Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I can’t say we minded that Diane was going to be doing all of the lead singing,” Mary countered. “We wanted to be a success, and if that’s what it took we were willing to go along with it. Plus, we just knew that we’d have our chance eventually.”

  Mary and Florence didn’t know Berry well enough to realize that, once his mind was locked into a decision, it was difficult to alter his position on it. They thought that, despite what he had said, they would be able to sing a song if it was “right” for them, like when Florence sang lead on their second single, “Buttered Popcorn.” They didn’t realize that, from this point on, Diana would pretty much be doing all of the lead singing, and that few songs would ever be right enough for them.

  Berry’s fateful decision was based on his business sense as much as any affinity for Diana. She really did have the best, most “commercial” singing voice. Florence’s voice didn’t have the character, discipline or assurance of Diana’s. Mary’s was a good voice, too, and very different from what one might expect from a pop or soul singer. She seemed to actually be a jazz singer at heart. Her sound was misty and sexy, but not necessarily the kind of voice that would jump out at the listener on a pop record. Many years later, in 1996, Berry explained it this way:

  Look, Diana had magic. She had feeling. Exuberance. Florence had a good voice, sure. Florence was fine. She did what she did, but she wasn’t unique. Mary was fine. She did what she did. It was fine. No one ever said those two couldn’t sing. They wouldn’t have been in the group if they couldn’t sing. But, Diana? She was more than fine. Her voice was totally unique, totally something you never heard before. It wasn’t just a big voice, you know, a loud voice. Just because a person sings louder than another person doesn’t make that person a better singer. Also, Diana put everything into it, her shoulders, her body … all of it.

  Indeed, because of its nasal tonality, Diana’s voice seemed to cut right through any orchestration—you paid as much attention to her as you did to the insistent Motown rhythm. Plus, stylistically she was really quite amazing; she knew how to caress a lyric or turn a phrase in such a way that you had to wonder whether it was the result of careful tutoring in the studio or sheer instinct. Her producers insisted that her style was instinctive. Listening to unreleased versions of songs made popular by the Supremes in later years, it’s easy to see that Diana could record the same song many different ways, and all of the performances would be worthy of release because she would always give a real performance in the studio. Moreover, Diana’s enunciation was impeccable; indeed, her critics said that it was sometimes too precise and affected. That didn’t matter. Berry wanted his Motown songs to tell a story, and he knew that when Diana sang them the listener could always understand every word. Simply put, Berry simply felt that once his writers and producers could focus on exactly which voice they would be constructing their songs around, it would be easier for them to come up with hit records for the Supremes. It didn’t take long. Shortly after that meeting, a song was created that would change the course of history for the Supremes and all the other Motown stars as well.

  Lamont Dozier recalled:

  One evening after a writing session for the Marvelettes, Eddie, Brian and [writer-producer] Mickey Stevenson were playing a game of cards while I was tinkering on the piano. I came up with this little melody and the question, “Where did our love go?” Brian heard it and said, “Hey! That’d be great for the Marvelettes.” He had coproduced “Please Mr. Postman” for them and was always looking for another hit for them. “Let’s work it out.” So, we all gathered around and quickly wrote this song—“Where Did Our Love Go.”

  A few days later, at least, as the story goes, when H-D-H played the song for the Marvelettes, they were unanimous in their disapproval and refused to record it. It’s surprising that the girls would have had any say in this at all. Usually—if not always—the artists didn’t get to pick and choose their songs, especially at this juncture in Motown history. They recorded whatever was put in front of them, and that was the end of it. They were just happy to be recording anything and, really, the songs were usually pretty good anyway. They were teenagers happy to be at Motown. It wasn’t as if they had strong artistic opinions. At any rate, Wanda Rogers—who was one of the Marvelettes—says that the group vetoed the song because they thought it was “absolutely ridiculous. The most pitiful tune we’d ever heard. We never dreamed it would amount to anything.”

  Berry Gordy suggested that H-D-H offer the song to the Supremes. It was melodic and easygoing, and he thought it more their style. The girls, it’s been said, disliked the song more than had the Marvelettes. This, too, is hard to believe. Indeed, it’s often difficult to discern the truth amid so much fable and fantasy, especially when it involves the history of something that would turn out to be so important to our pop culture.

  This much is known for certain: it was Eddie’s idea to have Mary Wilson sing lead on the song—a soft, rocking ballad that seemed perfect for her contralto voice. However, Brian reminded everyone of Berry’s recent pronouncement. “Diane’s the lead singer,” he told the others. “Didn’t you hear about what Berry said?”

  Of course, Mary was disappointed. She now says that she didn’t particularly like the song either, but a lead was a lead and she knew they were about to become more scarce for her and Florence. Fatefully, had this decision gone her way it very well could have changed a lot more than just the arrangement of a pop song. Diana Ross’s entire life and career might have unfolded in a very different way—not to mention Mary Wilson’s.

  So, it was decided. The Supremes would record the song, and Diana would sing lead on it. Lamont Dozier recalled that the session for “Where Did Our Love Go,” which took place on 8 April 1964, was “a pretty trying experience. The girls weren’t into it. They just didn’t want to do it, and so they had an attitude about it. We had some nice background arrangements for them, but they were so haphazard about the way they sang them that we said, ‘Forget it. Let’s just make it simple.’ And we just changed it to having them sing ‘baby, baby’ over and over again. It couldn’t have been much simpler than that.”

  It was against this backdrop of frustration and disappointment that another decision was made about the production, one that would turn out to be significant. Dozier distinctly remembers the breakthrough: “We were used to cutting Diane in the higher key that we had recorded her in previously. For this one tune, though, we decided to drop the key. The result was surprising: in a lower key, she sounded, well, sexy. We were very impressed with that, but we didn’t think too much more about it. We were just glad when the session was over.”

  Afterwards, H-D-H played the song for Berry. He listened to it, chewing on his tongue as was his habit back then. The sound from his speakers was a pure, crisp and memorable little chant. “Baby, baby,” the girls sang, plaintively, “where did our love go?” The fellows had even added a foot-stomping sound at the beginning of the record to give it a unique lift. They actually had an Italian kid named Michael Valvano come in and stamp his foot on a piece of plywood next to a microphone. Back in those days, the producers of Motown songs did whatever they had to do to get the sound they wanted, and almost every trick they used seemed to work. After the foot-clomping sound, drums, guitars, tambourines, xylophones and handclaps relentlessly keep time.

  “So what do you think?” Eddie asked Berry once the record was finished playing.

  “I think I need to hear it again,” he said, frowning.

  They played it again.

  “Well,” Berry said, after a second listen. “It’s not bad, fellows. It’ll go Top 40, maybe even Top 20, and for the Supremes that would be amazing.”

  “But not to number one?” Lamont asked.

  Berry laughed and shook his head. “Sorry, man. It’s not good enough for number one.”

  For H-D-H, that conclusion was more than a little disappointing. It was back to the drawing board for them.

  The first hit: “Where Did Ou
r Love Go”

  At the time that “Where Did Our Love Go” was being prepared for release, another revue was being planned, but not by Motown. Dick Clark’s annual Cavalcade of Stars was gearing up for a summer tour. Taylor Cox, who was one of the chief executives in the Motown management division, recalled:

  Because Brenda Holloway [a Gordy discovery from Los Angeles] had a monstrous record on the charts called “Every Little Bit Hurts” Dick Clark wanted her on his tour. Berry was interested in doing something with the Supremes in order to generate a little money in their account to pay for all of their flop recording sessions. So, I told Dick that he could have Brenda Holloway, but he’d have to also take Diane and the girls. He balked at that. He didn’t want them. But he did want Brenda, and he got the point that he wasn’t getting her unless he took the Supremes too. So, he offered us six hundred dollars a week for the girls, which wasn’t even enough to cover their traveling costs. But we sent them out, anyway.

  It was in June of 1964 that the Supremes left Detroit on the Cavalcade of Stars, billed as “others” on a show starring Gene Pitney, the Shirelles, Brenda Holloway … and others. (The rest of the others included the Crystals and Brian Hyland.) A problem had arisen, however, because the girls’ chaperone Ardena Johnston had quit over a confrontation she’d had with Diana Ross in Washington, and Esther Edwards was not available for this tour. “Who can we get?” Berry asked in a meeting of the Motown executives, according to Taylor Cox. “Who can go out there with the Supremes?”

  “Well, the question is really, ‘Who can we get who can handle Diane?’ isn’t it?” Taylor said. “I mean, that’s why the first one quit, isn’t it?”

  “Good point,” said Berry. He shook his head. “I don’t think she’ll listen to anyone, really, except me, and I sure ain’t going.” He gave it a little more thought. “Other than me,” he concluded, “I think the only one she probably listens to is her mama.”

  “Well, fine, let’s get her, then,” Taylor suggested.

  “Her mama?”

  “Yeah, her mama.”

  The next day, without first consulting Diana, Berry telephoned Ernestine Ross and asked if she would like to go out on the road as a chaperone for her daughter and the others. Ernestine was nothing if not an expert on all things to do with Diana, and she knew that this idea would not sit well with her. Still, as far as she was concerned, it was a good one. However, she said she would have to ask Diana how she felt about the matter before committing to it. Not surprisingly, Diana was ambivalent about having one of her parents on the road with her. She was twenty, a young woman now, and she valued her freedom. Still, she and Ernestine did have a good relationship; Diana thought the world of her. It wasn’t as if Fred was going to be out there with her, which would have been a real problem. Moreover, she liked the idea of her mother having the opportunity to see her onstage every night, especially considering that she’d been one of her earliest allies in her quest to become a professional singer. So, yes, she decided, she would go along with it. “In fact,” Taylor Cox recalled, “she said she would love it. So, the six hundred dollars they were getting would have to also be used to pay the mother, who I think got about fifty dollars a week.” It should also be mentioned that when Ernestine told Fred Ross that she was going to go on the road with the Supremes, he was not exactly supportive of the idea—not surprisingly given his reservations about Diana’s singing career. It’s telling of Ernestine’s sense of independence from him, though, that she decided to go anyway. She wasn’t about to let him tell her what to do any more than her daughter would allow anyone to dictate to her.

  “When my mother went out with us, she loved it,” Diana Ross recalled.

  She taught us a lot of things about, for instance, going into a nice, beautiful dressing room and leaving it that way. Or going into a messy one, cleaning it up and leaving it better than we found it so that when someone else came after us they would say we left them a clean room instead of how nasty it was. Before long, everyone started calling her Mama Supreme. She wasn’t like some authoritative person over us. She was there mostly as a friend. They even played tricks on her. She was afraid of spiders, for instance, and somebody on the bus had a rubber spider, put it over her and she went running through the bus scared and screaming. Everybody just cracked up. I’ll never forget that. She was too much!

  “We had only enough money for two rooms on the road,” Ernestine Ross remembered, “so the girls had to take turns rooming with me. They always hated to room with me because I’d make them pick up. Diane and Mary used to go out every night after the show, but Florence hardly ever dated. Florence and I would stay in the room and play cards and wait for the other two to come home.”

  Ernestine was very fair with the girls, showing no favoritism to her daughter in any of the usual squabbles, clucking and fussing over all of them. However, having her mother around seemed to make Diana a little uneasy; she was more reserved on this tour than she had been on the Motor Town Revue. It could be said then that Ernestine’s presence had the desired effect on her daughter. Still, there were tensions and arguments during the tour, as would be expected. At one point the driver evicted Diana and one of the members of the Crystals from the bus, much to Ernestine’s embarrassment, because the two got into a screaming match over a pair of shoes.

  The impact the Supremes had on their audiences during this tour was also to be expected. As had been the case during the earlier Motor Town Revue, the crowd was politely confused by the group’s polished demeanor and versatile repertoire. It was a rock and roll revue, so it’s not surprising that some of the youngsters were perplexed by the group’s choice of material—or, it should be clarified, Berry’s choice of material for the group. Dick Clark recalls, “I was walking through the backstage area of one of the auditoriums we played and as I passed by a dressing room I heard three a cappella voices singing ‘People’ from Funny Girl. It was the Supremes. I remember thinking, ‘Hmmm. Three black girls from Detroit singing Barbra Streisand songs on a rock and roll tour. How odd.’”

  Actually it had been Florence who was responsible for putting “People” in the show, something most people still don’t know about that early tour. “Putting the act together, there was never any disagreement over the songs to be included,” she once recalled. “It was a committee decision. I picked out two tunes for the show, ‘People,’ and ‘I Am Woman,’ both Streisand tunes. I felt that Diane could really do a good job on ‘I Am Woman.’ She did a fantastic job. On ‘People,’ Diane and I did alternate. I did the majority, and she did the middle part.”

  “We were wearing these funny little silk outfits then,” Diana recalled. “They weren’t sequined. We looked like fish on stage. They came all the way up and we thought we were really sexy. I can remember skinny little me in one of those outfits …”

  In yet another twist of fate in the Supremes’ saga, during the time the group was on the road with Dick Clark’s revue, Motown reorganized its national record distribution by making deals that guaranteed its product placement in major sales outlets. Also, after five years in business, the company firmed up its relationships with important radio station program directors. Therefore, when “Where Did Our Love Go” was finally released on 17 June 1964, it would be one of the first beneficiaries of these stronger media ties. In the midst of Elvis Presley mania and the first inklings of the forthcoming British invasion, this glossily arranged new Supremes record seemed to fill a void. Unlike the previous Supremes records, this one was eagerly accepted by record buyers. If it had been released earlier, though, Motown probably wouldn’t have been able to fill all of the orders for it, and it would have been lost. Luckily for everyone, it was as if fate and circumstance had conspired to everyone’s advantage. “Where Did Our Love Go” soared up the charts. As it made its ascent, the Supremes finally received billing on the revue. No longer were they just one of the others; rather, their name was up on the marquee along with those of all of the other major attractions. Also, the
ir position on the revue was moved closer to the end of the show, which is where the headliners were always placed. Truly, these were thrilling developments.

  “When we’d go onstage every night and sing the song, the kids would just start screaming,” Diana Ross remembered. “We’d look at each other wondering what the fuss was about. Doing all of these one-night shows, we never had the time to think about what was happening with the record. Sure, when I called home, my sisters told me that it was being played—but that didn’t matter to me because they played all of our stuff in Detroit. They just never played the records anywhere else.”

  “You could hear it in the streets,” Rita Ross recalled. “You’d open your window and the neighbors were playing it. You’d go to a store and it would be on the radio. All of a sudden, it just seemed like my sister’s voice was everywhere I turned. That was very exciting.”

  The Supremes were about a month into the tour when “Where Did Our Love Go” began outselling all of the other pop and rhythm and blues songs released at that time. It was also receiving more radio airplay than any other record. All of this momentum and popularity catapulted the song to the number-one spot in the charts produced by Billboard, the most prestigious music industry trade publication. By the time the revue was winding down, the Supremes were actually headlining over Brenda Holloway, Gene Pitney, the Shirelles … and all of the others. Indeed, Dick Clark had accidentally secured the number-one act in America for just $600 a week. After the Cavalcade of Stars had performed in major cities throughout the East Coast and Midwest, the tour finished in Oklahoma. Berry then telephoned the girls to give them even more good news: they could take a plane back to Detroit instead of hopping on another bus. That’s when they knew they had finally made it.