Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Therefore, one evening at the Gordy manor, Diana and Berry, Suzanne dePasse and a host of other Motown people sat in front of an easel ready for the big presentation. Bob Merrill began to read. “Fade in,” he announced. “Tracy Chambers is a young girl living in the inner city who has a big dream …” and on he went. (Rob later explained, “The lead character’s name was Tracy Chambers, I decided, because my nanny’s name was Ophelia Chambers, and she was one of the brightest women I’d ever known.”) The love theme was played, the storyboards flipped, the little saga told. It ended on a melodramatic note: “And then she goes back to the ghetto, back to her man … and they live happily ever after.”

  Silence.

  Berry turned to Diana. “Well, what do you think, Black?”

  She seemed a little perplexed. “Well, hmmm. I don’t know,” she said, putting her index finger to her mouth. “What do you think?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think in a second,” Berry said. He then turned to his executive secretary, Edna Anderson. “Edna, get me Robert Evans.” She dialed the number of the president of Paramount Pictures. “Bob, it’s Berry,” said Berry, taking the phone. “I finally got the movie we’re gonna do next. It’s absolutely brilliant.”

  Preparing for Mahogany

  Diana Ross wasn’t sure how she felt about Mahogany, at least not at first. “Miss Ross never jumped, because when Berry made a decision that was it. He owned her,” Rob Cohen observed. “So, I think there was a sense in her that it didn’t really matter what she thought, she had to do what she was told anyway. Of course he asked her opinion on things and she weighed in. But, she suspected that there were things going on that she didn’t know about, offers on the table, deals being turned down, being made. The men were in control. Yet, she loved her success, so what was she gonna do? I sensed she wanted more involvement in her life. More power. She told me after the presentation that, coincidentally enough, she had been interested in fashion designing as a youngster in Detroit.”

  “Is that so?” Rob said to her. “You know what? You do have a unique flair for fashion, Miss Ross. No one dresses like you.”

  She smiled.

  “Hey, why don’t you design the costumes for this movie?”

  “Hmmm.” Diana thought. “Do you really think so?”

  “Sure, why not?” Rob answered. “You’ll be brilliant at it.”

  She smiled. Turning to Berry, she excitedly relayed Rob’s suggestion. Berry then looked at Rob and winked in recognition of the fact that Rob had finally just scored a few big points with Miss Ross.

  The weeks flew by with the new movie being planned.

  Rob gave Berry two choices for director of Mahogany: Tony Richardson and John Avildsen. Berry chose the noted British director Richardson, who had directed Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey and had also won an Oscar producing and directing Tom Jones. After Diana was briefly consulted, she agreed, saying that she wanted to work with an Academy Award–winning director. (In fact, she would have been working with one anyway had Berry chosen Avildsen, who got an Oscar for directing Rocky.)

  Though Diana and Berry didn’t know it at the time, Tony Richardson had found Lady Sings the Blues to be “pretty dreadful.” Richardson remembered the first meeting with Berry Gordy:

  He asked me to his house in Bel Air. There were a couple of cars waiting for us at the bottom of the hill with security men in them. We had to drive up the hill with one car in front of us and one behind. When I was in his home, I noticed cameras on me the whole time. It was fascinating, the Gordy empire. There were animals all about, a virtual menagerie; he had a doe named Diana sniffing around outside. It was a wild jungle on one hand, a prison on the other. Though Berry was charming and adorable, he always had these goons with him—I called them the Berry Mafia. Later, I learned that when he walked down the street there would be four gunmen with him—two in front of him and two behind him. But, I enjoyed this. I actually enjoyed the danger and suspense of it all.

  Meanwhile, Bob Merrill had moved on to another film project and John Byrum was hired to write the final screenplay of Mahogany. He was also at that first meeting between Berry and Tony. He remembered: “The two men were alike in some ways, but different in frightening other ways. For instance, Berry had peacocks all over the place, wild, colorful tropical birds. Tony also had peacocks roaming about his home in Saint-Tropez. Both loved the way these wild birds looked scampering around the estates, so they at least had that in common.”

  Byrum recalled that during the meeting Tony turned to Berry and observed in his very proper, British manner, “My good fellow, I must say that you have the quietest peacocks I have ever encountered in all of my days!”

  Berry laughed. “Oh, them?” he asked, motioning to one of the birds as it waddled by.

  “Yes. They’re so silent.”

  “Yeah,” Berry acknowledged. “But, that’s only because I had their voice boxes cut out of ’em.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was downhill from there,” recalls John Byrum. “From the outset, Tony looked at Berry and Diana like he did those peacocks, these weird creatures he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Only, in the case of Berry and Diana, they weren’t so silent.”

  John remembered the first time he met Diana at a chic Hollywood restaurant called the Cock ’n’ Bull on Sunset Boulevard.

  She was alone, which was very strange because I got the impression that she rarely went out without an entourage. She struck me like a kid with a charge card and the power to run it up as high as she wanted. During the meal, she pulled out a thick notebook filled with lists and ideas. She showed me a page of questions and answers: “Who is Tracy Chambers?” “I am Tracy Chambers.” “What do I do?” “I am a fashion designer.” “What are my goals?” “To be successful and happy.” It was as if she was a high school student preparing for the lead in the school play. But, as basic as she was in her approach, she was right on the mark with it in terms of developing a character and giving her a back story. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had a similar list of questions and answers as a member of the Supremes: “Who am I?” “I am Diana Ross of the Supremes.” “What are my goals?” “To leave those other girls in the dust, and make movies.”

  I was very surprised at how straight she was. I expected this real rock and roll mama, you know, a wild-eyed Supreme in a sequined gown walking into the restaurant singing “The Happening.” But, she was so calm, reasonable, polite. When I walked her out to her yellow Rolls-Royce and she got in it and drove off toward Beverly Hills, I thought of her as a Beverly Hills housewife with a great job that had to do with making records and movies. I liked her quite a lot.

  Casting Mahogany: “How much?”

  The task of casting Mahogany was at hand, but so far only Billy Dee Williams was a definite go for it—and, surprisingly, Diana didn’t want him in the movie, at least according to John Byrum.

  Billy was under contract to Berry—$250,000 a year to be exclusive—and Berry wanted to use him in Mahogany. However, something was up between Billy and Diana, because she kept saying, “Do we have to use Billy Dee? But, why?” I had written Mahogany with an eye toward a Carole Lombard–Clark Gable kind of quality. I thought the two—Ross and Williams—had that unique chemistry in Lady. But, I would find that it was gone by the time they got to Mahogany, and I never knew why. By this time, I got the impression that she didn’t want him. But he was in—Berry laid down the law—and that was that.

  Rob Cohen, John Byrum, Diana and Berry met one afternoon in Berry’s office to determine the rest of the movie’s cast. It was 15 July 1974. Diana had been at a sound check earlier in the day for her opening at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. She was nervous about the act because, as Gil Askey recalled it:

  We were opening with “Love Child,” a totally new arrangement and a song she hadn’t done in a while, which had her rattled. Then, we went into Stevie’s “Superstition,” then Bette Midler’s “Do You Want to Dance?” All of it w
as new and so she was very tense and sort of upset. When we finished the run-through, she said to me, “I gotta get the hell out of here, Gil. We’re casting my new movie this afternoon.” I thought, “Wow.” Never thought I’d hear those words from her. Sounded good, though.

  As always, the casting was done in a way most people would never have believed possible—the Motown way. Berry handed Diana a copy of The Academy Players’ Directory, a catalog in which practically every actor and actress in Hollywood is pictured in alphabetical order, along with the addresses and telephone numbers of their agents or other representatives. “Okay, Diane. Now, you get to pick who you want to work with,” he told her. He lit her cigarette, and then one for himself.

  “Wow,” Diana remarked, holding the book as if it were the Holy Grail. “This is really something,” she said, smiling. “Okay.” She opened the directory and started thumbing through it. “How about him?” she suggested, pointing to an actor.

  Berry leaned over and looked at the picture. “Hmmm,” he said, scratching his head. He turned to Rob. “How much for that one?”

  “Too much,” Rob said. He whispered a figure in Berry’s ear.

  Berry winced. “Uh, gee, that’s a whole lot, Diane,” he said. “Who else do you like?”

  Diana continued flipping through the pages. Finally, she made another choice: Jack Nicholson. “Oh, I love Jack Nicholson!” she said brightly. “I want him. Can we have him?”

  Berry scratched his head again. “Nicholson, huh?” he said. “Okay. Rob, how much for Nicholson?”

  Rob Cohen gave him a figure.

  “Jesus Christ,” Berry exclaimed. “That much for Jack Nicholson? You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Well, hey! He’s a big star,” Rob responded with a tolerant grin.

  “Okay. Well fine, then,” Berry said. “You can’t have him, Diane. Costs too damn much.”

  “But he would be just great playing the role of the photographer, Berry,” Diana said. “Can’t we? Please?”

  “Nope. Costs too much.”

  She frowned, took a puff of her cigarette and let it out, slowly.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Berry continued, seeing that she was upset. “Just keep looking. You’ll find someone we can afford, I’m sure.”

  This went on for a while until, finally, they settled on … Anthony Perkins.

  John Byrum can’t help but laugh at the memory. “Even though Berry and Diana may have been acting in a naïve fashion—picking an important costar as if out of a mail-order catalog—what they were doing that day is pretty much what the Hollywood casting system is all about,” he says. “It’s a meat market, and every actor has a price. Berry was used to dealing with street people and with the bottom line. People in the movie business think they’re more elegant than that. They have shinier veneers, but the bottom line is still the same: how much?”

  Filming Mahogany

  On 12 November 1974, shooting for Mahogany began in the middle of a tough Chicago neighborhood at 51st Street and Ellis Avenue. A few months earlier, Gordy and Cohen had selected a run-down tenement apartment in that location to be Tracy Chambers’ home. However, when the Motown contingent arrived they discovered that the owner of the complex had been so excited about having a Diana Ross movie filmed there that he had made drastic renovations. “After he finished, it looked like a goddamn Beverly Hills mansion in the middle of the ghetto,” John Byrum said. “The production art director had to go back and mess it all up, sandblasting the paint off the front of it, smashing the windows, trying to make it look like a ghetto again. We laughed a lot over that. It was one of the only light moments we would have in Chicago, actually.”

  In the months preceding the first day of shooting, Diana had applied herself to designing the many costumes for the film. In all, she designed fifty—from casual sportswear to elegant evening gowns—and supervised every phase of the operation, from purchasing the fabrics to beading and color and fabric coordination; some of the materials cost as much as $1,000 a yard. She always had a sense of style, color and texture and put it to good use with this endeavor. For her Mahogany wardrobe she was influenced by elements of Kabuki theater and the sensibility of French Art Deco designer Erté. She was given her own space at the Goldwyn Studio; soon drawings of beaded dragons covered the walls and seamstresses were everywhere. In the middle of it all was Diana, giving them hell. It was a scene that would actually be duplicated for the movie.

  The outfits for Mahogany were all a reflection of Diana’s colorful personality—pure glitz and fantasy, all the way—and, when she finished, she was quite proud of her work. Before leaving for Chicago, she hosted a showing of her costumes in a small boutique on Sunset Strip. “The whole point, I thought, was to impress her mother,” recalled John Byrum.

  She flew the woman in—a very nice, pleasant lady. Berry was there, and I remember him frowning at a model as she paraded around in this shiny, dragon-sequined, apricot-colored, satin Chinese thing that Diana—as Mahogany—was to wear in a fashion show in the film. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” he asked. Long-legged models came out wearing Diana’s other designs, and we all oohed and aahed at them while Diana sort of basked in it all. There was also a judo-type suit made of a transparent material of white and gold; a gold knee-length pantsuit with an angular pyramid hat; a bridal gown that was silver and purple … dozens of the most outrageous of costumes, her imagination clearly gone wild.

  Before the movie’s principal photography began, it was also decided that Diana would record a love theme for the film, which turned out to be “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” It was a song that had been floating around Motown for a number of years; a vocalist named Thelma Houston had a version of it that was being readied for single release. Rob Cohen happened to be walking down a hall at Motown and heard it. He was struck by the lovely melody, and poked his head into Suzanne dePasse’s office. “That’s a great song,” he told her. “We need that song for Mahogany.” Suzanne grimaced. “That’s not going to make Thelma Houston very happy,” she observed. “Well, Suzanne, I’m sure you can handle that,” Rob said, winking at her. When Berry heard the song, he agreed. He then put Michael Masser and Ron Miller to work on a new orchestration of it for Diana. When Michael finally played it for Diana on her piano one afternoon at her home, he knew it was the ideal song for the film. “She looked over to a picture of her children on the wall and had tears in her eyes,” he said. “That’s how we knew we were close.” After writer Gerry Goffin rewrote some of the lyrics, the recording session was, said Masser, “quick and painless. I think Diana did it in one take, maybe two. It was perfect.”

  Just before the Motown crew left for Chicago, where the first third of the film was to be shot, Cohen received a phone call from Berry. “We’ve got a problem with Tony Richardson,” he said. “He’s trying to poison Diana against you by telling her that you’re just a kid, still wet behind the ears.”

  “Well, what did you say to Diana?” Rob wanted to know.

  “I told her that the three of us are family,” Berry said. “We are the team. We’re Motown. He’s the outsider. And that she should remember that family’s what’s important.”

  Rob was grateful for Berry’s support. Later, he found out that Diana went to Tony Richardson the next day and asked him point-blank: “Look, if Rob is so goddamn stupid, then why’d he pick you?” Tony Richardson was careful about what he said to Diana Ross from that point on, but everyone became concerned: Why was this man trying to influence Diana against the Motown machinery? Berry didn’t like it, and neither did Rob. Still, they were too busy to worry about it—at least at that time.

  The script of Mahogany went through a few changes along the way, but ultimately it was about a girl named Tracy Chambers who climbs from a secretarial position at the Marshall Fields store in Chicago to become an international fashion model. She then tops her career with equal recognition as a fashion designer. Anthony Perkins portrays a psychotic photographer who dubs Tracy �
�Mahogany” because, in his eyes, she is not only “rich, dark, beautiful and rare” but also an inanimate object. Soon afterwards, Tracy’s boyfriend—Billy Dee Williams—tells her, “Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with”—a corny line but memorable just the same, and dreamed up by Berry. In the end, Tracy abandons her lucrative career and returns to inner-city Chicago to spend the rest of her life assisting her boyfriend with his political aspirations. It wasn’t exactly a feminist film, but it was a Motown film.

  “When we started filming in Chicago, the atmosphere on the set of Mahogany was tense,” Tony Richardson recalled. One of the reasons for such tension, though, may have been that the Motown contingent had begun to feel Richardson could not be trusted, and also could not relate to them. For instance, in a story conference with Billy Dee Williams, Tony discussed a scene in which Williams was trying to drum up votes from women and senior citizens. Tony said, “Get very passionate and excited, and say a few swear words. You know how you people swear.”

  Billy Dee was angered by the racist implication of Tony’s statement. “What do you mean ‘you people’?” he snapped. “I wouldn’t swear in front of a woman, and especially in front of old people, and I don’t know any black people who would. And you can forget about that Sambo line in the script, too.” (Apparently, Tony had added a scene to the original script in which Diana and Billy Dee were supposed to lift their glasses and say, “To all the Sambos in the world.”)

  Berry observed the confrontation between Billy and Tony, but didn’t comment. “He was eyeballing the whole thing and taking mental notes,” said Rob Cohen.