The marquee outside the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas had grown by two words: Diana Ross and the Supremes. Inside, Florence Ballard sat in her stage gown waiting for a cue that never came. She had turned twenty-four the day before. By her own account, she was told that if she walked out under those lights, she would be thrown off the stage.
Within days, she was on a plane home to Detroit, and another woman was reportedly wearing her costume. Seven years later, she was reported to be living on public assistance in that same city, a mother of three with a foreclosed house behind her. She had named the Supremes. She would be dead before her thirty-third birthday.
Florence Glenda Ballard was born in Detroit in the summer of 1943, one of more than a dozen children. Her family had come north out of the South, her father finding work on the line at General Motors and playing guitar in the evenings while his daughters sang along. Loss came early and often. A brother was struck and killed by a drunk driver at age three.
Her father died of cancer not long after the family settled in the Brewster-Douglas housing projects on the city’s east side, when Florence was about fifteen. She sang in church and at Northeastern High School, where a music teacher named Abraham Silver coached her voice. At a school talent show, she met a shy girl named Mary Wilson, and the two were drawn into the orbit of a neighborhood manager who ran a boys’ group called the Primes, later the Temptations. A sister group was assembled to perform alongside them: Florence, Mary, a girl from the same projects named Diane Ross, and Betty McGlown.
The manager called them the Primettes. In 1960, they auditioned at a new record company a former boxer and autoworker named Berry Gordy was building out of a house on West Grand Boulevard. He had called it Motown. He told them to come back when they had finished school.
They cut two singles for a smaller label first; neither made a mark. By the start of 1961, Gordy was ready to bring them in, on one condition: the Primettes was a child’s name. A songwriter at the company, Janie Bradford, brought a list of possible names. It was Florence who ran her finger down the page and chose the one they would carry into history: the Supremes.
Diana reportedly worried it sounded like a group of men. Florence held firm. On January 15, 1961, Berry Gordy signed the Supremes to Motown Records. She could sing.
Marvin Gaye, who worked down the hall at Motown, rated Florence the strongest natural singer of the three, a working musician’s cold judgment of a voice he had heard up close. What she did not have was any say over what the machine did with that instrument. For three years, the Supremes were the quiet embarrassment of the building. They released eight singles, and none climbed the national charts.
Around the offices, people called them the No-Hit Supremes. Florence had sung lead on one early side, a bright, silly record called “Buttered Popcorn,” which did well enough around the Midwest to prove the group could shift a record when the material was right. A singer named Barbara Martin had come in to replace Betty McGlown and then left before the first album, leaving the three women the world would come to know: Florence, Mary, and Diana. In the lean years and the fat ones alike, Florence carried the standards, the ballads a supper club crowd already loved.
She filled the room with them night after night. When the breakthrough came, it came like a dam giving way. After “Where Did Our Love Go” went to number one in the spring of 1964, the hits arrived almost faster than the group could record them: “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.
” Between the middle of 1964 and the middle of 1967, the Supremes put ten separate singles at the very top of the American charts. In the same window, Florence sang on sixteen records that reached the top forty and fourteen that reached the top ten. Three young women out of a Detroit housing project had become the sound of mainstream America, welcomed onto stages and television programs that had been bolted shut against people who looked like them. That welcome was engineered.
Motown manufactured the Supremes in the fullest sense of the word: choreography, matched gowns, wigs, long white gloves, lessons in poise and diction. The image was designed to be glamorous and reassuring at the same time, so the widest possible audience could adore three black women without feeling that anything was asked of them in return. In the recording studio, the arrangement was something else. By Mary Wilson’s account, Florence’s voice was so powerful that the engineers had to move her a full seventeen feet back from the microphone, or her sound would swallow the recording hole.
The strongest voice in the group was being physically walked backward away from the center of the music. Around 1963, Berry Gordy made a decision that had almost nothing to do with who could sing and almost everything to do with who could sell. He named Diana Ross the lead voice of the Supremes. The records were built around her.
The stage lighting was aimed at her. The other two slid into place as the harmony standing behind a star. It was a small change on paper and a total change of destiny for three human beings. By many contemporary accounts, Gordy and Ross were involved with one another, and the effect inside the group was plain enough: the woman being lifted up was close to the man making the decisions.
The woman who had founded the group was not. Florence watched the light sliding away and said so, plainly and repeatedly. A woman who complains that she is being pushed aside becomes, in the private language of the company, difficult. And a problem to be managed was exactly the kind of thing the machine had been built to solve quickly and cleanly.
Florence carried other weight. In the summer of 1960, at seventeen, by the account Mary Wilson later set down in a memoir, Florence was raped at knifepoint in a parking lot off Woodward Avenue. Wilson wrote that the attack fed a lasting distrust of other people and a streak of self-destruction that never entirely left her. The subject was simply never raised again between them.
A seventeen-year-old girl carried that wound alone and in silence into every rehearsal and every long night of being told to smile for a camera. The drinking that the company would later point to as the reason for her removal grew up in the exact place where that untreated trauma collided with a slow professional erasure. In April of 1967, a singer named Cindy Birdsong, who had been performing with Patti LaBelle’s group, began appearing in Florence’s spot, billed as a stand-in for the nights when Florence could not go on. Florence understood it as temporary, even considerate.
She believed she was resting and would step straight back into her place. In truth, the decision had already been taken above her head. By June, the billing had quietly changed. The name up outside the venues now read “Diana Ross and the Supremes.
” Once those words were painted onto a marquee, the argument was effectively over. No meeting had to be called. The single word Florence had chosen off Janie Bradford’s list six years earlier was still up there in the lights; it had simply grown by two words that did not belong to her. Around the first of July, the day after her twenty-fourth birthday, she went on stage at the Flamingo for the last time.
By her own account, it did not end with a conversation or a contract. It ended with Berry Gordy telling her that if she went out onto that stage, he would throw her off it. She had been drinking, as she often was by then. There was a confrontation before she was due to go on.
And on one of those Las Vegas evenings, Cindy Birdsong stepped out into the light in Florence’s place, by one reported account wearing Florence’s own gown. The removal, planned quietly since the spring, was complete. She flew home to Detroit with the thing she had built taken clean out of her hands, no press conference, no farewell, no acknowledgment from any stage. In August, the Detroit Free Press told its readers she was simply resting, taking a temporary leave of absence for reasons of her health.
There would be no rejoining. On February 22, 1968, Florence and Motown negotiated her release. The deal was handled on her side by an attorney named Leonard Bourne. By the account set down in the most detailed later histories, her attorney received a lump-sum payment of nearly $140,000, well over a million dollars in today’s money.
Other accounts put the sum she actually saw far lower, around $15,000. What every version agrees on is this: it was a one-time settlement in exchange for her entire share of the group she had founded. As a condition of the release, she was advised not to promote herself as a former member of the Supremes. The single greatest asset her career had ever produced, the fact that people would pay to see the founding Supreme, was placed off limits by her own signature.
Days after the release was finalized, she married Thomas Chapman, a man who had driven cars for Motown. Together they would have three daughters: twins Michelle and Nicole, born that same year, and a third daughter, Lisa, a few years later. In March of 1968, she signed a solo deal with ABC Records. She released two singles, “It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It” and “Love Ain’t Love.
” Neither found an audience, in no small part because she was forbidden to lean on the only credential that would have sold them. The full album she made was quietly shelved. By 1970, the label had let her go. The settlement money, meanwhile, was being drained away under the care of the same attorney who had negotiated her exit.
Bourne would later face charges of embezzlement. By the time Florence understood what had happened to her savings, the fortune was gone. In 1971, she sued Motown for royalties she believed she was still owed; by one account, the suit reached for as much as eight million dollars. She lost.
That same year, her husband left the home. The bank took the house. In the space of roughly three years, she had lost the group, the record deal, the fortune, the lawsuit, the marriage, and the home. By 1974, the woman who had named the Supremes was reportedly applying for public assistance in Detroit, raising three young daughters on almost nothing at all in the city that group had made famous.
That same year, she checked into Henry Ford Hospital and completed a program of treatment that ran about six weeks. In 1975, a settlement paid out by her former attorney’s insurance gave her just enough to buy a small house on a street called Shaftsbury. She reconciled with her husband. She decided she wanted to sing again.
In June of 1975, she walked out in front of an audience for the first time in more than five years, at a benefit held in a Detroit auditorium, backed by a rock group. She was thirty-one years old, and she still had the voice. For one bright, fragile moment, a different ending seemed possible. It was not the ending she was given.
In February of 1976, she went into the hospital complaining of numbness in her arms and legs. On the morning of February 22, at about five minutes past ten, Florence Ballard died of cardiac arrest brought on by a blood clot lodged in an artery of her heart. She was thirty-two years old. The founder of the most successful American singing group of the 1960s was gone before she ever reached thirty-three.
Her funeral was held at New Bethel Baptist. Diana Ross came, and Mary Wilson came, and Stevie Wonder and the Four Tops came. Ross and Wilson, who had barely spoken to one another in years, stood together over the casket. Years later, a musical opened on Broadway called Dreamgirls, about a Motown-style group and a powerful voice pushed aside when the machine decided a more marketable star would sell better, and audiences understood whose life it was echoing.
A young actress won an Academy Award for playing the character built in Florence’s long shadow and dedicated the honor by name to her memory. In 1988, the Supremes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Florence among them, honored for the very thing she had been forbidden in life to even mention. Years later still, the group received a Grammy for lifetime achievement. Diana Ross said afterward that there had been something inside Florence that was pulling at her, something she was not able to handle.
It is the surviving star’s account, offered gently. But Marvin Gaye’s verdict, from the man with nothing to gain by flattering a dead woman, was simpler: she had been a hell of a singer, probably the strongest of the three girls. Nothing that was done to her was against the rules. The billing change was legal.
The buyout was legal. The settlement was legal. The court that sent her away with nothing was following the law exactly as it stood. The machine did not have to break a single rule to break her.
She named them. She lies in Detroit now, thirty-two years old forever, and the name she chose off a songwriter’s list is still up in the lights somewhere on a marquee that was never once hers.