The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (74 page)

That summer of 1975, Mary Wilson persuaded Flo to visit her in L.A.

for a few days, and sent her a ticket. Once there, she even accepted Mary’s invitation to come up on stage to take a bow at a Supremes concert at the Magic Mountain amusement park. She happily basked in the ovation and posed for pictures with her successor Cindy Birdsong.

But whenever Mary would say that Flo should get back to singing, that it would be beneficial for her head, Flo lost her spark, saying, “I can’t, Mary. I just can’t.” Despite the momentary peaks of the trip, Mary said that during her stay Flo “was the saddest person I had ever seen.” Flo went home, feeling no better. But then there came some long-overdue good news: Leonard Baun, who had been disbarred for 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 394

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misconduct in a different case, agreed to settle Flo’s lawsuit for $50,000.

When the money appeared, so did Tommy Chapman. And incredibly, she took him back. The Chapman family moved into a small red-brick cottage on Shaftsbury Street in northwest Detroit, half the size of their Buena Vista digs but to Flo a real home again. Tommy was earning money driving and as a road manager for a local singing group. Flo bought a new Cadillac Seville. All seemed well. Flo even took a huge step—singing again, and better than she thought she could, at a benefit concert at the Ford Auditorium where she performed “I Am Woman” and, as an encore, to the delight of the audience, “Come See About Me.” But looks can be deceiving. Not able to rally herself, she would sink back into ennui and despair, seeing her future as a bleak one. Her drinking, as always, only made her more unstable. Often her mother or sisters would have to pry the kids from her instead of letting them get into the car. They’d then look after them as Flo would ignore their pleas not to drive and cruise the roads for hours. When she was home, she would sit on her bed, sucking down glass after glass of vodka and listening to old Supremes records on the Victrola as if she was trying to somehow relive the high of the glory days and crying over the loss of it all. She would drift off to sleep playing “Where Did Our Love Go” over and over.

Living so long in so much pain, mental and physical, she was weak and in a fragile state of mind. She’d been mugged on the street a number of times, making her paranoid. Then, that winter, she slipped on an icy sidewalk outside a supermarket and broke her ankle. She told people she’d sued the owners and gotten a nice settlement. But the in-jury laid her up. With a cast on her foot and inactive, she gained even more weight, putting a strain on her heart. She also was prescribed pain killers, which she may have abused and dangerously combined with alcohol.

By the new year, she had plainly lost her mind. To whoever would listen, she would spin conspiracy theories in which Motown villains had plotted against her; they’d spiked her drinks so she’d be woozy and miss rehearsals and look bad, they’d brainwashed her, they’d “controlled my mind.” She swore she had more money than people thought, that Berry Gordy had so feared her revealing all this, as well as the bad publicity about her being on welfare with her kids, that he’d secretly paid her under the table. The supermarket suit, she said, was made up to explain the additional money. Yet she had allowed the bad publicity to come to light and was still threatening to write a book revealing Gordy’s “dirty laundry” and to “implicate” Diana and Mary in his nefarious plots.

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If there was one refuge that brought her calm, it wasn’t the new house but the old one she’d had to abandon. Refusing to let go, she’d return there night after night, let herself into the dark and shuttered house, light a candle and go from room to room checking each and making notes about how she’d decorate it when she’d come back there to live. Sometimes she’d awaken the kids, dress and put them in the back of the Cadillac, and drive them there, where she’d put on a show.

Making a grand entrance out the door, she’d stand on the “stage” of the front porch, sing songs as the kids sat on the freezing ground, take her bows, then drive home.

At these moments, she was
Flo the Supreme
again. Tony Tucker remembered that when she was
Flo
and someone showed her pity, such as when someone remarked that her friends should stick by her, she’d go ballistic. “I don’t need no motherfuckin’-body to stick by me!” she scowled. “I’m Flo Ballard! I’m a Supreme! Get out of the way, I got a show to do!”

For all the delusions, though, Flo actually did get some offers to sing again, and she was seemingly getting used to the idea, mentioning that

“big” women were “in,” like Aretha and Roberta Flack; and her time was now. Suddenly she was dieting, rehearsing her singing in a new basement studio she’d built. Her doctor had diagnosed her with hyperten-sion and she was taking medication for it, though she didn’t realize that the other pills she kept taking elevated her blood pressure all over again.

It was all too much for her heart. In early February 1976, she had a phone conversation with Mae Atkins, during which she slurred her words and sounded drunk. “I don’t feel well,” she complained. “I have a pain in my chest.” Mae told her to get to a hospital, but Flo shrugged it off. Then, going back to the apartment to visit Lurlee and Maxine, she kept drinking ice water, saying that “I’m hot inside. I can’t get rid of this hot feeling.” Flo always was a hypochondriac so it didn’t seem cause for alarm.

Two weeks later, at around 3 A.M. on the morning of February 21, Flo called Lurlee and said she couldn’t sleep, that she was having trouble breathing. “Mama,” she said, “if anything happens to me, I want you to keep the children.” Lurlee told her she was talking crazy and to go back to bed. Tommy was out working overnight, so she was alone in her room, but her labored breathing so worried her daughter Nicole, now 8, that she called Lurlee, who told her the same thing she had Flo, that there was no cause to worry.

At around 10, Tommy came home, opened the bedroom door, and in horror saw Flo lying on the cold floor in her bedclothes, unable to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 396

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move her lower body. She could only croak in a hoarse whisper, “I can’t move my legs.” Tommy and the kids lifted her onto a sofa and he called for an ambulance. Taken to Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital, she still had no feeling in her legs and was put in a bed in the emergency ward for observation. She was on her back for the entire day. The doctors did tests but had little to say as family members drifted in and out. When Maxine got to her bedside, Flo was clearly worried. “I got to be able to take care of my kids,” she struggled to say.

Maxine would later say that as she looked at her sister, she knew that Flo was taking her last breaths. But when Flo made it into the night, the family went home, saying they’d be back the next morning. Before they could, early on the morning of the 22nd, a blood clot formed in Flo’s coronary artery. At around 9 A.M., her heart finally gave up. Flo Ballard was pronounced dead. She was 32 years old.

The death of “Blondie” Ballard caused great and genuine sadness at Motown. When someone phoned Mary to tell her, she stood helpless, phone in hand, repeating, “I knew it . . . I knew it. . . . ” She and Ross made immediate plans to fly to Detroit for the funeral. Gordy didn’t, but he did insist upon paying for the funeral, which was treated by Motown as a chance to purge, or at least gauze over, old guilts by spending a lot of money on a woman Gordy had recently hung up on when she asked for a few bucks. And if this became an exemplar of how well Motown took care of its own at the same time that it could publicize itself and some of its top acts, well, as Gordy would put it, “That didn’t hurt either.”

The service at the Reverend C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Church on February 24 was planned as meticulously as a Supremes concert in Las Vegas. Flowers were everywhere, with big wreaths and floral arrangements wrapped in banners identifying Motown acts, and one reading just “MOTOWN,” which while meant to articulate the personal tribute of each act and the company in general seemed more like those old
Billboard
ads with Motown artists in bubbles. Some had messages, such as “I LOVE YOU . . . DIANA” and “GOODBYE BLONDIE,” which was from Gordy but didn’t have his name on it, possibly because he 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 397

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knew how Ballard fans now felt about him. Curiously—or perhaps not—there was no wreath with Mary Wilson’s name.

The widower Chapman, hit hard by Flo’s death, seemed a little out of his mind as well, telling people he was in charge, having “allowed” Gordy to pay for the funeral and that he had ordered him to “do the right thing” for Flo. And he did in fact overrule the planners’ intention to dress Flo in the open coffin in a Supremes gown; instead, she was put in a knee-length powder-blue robe—although through it one could see the black and blue leg bruises that he’d inflicted.

It would be perhaps the biggest funeral ever seen in Detroit, which surely would have elicited one of Flo’s sassy one-liners since so few had wanted to know her in her declining years. On that day, the church was stuffed with 2,500 people, many of whom came with cameras to capture the arrival of the VIPs. Maxine Jenkins called it all a “circus” and a

“showcase for celebrities,” and outside there were twice as many people behind flimsy police barricades and the crowds would lurch forward when each limousine pulled up, forcing cops to drag people away and clear the way into church, with each celebrity cheered as if at a concert.

When Diana emerged from her limo in a dignified black suit, cheers mixed with boos and catcalls—“Hope you’re happy now, Diana,
you
did this to Flo!” rang out one loud voice, framing a narrative that would haunt her from now on. Regally ignoring the abuse, shielded by two bodyguards, she was ushered inside and, as planned, right past the other celebrities and guests waiting in line to be seated.

“It was strange,” recalls Ray Gibson, who came in from L.A. “All of us came through the side door. Mary, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops.

But Diana came in from the top of the stairs in the back. She made her grand entrance as only Diana can. But did she have to do it on Florence’s day? Couldn’t she let Florence have the spotlight just this once?” The word “upstage” was used a lot about Ross that day, and for years later when people spoke of the funeral. Taken straight to the front pew next to Chapman and the Ballard daughters, she could be heard screaming in grief and appeared faint in the hot and stifling church, prompting others to fan her. Mary, in a mirrored and jeweled skull cap she’d worn on her last album cover, and a veil, boa, and fur coat, was seated a symbolic three rows behind her. According to
Call Her Miss
Ross
, Lurlee Ballard “eye[d] Diana Ross suspiciously at her left”—but while many in the house did eye Ross in that manner, it would have been quite a feat for Lurlee, who wasn’t there. “Flo’s mama didn’t go to the funeral,” says Gibson. “The doctors told her not to, it would’ve 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 398

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been too much for her. In fact, they had to take me out of there. It was so emotional for me that I was making a terrible mess of myself.” Because many in the audience continued hooting and hollering, C. L. Franklin admonished them to hush up out of respect for the dead as he gave the eulogy, saying it was “Flo’s homecoming.” All the while, chants of “We want Diana!” could be heard from outside. Then came a crash as a car window was shattered, unnerving everyone. When the eulogy was over, many were eager to leave before the mob could surge inside. But Diana rose and came forward. Picking up a microphone, she called Mary up. Wilson, sobbing in her seat and not expecting to have to say anything, haltingly joined her standing next to the coffin, “furious,” she would later say, “that I was being dragged into this.” Diana intoned, “I believe nothing disappears, and Flo will always be with us,” then handed the mike to Mary, saying, “Here Mary.” Not knowing what to say, she uttered, “I loved her very much,” and touched Flo’s cheek.

The service ended with the organist playing and a choir singing

“Someday We’ll Be Together,” which might have fit the occasion except for the fact that Flo and Mary had not sung on the record. Flo’s casket was carried out to a hearse, the Four Tops and Marv Johnson among the pallbearers. The flower arrangements were tossed into the crowd like meat into a pool of sharks, to keep it at bay; but within minutes the flowers had been stripped bare, leaving only the wire and Styrofoam frames lying twisted in the gutter.

The burial was at Detroit’s Memorial Park cemetery, away from the mobs and the media. Only around a dozen mourners had made their way there when the coffin was lowered into the ground. Diana, having done her part, was nowhere to be seen, something close to an
infamia
to Mary.

“We were the only two people who had shared Flo’s greatest moments,” she would write. “For that reason alone, Diane should have been there.”

Mary threw a flower on the coffin as it went down.

The February 27 coroner’s report determined the cause of death as

“coronary artery thrombosis [blood clot] which totally occluded the right coronary artery [causing] cardiac arrest.” There were only trace amounts of alcohol or drugs in her blood, and the leg numbness 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:07 AM Page 399

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she had suffered was called an “emotional” and “hysterical” reaction, not a physical symptom. Meaning that nothing else killed Flo Ballard but the cumulative damage to her heart. Those like Lurlee who would take to saying Flo had died of a broken heart were perhaps half-right; in truth, she had lived with a broken heart, for too long.

Berry Gordy’s generosity stopped at the grave site. All that the Ballard family could afford as a headstone was a flat metal plaque on the plot embroidered with flowers and engraved “Florence Glenda Chapman, wife and mother,” with dates of birth and death separated by two musical notes. (When Lurlee died five years later, her grave would be marked only with a concrete cement marker, without any name on it.) Diana set up a small trust fund of a few thousand dollars for each of Flo’s daughters, specifying Lurlee and not Tommy Chapman as the guardian. Rather than be grateful for the gift, Tommy became enraged at the slight, and when Lurlee petitioned for and won custody of the girls, he blamed Ross for turning the judge against him. But when Lurlee died in 1982, he didn’t demand the children be with him and they would be passed from one Ballard relative to another until they were adults.