The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (6 page)

“Flo was an extremely self-aware person as a teenager,” averred her younger cousin, Raymond (“Ray”) Gibson. “Guys in the projects would say she had a great behind. I think they said it because Flo would make you believe she did, by how she walked, how she carried herself; she 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 14

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made you believe she was sexy, made you believe anything she wanted you to believe. When I was a kid, I saw her as an overwhelming personality. Most people who knew her did.”

Ballard’s voice was similarly convincing, not because it was perfect but because she had immense power in the upper ranges of the scale, meaning she could more than handle loud, gospel-style belting, she too being a devotee of C. L. Franklin’s tent shows and record albums. Following Wilson on their junior high school talent show, she rocked the joint with a soulful blasting of “Ave Maria,” nailing it and earning a standing ovation.

Watching from the wings, Wilson was blown away, and would recall that Ballard “looked like a movie star” in her white gown and with her command of the crowd. Afterward, they got to talking. Ballard, saying she’d heard Wilson sing with the glee club, commended her on her stage presence and casually suggested they should start a singing group.

Wilson regarded it as idle chatter. A
girl
singing group, she thought.

Who in the world would go for
that
?

But what Wilson didn’t know was that Ballard wasn’t only serious; she was merely one future degree of separation from making it happen.

That, too, was very much like Flo.

Florence Glenda Ballard was born on June 30,1943, the eighth of fourteen children. Her father, Jesse, had been swept into Detroit in the great migration, arriving from Rosette, Mississippi, in 1929 to work in the Chevrolet plant. His wife, Lurlee, soon joined him and they found a small home on MacDougald Street, raising, and trying to keep track of, all the children they would have. In the interim, other Ballard relatives and their families moved up from Mississippi, making for family picnics that could fill Grand Circus Park. When Jesse and Lurlee were done multiplying, the only sufficiently large and affordable quarters available were at Brewster-Douglass, in one of the roomier, two-storey, three-bedroom row houses, though the kids had to sleep two or three to a bed.

They were a tenaciously close-knit brood, the epoxy being the parents’ strict—if in Jesse’s case hypocritical—moral codes. For his part, Jesse followed his own code, which he usually found at the bottom of a gin glass. His after-work hours were spent on bar stools all around southeast Detroit, and Friday nights had a particular air of suspense.

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That was Jesse’s pay day, and when he’d get home the kids would be lined up waiting for allowances from whatever meager change was left in his pockets.
If
there was any left.

One Friday night, Flo watched from the window for Jesse, only to see him thrown like a sack of dirty laundry out of a car, out cold, one shoe missing, his pockets turned inside out. Flo, her sister Maxine, and Lurlee had to carry him inside the apartment, where he lay face-down on his bed for hours, drying out. Another time, Jesse was so loaded that he went to the bathroom and unwittingly used a five-dollar bill as toilet paper. One of the kids saw the bill floating in the bowl and eagerly pulled it out and cleaned it off, a stroke of good fortune beyond words.

The most remarkable thing about these scenes was that they happened so regularly; none of it seemed overly unusual. It was part of life with Jesse. In time, as Jesse became even more disjointed, Lurlee grew understandably concerned that his alcoholism might be handed down to his kids, making her even more vigilant about shielding them. However, grim reality had a way of intruding. With Jesse’s money almost always whittled away to nothing, they often lived hand to mouth.

Sometimes, the only way to get dinner on the table was to send Flo and Maxine down to the corner market to collect food, spoiled or otherwise, that had fallen on the sawdust floor during the day.

They also suffered unspeakable tragedies that severely tested their faith and family bonds. First, in the mid-’50s, the youngest Ballard, a 3-year-old named Roy, strayed from two of his sisters who were taking him to the movies and was struck and killed by a drunk driver.

Lurlee—like all of them really, but most obviously in her case—never did recover, losing much of the strength that had become a buffer against Jesse’s neglect. They would all hunker down in grief again in 1959 when Jesse himself, his anatomy eaten away by booze, contracted stomach cancer and quickly died.

Lurlee from then on began to gain an enormous amount of weight, smothering her losses with bombast and unlimited calories; yet her spirit remained undiminished. Whenever any of the kids told her their teacher had yelled at them, she’d march to the school in her tent-sized housecoat and scare the teacher into promises never to do it again.

Florence “Blondie” Ballard was clearly cut from the same mold.

While she was scarred—more than most people would ever know—by the travails of the family and Jesse’s predilection for addictive substances, she rarely let on about it; her surface identity as an aggressive and sassy young woman was intact, just as Lurlee’s always was. Even so, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 16

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Flo could seamlessly slip into moody silence, her eyes haunted by something unspoken. Even swathed by the closeness of her family, she needed to get away, into the musky air of the street, or to take her bicy-cle from the storage room and ride to her cousin Raymond’s home a few blocks away.

RAY GIBSON: There were just so many of them in that apartment. They’d all be up each other’s butt. And Florence was in the middle in age; she was too old for the young ones and too young for the old ones—hell, one of her sisters is like ten years older. And I’m younger than Florence and I barely even know the older ones. I only really know two younger sisters, Pat and Lynne. I never had anything to do with the older ones; I stayed away from ’em, some of ’em I heard were bad news, and that was borne out through the years. So, yes, they were close, but I don’t think Florence got a lot of helpful guidance from anyone at home. I think she felt she was the most mature of them all, and felt kind of suffocated there.

Florence would come over to my house and begin to sing for me. She would just break into song, because she loved to sing more than anything in the world. She’d sing Billie Holiday songs, pop songs, whatever her mood was. I remember her father used to play the guitar and that the family had these sing -

alongs, but when Jesse got sick they stopped. But Florence had to sing. She taught me how to sing. Even when she was with the Supremes, she’d come over and want me to sing with her, so she could get the harmony down. I was Mary Wilson’s stand-in, man.

I’ll tell you something. Through the years, Florence used to send me stuff, Supremes stuff, things she’d acquired on tours and whatever. Pictures, albums, I even have a Wonder Bread wrapper with the Supremes’ pictures on it. It was a promotion thing and she loved it—y’know, the
whitebread
Supremes. She laughed about that, and kept it; then she gave it to me. That was near the end of her life and she was moving around a lot, so she wanted me to hold on to these things. And who knows, she might have in some way seen the end coming, and she wanted someone to preserve all this memorabilia. She knew I would, and to this day I have them on my wall. I have one of her dresses—a white gown with mesh netting on the bottom. It 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 17

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came one day with a note that read: “To Raymond, a very sweet fellow, Florence.” You don’t think my eyes lit up when I read
that
?

I mean, it really affected me deeply that she trusted me enough to give these things to me and not to any of her brothers or sisters, or even her mother. Because I wasn’t immediate family. So one day I asked one of her older sisters, I said, “If anything happens to me, what do you want me to do with this Supremes’ memorabilia?” I assumed that the family would want it. I told her I’d put it in my will, so they would have it.

And she told me, “We don’t want that junk.”
Junk!
That’s what they thought of Florence’s treasured belongings. To them, it was just junk. She said, “I guess we’ll have to bury it with you, Raymond.”

He didn’t need to gild the meaning of the story: that in the projects, Florence Ballard felt like she belonged in the trash, too.

Diana Ross’s world didn’t intersect with Wilson’s or Ballard’s until 1958, when her family moved into the maw of Brewster-Douglass, and even then only tangentially at first. Nor was she known generally as Diana Ross. She was born in Detroit on March 26, 1944, with the somewhat less glamorous name Diane Ernestine Earle Ross. This would become an issue when Ross renamed herself, the assumption being that she was putting on airs. By way of defense, she would insist that while her parents had chosen “Diane,” someone in the maternity ward screwed up and wrote “Diana” on the birth certificate. If that sounded like the spinning of yarn, she would duly note that her mother, Ernestine, had always informally called her Diana because both mother and daughter liked it better.

Ross didn’t arrive in the projects until she was 18, a worldly traveler to some and a pretentious phony to others; and to still others, both. Yet however people viewed her, there was no question she was on a faster track out of the ghetto than most. Clearly, she had some advantages.

Her father, Fred, was a tall, handsome, taciturn West Virginia native who had fought in World War II. He was strict and hard-focused, maintaining a career as an amateur boxer while providing well for a growing family by working two jobs, one seemingly forever at the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 18

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American Brass Company. He had a vise-like grip on every facet of his family’s existence—eventually he and his wife, Ernestine, had three sons and three daughters, Diane or Diana the second-eldest after her sister Barbara. And yet he was distant, physically due to long work hours and emotionally due to his nature.

“To this day, I don’t know him well,” Ross said in 1993, a few years before he died. “Throughout my childhood, he stayed unreachable.” In an earlier interview with Barbara Walters in 1978, this seemed implicitly obvious when she confessed, “I guess being a second child and always wanting attention, and whatever the reason is I’m in show business, I always wanted everybody to care about me. I’ve tried very hard. . . . It’s like [I’ve cried out] ‘Love me! Love me, please!’” Not hearing that from Fred Ross, inevitably she turned to Ernestine, a sunny and forbearing woman who sometimes was sickly because of tuberculosis but would rather have died than lie in bed pitying herself. She was far more liberal-minded than Fred, allowing her children greater leeway to spend time on their own, out of the apartment house where they lived on St. Antoine Street. Following Barbara’s lead, Diane could hardly sit still, acting and singing in school events and excelling in swimming, though she developed a major insecurity, believing her sister was better at all these pursuits, and that her parents loved “Bobbie” more than they did her.

The Ross kids were a smart and curious lot, always ahead of the game compared to their schoolmates. For most of Diane’s formative years, the brood, among them her Aunt Bea, were never rich, but neither did they want for much. Fred was proud that no one could call the Rosses a hand-me-down family. Still, there was no confusing St. Antoine Street with the Riviera, or even Pontiac. One day, when Diane was around 8, two of her friends in the building were playing hide-and-seek when one of the kids forgot about the game and the other, who’d hidden in an abandoned refrigerator in the backyard, was found hours later dead of suffocation when the refrigerator was pried open. Another time, Diane came home in tears and bloodied after being accosted on the street by a white gang, one of whom called her a “nigger” and punched her in the nose. That incident, she has claimed, turned her from pig-tailed wimp to tomboy, “skinny but wiry and strong,” and the

“protector of the family.”

For that metamorphosis, she credited not Fred but Ernestine for telling her to stand up for herself and “fight for all you’ve got . . . and above all, to
win
.” She began to assume a tough-guy demeanor and to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 19

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get into tussles with other kids. In the personality transformation, she also became bossy, sarcastic, ornery, such that most of her schoolmates took to avoiding her; few took her side when she got into a call-out with some other girl. To be sure, though, Diane Ross made for an odd bully; most around her could see she had less confidence in her fighting than in her high-and-mighty attitude, thus explaining why she would usually back down from a fight she herself had picked.

It was as if she knew she wouldn’t make a credible victim, not with her family’s status; as if she knew her bravado was a front. There was the time she got into a spat in the kitchen with Bobbie, who was so exasperated by her sister’s shrill whining that she picked up a can of Ajax and shook some of the white powder in Diane’s face. Seeing their mother enter the room, Diane on cue broke into tears trying to gain sympathy from Ernestine, who instead laughed at the sight of her white-faced daughter. If that was a mite deflating to Diane, she knew she could usually get her way with that kind of histrionics. It was such an easy part, and she played it well.

Periodically, to get the kids off the baking streets in summer, Fred and Ernestine would send them to visit relatives in Bessemer, Alabama—

not a vacation spot many blacks would have chosen. Riding southward, the Greyhound bus Ross was on would stop in Cincinnati and the blacks herded to the back seats; from then on, they could use only the bathrooms and fountains labeled “Colored.” To the young, naive Ross, these were long, strange trips indeed; but the Ross family had also experienced the violence of racism firsthand, when a female cousin was found dead, her car wrecked, on a back road en route to Atlanta.