Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Meanwhile, original Supremes singer Mary Wilson and her mother, Johnnie Mae, stood in the long, slow-moving line of people waiting to be seated. Mary watched the scene with sad eyes. Ernestine Ross, Diana’s mother, stood in the same line, also watching quietly, a pained expression on her face. It was obvious to everyone that Diana Ross was not exactly welcome here.

  As the battery of news reporters, television cameramen and photographers documented the mad funeral scene, Diana Ross was hurried into the New Bethel Baptist Church ahead of everyone else. Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, Mary Wilson and other Motown stars as well as the deceased’s family members and friends all stood with their mouths wide open as Ross’s bodyguards pushed them out of the way in order to spirit the star inside the church.

  Diana didn’t slip anonymously into the church and sit with her own mother or with Mary Wilson and the other mourners. In retrospect, though, when one really considers it, would such a thing even have been possible for a woman so famous, especially in Detroit? Rather, she walked to the front of the church and sat in the first pew—reserved for the deceased’s immediate family—next to Florence’s grieving mother and husband. It’s impossible to imagine that she did so without consulting someone about it in advance; this seating had to have been prearranged.* Still, it was a bad idea. It made Diana appear to want to be the center of attention, and much of the attending public and media certainly took it that way. One wonders where Berry Gordy—Diana’s chief protector, but not at the funeral—stood on the matter, or if he was even consulted about it. At any rate, Diana seemed oblivious to the stares of those around her. Her eyes were moist, her head bowed. She held one of Florence’s young daughters on her lap and adjusted the yellow bow in the child’s hair. The next day, photographs of her and the little girl would appear in newspapers around the world.

  Of course, Diana’s presence in the front row caused even more chaos in the church. “Be quiet. Sit down and be quiet,” shouted the Reverend C. L. Franklin from the pulpit. He was the preacher-father of singer Aretha Franklin. It had become impossible for him to control the 2,200 people inside the church, some of whom had come to pay genuine tribute to Florence, but most of whom had really come to see what was left of the Supremes—Diana and Mary in a church and Florence in a casket. People were actually hanging over the balcony, taking snapshots with flash cameras. “The stars have asked us to ask you not to take pictures of them in the church,” announced one of the deacons. Members of the press disregarded the request and, instead, ran up the center aisle to snap photographs of the star sitting there. It was a circus.

  After Rev. Franklin gave his eulogy, Diana rose, and what she did next was a perfect example of the kind of inexplicable behavior that has given her detractors so much to work with over the years. As she walked up to the altar, the noisy crowd finally hushed itself. People began to whisper. Was she going to sing? Speak? What in the world was she doing?

  This moment was one that seemed to force much of Diana Ross’s public to get off the fence that they had straddled for so many years. Some had simply accepted her as the figurehead of the Motown movement and saw her regal way as appropriate to her status. Others saw a woman who had been extremely lucky—one who would thumb her nose at her humble origins with each grand entrance or snubbed photo op.

  One thing any sensible person would agree with, however, was that Diana Ross, for the most part, was misunderstood. That’s not to say there was a consensus that she had been unfairly portrayed over the years. More accurately stated, she was, to much of the world, beyond comprehension. The word “enigma” seemed custom-made for her. She had burst out of the housing projects of Detroit with such momentum that there was little hint of her beginnings there. She carried herself with a dignity that many blacks saw as snobbish. Yet the mainstream, white-dominated world of show business at that time believed there were limits to her ability as a black woman to cross over into white America. In many ways, she didn’t really fit into either black or white America. Indeed, it was as though she had created a tier of celebrity all her own.

  The two women who completed the original Supremes had for years represented Diana as a woman with an agenda, one who would cast a shadow over the two of them in order to make her own star shine more brightly. In truth, they had managed to keep their heads well below the clouds in which Diana’s was firmly planted. Ironically, though, Florence’s and Mary’s less-polished personas made Diana appear even more disconnected from her roots. In a sense, their folksy quality served to magnify the divide between Diana and her meager beginnings.

  Had Diana been the unfeeling self-consumed monster some thought her to be, she would most certainly have remained in her seat that day—taken the safe route. She’d made her appearance, no need to go above and beyond it. Diana, though, felt a call to arms. The daughter of a sensitive, caring mother and an emotionally distant father, she was, herself, a contradiction of sorts. The woman she presented onstage was more her mother’s daughter, offering sentiments that her audience received with open arms. In her private life, though, she often seemed removed and aloof, like her father. She was a woman trapped in a shell of competing objectives, wanting to reach out and touch a world in which she would never truly feel comfortable.

  On that chilly February day in Detroit, Diana approached the pulpit with a request. “Could I have the microphone, please?” she asked, once she had finally made her way to the altar. Her voice was soft and delicate. Someone handed her the mic. “Mary and I would now like to have a silent prayer,” she announced.

  Everyone turned around to stare at Mary Wilson, sitting discreetly in the back of the church and wearing a black fur and matching jewel-studded cap. She looked surprised. From her expression it was obvious that the last thing she wanted to do was go up to the altar and be the center of attention. In fact, she looked like she’d rather crawl into a hole and simply disappear from sight. With all eyes upon her, she walked down the aisle and was helped up to the pulpit. Diana greeted her with an embrace. As flashbulbs popped all around them, the two women stood beside a blue and white, heart-shaped arrangement of carnations with a ribbon that read: “I love you, Blondie—Diana.” (“Blondie” had been Florence’s nickname.) Then, facing each other in front of the closed casket, they said a few words. “I believe that nothing disappears and Flo will always be with us,” Diana announced solemnly.

  She handed Mary the mic. “I loved her very much,” she barely managed to say.

  The two women looked down at Florence Ballard’s silver-colored casket and said a silent prayer. It was clear to both surviving members of the Supremes that her death would impact them both; but each in very different ways.

  Mary knew that she had lost a link to her glory days, a woman with whom she could commiserate about the wrongs she felt she had suffered.

  It is likely Diana believed that Florence’s passing would make it impossible for her to solve one of the great mysteries of her life. She had long believed that she had carried the brunt of what she called the “burden of stardom” for the group, and that there should have been some element of gratitude to her for making their success a reality. That appreciation never surfaced, however. Instead, a building animosity grew toward her from her two partners. They handled it differently, though. Mary, at least at that time, remained fairly close-lipped about any resentment she felt toward Diana. But Florence had pulled no punches; she had spoken her mind. Everyone knew how she felt. Indeed, it would have been Florence, had she lived, who could have helped Diana answer the question that would trouble her for so many years. It was a question Florence would have addressed in her no-nonsense style, without hesitation, had Diana only chosen to ask her.

  The question was simple: “What was so wrong with me?”

  Part One

  DIANE

  “I remain in bondage”

  Once she was famous, the reasons for Diana Ross’s success were evident. But, what about in the beginning? Certainly in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1950s wh
en Diana was being raised, many youngsters in her neighborhood had talent. Some were better singers than others, some had more charisma than the rest … and some had luck, and others didn’t. Indeed, most didn’t make it in show business at all and ended up doing something else with their lives. It’s a tough vocation and takes a special kind of person to be successful at it. So, what was it that Diana Ross possessed that helped to transform her from a gawky, nasal-sounding youngster into one of the most influential and successful entertainers of our time?

  Not surprisingly, in order to understand the life and career of the woman who would one day demand to be called “Miss Ross,” one first has to take a look at the childhood of a young girl once known simply as Diane.

  Diana’s father, Fred Ross, was born on 4 July, Independence Day, 1920, in Bluefield, West Virginia, to middle-class, well-educated parents, Edward and Ida Ross. He was an only boy, with three sisters, Jesse, Edna and Georgee. This author interviewed Mr. Ross in 1981 for a series of articles I wrote about his daughter Diana, and also in 1984 for my first book about her. He was tough, firm and a stickler for detail in telling his family history. His father, Edward, taught at West Virginia State College in Bluefield; his mother, Ida, died when Fred was just two years old. In 1924, Edward found that he was unable to cope with his job and the responsibility of raising four children, so he divvied them up and sent them off to live with relatives. Fred ended up in Rogersville, Tennessee, with Edward’s sister. Edward died a few years after that.

  Another of Edward’s sisters had migrated to Detroit, Michigan, to start a laundry business and it was she who suggested that Fred move north and live with her, in 1937. “She had a good, solid heart,” he said, “and she wanted to see me have a real chance at life in the north. I was just seven, but already I had a new start in life.” He attended Balch Elementary and Miller Intermediate in Detroit, and then Cass Technical High School, from which he graduated an excellent student. Over six feet tall and weighing 160 pounds, Fred was handsome with a winning smile and muscular physique, strong and determined. He became a professional boxer.

  Boxing is not a team sport. Although there may be help from trainers, in the end it is the solitary combatant who determines his own success. Therefore, Fred Ross felt from an early age that he was the master of his own fate. No one told him what to do, or how to do it. In the city that produced the “Brown Bomber,” Joe Louis, one of the greatest fighters of all time, Fred Ross was considered a “comer.” He won the middleweight title of the Industrial Championship, the Diamond Belt middleweight crown, and got as far as the semi-finals of the Golden Gloves competition. Although he was popular with the ladies because of his build and good looks, his peers remember him more for his often-icy reserve. Always cordial but rarely warm, he was a determined, serious young man. “I think maybe I always resented the way my father had broken up the home,” he said. “It made me more determined as a young man to work hard, make money and be a success if only so that I would never have to make the same decision my father made. I never wanted to split up my family because of economic reasons.”

  As Fred Ross jabbed his way through young adulthood, Ernestine Moten had just arrived in Detroit with her sister Virginia in 1936.

  Born on 27 January 1916, in Allenville, Alabama, Ernestine was the youngest of twelve children raised by the Reverend William and Isabelle Moten. There were William, Isiah, Laure, Sherman (Mike), Marry (Missy), Shack, Luciel, Ameil, Willie, Gus, Virginia Beatrice (Bea) and Ernestine, so it was a full and lively household even if it was a very small house. Her father, the pastor of the Bessemer Baptist Church, was as industrious as he was religious; he owned a small produce farm.

  This author interviewed Ernestine in 1977 on the occasion of her marriage to her second husband, John Jordan, and then again in 1981 for the series of stories I authored about her daughter Diana for the newspaper Soul. She told me that as a youngster she attended the Perry County Training School, where she had a strong interest in gymnastics and enjoyed participating in competitions. A favorite story of hers was that, as a teenager, she came up with a routine that was a surefire showstopper. She would take both legs and put them behind her head. Then she would extend both arms through the center—and walk on them! “No one in Bessemer had ever seen anything quite like that,” she said. “I used to win every competition with that move, though my mother warned me, ‘If you keep doing that, you’re gonna get stuck looking like a frog for the rest of your life.’” Ernestine was an A student throughout grade and high school. “I would have been the student with the best grades in the whole school,” she said, “but I ended up in second place because the teacher didn’t like me as much as he did another girl. That was fine. But I hated second place. I never thought of myself as being second to anyone.”

  Ernestine said that she lost four siblings when she was a child. “The first one to go was Laure,” she said.

  I was just a little girl. I remember I woke up and went into the living room and there was my mother with a cross to her bosom, crying. And my father, crying. And all of my brothers and sisters. I was so frightened. I started counting them, one by one—and there were only ten. It took me a minute to figure out who was missing. Laure. I asked my mother where she was, and she pointed to the ceiling and said, “She’s with God, now. She’s taken care of.” I couldn’t stop crying, then. I remember throwing myself on the couch and crying. We never knew what happened to her, really. It was just some kind of flu, or something. Back then in the South black people died all the time, and no one knew why. It wasn’t as if we had the best medical care.

  A few months later, I came home from school and—the same thing. Everyone was crying in the living room, kneeling before the cross we had there. I counted again. This time, Isiah was missing. He had been in a fight and was shot. I simply couldn’t believe it. Then, in years to come, we lost Ameil of natural causes. Then a mining accident took William.

  Ernestine attended Selma University in Alabama for a year before she and her sister Bea decided to move north to Detroit for what she hoped would be a better life and gainful employment. “You just couldn’t find jobs in the South,” she said, “so Bea said, ‘Why are we staying here?’ She was like that. So, we said, fine, we’re leaving. And we did.”

  By the age of eighteen, she was a tall, slender woman with chestnut-brown skin and flowing, black hair that hung fully about her shoulders. With dancing, almond-shaped, light brown eyes and a bright, full smile, she was gorgeous. She was also a singer, entertaining in local clubs and in church choirs, though she didn’t take it seriously. Like a lot of women of her time, her goal was to marry and have children. She loved her life and wanted to complete it with a family.

  Ernestine met Fred Ross in 1937. “I was at a friend’s house,” Fred told me, “and this woman walked in, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen with these great eyes and this wonderful smile. And I thought, wow. Just wow. We started dating and we were engaged in a few months.”

  Though both were educated and had a practical outlook on life, Fred and Ernestine were also different in many ways. She was lovable and easygoing, content to leave her studies behind in favor of domesticity. He could be distant and aggressive as he continued his boxing with an almost fanatical determination, and his education as well. He enrolled in Wayne State College for a couple of years, majoring in business administration. Soon, he left boxing behind and secured a trainee position at the American Brass Company—later known as the Atlantic Richfield Company—making sixty dollars a week operating heat furnaces. “I wouldn’t marry her if I thought for a minute we’d have any financial instability,” he recalled. “Life is too short to be poor. That’s why it took a couple of years. I wanted to be sure we were set up.”

  Fred needed Ernestine in his life. Her easy way with people, and with him, made him relax into the relationship. He changed a great deal when the two began dating, say those who knew him well back then. “The man was a little reserved,” said Benny Robinson, who worked
with him at American Brass. “Falling for Ernestine was what changed things for him. Once he was with her, he just wasn’t as angry as he’d been, and I think that was one of the reasons he decided to quit boxing. The boxing was all about his anger, I think. Ernestine’s joy for living was contagious, and I think it rubbed off on ol’ Freddie.”

  The couple wed on 18 March 1941—Fred was twenty, Ernestine, twenty-three. “We didn’t have a honeymoon,” Fred said. “Are you crazy? Like we had the money for a honeymoon? No, we got married. Then we went home and that was that.” The newlyweds moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment in a large Detroit complex at 5736 St. Antoine, on the third floor, number 23.

  On 1 June 1942, Ernestine gave birth to the couple’s first child, Barbara Jean Ross, whom the family would call Bobbi.

  Then, on 26 March 1944, Ernestine had another daughter. She had intended that this child be named Diane but through a clerical error at the Women’s Hospital in Detroit, “Diana” appeared on the birth certificate. Fred said that he didn’t care what name was on the certificate, his daughter’s name was Diane, and that’s what her friends and family were to call her. It’s also interesting that Fred may have wanted everyone to call her Diane—and most people did—but Ernestine almost always called her Diana.

  “She was such a beautiful child,” said Ernestine. Of course, most parents feel that their children are special, but the infant Ross really was striking, with large eyes, wavy black hair and mocha-colored skin. She was a good baby, too, at least to hear her mother talk about her. “She didn’t cry a lot, like Bob,” Ernestine once said. “She was serious, like her father, always looking right at you. She seemed older than her years. She was the kind of child you felt you should treat like an adult. I would talk to her like she was grown! And she would look at me like she knew what I was saying!”