The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (25 page)

‘Come See About Me?’” We said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” She sang lead, and we got to do her old parts and Mary Wilson’s parts. She was fantastic!

The crowd gave Flo her second standing ovation of the day. It was the last ovation Flo Ballard would ever receive for a performance.

At Mary Wilson’s instigation, Flo also appeared in August 1975 at a Magic Mountain, California, performance of the third generation of Supremes, consisting of Mary Wilson, Cindy Birdsong, and Scherrie Payne. In 1974, Payne had replaced Jean Terrell, who had replaced Diana Ross. Although Flo didn’t sing, tears appeared in her eyes as she heard the audience applaud, and yell,

“Flo, we love you.”

According to Flo, after that concert she refused an offer made via Mary to return to Motown. In her words, “Everything was laid out. They were going to have me do vocal training and everything, but they weren’t going to put me back into the Supremes. Who would want to go back after you’d been stepped on like that? No, not me, no. I’d rather just live in Detroit and be poor for the rest of my life than to go back to Motown.”

According to Mary Wilson’s version, all that Wilson did was encourage Flo to find a good producer, get some good songs written, and get her career going again. Wilson said Flo told her she was just no longer capable of doing it.

Flo’s downslide continued when she returned to Detroit. Flo said later that the
Free Press
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When it didn’t, the end result was deeper disappointment.

Finally the phone stopped ringing, and Flo’s depression deepened. The relapse took her to new psychological lows. She was readmitted to Henry Ford Hospital’s psychiatric unit in the fall of 1975, and this time she stayed there for two weeks. “I had to go somewhere because I knew that I was just falling completely apart. . . . I even began to hate myself—I really did—I hated myself so much because I drank beer, because I didn’t have any money, because I couldn’t do anything for my kids, because I was on ADC. It just seemed like everything was falling in on me, and I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to go back in the hospital or anywhere else and leave my kids. That was very hard to do, to leave the children, but I just had to do something. I mean, I just couldn’t see myself going on and on and on like this.

“When I went to the hospital again, the doctor said the same thing he said the first time I went in there: that I just needed a rest to clear my mind.

They had me on two milligrams of Librium, nothing strong. And after that nothing.

“A young doctor came in the morning after I had admitted myself, and I told him I’d like to see a psychiatrist. He said to me, ‘Do you see anything crawling on the walls? Do you see any rats? Do you feel like climbing the walls?’ I looked at him, and I said, ‘What!?’ and started laughing. Then he said, ‘What do you want to see a psychiatrist for?’”

This question, and Flo’s answer, could have prompted a turning point in Flo’s life. Now in her second stay in what amounted to a mental institution, Flo was digging down deep into herself to unearth what very likely was by now her major problem: “I’m an alcoholic,” she told the doctor. “I can’t understand why I keep drinking and why I keep feeling so bad all the time.” Here Flo had frankly and voluntarily announced her problem to an allegedly qualified medical professional; but instead of telling Flo that she may have felt bad because alcohol is a depressant and that drinking can lead to misguided actions that cause further depression, the doctor replied breezily, “It’s easy. You 158

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lost everything you had,” according to Flo. He then asked her, “How much beer do you drink?” She said, “Maybe eight cans twice a week or something.”

The “or something” was significant. Like most people with an alcohol problem, Flo probably drank more than embarrassment allowed her to admit.

But the doctor continued to back away from his patient’s problem. In response to her admission that she drank a minimum of sixteen cans of beer a week, he said, “That’s nothing. I drink maybe a six-pack a day.”

Flo pressed the issue. She told the doctor, “I’ve got to be an alcoholic,”

and asked that she be allowed to go to what she called “sessions for alcoholics,”

possibly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, that were held at the hospital. The doctor continued to resist. “You don’t need to go to those,” he insisted. “Yes I do; yes I do,” Flo said. Finally, he relented. “Well, it won’t hurt,” he said but added, “If you want to go you can go, but you’re not an alcoholic; you’re just under a lot of pressure and strain.”

The first meeting made an impression on Flo. “I saw people there that had liver damage, that couldn’t walk to the classes, that had to be pushed to the classes in wheelchairs. It was pitiful,” she said. “One lady had her whole ankle wrapped up; her feet were infected from drinking, from her liver; and her face, her pores were just wide open—her skin was, like, gone. Everybody told how much they drink in these classes. One guy said he spent $169 on whiskey a week. I listened, and I thought, ‘That’s unbelievable! He couldn’t!

He couldn’t!’ I said, ‘How could you drink that much? That’s a lot of booze.’

He said he was drinking three or four fifths a day. Unbelievable. I said, ‘I drink maybe six or eight cans of beer maybe twice a week.’ One of the ladies in the class looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have any business here. Hell, beer ain’t nothing! Look at me, I drink fifths a day!’ I thought, ‘Wow! Should I leave or stay?’”

Flo said she kept going to the meetings while she was hospitalized. “It was interesting to learn how alcohol affects different parts of your body, your stomach, your intestines, your bladder, your liver,” she said. “And all of it just made me shake. They were telling the class how the liver just expands and 159

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c expands and becomes so big because it’s sore from alcohol—ugh. After that I said, ‘Wow!’ but I stayed in there. I just hung on in there and got as much out of it as I could.”

If Flo had been encouraged just a little more, she might have kept going to meetings after leaving the hospital. She didn’t. But even with her short exposure to what was probably AA, she managed to take some lessons home with her.

“Some of the things they said made a lot of sense,” she noted. “Like ‘Live for one day and don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow is not promised,’ and it’s not. And when I came out, I just told everybody, ‘Hey, look what alcohol’s doing to you.’”

Flo had also begun reading the Bible frequently during her second hospitalization. She said she did so “because I was saying to myself, ‘Who can I trust? Everybody I turn to just takes things, or takes money.’

“Finally I began to just accept that I was on ADC and that I was going to remain like that for the rest of my life, that nothing would be done about my rights or lawsuits or anything, that my rights were all just violated, and who gave a damn. . . . So I just said, well, forget it. I just put it out of my mind.”

Florence had stopped going to church in her teens, when her singing career began, but “my mind stayed on God even when I was with the Supremes,”

she said. Flo stuck with her Bible reading after leaving the hospital because “it seems like it’s always something in the Bible to put me at ease.” The book, and particularly the Psalms, taught her to “trust in God, not in man.”

Once, while Flo was living in her final residence, her mother and one of her daughters were sick, and she had to take both of them to the doctor, then watch over them after she brought them back home. “That night” she said,

“I couldn’t rest. I would fall asleep and wake up, fall asleep and wake up. So finally I went to sleep and woke back up at 6:00 A.M. I began to wash clothes and do a whole bunch of housework. And that still wouldn’t help. So finally I said, “God, I can’t even sleep; I can’t rest—I’m restless.

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“I opened the book and began to read Psalms, and it said there, ‘You will sleep, and you will awake in peace.’ I fell soundly asleep that night. Next morning I woke up feeling terrific, really great.”

Flo also started listening to music again. “I turn it up and I play the radio all day, play it in the car, everywhere. And it doesn’t bother me now,” she said in 1975. “When a Supremes record is played, I just listen and say, ‘It sounds great.’ Because, I guess, I’ve faced reality. I say to myself a lot also, ‘The past is just dead.’ I’m no longer trying to find a way of escaping from reality. I never will, not anymore. Or drink to make myself happy. Or do anything to make myself happy, for that matter. If there’s something that’s causing you pain, then instead of you drinking or taking tranquilizers or anything to get rid of the pain, you should just live through the pain, cry, scream, holler, do anything to get it out of you. I had been holding it all in me.

“By drinking, you can forget; you can feel happy or sad. In my case, it just made me sadder. When you take tranquilizers, they relax you; you go to sleep. But when you wake up, it’s another day. . . . And after you stop taking them, your thoughts are still there. Your thoughts are actually still there anyway while you’re taking them, but they’re not as severe. And if anything makes me unhappy or if I become depressed right now, then I’m just depressed; I have to just face it. And in a few days it will pass. I’ve learned now how it goes away.”

Flo also said that the publicity about her plight had helped her mentally, even if it hadn’t done much for her financially. “It was out. Everybody knew that Motown had definitely taken some money, and so had this attorney, Leonard Baun.” Some small part of Florence may have been looking forward to June, when a court hearing on Patmon, Young’s suit against Baun was scheduled. But the case was postponed until August. “I got mad, and they said,

‘We don’t think you’re well enough,’ that I wasn’t strong enough mentally,”

she said.

“But we were all really cramped. Me and the three children were sleep-ing in one bedroom, in twin beds. I got very depressed. I wanted to move 161

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c away from there so my children could stretch out.” For that, she needed more than her welfare check.

Luckily for Flo, a settlement of her case against Baun was in the works.

“Baun’s lawyers were calling Patmon,” Flo said, “and asking them, ‘How much money does she want?’” Patmon, trying to raise the ante, was refusing to even talk to Baun’s lawyers. Flo misinterpreted this, concluding that “evidently Patmon didn’t give a damn about nothing.” According to Flo’s account, she and her brother Billy actually went around their own counsel and negotiated directly with Leonard Baun’s lawyers, accepting what Patmon, Young considered a lowball offer.

Patmon, Young were evidently irritated with the settlement offer Flo accepted, which was $82,000, of which $20,000 would go to Patmon, Young for their work on her behalf. “They claimed they were working really hard, and that if I hadn’t settled, I could have gotten way much more money,” Flo noted.

Harry Okrent, Baun’s law partner, then offered Flo $10,000 to settle with him. Okrent had said that he never represented Flo and that he had nothing to do with Baun’s treatment of her. Flo said that Patmon told her, “If Okrent can give you the $10,000, then he can give you $25,000.” But Flo said, “I looked at Okrent. He was so old; he looked so sickly. I said, ‘God, maybe I don’t even want the $10,000!’” and refused Patmon’s advice. She took the $10,000.

In the
Dreamgirls
movie, the Florence Ballard character comments, “I blew half a million in two years,” after she left Motown. In reality, Baun had walked away with most of Flo’s Motown settlement money, and the settlements with Baun and Okrent netted her a grand total of $72,000, a far cry from what she was due, particularly had she received royalties.

Although the Lost Supreme had once again come out on the short end of the financial stick, the settlement money did cheer her and improve her situation, enabling her to buy a car and move to a house big enough for herself, her husband, and her children. Maybe things were looking up.

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How could we have grown up together and then
turn out to be not liking each other? I think we
all have problems.

—Florence Ballard

Flo’s situation had
improved, but she had fallen into a pattern. An injustice would be committed against her. She would respond with everything she had, putting her foes on the defensive. Unhinged, they would stagger back-ward, giving her an opportunity to follow through. She would then give up her opportunity, drop her guard, and allow herself to be cheated or pushed aside. She followed this pattern with Diana Ross; Leonard Baun; Harry Okrent; Tommy Chapman; the men who kidnapped, robbed, and may have planned to kill her; and many other people and entities, including Motown.

Florence always characterized her tendency to let her opponents off easy as a combination of disgust, sorrow for her foe, and fatigue. Of accepting the settlement from Baun, she said she did so because she thought, “Well, this can go on forever and ever and ever. And they said Leonard Baun is $100,000

in debt to the Internal Revenue. The guy’s messed up, getting ready to get disbarred and everything. . . . So I just went on and took his insurance money and invested it and said, ‘Well, let’s see what happens with that.’”

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Flo said she did not protest when Patmon, Young received their $20,000

fee for bringing about the settlement, even though she mistakenly believed they were working for Motown, her archenemy. “Patmon, Young, and Kirk should have received nothing, as far as I’m concerned,” Flo said. “But I just said, ‘Take it; the hell with it,’ because I was just tired of the same thing over and over and over again. . . . I should have kept the $20,000 I let Patmon and them get; I should have kept it and sued them—that’s what I should have done—but I was tired of it, and I said, ‘I’m just sick of it’ . . . so I said, ‘the hell with it.’”