The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (62 page)

Whatever funds they had from the $15,000 advance and from the Motown termination, they were going out that twenty-fifth-floor window, fast. For Flo, it wasn’t enough that people knew she was in New York making records; they had to know she was living in a manner be-fitting
the
solo Supreme. Luxury and decadence were what it was all about. The work of creating acceptable music seemed, at times, not as important.

As it happened, all the Supremes, past and present, would be working in New York during the early spring—a time frame that was every bit as crucial to the Diana Ross and the Supremes brand, as they’d be doing their first high-end gigs under that banner: another
Ed Sullivan
Show
on March 24 and, ten days later, the kick-off of a two-week run back at the Copa. At first, Flo was under the impression she and Tommy would be left guest tickets for the
Sullivan
show; Tommy called 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 325

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the theater to make sure. Then, on the day of the show, someone called from Sullivan’s office and told him there were no seats for them.

Flo watched the show at the penthouse, joyfully ragging on the girls as “pitiful” and yelling at the screen “Mary! Wake up!” as they performed “Forever Came Today”—which she recognized as a song she’d sung on, and thus barked that Motown owed her royalties on it. She even had a copy of the record, and later put it on a Victrola while she sang the background part; in her head, Flo Ballard was
still
a Supreme.

Which was what the ABC Records people would have wanted her to be in her mind and music. It was really the Supremes that the company wanted on vinyl, even if two-thirds removed. Toward that end, ABC had tapped as her producer, George Kerr, a former member of Little Anthony and the Imperials who later turned to writing and producing—

first at Northern Soul and then, briefly, at Motown. In ’66, Kerr co-wrote with Sylvia Moy and Michael Valvanor “You Hit Me Where It Hurts Me,” but when the Kim Weston single he produced was not released he walked and re-cut it with Alice Clark on the Warner Brothers label. (In the ’70s he would produce the O’Jays, the Moments, and Linda Jones.)

Kerr knew what his mission was; the first song he cut with Ballard,

“It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It (It’s What I Say That Matters),” which he wrote, could not have been more transparent. Kerr laid on layers of echo and strings, a funky bass line, and
woo-ooo-
ing backup singers, then had Flo do her best Diana Ross imitation, all high and cute and breathy. The similarity was striking at times, with a sensuousness that—channeling “Buttered Popcorn”—lent a real randiness to the saucy Smokey Robinson–esque lyric: “If I were a candy dish,” she purred, “I’d wanna be the one you keep your sweets in, my sweet man.” Still, it
wasn’t
Ross, or the Funk Brothers; at best, it was a packet of Motown sweet and low set to a pre-disco dance beat, and it wasted her flair as an earthy R&B singer—something she demonstrated on the B-side, a torchy, emotive cover of the Imperials’ “Goin’ Out of My Head.” But the plain truth was that Florence Ballard, as Berry Gordy knew from the start, wasn’t a
lead
singer.

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In general, the timing of the sessions seemed to be cursed. It wasn’t enough that Flo had to live with the psychological torture of knowing that the Supremes were only blocks away at the New York Hilton and doing star-studded, high-profile gigs. On April 4, only a couple of weeks into the project, all such seemingly important matters were rendered trivial by a shot fired by a born loser named James Earl Ray in Memphis, leaving Martin Luther King sprawled lifeless outside Room 307 on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.

Once more, fires burned throughout low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods, with something like eighty riots that night eventually costing nearly fifty lives. But while Baltimore and Chicago and D.C. were afire, this time Detroit stayed cool. So did New York, where the Supremes were to open at the Copa the very same night until Gordy, who’d flown in, postponed the entire engagement for a month.

(On a lesser stage, a Temptations concert in South Carolina went on as scheduled, about the last thing the group wanted to do.) Gordy, who had released the album with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and hosted a King visit to Motown, was asked by his widow, Coretta, to arrange, with Harry Belafonte, a June benefit concert in their hometown of Atlanta, to commence the People’s March to Freedom—the campaign on which King was working, a symbolic procession to D.C.

The Supremes would be highly visible in these rites of mourning, though nothing in their art or level of intellectual curiosity suited them to be avatars of the struggle. But this was Gordy’s time to prove his commitment to the cause—and as the voices of his brand of black capitalism, the girls had to help him make his statement, even if they were props. This was the case, literally, on April 5 after they’d been hurriedly booked onto
The Tonight Show
to help keep the calm through song, which would be a near–a cappella rendition of the affective “Somewhere,” which for several years had featured Diana’s spoken sermon about people working together in peace and harmony.

That afternoon, Gordy had taught her a reworked rap memorializ-ing King that he’d written himself, including lines from the “Dream” speech. It was an unforgivably heavy burden to place on her at such short notice, and at the 4:40 P.M. taping of the show, the girls came on in muted black gowns and began a dirge-like rendering of the song. On the break, as Mary and Cindy quietly hummed behind her, Diana was so unnerved that she mangled parts of Gordy’s rap, which only made her seem more endearing and human. After the song, she, alone, was called over to sit next to Johnny Carson, whereupon she came close to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 327

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tears speaking extemporaneously of Dr. King. “He lived and died for one reason,” she said, “and I want all of us to be together. . . . I think we should walk together. It’s very important because, well, just
because
,” to emotional audience applause.

Even under the sad circumstances, Gordy saw it as another virtuoso Ross performance, reportedly remarking afterward that “[w]e should have her say more shit like that.” For Diana, though, the experience was heart-wrenching, and she saw it as nothing to crow about. Once the show was over, she all but crumbled into a chair and sobbed uncontrollably. Mary and Cindy, having already changed into street clothes, stood waiting in the corridor, sharing a laugh. Motown lackeys were checking itineraries and trying to get Diana moving, but she sat inert, leaning forward, head in her hands.

Annoyed by the nudging, she woofed, “In a minute!” Then, when it didn’t stop, she could only beg, “Why can’t I just have a minute?” In that pregnant moment, she wasn’t a diva, just a small young woman under far too much pressure—a side of her personality that would emerge periodically, endearingly, only to be banished back into hiding.

That night, Gordy and the girls flew to Atlanta for the funeral. The next day, images of a solemn Diana Ross draped in a mourning shawl appeared in newspapers across the country. Three months later, they were back for the People’s March ceremonies, where the Supremes reprised “Somewhere.” As headliners of the show (Gordy also brought in Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Gladys Knight and the Pips), they were standing beside Gordy when he was presented leather-bound volumes of Dr. King’s books by Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King’s assistant and the new president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the start of the march, the Motown contingent got in line, if for only a few well-publicized steps, with the Supremes shoulder to shoulder with Gordy, Belafonte, and Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Flo, of course, was not among the celebrity mourners. Neither did she have the option of being able to postpone her recording sessions. On the morning of April 5, she was in the studio, knocking off songs for her album. Meanwhile, ABC readied her first single. In late April, a two-page ad ran in
Billboard
touting the label’s new releases, including

“It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It (It’s What I Say That Matters)”/“Goin’

Out of My Head” by “Flo/Florence Ballard.” Within weeks it began to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 328

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trickle into record stores and went out to radio stations with a circumspect PR release stating only that “Florence has been part of an entertainment trio for many years.”

The ABC Records people, again, could have cheekily tested the boundaries of the prohibition, by perhaps boasting how “supremely proud” they were to have her. But timidity seemed to pervade every aspect of the song’s promotion, or rather lack of it. Overall, they did little, as if by doing more they would offend Motown—an amazing lack of spine for a huge corporation. Early on, when they tried to book Flo on promotional appearances, they were warned that the big booking agencies “wouldn’t touch” her, because this might jeopardize their lucrative deals with Motown.

Gordy’s tentacles indeed seemed to be everywhere, allowing Flo to see firsthand why bigger Motown expatriates like Mary Wells and Brenda Holloway had run into the same wall. In Detroit, where ABC

hoped for some buzz on the record, most stations never were sent copies of it.

ROBIN SEYMOUR: I don’t think I ever saw it at WKNR. I think I would have played it.

I loved Flo, I thought she was a helluva singer. But it’s possible some deejays wouldn’t have. Look, Barney Ales ran the marketing at Motown, he was a powerful guy. And there was, you know, a lot of Teamsters money at Motown. People in the business would be “contacted” every once in a while if Motown had a gripe about playlists, and they’d do what Motown wanted.

Now, listen, I’m not saying they did that with Flo’s records.

I don’t know that they thought they
had
to, those records weren’t anything to be afraid of. And I think the deejays in town rubbed off that—there was no reason to play them, ABC

wasn’t exactly flooding the stations with the records. Maybe it just wasn’t very good.

For Flo, the lack of support was hammered home by ABC’s own corporate
president
, a bumptious fellow named Larry Newton. When he was introduced to Ballard, he oddly told her, “You know, Flo, it’s not good for an artist to switch recording companies,” then name-dropped, as if starry-eyed, that he’d played golf recently with Berry Gordy.

But was Gordy—as Flo came to believe, understandably—

blackballing her? It seems more accurate to say that ABC was perfectly 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 329

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content to blackball
itself
in the matter of Ballard’s work, either out of respect (fear) for Gordy or because the songs didn’t make them
want
to cross Gordy.

Yet even after “It Doesn’t Matter” proved a prophetic title, ABC

held to its part of the bargain, in releasing a second single, needing a stronger song to carry the album that was being completed with low-grade songs such as weak covers of “Yesterday,” “It’s Not Unusual,” and

“The Impossible Dream.” Toward that end, a new producer was hired, one with real Motown cred. This was none other than Robert Bateman, who’d “discovered” the Primettes at the Windsor Festival and was at their Motown audition. The long-limbed Bateman, after working for MGM, was now freelancing and immediately accepted the Ballard job, which was to produce four sides.

Bateman chose as the single “Love Ain’t Love,” written by former Columbia writer-producer Van McCoy, whose mien even then was the kind of lush orchestration that would be fully realized in 1975 with the leviathan hit “The Hustle.” For the vocal, Bateman let Flo belt away with throaty, playful lustfulness—“Come on, let me kiss you! Stop wasting time!” she exhorted, being very Flo-like. But she was once more mired in a string-coated dance mix. (A better bet seemed to be the B-side, Bateman’s “Forever Faithful” with its HDH-style funk and sax solo.) With ABC still not doing any booking for her, Tommy tried it himself, enlisting Cholly Atkins to brush up Flo’s choreography and Cholly’s old partner Honi Coles to use his pull to get her into some clubs—until Coles wrote him in June that the agencies had shied away

“because of her former connection with Motown.” Chapman did make one late-summer gig, a two-nighter at the Wonder Garden in Atlantic City, a venue no one would confuse with the Copa. Tony Tucker, who came in for the show, remembered it as “a hell-hole bar” crawling with

“tacky ladies of the evening and their low pimps.” Flo, seven months pregnant and looking it—her doctor had told her she would have twins—seemed to want to be anywhere else. Right up until she went on she didn’t know what songs she’d sing—because the band knew how to play only a few songs, none of which Flo had sung before. When the show began, people in the audience were stunned by the sight of a very pregnant woman moving about on a stage, looking obviously distressed.

Flo, bathed in harsh, amateurish lighting that accentuated her size, tried to vamp as the band played on, but she was awful and after the disaster she bawled hysterically. Raging at Tommy for making her do this, she vowed, “I ain’t going back out there no more!” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 330

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Tommy, with not an ounce of sympathy, yanked her arm sharply and screamed in her face, “Shut up!” telling her she
was
going back out for the next show. She did, with even worse results before a half-empty house.

When they got back to New York, there was no reason to stay. The sessions were done, the new single slated for release. And so they gave up the penthouse, packed up, and began driving back to Detroit, where they could be at home when the new single was released in early October—and of course for the birth of the twins. On the way, they stopped off in Chicago, where Flo had gotten a gig as a warm-up act for a Bill Cosby show at the Auditorium Center.