been when Baun first advised Flo at the time he set up her trust account, which is why Baun took offense at the remark as a slap at his integrity. Reminding Roshkind that he was sheltering Flo’s money, he then tapped into Flo’s resentment and suspicions of Motown, saying, with a sneer directed at his adversary, “Don’t worry about it” and that “a clean break” from the company was “the best way to go.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 313

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Roshkind laughed. “Yeah—the best way for
you
.” But he could have saved his breath. After the way Motown had humiliated her and made her fight for every dime, Flo was not about to let Motown have any say over her money. Roshkind, making a final effort at parting as “friends,” threw his arms around her, but Flo didn’t recip-rocate, standing rigidly, arms at her side. He then wished her well, grandly assuring her she could call him or Berry any time. “I mean it,” he said.

“Okay. Then I wanna call Berry right now,” she parried, leaving Roshkind to nervously shuffle papers until he was sure she wasn’t serious, at which point Flo went on, “And if he’s so concerned about me, why ain’t he in here right now sayin’ goodbye?” The flummoxed flack had no reply, and as she and Baun turned for the door, the silence in the room stood as Motown’s goodbye and good riddance to the founding Supreme. But Gordy was not through messing with Florence Ballard.

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CAME

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Three days after her divorce from Motown, Flo and Tommy Chapman flew to Hawaii to elope. Though her family and friends were disappointed they wouldn’t get to see that rare day of happiness in her life, no one begrudged her wish to get away from it all without delay and be with the man she loved for a few days in paradise. But only for a very little while, as it turned out. They spent a good part of the honeymoon arguing, something that was common for them but which escalated after they were married.

RAY GIBSON: The truth was, Tommy was always a little snippy with Florence, but when they married it was like he took it as a license to control everything she did. I mean, he was telling her to shut up and all that—how do you talk to your new wife like that in public? But he had to be the boss, to be the man, to be like Berry Gordy.

Like I say, Tommy could be a nice guy but he just didn’t get it. He loved Florence, but that was only one part of the bargain; a nobody like Tommy Chapman sees a woman with more money and talent than he would ever have, that he’d be nothing without her, and maybe deep down he resented her for it.

His behavior just sort of confirmed what a lot of us thought, that Tommy was playing an angle with Florence. The most heartbreaking part of it was that Florence, God bless her, couldn’t admit he was doing that. I’d see her with her eyes all red from crying about something Tommy said or did, and she’d 314

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always make sure to say how much she loved him and he loved her. And there
was
that, which was good enough to her because she didn’t want another part of her life to be a failure.

But here she was supposed to be happy. She had a new career, she was married, she was gonna have kids. And yet I sensed that her life was more desperate than ever.

The ABC deal was reinstated in late February after the company received a copy of Flo’s termination agreement. Holding off on the signing, Tommy flew to New York for some last-ditch pitching of Flo to other labels, but not a one expressed any interest, their reasoning quite likely having much to do with the inside industry knowledge of her drinking and “troublemaking” at Motown. Consequently, Flo knew that the ABC opportunity would likely be her last shot at the brass ring.

ABC’s interest came only because the music division of the giant broadcasting corporation was looking to make a large leap. In ten years, as Am-Par, then ABC-Paramount, it had released fairly standard pop fare, its biggest hits being Paul Anka’s ’50s “teen idol” fare. And yet, with some irony, ABC-Paramount released black-and-proud anthems by the Impressions (“I’m So Proud,” “Keep on Pushing,” “Amen,”

“People Get Ready”) that Motown wouldn’t have dared broach; and its iconic jazz sub-label, Impulse, was home to John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and McCoy Tyner. In ’67, it commenced a bid for expansion by acquir-ing the West Coast Dunhill label, bringing the highly commercial Mamas and the Papas and Three Dog Night to the table.

Ballard was thought pertinent to this growth. When she and Tommy flew in early March to New York to sign the two-year contract, one year with an option on a second, company executives told her that what they wanted was a “Supremes-like sound.” Considering that the very word was restricted from use, this objective was easier imagined than done. And far,
far
too heavy a burden to put on a still-far-from-whole Blondie Ballard.

An even bigger burden was now on the actual Supremes. By early ’68, post-Flo, the group was losing altitude. Although Ballard’s departure had little to do with this turn of events, surely some would have spun it that way if she’d made a mark as a solo artist. It would be the easy thing 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 316

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to do, running along an agreeable story line of vindication and payback, and Gordy couldn’t say he didn’t ask for it.

What caused Motown to ponder this nightmare scenario was that the follow-up to the stunning “Reflections” was arguably HDH’s most flyweight Supremes effort, “In and Out of Love.” Not that it didn’t have some typical ingratiating HDH quirks—mainly in the strum-ming acoustic guitar riff on the intro that satisfied the Hollands’ pet yen to drop a country-western feel into a Motown record before the strings and horns took over the sonic field. Nor was the bouncy beat anything less than a smart pivot back to the toe-tapping reverie of

“The Happening.”

The rhythm track was cut in L.A. in April with the working title

“Summer Good, Summer Bad,” then completed in Studio A in early June—with Flo having put in her last hours there. Not just was the old HDH “feel” diluted, but Diana’s cyclical repeating of the lyrical core,

“keep falling in and out of love,” didn’t quite make clear whether she was happier falling in or out of love, or why it was supposed to matter.

Released on October 25, 1967, with “I Guess I’ll Always Love You” on the flip, it ran out of gas at No. 9 in early December, not a disaster but also not enough for Gordy. Yet when he looked to HDH for another rebound, they were nowhere to be found. As he wrote in
To Be
Loved
, “I was told HDH had stopped recording and were in some sort of strike.” Lamont Dozier himself has used the term “strike” in describing HDH’s actions. (Another time, asked what he did that summer, he responded, “I mowed the lawn.”) The Hollands prefer “slowdown.” Whatever the semantics, it was a double blow for Gordy, given that HDH controlled the creative ship of state at Motown, at A&R and Creative Control.

In fact, Gordy’s judgment about which records to green-light seemed to be slipping as he drifted further from the day-to-day grind to galavant with the Supremes. Incredibly, overruling the Friday group meeting verdict, he had nixed the release of Marvin Gaye’s first single in nearly a year, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” co-written (with Barrett Strong) and produced by Norman Whitfield and perhaps the single best piece of work ever to come out of Motown; instead, possibly as a favor to HDH, he went with their Gaye record, “Your Unchanging Love,” which became only a minor hit at No. 33 in mid-’67. Whitfield’s re-cut, up-tempo version with Gladys Knight and the Pips went to No. 2 later in the year, becoming the top-selling Motown single up to then—until eclipsed by the too-long-belated release of the magnifi-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 317

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cently brooding Gaye version late that year, which stayed at No. 1 for seven weeks.

While Gordy waited for HDH to show, he had to stretch the soup to put together the Supremes’ next album,
Reflections
, including with the title track and “In and Out of Love” a hash of second-tier HDH–

and Smokey Robinson–produced tracks such as “Bah-Bah-Bah,” written by Brenda Holloway and her sister Patrice, and covers of “Up, Up and Away,” “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” and “Ode to Billie Joe.” Riding on the back of the two hits, the album made it to No. 18

on the album chart and No. 3 on the R&B album chart. If the album didn’t reflect any great intensity on the part of Gordy, it did reflect his sense of pique and vindictiveness, as the cover’s montage of the Supremes in various candid photographs included none of Florence Ballard—marking the first stage of what would become a general “de-Ballardization” of Supremes history around the Motown camp.

Gordy would claim that, for the next Supremes single, “[w]e were forced to go back to the can,” coming up with the HDH “Forever Came Today,” which he said had been “cut a year before.” Yet on the 2000 box-set
The Supremes
, Harry Weinger lists the session dates for the song as December 20, 1967, and January 1, 1968. That would indicate HDH were on the job, not on strike. As well, Eddie Holland calls the tune “one of my favorites,” which seems to suggest that Gordy—

who later used the strike against HDH in years of legal warfare—may have overstated just how crippling their work stoppage was.

Even so, “Forever Came Today” is something of a riddle. Session sheets for the song seem not to have been kept. Weinger specified no studio locale for it, though it has that non-Detroit, “L.A.” feel—as well as a very strange coronet-piccolo intro that sounds like a riff from Wag-ner’s “Bridal Chorus.” Stranger still, perhaps, is that the lyrics are probably the most optimistic love song Eddie Holland ever penned, sans the usual emotional tug of war—“When you walked into my life / You made my lonely life a paradise,” Diana joyfully trilled.

Whatever its origins, it is clear that the backing vocalists were not Wilson and Birdsong but the Andantes. That trio had been called in to spruce up Flo’s flat background line on “In and Out of Love,” but from

“Forever” on, Wilson and Birdsong were Supremes merely for appearance’s sake. The reason was simple, and cold: Gordy was now actively trying to bring forth a record that would mark Diana’s solo breakout, and of course no other Supremes members could be in its grooves. The beauty of it for Gordy was that even on tracks he determined to be 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 318

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more appropriately Supremes singles—which was the case with all singles chosen for the next year—no one would know the difference anyway, as the Andantes were that good.

Gordy had a more tactful way of putting it—that Mary and Cindy, by remarkable coincidence, always seemed to be “unavailable” or, more preposterously, “out of town” when Supremes sessions went down.

(Amazingly, Ross was always available.) However, never truer than now was Shelly Berger’s observation that the Supremes were for all practical purposes Diana Ross and two who-cares backup vocalists.

The bummer was that “Forever Came Today” came and went without a ripple after it was released on February 29 with an aptly titled B-side, “Time Changes Things.” The Motown promotion machine plied its trade, but neither that effort nor even the tune’s debut by the Supremes on the March 24 episode of
The Ed Sullivan Show
could move it higher than No. 28 on the pop charts and 17 on the R&B.

But while the Supremes’ crashing chart fortunes could have been a problem for HDH as well, they decided to put everything on the line with Gordy. By no coincidence, they extended their own feelers to other record companies, one of which, Capitol, assured them they could run their own subsidy label if they jumped ship. In late spring, Eddie Holland strode into Gordy’s office with an ultimatum. His previous demands for a cut of publishing royalties and stock equity having been rebuffed, his new—and last—demand was for a $100,000 interest-free loan for the trio so that they could incorporate the HDH brand into a business entity, with private office space and the freedom to bring in their own acts while still working at Motown; if they didn’t get the money and the autonomy, Holland said, they were gone.

The terms of the ultimatum sounded nothing but dangerous to Gordy. He could imagine his authority being whittled away, and that he’d be in effect financing an independent label under his own roof that would someday become a competitor. Trying to put them off without saying no, he launched into the “Berry rap,” reminding them again that he had bankrolled their rise to fame, with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances and the millions in writers’ royalties that he’d invested in them. (Pulling out a file, he put the exact figure at $2,235,155.) They were set for life, many times over. And all that stood between them now was a measly hundred grand?