The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (73 page)

THE SUPREMES

The Supremes had pushed on, with decreasing success and a freely swinging revolving door. In 1972, Cindy Birdsong became pregnant and took a leave from the group, replaced by Linda Laurence, who’d sung backup for Stevie Wonder. The bonus of which was getting Wonder to produce their ’73 single “Bad Weather,” though it reached only No. 87. Now, with contracts having expired and no one at Motown in a hurry to extend them, the girls’ only work for months was outside the studio, in concert venues. Then Terrell, who had fronted the last Top Twenty hit they would ever have, “This Is the Story” in ’72, had a run-in with a domineering Mary—she having executed a role reversal in the transition, taking over the Diana Ross I’m-the-boss attitude.

“I’m the original Supreme, I started the group,” Mary told her, pulling rank and stretching the truth.

“Well, you’re not the lead singer,” Jean retorted, now in the “Flo” role. “So I’m not listening to you. Maybe you’ve been here too long.” It was precisely the kind of lip that made Gordy turn on her. Soon after, Terrell split. So, too, had manager Shelly Berger. It might have been a good time to fold the group once and for all. But Wilson doggedly kept it going.

Stardom had become a narcotic for Mary; it appeared to be all that kept her going. Even her romantic life, such as it was, seemed to rub off the group. In ’74, after engaging in yet more meaningless flings with famous men as disparate as Flip Wilson and Steve McQueen, she was romanced by a Dominican businessman with a huge Afro, Pedro Ferrer, a big-talking nobody about whom it was said that only one person could tolerate him. Since that person, of course, was Mary Wilson, Ferrrer began to assume a larger role with the Supremes—“assume” being the operative word. In a sense, in fact, Ferrer became Mary’s version of Tommy Chapman. After she married him in the chapel of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas in mid-’74, she made him the group’s manager, and though all the decisions were ultimately hers, it mortified the other girls that she would actually take cues from a guy with no expertise in music or managing.

“Oh yeah,” smirks Shelly Berger, “that was a clever move.” Once contracts were extended, Mary made herself co-lead singer with Scherrie Payne, sister of “Band of Gold’s” Freda Payne, in yet another Supremes incarnation. Linda Laurence had left as well, and Birdsong agreed to return, though she would exit soon after—one of Pedro Ferrer’s suggestions—for another faux Supreme, Susaye Greene, who had sung with Laurence while backing up Stevie Wonder. Still a viable entity, even if one needed a scorecard to keep up with the changing per-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 389

EPILOGUE: WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?

389

sonnel, these Supremes could in no way be compared with the old Supremes. Instead, they were accepted for what they were by the mid-

’70s: a tame disco-era act with a marketable name. On the strength of an earlier song that had become a dance club favorite, “He’s My Man,” in 1975 they recorded five more singles and three albums in that mold.

But they were on borrowed time now.

A state of being that another original Supreme, the forgotten one, could relate to.

It had been six years since Flo Ballard found an attorney to represent her, a rather unstable character named Gerald Dent, whom Flo said she liked because “[h]e wasn’t scared of Gordy,” though given future events Gordy might have done well to be scared of him. In 1970, he not only sued Leonard Baun but filed an $8.5 million civil lawsuit against the Motown Recording Company claiming that Ballard had been “secretly, subversively and maliciously” fired and that it had concealed money she was owed.

In the interim, however, Dent seemed to crack up. He was indicted for obstruction of justice in another case, after telling a witness to hide out in Canada. Going through some heavy personal problems, he then nearly killed himself with an overdose of pills. Finally, on April 2, 1973, while pleading a different case in court, he whipped out a gun he’d smuggled into the courthouse and fired a shot at an opposing witness.

As spectators dove under benches, and the judge under his, the court officer opened fire, killing Dent. Shortly after Dent’s bizarre, disturbing death, the lawsuit against Motown, going forward under another attorney, was thrown out of Circuit Court, the judge ruling that Ballard hadn’t proven any illegal or malicious intent or financial shenanigans that would mitigate the termination agreements. She could rescind the agreement and move to renegotiate the terms, but only if she repaid Motown the $160,000 she’d been given by the agreement—an option that was comically moot given her economic state and cosmically off the wall in the legal sense, it being a mystery how a binding agreement can be made unbinding for the right price. The judge did say that Flo could press on in a lower court with her mental and emotional claims.

But as far as money went, she was out of luck.

Later that year, Flo gave birth to her third daughter, Lisa Chapman, and was scraping by on Tommy’s sporadic paychecks. Then came the cruelest blow of all. Because she had been unable to satisfy the IRS

0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 390

390

THE SUPREMES

judgment, and subsequently unable even to pay the mortgage, the bank holding the mortgage foreclosed on the house on Buena Vista Boulevard.

When word got around, some of her friends, knowing how much she loved the house and what it meant to her that her children have a nice home to grown up in, worried themselves sick that if anything would kill her, this was it.

Flo, swallowing her pride, appealed to Gordy, Ross, and Wilson for help. Maxine Ballard Jenkins remembered Flo reaching Gordy by telephone one day. “Berry,” she said, “I need money. My kids got to eat.” Maxine didn’t know what Gordy said but recalled that “the phone came crashing down” in anger and frustration. The same happened when she tried reaching Diana and Mary, “only to have them hang up on her,” said Jenkins, leaving Flo to scream into the dead phone line, “Those black bitches!”

RAY GIBSON: It was just so sad, everything was just so fucked up. I was with Florence the day that Baun told her she was broke. That was after he had told her he’d invested some of her money in an apartment building and we went to see it and there was nothing but a vacant lot. I had begged Florence not to leave the Supremes and she’d said to me, “Raymond, I got all this money and now I’m gonna go spend it.” And she did.

She had all these “friends” who helped her spend it, then she was broke and they didn’t want to know her anymore. And Tommy . . . the thing with Tommy was, I don’t think he stole money from her but he sure as hell helped her spend a whole lot of it. I’d moved to L.A. in ’73 and I hadn’t seen her for a while and then she called and said, “Raymond, you need to come home. I need to see you. You need to help me get my head together.” She was lost and confused. Tommy, he was gone. She didn’t know what to do. I did what I could. I didn’t have much but I sent money for the kids, so she could at least go buy them some food.

At some point, though, she had some kind of rapprochement with Ross. When Diana came to Detroit that year she invited Flo to her second daughter’s birthday party at Gordy Manor—not coincidentally, he wasn’t on the trip. She and Diana also had chatted on the phone after the release of
Mahogany
. Thereafter Diana, who couldn’t conceive that 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 391

EPILOGUE: WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?

391

Flo might lose her home because of a few thousand dollars in missed mortgage payments, agreed to either lend Flo money or just pay off the arrears herself, even though Ross would tell the
Chicago Tribune Magazine
a few months later that Flo “didn’t want my help.” Here is where it gets a bit murky. According to Wilson in
Dreamgirl
, someone she identified only as “another recording artist” agreed to lend Flo $700, for what purpose she didn’t say; but after Flo was asked to sign an agreement that had several blank pages attached, she “wisely” refused to sign them. That “recording artist” may have been Ross, although $700 seems a bit light for the back mortgage payments Flo owed. It may well have been someone else, since Ray Gibson remembers hearing that Diana tried to send money but backed off because of Tommy Chapman’s meddling.

“Diana would only do it if an agreement could be worked out—

but Tommy wanted her to send the check to him, which she wouldn’t do. Diana is smarter than that. She never would have given Tommy that check. She knew better. We all knew better.” In
Call Her Miss Ross
, J. Randy Taraborrelli contends the opposite, that Chapman was suspicious of Ross’s motives—“[H]e thought she had ulterior motives for wanting to save the home”—and thus wanted her check made out to him instead of to the bank, which prompted Diana to call off the deal. In an endnote Taraborrelli wrote: “Ross has never discussed [the payment] but there are many Motown executives who recall this transaction and a copy of the voided check exists in Motown’s accounting files.” And what of Mary Wilson? In
Dreamgirl
Wilson took pains to explain why she hadn’t reached for her checkbook to aid Flo: “Word of Flo’s financial plight didn’t reach me until she had lost the house. She never asked for help”—a rationalization at best and willful blindness at worst, similar to Diana’s unlikely plaint to the
Chicago Tribune Magazine
that Flo hadn’t wanted her help (to which she added, “She got to be a pain in the ass and I said, ‘Oh, forget it!’”).

Indeed, at the time, Mary was trying hard to keep up with Diana Ross in self-absorption; as a result she spent like a drunken sailor, buying among other decadent items a white stretch Mercedes Benz and a classic Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce.

When Tony Tucker brought up Flo’s predicament to Mary around that time, she could hardly be bothered. “I can’t go around trying to save Flo,” she said, adding that Flo had “spent her money, she mis-managed it. So what should I do about it?” Another time: “I have my own problems. I can’t start feeling sorry now for Flo.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 392

392

THE SUPREMES

Flo, sensitive and intuitive as she was, didn’t pull any punches about what had happened to the souls of her ex-Supreme mates. Of Ross, she told Tucker, “It’s a sickness, honey, simply a sickness; she thinks it’s all about her.”

She concluded: “That whole Supremes thing is a total sickness.” Thus did Flo lose her house, and among her other problems—ones that didn’t include what color Rolls-Royce to buy—was the dangerous ground she was on with the increasingly violent Tommy Chapman.

Maxine Jenkins recalled that when she made a routine visit to a neighborhood doctor Flo also saw, she spied Flo one time in the waiting room, wearing sunglasses, shaking and crying. Maxine asked her what was wrong and Flo lifted the glasses to show two black eyes and deep red bruises on her face, put there, she said, by Tommy.

Chapman’s physical abuse of Flo had been suspected for some time, with Flo always cutting him slack, making excuses, even blaming herself for provoking him. But now he was also shirking his duties as a father and not bringing in any income. A frustrated Flo, who indeed would go right back at Tommy when she was angry, would call Maxine and say, “That black motherfucker didn’t bring me any money for my kids!”

With the house gone, Tommy took the car and drove off into the night. This time, Flo didn’t keep the porch light on for when he’d return.

Sick of being battered and abandoned, she filed for a separation and, with her mother and Maxine, moved into a rundown, $150-a-month apartment on the dumpy west side of town. Shutting off the outside world, she ate her way to over 200 pounds. To feed the kids, she applied for aid from the city’s Aid to Dependent Children program and received $135 biweekly.

Shaken and saddened by seeing Flo lose her house and descend into poverty, Mae Atkins, her neighbor on Buena Vista, who with her husband, Cholly, had once rented Flo’s basement as a dance studio, anonymously called a reporter at the
Detroit Free Press
and related Flo’s story in the hope that someone would come to her aid. When the paper ran the story, many Supremes fans were shocked that she had hit skid row.

Many fans had indeed forgotten her, either assuming she was contentedly raising a family in splendor and leisure or never realizing she’d ever left the group. Few knew of her lawsuit against Motown. Now, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 393

EPILOGUE: WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?

393

here she was, overweight, abandoned by her husband, and on welfare—

“livin’ in shame,” indeed. The implication was that Motown had to be plenty cruel to fire her, pay her off in peanuts, then let her—a
Supreme—
go to pot. Because Flo had always played along with the myth of leaving the group amicably to “get some rest,” the truth hurt.

“I didn’t leave,” she said. “I was told to leave.” That story line would continue to follow Diana Ross and Berry Gordy for many years, with future implications that would bedevil Ross.

Numerous well-wishers sent her letters and cards. Some came with checks. A few offered jobs, which she didn’t take. The Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks dropped by her new place, knocked on the door, and when Flo’s sister answered, stuck a hundred-dollar bill in her hand and told her, “Here, give this to Flo.”

The heartbreaking story was picked up by newspapers across the country; the
Washington Post
sent two reporters to Detroit to write their own article. Flo was buoyed by the attention, and was ready with a juicy quote. “I dislike him very much,” she said of Gordy, “since I trusted him very much and I also had a lot of respect for him at the time and I put my faith in this man, but the money was never there! I dislike him
very
much.” Interviewed by a Detroit radio station, she said, “I spend my life trying to come out of this nightmare. I [have] had mental anguish and a whole lot of mental problems,” adding, “I am feeling a little better. I want to do something. I haven’t made the decision what.” She mentioned getting a “call from New York to record” but admitted that she wasn’t nearly ready for anything like that—“Not yet. When I get over these problems.”