Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Most critics would be dumbfounded by the excellence of the Lady Sings the Blues recordings—as if the only material Diana had ever made were the Holland-Dozier-Holland-produced commercial hits with the Supremes. Those same critics probably never paid any attention to Diana’s recorded Rodgers and Hart performances or to her televised renditions of the Irving Berlin and Fats Waller catalogs, or to anything else she ever recorded that didn’t soar to the Top 10. It certainly wasn’t surprising to anyone who was familiar with her diverse body of work that Diana would be able to tackle the music of Billie Holiday. Don’t forget, this is the same woman who was determined to out-Streisand Barbra just a couple of years earlier on the Jule Styne score to Funny Girl. Not that Holiday has anything in common with Streisand, either—but to Diana Ross a challenge was a challenge.

  Making the movie

  On 14 August 1971, Diana Ross gave birth to a daughter, Rhonda Suzanne—her middle name in honour of Suzanne dePasse. Berry was at the hospital awaiting the birth, as was Bob. In an ironic twist, Mike Roshkind—who was also present—told one reporter, “There were so many nervous men there, you couldn’t tell who the father was.” At this point, it’s not known if Berry knew that he was Rhonda’s father. Indeed, he has indicated that he only began to figure it out as she got older. As far as Diana and Bob were concerned, though, they had made the right decision in presenting the baby as their own. In that regard, they sent out official announcements to their friends: “Diana and Bob Silberstein Announce the Arrival of their Daughter: Rhonda Suzanne Silberstein.” Diana doesn’t speak much about this time in her life, but one can only imagine the turmoil she must have felt about it. Meanwhile, she pulled herself together and threw herself back into her work in the movie.

  Once she felt satisfied with the recording sessions for Lady Sings the Blues, Diana became consumed by the story. She continued her research into Holiday’s life by studying photographs to assimilate facial expressions and posture and the fact that “She probably had bad feet.” She even noticed the combs, brushes and peanut-brittle wrappers in photos of her dressing room. She began asking questions about drug abuse of people she knew to be addicted, or who had quit. She interviewed people who had known Billie personally. “I found that if I talked to three or four people about her, they all knew a different Billie Holiday,” she said, “which is just like if you talked to people about Diana Ross. Some remember her as a bitchy so-and-so. Billie,” she hastened to add, “not me.”

  By now, Berry was also brimming with enthusiasm about the project—especially when he realized Diana’s devotion and saw how good she was in screen tests filmed with five potential leading men in a Paramount Studios office. Berry agreed to invest from his personal savings an amount that would surpass the studio budget of $2 million. Eventually, Billy Dee Williams, who had just finished work on the television film Brian’s Song, was selected to be her costar. Even though his had been the worst audition of the bunch who wanted the role, Berry saw something between him and Diana that he knew was magical. When Diana saw the footage of her work with Billy, she agreed. She sank down in her seat and told Jay Weston, “I just got chills. I’m in love.”*

  Finally, with a 100-page shooting script and 168 different scenes, principal photography for Lady Sings the Blues began on 3 December 1971. Motown’s Suzanne dePasse and Chris Clark had written a movie that was not really true and not really false … just a great Diana Ross vehicle. The film was very loosely based on Billie Holiday’s autobiography, which she wrote with William Dufty. It told the story of how Holiday, a child rape victim and former Manhattan prostitute, eventually became the toast of the town with a triumphant engagement at Carnegie Hall. Along the way, she has a stormy relationship with Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams), faces discrimination in the South, witnesses a lynching in an open field, suffers the anguish of an attack by Ku Klux Klan members while on the road with a band of white musicians and the murder of her friend Piano Man (played brilliantly by Richard Pryor) by two drug dealers.

  Until the movie was finished on 18 February 1972, changes in dialogue were made virtually every day. It was stressful, but Diana kept up with all of it and acquitted herself beautifully. It was an extremely physical movie, too; Ross had to grapple with Williams (with switchblade in hand, she actually cut him), bang around in a padded cell and scream through numerous drug withdrawal scenes. However, Gil Askey says that it wasn’t the physical or wildly emotional scenes that were the most difficult for Diana. “The ones that dealt with more provocative stuff were tough for her,” Gil recalled.

  Like when she’s sitting on the toilet wearing just her bra and shooting up heroin. She was more concerned about the bra thing than she was about the drug depiction.

  In another scene, Diana had to act like she was picking up money with her thighs while the audience leered and cheered her on. She was a wreck about it. She was very, very modest about her body. She never even liked to change clothes in front of anyone, not the other Supremes, not even her mother. Only time you ever saw her body was in a swimming suit. Not that she was gonna be showing any skin in the scene, but the idea of all that attention on her you-know-what freaked her out. After she told me she was nervous, I went out and got her a bottle of Courvoisier, told BG I was gonna do it. “C’mon girl,” I said. “Drink this. It’ll make you relax.” She gulped a couple of shots, took a deep breath and went in and did the scene.

  Diana wasn’t the only one nervous, though—so was Berry, especially during her love scenes with Billy Dee Williams. Williams recalled:

  Well, it was clear to me from the beginning that they had this psychodramatic, complex love affair going on, even though she was married to someone else. I don’t mean they were having sex; everyone knew that was over. But, just because you’re not having sex with a woman doesn’t mean you don’t still feel territorial where she’s concerned, and Berry did. I think there was only one scene in the whole film where Diana and I really kissed, and Berry made it very tough on us. It sounds silly in retrospect, but he really did not want the kiss to take place. We’d get to that place in rehearsal, and he’d stop it. Again, and he’d stop it. He was saying he wanted the real kiss to take place on camera, but we knew that he just didn’t want us to make out more than once. Diana was beyond frustrated. “Jesus Christ, Berry,” she said, “it’s only a kiss.” I have to tell you, I truly believed that he had never seen her kiss another man before in his life, and he did not want to see it. So, I thought that was kind of sweet. And kind of weird, too. In the end, we did the kiss, obviously. Diana has the best mouth in show business, and kissing her was … well, magical. And I was only acting. So, after that kiss, I was, like, okay—I get it—if this was my woman, no way would I want her kissing another man.

  When the movie was almost finished, it was nearly four hours long and there were still scenes to be shot. Paramount’s brass insisted that the film would have to be edited to ninety minutes before it could ever be released. “They want to butcher it,” Berry fretted. He said that he fully intended to edit the movie before releasing it, but that he had to continue shooting excess film in order to get what he wanted. To Berry, the process was comparable to cutting ten different songs, finding the one that would be a hit, and then trashing the other nine.

  “That might be a good way to make records, but it’s a crappy way to make movies,” Paramount president Frank Yablans told him. Yablans said that he would close down production as long as Berry continued to spend Paramount’s money filming scenes that would end up on the cutting-room floor.

  A bigger problem, though, was that Berry and Sidney had spent the entire $2 million budget and they weren’t even done with the movie yet. Berry thought it would be a simple thing to get more money from Frank Yablans—after all, films go over budget all the time, don’t they? But this was a black film, and Yablans—worried that its commercial appeal might be limited—wasn’t going to give him another dime for it. In fact, he told Berry to just end the film where it was at that point. �
�But it’s in the middle of the story,” Berry argued. “I don’t care,” said Frank. “Fade to black and put big letters on the screen that say THE END, and that’s the end of it.”

  Ultimately, Berry negotiated to buy out Paramount and, as he put it, “protect Diana Ross and the Billie Holiday legend.” Not only did Gordy pay back the $2 million that Paramount had put up in the first place, he would also take another $2 million from his personal savings account and invest it in Diana’s future—this movie. Berry—a man used to owning the names of singing groups, most of their music and, certainly, their contracts—now owned Lady Sings the Blues, which was the way he liked it. Still, Paramount would distribute the film; Yablans wasn’t going to let him have distribution too.

  “This was a wonderful thing to do for Diana,” Sidney Furie recalled, “but I can tell you that it put the pressure on Diana like you would not believe.” Furie remembered a day Ross came into Berry’s office for a meeting. She was distraught. “I don’t know if I can let you do this, Black,” she said to Berry.

  “What do mean? This is the right thing to do for you, and the film,” Berry said.

  “It’s too much of a risk,” Diana said, her insecurity coming through loud and clear now. “We don’t even know if I can pull this off, Berry. This is a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, well, it is,” Berry agreed. “But haven’t I always told you I would take care of you? Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

  Berry wasn’t just pacifying her. He really did believe—and it had been proven time and again in their relationship—that if he could convince her that he had confidence in her ability, she would rise to the occasion. Still, this was a tall order for her.

  “She was quiet,” said Sidney Furie.

  In a sense, I know she was grateful. But, by this time I knew how her mind worked and I knew she was feeling like she was in over her head, and too much was riding on her performance. This was a big anxiety for her, a woman who had never really acted before, to have this man with whom she’d had this complex relationship now stake $4 million-plus of his own savings on her. It was a huge gamble, and she knew it. And, also, not to be too cynical about things, but you know she had to be figuring, “Jesus Christ, how indebted am I going to be to this man after he does this thing for me?”

  In terms of other financial minutiae surrounding Lady Sings the Blues, what may come as a surprise to some is how much Diana was earning for her work. Berry may have hoped that she would start making real money as a film star—and maybe one day she would, but not really with this film. According to the statements from Media Management Corporation—Motown’s in-house management division—beginning on 3 December 1971, the date filming began, she was paid $12,500 a week for her services until completion date, which was 18 February. So, for the nine-week production she earned $125,000. Note, though, that, according to the statements, Motown extracted its usual 15 percent—$1,875—from each of her paychecks. It’s unclear whether or not William Morris took its usual 10 percent—that company now represented her instead of Motown’s IMC wing—but the agency probably did. Indeed, this was a labor of love, not one on which anyone would make much money. But, considering that she had just recently paid $350,000 for her home in Beverly Hills, maybe the figures aren’t so bad. It’s all relative to the times, obviously. Still, one has to wonder if Diana Ross ever considers the fact that, today, someone like Julia Roberts earns about $25 million for a movie, and if she wishes she wasn’t getting started in the film business now, instead of 1971.

  It must also be noted that, according to the same statements, once Lady came out, Diana’s concert appearance fee shot up from approximately $35,000 a week to $75,000 a week, which is what she was paid to appear at the Waldorf-Astoria after the film’s release. Then, by December 1973, she was making $140,000 for engagements, such as one in Lake Tahoe in December. So, even though she didn’t seem to make much money on the film, its eventual success definitely increased her earning potential.

  The evening of the last day of filming, Diana became pregnant again. Most of her friends felt at the time that if she had not become pregnant, she would have sought to dissolve her marriage. Bob was only living at the house with her occasionally by this time. At one point he even rented his own apartment in the Hollywood Hills and threw a housewarming party. Diana was the hostess! They were great friends, but maybe not great spouses. It actually was difficult for outsiders to completely comprehend their relationship and whether or not it was working out as Diana had hoped. It did seem to some that the passion she had with Berry wasn’t there with Bob, but that maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. “I don’t know anything about their personal life,” Berry claimed. “I stay out of it. They fight, they’re happy, they’re sad, whatever….”

  As Diana prepared for the birth of her second child, Gordy and his crew prepared for the birth of Lady Sings the Blues. Producer Jay Weston concluded:

  Berry had interfered with the directing of the film to the point where he had been behind the camera, in front of the camera, telling Diana what to do, what not to do. When Berry gets the bit in his teeth, there’s no holding him back. He started editing the movie himself, with no experience whatsoever, taking cassettes up to his house every night. Sidney [Furie] just threw up his hands and tried to work with him as best he could under the circumstances. Motown, Gordy, just completely took over. But, you know what? Could anyone had expected anything else? This was his baby. Not just the movie … but its star.

  Touch me in the morning

  By the summer of 1972, Diana Ross and Berry Gordy had spent so much time working on Lady Sings the Blues that her recording career had begun to slip. The current material released by Motown was, for the most part, mediocre and resulted in low chart action. Because Berry really wanted a hit record for Diana, it was time, once again, to call in the Motown troops.

  First summoned was Ron Miller, who had worked with the Supremes in the 1960s as a writer/producer, but made his biggest impact late in the decade with his classic song “For Once in My Life.” Written in honor of his daughter on the day she was born and recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1968, the song pretty much became a classic on the day it was recorded—it was that memorable. Most people don’t even realize it’s a Motown composition because so many versions have been recorded by traditional artists such as Perry Como and Andy Williams. Ron Miller, who is white, looked like a rumpled college student in the early 1970s. He was known at Motown as being the resident curmudgeon, critical of everything, but a perfectionist at his music. According to Ron, Berry called him on the telephone and said, “The thing with this movie [Lady] is that some people think it’s gonna be great for Diane and some people think it’s gonna ruin her. So, what I need is a natural hit. I have to have a song like ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ that is so magical that no one will question that it’s a number-one record. This way, if the movie comes out and she gets murdered by the critics, I can come right back out with this hit record and save her.”

  Also at this same time, Suzanne dePasse had met a young composer named Michael Masser at a cocktail party. She liked him, thought he was very personable. “Well, would you like to start at the top?” she asked him. “If so, we need a song for Diana Ross, and we need it now.”

  Michael went to work. In the next few weeks, he would compose a number of songs for Diana, all of which Berry felt were strong but could use Ron Miller’s compositional and lyrical finesse. He decided to team the two men on a project, something that might take Diana to the top of the charts. It was up to them what they came up with for her.

  Ron had already dreamed up the title “Touch Me in the Morning,” but, as he recalled:

  I didn’t have the vaguest idea what it meant. It was just this great song title without a great song. So, I analyzed Diane as a person and realized that she was a contemporary woman who was probably liberal about expressing her sexual values, like most Cosmo women in 1970s society. Once upon a time, it was the man who might give a woman the brush
-off after a one-nighter telling her, “Nothing good’s gonna last forever.” Now, it could be the other way around. So, then I started writing. I wanted something more adult than “Baby Love” but pop and R&B enough to cover all markets. I wrote it to be a hit. It was a cold, calculated, precise job of crafting a hit record.

  Ron worked with Michael on a version of the song that Berry loved, but Diana didn’t. “I think it’s okay for an album,” she said, “but it’ll never be a hit.”

  “At this point, Diana had a tendency to look down upon her record career as something subservient to the ultimate goal: movies,” Ron Miller said.

  Her message to me right from the start was: “I’m only doing this nonsense because Berry said I have to, but I’m really a movie star now. So, when my movie comes out, don’t expect me to keep recording this kind of shit.” Don’t misunderstand; she didn’t say those exact words but that was definitely the vibe. She had also been giving the other producers hell at the company in recent years. The word was that if you wanted something done, you kind of had to finesse her into doing it. Anyway, Berry made her do “Touch Me in the Morning.” She wasn’t that keen on it.

  On Monday morning, Ron Miller had to arrange a meeting with Diana in order to rehearse the new song. She asked him to arrive at her Beverly Hills home at seven in the morning. When he protested the hour she said, “I can’t help it, Ron. I have to go to New York to buy hats!”