Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  One of Bob’s former girlfriends in Los Angeles says that Bob telephoned her with the news that he could no longer see her. When she asked why, he told her that he was marrying Diana. “I didn’t even know he knew Diana Ross,” she said. “I thought he was joking. Before hanging up, he apologized to me, saying, ‘I just didn’t want you to read it first in the newspapers.’”

  The ceremony took place at one o’clock in the morning at the Silver Bells Chapel. Suzanne dePasse, the Motown executive who was also Berry’s close associate at the company, was put in the difficult position of being Diana’s witness, but also, apparently, promising not to tell Berry about the ceremony until after the fact. She recalled, “It was, like, one minute we were grilling hot dogs and the next minute everyone zoomed home to get a bag and we were on our way to Las Vegas.”

  Bob wore a simple sports jacket and slacks. Diana, a paisley pantsuit and dark glasses. “I didn’t even know who she was,” said the reverend who performed the ceremony. “The cab driver had to tell me. She seemed happy, as did he. It was rushed, though. They just wanted to get it over with. It wasn’t particularly romantic between them, though they did seem happy.” None of Diana’s other friends or family was present, including her parents. Ernestine was staying in Diana’s home at the time, so it was surprising that she was not at the ceremony. “The next day, we told my mother,” Diana later recalled. “She was shocked. All of our friends were shocked because they didn’t think we’d go through with it. After it was all over, we were shocked.”

  “I was surprised that Diana didn’t tell her mother,” said one associate of hers at the time. “She and Ernestine were close, but in the end Diana was the type of woman who never wanted to feel she was asking anyone for permission to do anything. That she didn’t include her mother in such an important thing when Ernestine was actually staying with her in Beverly Hills … well, I found it confounding at first, but not surprising.”

  The newlyweds didn’t have much of a honeymoon. The day after the wedding, Diana returned to Los Angeles to continue work on her first television special for ABC. That same day, Suzanne dePasse went to work at Motown with the pending chore of having to be the one to tell Berry that Diana had married Bob. She asked him to come into her office. He sat down and, while cringing, she gave him the news.

  “You gotta be kidding me?” Berry said, seeming bewildered. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, I’m not, Berry,” she said.

  “This is a joke, right?”

  “No, it’s not, Berry.”

  “I had all kind of emotions,” Berry would later say. “I was surprised and shocked, but at the same time I was relieved.” He says that the surprising wave of relief he felt was because, in that moment, he realized that the pressure of having such a personal relationship with the company’s biggest superstar had suddenly been alleviated. Berry tried to be philosophical, but he was hit hard by this turn of events. He couldn’t believe that Diana would do such a thing without consulting him about it. He knew she had been pulling away, especially in recent months. But, still, they had maintained their intimate relationship. So, her marrying someone else on the sly was perplexing. He was hurt. Chris Clark came into his office on the day he got the news about Diana and Bob, and tried to comfort him. “You have to admit,” she said, trying to be cheery. “For Diana to pull one on you, well, that’s pretty impressive.” Even he had to admit that it was true. He then took Chris to Bermuda for a vacation so that he could clear his head and come to terms with the surprising and, really, life-changing news.

  Within two weeks of the wedding, Diana announced that she was pregnant. It was then that people at Motown, and even Berry, started to wonder what was really going on with her. He decided not to ask too many questions about it, though. Still, he had to wonder, especially since he knew they had been together only about six weeks before the wedding. “Once she began to show, I did have a few fleeting thoughts,” he would recall. “Could it possibly be … ? Nah.”

  Diana knew the truth. She was pregnant with Berry’s child. She also knew, however, that Berry had evaded any talk of marriage to her many times in the past.

  There may have also been another consideration for her. In 1992, her brother Chico Ross told this author,

  Here’s what I know: she was on tour, and she found out she was pregnant. She’d really, really wanted kids and I think I even remember that she had thought about adopting as a single parent. She once told me that there was something in her that made her worry that since she had this great career maybe it was too much to ask for her to also have children, a family. So, when she found out she was pregnant, she was pretty happy. All excited, she flew back to Los Angeles to tell Berry and …

  Chico then explained to me that, upon returning to Los Angeles, Diana discovered that Berry and Chris were still together and was extremely hurt.

  Diana did love Berry, which was obvious, and carrying his child must have felt somehow right. “When she found out she was pregnant,” recalled someone who knew her well at the time, “she had a lot of feelings, obviously. But the overwhelming emotion she felt was happiness. She was just so happy about it. Then, of course, all of the other stuff came into play.”

  Diana’s decision not to tell Berry does suggest that she really did want to move on with her life without him. After all, what better way to have him on a permanent basis would there have been than for her to go to him with the news that they were having a baby? It’s not what she wanted, though. Indeed, she was clear about that then, and she still is today. She says that she did not want to be Berry’s wife.

  Bob was absolutely unconditional in his love for Diana—more so than most men may have been in the same situation. He said it didn’t matter that she was pregnant with another man’s child. He loved her and wanted to marry her. If she was his wife, he said, he would raise the child as his own—and it would be a secret the two would keep. She agreed.

  “The blues? But why?”

  Diana Ross once had a dream. She’s said that she almost wrote about it in her Secrets of a Sparrow memoir, but decided against it. She should have. It says a lot. In her dream, she was confronting Berry Gordy over one thing or another. She put her hands on her hips and demanded to know, “What makes you so smart?”

  He looked right back at her and answered, “You.”

  Even before she left the Supremes, Berry was anxious for the next step in her career. The movies. Not only did he want to see her move forward, he also wanted to see her start making some real money. It’s really surprising, when one takes a look at Motown’s management statements during these years, how little money everyone was making.

  For instance, Motown widely proclaimed in press releases that Diana was making $100,000 per engagement. Sometimes—not always—with the Supremes, that was true. For their final engagement at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, the group was paid more than $100,000 for the two-week gig, this according to the their IMC (International Management Company) contract—about $16,000 of which went back to Motown for its management commission. However, that was a huge amount of money for the group to be paid and usually they earned far less—maybe $25,000 for a two-week engagement. After she left the Supremes, Diana’s fee stayed about the same. In February 1971, she was paid about $25,000 for a two-week engagement at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami, Florida—$5,000 of which went back to Motown management. From the balance, she had to pay for all of her own expenses, including her musicians and background singers (but at least she didn’t have to split the money with the other two Supremes). Moreover, the William Morris Agency, which booked the engagement, took another 10 percent. Also, of course, she had her personal expenses and taxes—and payroll taxes, too.

  Truly, there was no way Diana was going to become a very wealthy woman, considering the money she was thus far earning. In fact, according to her statements, she cleared less than $6,000 for those two weeks at the Eden Roc. Berry’s artists often complained about not making much money a
t Motown but, if one looks at the figures, Berry wasn’t making much either—at least on concert and TV appearances. It was record sales that really filled the Motown coffers and, according to the recording contracts, it would seem that Motown got the lion’s share of those proceeds.

  To be a movie star had never really been Diana Ross’s goal. She had always wanted to sing and, of course, as a result of the careful exploitation and commercialization of her great talent by Berry Gordy and the Motown machinery, she became, arguably, the preeminent female vocalist of the 1960s. It was Berry’s dream that his protégée not be limited to a career as a pop singer—and that in stretching her horizons he would also push aside any restrictions the public and industry might have about Motown. But how to go about it? How could he take a young woman who was widely viewed as the sloe-eyed lead singer of a pop confection called the Supremes and transform her—not only in the public’s view but in her own—into a serious and highly paid Hollywood actress?

  One thing she already had going for her: that face. Certainly, no one looked quite like that. She was so beautiful in the early 1970s with the flawless ebony-colored skin, the large, expressive eyes—that smile!—Berry knew that she would, as he put it, “look absolutely amazing” on the big screen. But could she act? Well … he wasn’t convinced that she could sing just ten years earlier, and look how that turned out! He believed anything was possible of her, and she believed in him no matter their personal problems of recent years. She also knew, as had been proved many times over, that there was no telling how fate and circumstance might conspire to cause a surprising opportunity.

  Indeed, the seeds of Diana’s movie success were planted in a strange way, back when she was with the Supremes. It was in 1969 when Diana Ross and the Supremes opened a two-week engagement at the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Diana was never fond of performing at the Waldorf because the payment for the Supremes was so ludicrously low there—even by Motown standards. For example, for that two-week engagement—14–31 May—the group was to be paid just $7,000. Of course, as stated above, they had all of their deductions to consider and then had to split the money three ways. If each girl cleared $1,000 a week at the Waldorf, she was one lucky Supreme—and they worked hard, too: two shows a night, every night! “We’re killing ourselves for nothing,” Diana would complain when they played the Waldorf. However, Berry would always counter with, “It’s not about the money when you play a place like the Waldorf. It’s about who will see you there, what connections you’ll make.” He was right about that, as it would turn out. On opening night, a man sat in the audience who would change the life stories of both Diana and Berry. He was Jay Weston, and he sat ringside with Cinema Center Films president Gordon Stulberg.

  At this time, Jay was interested in doing a movie about the life and times of tortured jazz singer Billie Holiday. Weston had met Holiday in 1957 when she performed at the Newport Jazz Festival and been so enchanted by her that, two years later, he optioned her heartbreaking autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. In the mid-1960s, with a script based on the book by writer Terence McCloy, Weston cut a deal with CBS Features to mount the movie. His first choice to star as Holiday was the brilliant black actress Abbey Lincoln, whom he had cast opposite Sidney Poitier in For the Love of Ivy. His second choice was the equally remarkable singer and actress Diahann Carroll. He also had in mind the actress Diana Sands, who had appeared in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway and The Owl and the Pussycat on film.

  During the show, Weston nudged Stulberg and pointed at Diana as she sat on the lip of the stage and sang “My Man,” her solo in the act at that time. “There she is,” he whispered. “That’s my Billie Holiday. Not Lincoln, Carroll or Sands. But Diana Ross.”

  Stulberg frowned, blinked a few times and whispered back, “Huh? That’s kinda crazy, Jay. I mean, she’s good and all, but she’s no Billie Holiday.” The next day, Jay and Gordon met about the idea. Again, Jay was unsuccessful in convincing Gordon of anything having to do with Diana.

  “Look, she’s one of the Supremes,” Stulberg said finally. “I like the Supremes as much as the next guy. The one girl in the middle is good, too. You want to put her in the movies, too? And what about the other one? We can’t leave her out, can we?”

  “I was being facetious, of course,” he later recalled. “I just didn’t get Jay’s enthusiasm for Diana. ‘If you change your mind about this Diana Ross obsession,’ I told him, ‘come back to me. CCF will do it with Diahann Carroll, but not with Diana.’ He believed in Diana so much, he was willing to take the concept somewhere else. So, at that point, CCF was then out of the picture.”

  In June 1969, at just about the time plans were finalized for Diana’s last engagement for the Supremes, Jay Weston set up a meeting with Berry Gordy at Berry’s Los Angeles office. Once there, he put forth his idea of having Diana star as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. As much as Berry was interested in establishing Diana and Motown in films, Jay’s idea took him by surprise. Caught off guard, Berry acted uninterested. “Look,” he told Jay, “I loved Billie Holiday. But she was a junkie, and there is no way I am going to give you my girl to do a movie about a junkie. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

  Actually, Berry did not have such a pejorative view about Billie, no matter what he might have said that day. He had actually once met and admired Billie Holiday. In fact, he had a photograph taken of him and Billie at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit, where Maurice King conducted the house orchestra and Berry’s sisters ran the photograph concession.

  “He turned me down flat,” Jay Weston later recalled. “He was suspicious and acted superior. But it didn’t sour me on the idea because I knew she was right for the role.”

  Although Weston was a movie producer, he didn’t realize at the time that he was facing a pretty good actor in his face-to-face with Berry. Though Berry tried to appear smug, secretly he was thrilled with the idea that a successful film producer had come to him with an idea to star Diana in a movie. This was precisely the kind of opportunity he had hoped to find in Los Angeles, and the project had, magically enough, fallen right into his lap. “If he wants her bad enough, he’ll be back,” Berry told Ewart Abner. (In a short time, it would be Abner who would run the day-to-day Motown Records operation while Berry focused on movies.)

  According to what Abner recalled, Berry summoned his secretary as soon as Jay left his home. “Get me Diane on the line.”

  “She’s in Washington. The Supremes are performing at the Carter Barron this week.”

  “I don’t care where she is … just get her!”

  Coincidentally, Look magazine had recently called Motown to arrange a cover story on the Supremes. Berry’s staff persuaded the editors that the focus of the story should really be on the possibility of Diana leaving the group, and the cover photograph should be of just her, alone. It had been finalized that week—everyone at Motown was buzzing about Diana’s first solo magazine cover. When Berry finally reached Diana in Washington, he asked her, “Black, what do you know about Billie Holiday?”

  “Who?” It came from nowhere. She didn’t know why he would ask such a question of her.

  “Billie Holiday! Billie Holiday!” he said impatiently. “Find out what you can about her. Have someone do some research for you. Oh, and Black, when you talk to the guy from the magazine, mention Billie and know what the hell you’re talking about. Talk about the blues.”

  “The blues? But why?” she asked.

  “Just do it.” With that, he clicked off. One can only imagine her reaction on the other end of that line. But Berry, ever the shrewd operator, had decided to use the media to explore the Billie Holiday idea.

  A few months later—in September 1969—Look published the cover feature. “Just listening to Lady Day brings sadness to me,” Diana told writer Jack Hamilton, “and I’m trying to find out everything about her. I want to sing about blues and sadness, a natural part of life. I’m trying to find out the real psychological reasons Billie Holid
ay gave up and took to drink and drugs.”

  “What was that Billie Holiday stuff for?” Diana asked Berry later.

  “Oh, never mind about that,” he answered. “I’m working on something.”

  Also at around this time, Berry decided to have Diana sing “My Man” on a Bob Hope special. She wanted to emulate Streisand’s Funny Girl performance. “But, c’mon, Diane. That version’s not the best one,” Berry told her. “You gotta sing it like Billie Holiday.”

  “But I’ve never even heard Billie Holiday sing that song,” Diana argued.

  Gordy sent his aides to scour record stores in Los Angeles in the hope of finding Holiday’s version, but with no luck. Finally musical conductor Gil Askey came into the office with the Holiday recording. Berry summoned Diana and played it for her in front of Askey. “Now listen to this, Black, and sing it exactly the same way on the Bob Hope special,” he told her—which is precisely what she did, though she didn’t think Billie’s performance was very good (“I listened to that first record and thought, ‘What’s so great about Billie Holiday?’” she would later admit). As well as “My Man,” Berry did allow Diana and the Supremes to perform two other songs associated with Barbra on that same program: “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long” and “Cornet Man.”

  As soon as the article appeared in Look magazine, Jay Weston went back to Berry, just as Berry suspected he might. However, Berry turned him down again. Jay’s interest in Diana wasn’t strong enough; Berry wanted the man to hunger for her. After a disappointed Jay left Berry’s office a second time, Berry once again said to Ewart Abner, “Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”