The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard by Peter Benjaminson

groups were out of action, at least under their original names, when Flo chose the name for her group.
    Names, as it turned out, were important at Motown, since Gordy managed to keep his hands on many of his groups’ names and copyright them.
    That way, the “groups” could continue to perform for Motown after the individual members had left the company. As a result, many former Motowners would look back mournfully at names that originally had been theirs, watching other singers parade around the country and the world with “hijacked”
    names while millions cheered.
    Once the name issue was settled, Gordy signed Flo, Mary, Diane, and Barbara to their first Motown contract. Because they were minors, their mothers signed for all four of them, on January 15, 1961. None of the mothers or daughters had legal counsel. They all believed Gordy when he said that he and Motown would do only what was best for the young women and that 28
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    they should allow Motown to completely manage their careers and their money.
    In reality, the contract was, as Mary Wilson would put it in 2007, “atrocious.” All the money Motown spent on the Supremes would be subtracted from their royalties. In other words, if successful, they would pay for themselves. Although they had formed their own group before Motown existed, if one of them left the group, Motown, not the singers, would select the new group member. The group’s records would earn each of them three-fourths of a percent of 90 percent of the suggested retail price for each record, less all taxes and packaging costs. Each would thus receive half a cent from each seventy-five-cent single sold, but all expenses would be taken out first. Under this formula, for each record that sold a million copies, each Supreme would end up receiving five thousand dollars minus her share of the cost of all preceding unreleased records by the group as well as her share of all the costs of the record for which she was receiving royalties. While the contract allowed Motown to charge all the expenses of making a Supremes record to the Supremes, it did not require Motown to release any of the group’s recordings at all. And Motown became the young women’s booking agent, manager, accountant, financial adviser, and lawyer. Each year was divided into two audit periods, and performers were allowed to audit only one of those periods for each year.
    Author J. Randy Taraborrelli has argued that despite Motown’s boasts, and despite the numerous #1 hits achieved by the Supremes, only two of their records—“Where Did Our Love Go?” and “You Can’t Hurry Love”—were instant million-selling records, although the company claimed that the group put out eight million-sellers from 1964 through 1968. Most, perhaps all, of these records later sold a million or more copies in some format, but if you were legally separated from the group, as Flo later was, you would never receive royalties from the sales of any song that occurred after your separation, even if you had participated in recording it and in promoting it through concerts, interviews, and appearances.
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    Taraborrelli’s claim is challenged by those who argue that he may be counting only domestic sales of the records and that Motown’s overseas sales were large. The situation is further clouded by the fact that Motown did not join the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which verifies record company sales figures, until 1980. This produces the following conundrum: Did Motown close its books because its “million-selling” singles were not, in fact, selling a million? Or because they were selling a million but they didn’t want to pay out a million records’ worth of royalties? Or for some other reason?
    When you do the math, as the Supremes should have but didn’t (although even if they had wanted to, they wouldn’t have been able to get a complete picture with the scant information