A couple of days before her death in February 2021, Mary Wilson uploaded a video to her YouTube channel. Poignantly, it was full of forthcoming plans: the 60th anniversary of the Supremes’ debut single the following month; interviews she’d given for Black History Month, discussing the problems the group had faced touring the south of America in the 1960s; videos she was planning to upload, including a tribute to Florence Ballard, the former Supreme who had died 45 years previously, aged 32, after a struggle with alcoholism that had seen her fired from the group in 1967.
Her voice catches slightly when she mentions Ballard’s name: Wilson never gave up on her, even when Ballard appeared to have given up on herself. “She was always trying to help her,” says Wilson’s friend, actor Beverly Todd. “Mary loved Florence and she understood why Florence was in so much pain” – Wilson believed her alcoholism had less to do with the pressures of fame than the fact that Ballard had been raped at knifepoint in 1960 – “and she would invite her to become part of what she was doing. The last time, she was trying to get Florence back involved with the Supremes, but Florence told her, ‘Mary, why do you keep trying to help? Stop trying to help me.’”
