Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Then at the end of the year, in December 1955, Ernestine gave birth to another child, Wilbert Alex—nicknamed Chico. Fred Ross became worried. “There were six kids at that point,” he recalled. “I wasn’t poor but I sure wasn’t rich, either. I had heard about these low-income projects that were being built and went to see what they were like. I was impressed with them. So, I started making plans, and we moved there. They were called the Brewster Projects. In ‘the projects,’ as these kinds of developments were called by the locals, we could find a suitable three-bedroom apartment for a reasonable monthly rent.” Therefore, on 26 March 1958—Diana’s fourteenth birthday—her family moved to the Brewster Projects. Further propagating the Motown hype about her upbringing, Diana remembered the Brewster Projects for a 1977 television special for NBC this way: “Not all of us kids survived the ghetto, but the ones who did were a mighty tough lot. You see, the ghetto will get you ready for anything. The first big fight is just getting out. But, I didn’t know such words as ghetto,” she concluded. “You see, the ghetto was my home.” It was scripted for her, of course. Still, her father had to disagree with the assessment.

  Actually, the first big fight was getting into the Brewster Projects, not out of them. If you got in, you were one of the lucky ones because the Brewster Projects was a place where large families could afford to live. At that time, a stigma hadn’t yet been attached to the projects. The front yards had nice lawns, the buildings were decently built. There were nice courtyards. The apartment we were in had three bedrooms, a full basement, a living room, kitchen and dinette. It wasn’t so terrible at all, believe me.

  No matter what they may look like today—and they are, admittedly, quite dilapidated in parts—back in 1958 the Brewster Projects stood as testament that low-income housing did not necessarily have to be slums. Located on Detroit’s east side, within walking distance of downtown, the projects were more a tight-knit neighborhood community than a cutthroat, crime-riddled urban jungle. The families living there looked out for each other. If someone’s kid was misbehaving, any parent who lived in the neighborhood felt free to chastise him—and was later thanked for doing it. Most of the adults who lived in the projects were hardworking people who were proud of their environment and wanted to protect it from outside influences. As the parents socialized in the courtyards on warm summer nights, their youngsters gathered on street corners or on the front steps of their houses to sing and dance to the latest songs blaring from transistor radios. They all sensed that they were part of an infrastructure that cared about them. It’s a misrepresentation of the Brewster Projects to think of it as a slum. It wasn’t, at least not at this time.

  It was around 1955 that Diana began to sing. “I can’t even remember when I actually started singing,” she would recall. “I think I always sang.” As her record player spun songs such as blues singer Etta James’s “Good Rocking Daddy” and “Dance With Me, Henry,” young Diana would position herself in front of a full-length mirror in her bedroom and mouth the lyrics, performing and posing for her own entertainment. Like many kids standing in front of mirrors and performing for themselves in Detroit at this time, she thought she had charisma and talent to spare. The big difference between her and the rest was that she really did!

  She remembered her first “public appearance” this way:

  When I was maybe nine I had gone to the hospital with bronchitis-pneumonia and my mother told me that while I was going into the hospital in the emergency ward I kept singing, “Open the door, Richard. Richard, why don’t you open the door?” So, I was known to be this little singer, you know? When I was eleven, my mother had a big party, about twenty people. I was eleven. I used to sing with a lot of records. There was a record out called “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and another called “In the Still of the Night.” I would sing along with them. So, my parents invited me to the party to entertain the guests and I went and did my thing up there in front of all of these people and they loved it and passed the hat. I collected enough money to buy myself a pair of patent leather tap dance shoes. I was taking tap dance lessons at Brewster Center at the time.

  By 1958, the popularity of black bands and singers had reached an unprecedented level, not only in Detroit but also in the rest of the country. Black recording artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Big Maybelle, Chuck Willis and Dinah Washington and groups such as the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots had already made indelible impressions on the entertainment business. However, something even more fresh and exciting was beginning to change the face of popular black music, and many of the local teenagers had caught this new fever called rhythm and blues. A hybrid with the then-current trend of rock and roll, this new R&B had a more insistent, contagious beat—a sound that the kids in the projects were quick to imitate. For fun, they formed their own groups and improvised their own arrangements of songs recorded by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and the Drifters.

  At this time, three youngsters, Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks and Kel Osborne, migrated to Detroit from Birmingham, Alabama. Under the direction of a fast-talking hustler of a manager named Milton Jenkins, they formed a vocal group called the Primes. As the oft-told tale has it, very soon after the Primes began to get a little recognition in the neighborhood, Jenkins decided that they needed a “sister group” with which to perform. It was intended to be a way for them to have back-and-forth interplay on stage with the opposite sex, an ingenious little gimmick to distinguish the Primes from the competition, although, as it happened, they never really got to perform together.

  Milton Jenkins happened to be dating Maxine Ballard, one of the siblings of a local girl known by all in the projects to have a big and impressive singing voice, fifteen-year-old Florence Ballard. (Eventually, Milton and Maxine would marry.) Maxine told Milton about Florence, mentioning to him that her sister used to love to sing “Silent Night,” the Christmas carol. She would stand by a half-open window and sing at the top of her lungs. When neighbors would tell her she sounded good, she would open the window just a little wider the next time she sang until, finally, she was singing before a fully open window. An audition for Milton Jenkins was quickly arranged. When Milton finally met Florence and heard her sing, he found that she had a wide range, a style so belting as to be a little startling. She was a gospel singer, actually, one of those girls who could raise a whole congregation to their feet with her soaring voice. However, Jenkins also felt that this girl had potential for success in the secular world and that with a bit of work to refine her she could become a star. Excited about the prospects, he decided that she would be the one to form the sister group to the Primes. The name of that group? The Primettes, of course.

  Florence, a buxom and shapely girl nicknamed Blondie because of her light skin and auburn hair, then began the task of forming the new singing group. The first thing she did was recruit another local girl, fourteen-year-old Mary Wilson, who also lived in the Brewster Projects and who attended school with Florence. “If you ever get a chance to be in a group, you call me,” Mary had told her. “And I’ll do the same.”

  Mary, rail-thin but stunning with dancing brown eyes and a gleaming smile, boasted a rich, misty-sounding voice perfect for blending with background harmonies and also not at all bad as a lead voice. Mary was no Blondie, though, and she knew it. She was in awe of Florence—especially after hearing her sing an operatic “Ave Maria” in the church choir—and thought of her as being the most dynamic singer “this side of Mahalia Jackson.”

  The two were an interesting combination: Mary shy and sweet, Florence streetwise and sassy. Florence was also one of those girls in the neighborhood who always seemed ticked off about something. “She was fun and people liked her, but they also knew not to cross her,” says Martha Reeves, also from Detroit and also soon to be a singer with Motown. “She’d cut you down with her words, her eyes. She was sassy.” Still, Florence and Mary became fast friends, each balancing the other’s personality.

  The girls began
auditioning a number of local youngsters in hopes of finding two more members for the Primettes. Anyone who thinks they took this endeavor lightly is not getting the picture. This was no after-school hobby for them. It was serious business. They wanted to sing and become entertainers, and they had the work ethic to get them to the next level. They weren’t lazy, misdirected or distracted. They didn’t do drugs, they didn’t drink and only dated when the mood hit them. Rather, they were focused and determined.

  After singing with a few youngsters, they finally settled on Betty McGlown, a tall, dark youngster who had a fair, though not spectacular, voice. She didn’t reside in the projects; rather, she lived on the west side of town. There was still one spot open in the group, though. One day, Paul Williams came up with a recommendation. He’d met a young girl one afternoon who had been singing with friends on the stoop. Her voice cut through the sounds of the rest of the youngsters and seemed … different. There was definitely something unusual about that voice, and Paul—just a kid himself—could recognize it. When he went to meet her, she introduced herself: Diane Ross. “Hey, I got a group for you,” he told her. “You’d be great in it.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, suspiciously. “I’ll just bet you do.”

  “I do,” Paul insisted, and he told her about the Primettes.

  Diana didn’t jump at the chance. As it happened, she was a bit disheartened at this time after having lost the starring role in a play to someone in school with about half her ability. The teacher explained that, in his view, her voice was too weak to carry through the auditorium and, moreover, “you sing through your nose, and that’s not good, at all.” It was a bitter pill for her to swallow; she hated being told she couldn’t do something she wanted to do, and it was especially tough when there was no way she could change things in her favor. She was still stinging from this rejection when approached by Paul. “Well, we’ll have to check with my mama,” Diana said, finally, “’cause what she says, goes.”

  Paul then found his buddy Eddie and the two of them accompanied Diana to her home in the Brewster Projects. Once there, they met Ernestine and promised that her daughter would be home “before the streetlights went on.” She said she would think it over and make a decision “later.”

  As it happened, the girls would be rehearsing at Milton Jenkins’s third-floor apartment on Hastings Street, where all of the cool jazz and blues clubs in Detroit were located, such as the Flame Show Bar, Three Star Bar and the Forest Club. It was also where all of the famous Detroit blues musicians honed their crafts, guys such as John Lee Hooker, Calvin Frazier and Big Maceo Merriweather, so this was the place to be in Detroit if you wanted to be surrounded by excitement and by music.

  Milton Jenkins realized that he had to obtain the full approval of the parents before confirming anyone’s membership in the group. Therefore, first on his list of visits was the Ross home, outside which he pulled up in his red Cadillac. Ernestine regarded him with more than a little skepticism when he walked through the door dressed in a custom-made sharkskin suit with matching silk handkerchief and tie. He had one arm in a sling—though he never did explain why. Obviously, he was a real character. He looked like a pimp, but he wasn’t. He was a hustler, though—just trying to figure out how to get ahead in the Motor City. However, he was also unfailingly polite, which went a long way with Ernestine. He reasoned that long hours of rehearsal would keep Diana and the other girls off the streets, out of gangs and away from boys—which also sounded pretty good to the Ross matriarch. In the end, Ernestine agreed to allow Diana to sing in the group. Jenkins left a happy man, and Diana was excited by now, as well. In the final analysis, though, they were both lucky that Ernestine was the one they approached, and not her husband, Fred.

  Father and daughter in conflict

  “Singing became my life,” Diana Ross would once recall. “I lived, ate, drank, and breathed it. It was all that I cared about. I had a dream, and I was completely determined to make it real. Nothing could deter me or discourage me for very long. My only obstacle was … Daddy.” Indeed, as soon as Fred Ross heard about the Primettes, he raised his objections. He didn’t like the idea in principle, thinking that Diana should, instead, focus on her schooling. He was determined that his children follow his example and credo: The only path to success was education.

  “I really didn’t care so much about her singing,” he says, “but I didn’t like the fact that she might start coming in late from playing local record hops—or whatever it was those kids used to do. She was still underage, after all. I feared she might not continue her education, and I wanted her to go to Wayne State University one day. I had my own ideas as to how things should work out, you know? Like any father. I’m sure she thought I was being unreasonable.”

  Fred’s lack of encouragement hit Diana hard. In fact, she always felt emotionally shortchanged by Fred. She got all of the attention she ever needed from her mother, but not from her father. It actually seemed to Diana that Fred preferred Barbara Jean to her. Bobbi was pretty—her face more rounded and less angular than Diana’s—and she excelled in academics. Therefore, she had already won Fred’s approval—or at least that’s how Diana saw it. Years later, she would recall, “Even at the bottom of one of my little childhood pictures, someone wrote ‘the talented one.’ And on my sister Bobbi’s they wrote, ‘the attractive one.’ I don’t know why they did that. I would never do that to my kids, label them like that.”

  “We always fought because I thought she was so beautiful,” Diana later admitted when asked about Bobbi. “I thought she got the most attention. I just wanted my dad to like me as much as he liked her.” Therefore, anything Diana could do to distinguish herself in his eyes was something she would jump at. She worked to gain his approval with her hobbies, her schoolwork, her day-to-day interaction with him, but never would she feel she truly had it. This was a dynamic that predated any idea she had about becoming a singer. It simply had always been that way between her and her father.

  Of Fred, Diana would write in Secrets of a Sparrow:

  He was smart, proud, confident, refined and respectful. Emotionally miles away, Daddy was a quiet man who didn’t talk a lot to anyone. I never succeeded in making that deeper emotional connection with him. I grew up wanting his love, wanting affection from him. Since he just wasn’t the type to give those things, I mostly tried to keep away from him. No matter how long my arms grew, no matter how far I reached toward him, I could never get close enough to touch him … and I’m not sure why. I tried not to get in his way; I hoped I didn’t have to …

  Of course, Fred loved all of his children and will insist on as much to this day. However, he was never effusive, not forthcoming with compliments and approval. He felt that such nurturing was in Ernestine’s purview. His responsibility was to work hard and put a roof over their heads, which he did. Not only did he work for American Brass, he took jobs at the Meyer and Stock suitcase factory, a gas station, the post office, rebuilding car transmissions … He was always working to keep the family well taken care of.

  Fred’s discouraging attitude toward Diana’s singing quickly became a sticking point between father and daughter and was to be the subject of years of discontent between them. He didn’t want her to sing, and that was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned. “It was a struggle with him each step of the way,” she would recall. In fairness to him, though, he says that he didn’t really think of it as that big an issue. “Look, if I knew then what I know now,” he said in the mid-1980s, “well, I may have proceeded differently. Who knew this thing was so important to her? I didn’t. I just thought it was a lark, a hobby, something that would amount to nothing but a distraction. So, yes, I did not encourage it. I did not want it for her.”

  Ernestine Ross just wanted her children to be happy and realize their goals. She felt blessed that they even had goals and was completely supportive of each child, treating them with equal affection. Diana would later say that were it not for her mother’s encourag
ement, she probably would not have become a singer—and, indeed, she probably wouldn’t even have got as far as the Primettes. “I remember her beauty, her zest for life,” she has recalled of Ernestine. “Her goodness almost defies description, as bright as the sunlight that poured in through her yellow kitchen windows, as sweet as home-cooked jelly. Her love gave me strength.”

  Also, Ernestine had enjoyed her chance in the spotlight, entering singing contests when she was young and holding her own aspirations for a career in show business. Though she put all of that behind her when she married, she still loved to sing gospel hymns around the house, such as the hopeful “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the name of which Ethel Waters, the great black actress and singer, borrowed for the title of her autobiography. Ernestine’s voice was intoxicating. It was sweet, lilting and high-pitched—“I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free.” Somehow, though, the sound was also very sad, as if Ernestine really did long to be free … But from what? No one knew. “My mother was a very classy lady who was dressed from the time she walked out of her bedroom,” Diana would recall. “She cared very much about her person and her hair. She always sat up straight in a chair, beautiful and tall, very trim and slim. The other mothers were always fat, and I used to joke that she was too good-looking to be my mother. I’d say, ‘I want a nice, big fat mama.’”