Why was Florence Ballard fired from The Supremes?
One July night in 1967, just before Diana Ross and The Supremes took the stage at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, singer Florence Ballard, one of the founding members of the group, felt a tug on her arm. It was Motown chief Berry Gordy.
“He told me, ‘If you go on stage, I’ll throw you off’,” Ballard recalled to the Miami Herald in a 1975 interview. “I didn’t go on. I couldn’t fight any longer. Cindy Birdsong [a member of Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles] was right there. She changed into my clothes and went on stage.”
At the time of her firing from The Supremes, Florence Ballard was only 24 years old. Once a poor kid from the Brewster Housing Projects in Detroit, she and her childhood friends Mary Wilson and Diana Ross became three of the unlikeliest superstars in modern American history, outselling every other recording group besides The goddamn Beatles during their mid-1960s prime.
Now, just three years removed from The Supremes’ breakout hit ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, Ballard was out. It hadn’t come entirely out of the blue.
Throughout 1966 into ‘67, the group’s constant worldwide, whirlwind schedule of tour dates, TV appearances, and recording sessions had exhausted all three singers and worn away at their original friendship. Berry Gordy, who had secretly begun dating Diana Ross behind the scenes, also showed no shortage of favouritism toward The Supremes’ standout star, with Florence Ballard often getting the short end of the stick.
“Pressures were aimed at me,” Ballard said. “Gordy would say, ‘Florence, you’re not doing it right.’ I remember when we were rehearsing [the song] ‘People’, and he said, ‘Flo, you’re not at the mike,’ or ‘Flo, you’re overweight.’”
Ballard also recalled Gordy using her as a scapegoat in front of the other girls, saying that he had planned to give them all a week off, but that he couldn’t because “Florence thinks too much.”
Looking back on this, Ballard said, “But I wasn’t going to let anybody walk over me.” After she was sacked, Ballard eventually filed an $8million lawsuit against Motown Records, which responded by asserting that Florence had been let go “because of her conduct and the fact she wasn’t performing well.”
Ballard had indeed been struggling with alcohol addiction, but her reported exhaustion and weakened performance had been equally a result of the extreme stress and tension of The Supremes’ day-to-day existence.
After Ballard lost her court case, Motown vice president Michael Roshkind offered her a measly exit offer of $2,500 annually for six years. “Then he said I had no right to say I was ever a Supreme,” Ballard recalled. “I cried and ran out of the room.”
Ballard got married in 1968 and later gave birth to twins. Her attempts to launch a solo career on ABC Records flopped, however, and she’d soon lost her entire fortune from The Supremes years. By 1975, she was living in a small house with her three daughters, a sister, and her mother, collecting welfare to get by.
“I’m not as frustrated as before,” she told the Miami Herald in the spring of 1975. “I feel stronger as a person. I want to sing.”
Less than a year later, Ballard died of cardiac arrest at just 32, making her one of the great tragic figures in pop history. Her story would loosely influence the Broadway musical Dreamgirls in 1981, as well as the 2006 film of the same name, for which Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar for playing the Ballard stand-in character, Effie White.
