Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Years later, Smokey would remember that Berry was perplexed by Diana’s singing voice. Was it a voice, he asked Smokey, or just an oddly pitched sound? “So, man, what do you think?” Berry asked Smokey as he played “I Want a Guy” for him. “Be honest with me. She sounds kinda whiny, huh? Kinda weird, ain’t she?”

  Smokey was about as close to a musical prodigy in Detroit at this time as anyone could be and he was easily able to identify the commercial possibilities of anyone’s voice. Admittedly, the untidy arrangement for “I Want a Guy,” with its annoying organ breaks, made for one of the most appalling recordings Smokey had heard from Hitsville thus far. Still, that state of affairs certainly wasn’t Diana’s fault. Smokey told Berry that Diana may not have had the best of singing voices, but she did have a lot of “personality” supporting it, and the combination made for—Berry was right—an interesting sound. “And there’s nothing wrong with having a sound,” Robinson concluded. “Plenty of chicks have great voices, but this is something different, something better. If she catches on, man, watch out!”

  Berry agreed with Smokey and, a few weeks later, decided to sign the girls to a recording contract. However, their group name would first have to be changed. He said he didn’t understand just what a Primette was, and he didn’t like it. “Well, you see, it means—” one of them began to explain.

  “Never mind,” Berry snapped. “We’re changing it.”

  The four girls were stunned by Berry’s decision. After all, they had spent the last two years establishing what they thought was a reputation in the Detroit area for the Primettes. Actually, no one knew who they were or cared, but could they be blamed for having group pride, and for getting as far as they had in Detroit? Still, Berry had a bigger vision for them. “Look, by the time I finish with you girls, everyone will know who you are,” he promised then. They couldn’t very well argue with that.

  Diana continues the story:

  Janie Bradford was working at the offices at the switchboard. And Berry said we had to get a new name right away. Well, we thought about it and just couldn’t come up with one. We made lists of names. I had a list, Mary had one and Florence another. We couldn’t agree, and they needed this name on the contracts. So Janie handed a list that she thought might be good ideas, and Florence just picked the name, the Supremes. By the time we got to the studio, “The Supremes” was on the contracts and it was all settled. I hated the name. Florence just grabbed it because it wasn’t Primettes or Marvelettes or any other kind of “ette.” It was the only name on the list which wasn’t. So that’s why she took it. The Supremes!

  Fred Ross’s bad idea

  When Diana Ross returned home one day with the news that she had an opportunity to sign a contract with Berry Gordy Enterprises, her father, Fred Ross, told her, “You are not signing any contract with anyone’s fly-by-night enterprise.” Father and daughter had had many months of arguments about Diana’s show business aspirations, all of which basically boiled down to the fact that he didn’t want her to have any. He still wanted her to attend college and do something “sensible” with her life, as both he and his wife had done. Academia and practicality had been important hallmarks of the Ross family history, and Fred Ross was determined that his daughter Diane continue the tradition. It also began to seem to some observers as if Fred actually felt threatened by Diana’s raw ambition. He wanted to be in full charge of his family and started to regard Diana’s strong-willed determination as a sort of defiance against him.

  While she was well aware of his feelings about her future, she certainly never dreamed he would betray her—or try to sabotage things for her. However, that’s exactly what appears to have happened a few weeks after the girls auditioned for Berry Gordy at Hitsville. Diana came down with the flu right before the group was scheduled for a few local bookings and a recording session. She was upset, and she knew that she couldn’t sing. As she and Ernestine discussed the matter, Fred had an idea, and not a very good one, as far as Diana was concerned. He suggested that her older sister, Barbara Jean—the member of the Ross family with whom Diana was most competitive—temporarily replace her in the group. “She can fill in,” he said, offhandedly. “She can sing, too.” Diana simply couldn’t fathom how he could suggest such a thing. She made it clear that his idea was not a solution—if she were not present there would be no performance. It would have to be rescheduled, she insisted. “And don’t you dare even mention it to anyone else,” she told him before she fled from the room, crying. Even Ernestine, who tried to understand everyone’s position in a family debate, fell clearly on the side of Diana. After all, she had spent so much energy on every aspect of the Primettes: their sound, their look, the choreography. For Fred to suggest that she could be replaced seemed cruel. Moreover, Fred knew full well how competitive his daughters were with one another, that Diana was also jealous of all of the approval Barbara managed to elicit from him.

  It’s unclear whether he truly saw this proposition as an acceptable scenario, or if he was trying to undermine Diana’s confidence. She, after all, had begun to jeopardize his position of power in the family. Her unstoppable confidence and unwillingness to accept failure made it clear that she could very well eclipse him in many ways. He would later say he was just trying to be involved in his daughters’ lives but, arguably, he had picked a questionable way of going about it if, indeed, that’s what he was trying to do.

  Whatever his motives, Fred didn’t like being told what to do, especially by his sixteen-year-old daughter. Therefore, when Diana warned him not to tell anyone of his idea, he did just the opposite and called Richard Morris, the man who had produced the Primettes’ recent recordings. Apparently, at least according to what Morris later told Mary Wilson, Fred told him that Barbara Jean would be a suitable replacement because she had more of a “group mentality” than Diana.

  In the end, Barbara Jean did get into the group. She didn’t make it into the recording studio, but she managed to get through a couple of singing engagements in her sister’s stead. Fortunately, she had neither the voice nor the ambition to pursue a vocal career. She was only too willing to relinquish her temporary spot with the Primettes as soon as Diana recovered. But, that wasn’t really the point. Diana felt that Fred had betrayed her, and the hurt she felt over it was deep and abiding. What’s also interesting is that Fred may not have even understood the ramifications of what he had done because, many years later, when asked about it, he didn’t even remember doing it! “I may have,” he said. “Or, maybe not. Look, I can’t remember everything, can I?” he remarked to this author in an interview. Then, to make things even worse, he took another step. “I thought, okay, she’s mad at me now,” he recalled, “and so, as a present—and I thought this was a very generous thing to do—I went and enrolled her in Wayne State College, and I paid for her tuition in advance. When I told her I had done this, she wasn’t real happy about it, I can tell you that much. She and I were at odds now, for sure.”

  It’s likely that Fred’s stubborn nature may have led to bigger problems. Indeed, it seemed that his and Ernestine’s marriage was ending. “We separated in 1960,” he said in 1984. “Why? Well, a lot of reasons. Who knows why a marriage doesn’t work? Pressures. Disagreements about the children. There was a lot of stress. I loved Ernestine, though, and she knew it, and knows it. It would be about seventeen years before we finally divorced. I took a two-bedroom apartment in Detroit on Elmhurst, where I would live for more than twenty years. The kids would come by on weekends, on Sundays … We tried to all stay close. It’s not like Ernestine and I hated each other. The thing is,” he concluded, “she just didn’t want to be married to me anymore. That’s a fact.”

  After the matter of being temporarily replaced in the Primettes blew over, Diana came home with a recording contract from Berry Gordy Enterprises and Tamla Records.

  “I decided to leave the decision to her mother,” Fred remembered. “I was at a loss. I knew this would be the end of her education. She was ho
stile about it, and I was emotional. I was supposed to cosign the contract, and I just couldn’t.” Fred didn’t know it at the time, but Barbara Martin’s mother felt exactly the same way; she wanted her daughter out of the group and into college.

  The next day, Diana brought her mother to Hitsville, where they were joined by the other Primettes and their mothers. Berry’s sister Esther Edwards, an elegant, articulate, impressive woman, explained the contract to the parents. The lecture Edwards gave regarding growing up at Hitsville was more important to the mothers than any terms of the agreement. Diana recalls,

  Miss Edwards was telling us all about the details and how they didn’t want to have any trouble with the girls’ groups, like their running out and getting married or if they traveled out on the road there was the danger that they would mess around and get into trouble. She pointed out that they were unreliable. She didn’t want to have to bring us home to our mamas expecting babies. But we insisted that we weren’t going to be like that and we were going to work hard.

  Diana and Mary were about to turn seventeen in March; Flo was already seventeen and Barbara, eighteen. Throughout the meeting, a young baby-faced black man in a white angora sweater sat in a corner and listened, but said nothing.

  When the meeting was over, Ernestine leaned over and asked Diana the name of the man in the sweater. “Why, that’s Berry Gordy!” Diana enthused.

  Ernestine sized him up and didn’t comment until she and Diana got home. “You aren’t signing no contract with no kid like that,” she decided. It really was one obstacle after another along the road to Motown for Diana, wasn’t it? When Ernestine finally understood that Berry was only about ten years younger than Fred, she decided that perhaps he could be trusted. A couple of weeks later, the Primettes and their mothers—who would cosign their contracts—returned to Hitsville. Though Ernestine had certain apprehensions and Fred was dead set against the idea, their daughter Diana Ross was signed to Berry Gordy Enterprises and Tamla Records on 15 January 1961.

  A loss of innocence

  The Brewster Projects was a safer place to live than many Detroit-area neighborhoods—but that’s not to say it was ideal. Considering the options in the Detroit area for lower-income housing, Fred Ross had made the right decision in moving his family into these particular projects. But, over a period of just three years, from 1958—the time they moved into their home—until 1961, the Brewster Projects had become a very different place, with drug-trafficking and other illegal activity going on right alongside all of the singing and dancing on street corners. Many of the parents in the close-knit community were concerned about these changes, but there was really nothing anyone could do about them. “We just had to keep our children close by and under watch, which became tougher to do as they got older and wanted their freedom,” said one former neighbor of the Ross family’s. “Fred’s concern, though, that Diane would end up in the streets at night during her gigs with the Supremes, became a reality, though. It didn’t take long for that to happen.” Indeed, as much as Fred and Ernestine might have wanted to protect their children from what was happening outside the safety of their home, there was no holding them back—especially Diana. She was young and excited about life and about her singing ambitions. She was a happy kid, but she was also headstrong, as everyone knew.

  As soon as the Supremes were signed to Hitsville, their producer and manager, Richard Morris, began booking them at clubs like the 20 Grand in Detroit as the opening act for rhythm and blues stars such as Wilson Pickett. The 20 Grand was fairly safe. It was popular and even somewhat prestigious as a venue, and performing on the same show with someone like Wilson Pickett, who was a star even back then, was a real coup. There was a lot of excitement about it from the girls. However, Morris also sent them to dangerous ghetto establishments, which wasn’t quite as thrilling and was also just a tad scary.

  First of all, because they were underage, the girls were performing illegally in such dives, but no one really cared about that—and certainly Fred and Ernestine didn’t actually know about it. The audiences were a problem in the lower-class establishments. As the Supremes sang, people who’d had too much to drink would throw nickels and quarters onto the stage, which doesn’t sound so bad but, actually, there was something off-putting about it. They weren’t really paying attention to the girls’ singing. It was more like a sporting event—see which Supreme you can hit with a quarter. Once, Diana jumped down from the stage to dance with a bunch of inebriated customers, much to the other girls’ horror. As long as they were onstage, they felt somewhat protected. But joining the audience? That was unthinkable. When Morris tried to tell young Ross not to take those kinds of chances, she wasn’t exactly receptive to his advice. “Life is too short not to take chances!” she said, echoing her father’s sentiment “Life is too short to be poor,” but with a twist. Surely, if Fred had ever known that his teenage daughter was performing like this, she would not have been allowed to leave the house, which is precisely why she didn’t tell him or her mother.*

  Still, the Supremes were young and, to a certain extent, they felt invincible. That sense of nonchalance about their surroundings did not last long, however. Something happened to one of the girls to change things, and in a dramatic way.

  Florence Ballard was just seventeen but she always seemed more worldly than the others. She was smart and tough, but she was also sensitive at the core and the kind of youngster the others always went to for advice. She was the dependable type, always eager to help her mother, Lurlee, in raising their large family. A shapely teenager, she also had a sassy, sexy side. She was flirtatious, with a smoldering kind of teen sensuality, and as a result, very popular in the neighborhood with the young boys.

  Because Florence was the one who had formed the Primettes—now the Supremes—and who, for the most part, made decisions for the group—again, much to Diana’s chagrin—it came as somewhat of a surprise when she suddenly stopped showing up for rehearsals. The girls were friends, but they weren’t sisters. They didn’t bare their souls to one another; they had their own families for such sharing. Therefore, even though it was clear that something was not right, the others couldn’t identify the problem and also couldn’t find Florence to ask her about it. She didn’t have problems or issues or unusual melodramas in her life. She didn’t drink, have promiscuous sex, do drugs. Like the other young ladies in the group, her focus was on singing. Knowing this about Florence, her singing partners became very concerned. They continued to call her house every day, but could never get her on the telephone. Over the next couple of weeks their concern turned to bewilderment and then anger. They could come to no other conclusion for all of the missed rehearsals than that Florence was simply no longer interested in being in the group. Whenever they spoke to Lurlee about it, she was blunt in her confirmation: “She just don’t want to sing with you girls no more.”

  Barbara Martin was also out of the group for some reason at this time, leaving just Diana and Mary to proceed as a duet act. They began rehearsing at a popular establishment called the House of Beauty. This was the city’s first full-service salon for black women, founded in 1948 by the tall and beautiful Carmen Murphy—who actually looked a lot like Ernestine Ross. She had begun dabbling in the music business and started financing recordings by gospel singers. She must have been quite the entrepreneur because before anyone knew what was happening she had formed the House of Beauty record label, and even had the House of Beauty Orchestra playing on its songs. She loved Diana’s and Mary’s voices and wanted to sign them to a deal. This was an exciting development. “They came to me, these two little girls, and they were good together,” Murphy once recalled in an interview. “People were real interested in groups, but duets, now that was new and sort of novel …”*

  “They had a rehearsal hall down in the basement with a piano, and everything,” Diana also recalled.

  Carmen had a boys’ group that used to rehearse down there, too, and they worked with us, too. They taught us a
few songs. Everybody was interested in wanting to help us and teach us, I guess because we were so cute. So, we started rehearsing down there as a duet, me and Mary, learning two-part harmony, and we were good, too! She and I would just sing songs like “When I Fall in Love” and I thought, well, okay, maybe we can do this, just the two of us.

  But then Florence telephoned Mary and asked that she and Diana meet with her.

  When Florence was late for the meeting, her friends thought she would not appear. However, once she finally did arrive, they were in for a shock. The ebullient, fun-loving Florence they had known just months earlier was gone. In her place was a different girl, one who seemed sullen and depressed and had dark circles under her eyes. She didn’t look at all as if she was even happy to see her friends. “What in the world is going on with you, girl?” Diana wanted to know. Now she was scared, as was Mary.

  What happened next is the subject of much discussion. According to Mary Wilson, Florence told this story:

  One night a couple of months earlier, Florence had gone to a dance party at a popular club in Detroit called the Graystone Ballroom. Lurlee Ballard gave her permission for the outing because she felt it was a safe environment since liquor was not served during such teenage dances—and also Florence would be with her brother Billy. Something happened though, and the two were separated. Knowing that Lurlee would be upset if she came home later than the agreed-upon time, Florence decided to accept a ride with someone she knew. When she told the girls what she had done, they became concerned. “Well, who is this guy?” Mary wanted to know. “I’m not saying,” was Florence’s response, which only served to make them more anxious about where this story was headed. Florence continued, now in tears.