The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (45 page)

Before he could utter another word, Flo was in high dudgeon. “Hold it, Berry,” she said, raising a hand “Stop! In the Name of Love” style.

“I’ll do it my way. That’s
my
thing, nobody else’s.” Gordy, not wanting to create a scene, and typically at a loss when a strong woman refused to shrink before him, mumbled, “Fine, suit yourself,” and went off to mingle elsewhere in the room.

Flo, against what her instincts told her, hoped that would be the end of it. Taking it as a victory, at the second Copa show she moved her one-liner up, to when Diana did the introduction of her as the “quiet one.” Waiting for it, she chirped, “Honey, that’s what
you
think!”—

only suggesting to the audience what Motown already knew, that when Flo Ballard had something to say, quiet she wasn’t. The reaction in the house was the same as during the previous show, but this time Diana didn’t break up and riff off it. Eyeing Gordy, she saw him wince, at which point she moved on, afraid that kibitzing with Flo might elevate

“the Flo line” to a fixture of the act—which she knew Berry did not want, never mind that it always went over so well, because it encroached on Diana’s turf as the group’s “hostess.”

Gordy needed some way short of a face-to-face confrontation to show Flo who was boss. Days later, it became evident. During a dress rehearsal at the Copa, Harvey Fuqua came in, silenced the musicians, and announced that there would be a change in the show—“People” was out of the repertoire. Flo was incredulous, as were those around the group who knew what that tune meant to her—that as her only lead vocal on stage, “People” was the last thin reed of her leadership role that she could hold on to. And also that dedicated Supremes fans had come to expect the song at shows, and would often call out for it from the galleries. There was even a live track of the tune on the shelved
There’s a
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Place for Us
album. With all this as context, Fuqua’s explanation that Gordy made the move because there were “too many show tunes” in the act seems vacuous, since obviously any other show tune could have been killed. The only criterion for killing “People,” it seemed clear, was that it was “Flo’s song.”

For Flo, there was only one explanation: It was payback from Gordy. And she wasn’t going to take it “like a lady.” According to Tony Tucker, who at the time was a teenager recently befriended by Ballard and employed as a flunky, a ballistic Ballard stormed off the floor and in full costume headed for the front door, letting it be known who she believed was behind the back-stabbing. “She’ll never get away with it!” she screamed—the “she,” everyone knew, being Diana, who with Mary stood in place, their mouths hanging open as Flo blasted through the door.

Pushing her way through lunch-hour crowds on Fifth Avenue while running to the Plaza a block away, she began “ranting and raving” things like “Flo’s not taking this shit!” and sputtering at Ross. Recalled Tucker: “People are slamming on their brakes, she’s not waiting on lights, she’s just yelling about ‘that bitch.’” In the Plaza lobby, realizing she’d left her purse with her room key at the Copa, the “quiet one” loudly banged her fist on the front desk and shouted, “I want the key to my suite now! I’m a Supreme!”

Up in her room, Flo lay out on a white sofa, crying and covering her eyes with an arm over her face. Hearing Tucker come in, she pointed to the decanters sitting on a table and gave him a directive.

“Baby, just pour.”

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A SYMPHONY

IN BLACK AND

MOSTLY WHITE

For Flo, the degradation would only get worse. Having stuck the knife in her, Gordy twisted it during the final Copa week by ordering the reinstatement of “People” to their set—but, in an even unkinder cut, it would be with Diana on lead. In the practical sense, this was not really a radical transition; as the song had evolved on stage, Flo and Diana came to sing one verse each, Flo the first, Diana the last. But in symbolic terms, Diana’s annexation of the other verse, as well, must have felt like a child being ripped out of Flo’s arms. Now, she would have to endure singing backup on her pride and joy—“That’s
my
song,” she would say by way of protest, to much nodding within the Motown entourage, but without effect.

The wonder is that Ballard was able to remain functional—and sane—for as long as she did. Not once through ’65 and into ’66 can anyone remember her faculties being less than keen on stage or in the studio, her footwork out of step, her vocals anything but firm, all those smiles that would hurt her face less than warm and endearing. Mary may have been the official “sexy one,” but even if Flo didn’t have a knockout quotient, her brand of sexiness—escaping grittily from deep within and not out of a makeup jar with a studied, plastic superficiality—

seemed to appeal to an equal reservoir of male Supremes fans.

If anything, Flo Ballard was the “underground” leader of the group, without the Cinderella qualities of Diana Ross but with a kind of

“Everywoman” depth that made it an almost involuntary reaction to cry out, in Sammy Davis Jr. style, “You tell ’em, girl!” This was, and should have been, all well and good—except that in the prism through 227

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which Gordy and his staff of yes-men looked at the Supremes, it resembled treason, and Flo was something like an apostate.

It’s likely even Flo didn’t fully comprehend why she had such pop-ulist appeal as she was trying to conform to the vacuous strictures of “class” and “elegance,” but she perhaps naively believed it was a lever of power she could use against Gordy if he had any ideas about booting her out of the group—which many others at Motown saw as an inevitability after she stood up to him at the Copa. Seeing what she could get away with would become a matter of great pride to her.

The problem was that, popular or not, she wasn’t in the same galaxy as Ross, who, as Marvin Gaye noted, had not just Berry’s ear but Berry himself. Thus, it wasn’t only Berry she was up against. And as early as mid-’65, it wasn’t necessary to merely assume Gordy would someday take Ross solo; locked in bliss and business with Diana, he almost seemed determined to prepare everyone’s awareness of that inevitability. For one thing, there were the gifts he was now lavishing on her, many of which were so ostentatious that they meant he would go to any lengths to keep her happy. (The most storied was a long white fur coat on which, some swore, he insisted they make love.) By now, too, he didn’t even care who overheard him when he talked up his plans for Ross. At the Copa opening, for example, he couldn’t contain himself when Diana hit a particularly pleasing note, leaning over to tell Mickey Stevenson, loudly, “She ain’t gonna be in this group too long.

She don’t need those girls.”

Which was exactly the theme he wanted to come out of all future articles about the Supremes in the big magazines. When interviews were set up for the group, Gordy let it be known that Diana would be the one who would answer the questions. During one interview with a European magazine, Diana, as if she’d been prompted to do so, reminded the reporter that she was to be called “Diana,” an odd request since her name change had been in place for a year. Mary would recall that as a ham-handed way of “putting more distance between her and us” by rubbing the new identity in their faces. An identity she trusted would flourish way beyond the Supremes.

By sheer coincidence, Berry Gordy felt precisely the same way. “As Diana Ross goes,” he was fond of saying, “so goes Motown.” For the sub-Supremes, all that remained in the wake of Diana Ross’s smashing notices at the Copa were idle wishing and hoping.

“Flo and I were still hopeful that we might be singing more leads, or more solo spots in the live shows,” Wilson would write in her memoirs, adding ruefully, “Little did we know that our fates were sealed.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 229

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Actually, Flo did know it, during the Copa run. Seeing what was going down, with Diana being given de facto solo star status, she tried appealing to the Supremes’ other sub-class member to stand with her.

“Mary, she has all the talking lines,” Flo told her. “We’re just standing there.”

Wilson, though, who rarely if ever had any on-stage lines anyway, was not about to do anything that would undermine the Copa high.

Not that she, too, wasn’t sympathetic, or didn’t agree that Ross was accountable for purloining “People” from Flo—“How much more of the spotlight did Diane need?” she wrote years later. “Everyone knew that Flo was very sensitive and that [performing the song] meant a lot to her. Berry’s taking it away from her like [this] was just vicious.” Moreover, Mary herself had felt Gordy’s sting. Every once in a while over the previous months she’d ask him if she could sing a lead, even if just at the back end of a set. Finally, annoyed by her peskiness, he brushed her aside like a mosquito.

“Oh, Mary,” he said with not a care for her feelings, “you know you can’t sing.”

Wilson recalled being “devastated,” so much so that she would need years of therapy “to overcome my gradual loss of confidence” when she could not forget the nasty diss thereafter.

Yet at the time she could never muster the nerve to join Flo in common peonage, falling before the reality that, as she later put it, “I couldn’t beat the system.” Nor did she have the stomach for risking her own job and financial security by giving it a try.

That left Flo out on a lonely limb, something she came to resent Mary for almost as much as she did Diana. “Mary Wilson,” she is quoted by Tony Tucker as saying during those convulsive three weeks in New York, “has lowered herself to being cute for a living, but I got talent. I’m the one with a voice around here, honey, and I want to sing. I don’t just want to hum.”

She was much harder, however, on Ross, scorching her at every turn—“That bitch doesn’t even know how to sing that song!” she would tell whoever was around at the time, referring to “People.” If there were too many show tunes in the act, she asked with perfect logic,

“Take out one of Miss Thing’s songs,” using a poison pen name for Ross that she would often employ.

Nerve was something Flo had plenty of. One time she was hanging around the Copa lobby after a show when Diana and Berry came through, hand in hand. Apparently just the sight of them acting so carefree and smug filled Flo with rage. Spotting her glaring at them, the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 230

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King and Queen of Motown moved toward the door before a scene was created. Flo reveled in their fear.

“That’s right,” she mocked them, “get walking. You better get walking!”

Naturally, none of this inner discord showed itself on stage or in their records. Ballard was far too professional for that. Even her one-liners weren’t practiced with malice; rather, she believed the audience reaction made them an effective part of the show, Gordy’s contrary opinion carrying no truck with her. No one ever knew what she would say, and when, but it always seemed to play well, delightfully unrehearsed as it was. Once, when Diana did some prefabricated patter about “thin being in,” the curvaceous Flo, who thought it absurd that her size-6 figure was somehow a fashion faux pas, riffed that “thin may be in, honey, but fat is where it’s at”—a barb aimed at Ross’s emerging role as a nouveau goddess of emaciation chic, and the fact that Mary was now cutting calories trying to become acceptably gaunt, though she would never quite get there. (The anomaly is that Ross was actually a bigger woman than most observers realized: At five-foot-five-and-a-half she weighed around 105 pounds—no Twiggy by any means, though her swizzle-stick arms and legs made her look smaller.) In fact, everything about the act remained smooth, unruffled, and classy. And after the Copa no important music venue seemed out of the Supremes’ reach. After the Copa and a second guest shot on
Ed Sullivan
, they were jetting across the Atlantic again to appear at the Grand Gala du Disque festival in Amsterdam, a kind of global talent competition with acts performing for their home countries. First prize went to the girls from Detroit. The next day, Jack Thompson wrote in the
New
York Journal-American
: “The Supremes were the winners in the international sweepstakes. . . . They held the huge audience in the palms of their hands for three-quarters of an hour.” That was followed by stops in Brussels and another sojourn in England, with appearances on the TV shows
Top of the Pops
and
Ready,
Steady, Go
. Then, back across the pond they went, to New York for a show at Arthur’s discothèque and a milestone one-nighter on October 15 at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Hall, home to Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic Orchestra, was not your typical pop venue, its acoustics built for classical opuses by 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 231

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Mahler, Stokowski, and Copland, and it had been interrupted by the

“lower classes” only sparingly, in 1964, for the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Thus the gig was another check mark on Gordy’s wish list of “legitimate” mainstream music hubs, and for the Hall’s management it was a boon, the house selling out quickly even at the top ticket price of a pricey $6.50. For the night the gross ticket sales would exceed $15,000—

a record at the time for the Hall, and a nice night’s work for Gordy, whose cut after “expenses” left little for the girls. For them, in fact, the affair left a taste as sour as some of the notes had sounded in a hall with acoustics meant for bassoons, French horns, and kettle drums. A very nasty
Variety
review of the proceedings punned that the Supremes were

“an echo of their selves,” given the “lack of a recording studio echo” and