Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I got a call from Berry and he said he was going to pull the picture,” Rob Cohen remembered. “I said, ‘Berry, listen to me. This is not a picture for the critics, or for Hollywood. This picture touches a human nerve and it’s going to work. Listen to me!’”

  “No, Rob. Diane’s screaming at me day and night that I made a mistake and …” Berry fumbled. According to Rob’s recollection, he was on the verge of tears. “I mean, did you see what Time said? Jesus, I really worked hard on this goddamn movie. What am I going to do now?”

  “You release that goddamn film, that’s what you do!” Rob insisted. He later said that he feared that if Berry pulled the movie from release at that time, it would never come out. “Think about all the great things in that movie,” Rob urged Berry. “Think about all your hard work, all those long, endless nights editing, how the people in the crew loved you. Forget Diana, man. Think about you for a change. You did an incredible job, Berry. You deserve this.”

  Berry did not answer immediately. “Okay,” he said finally. “Good advice. You always have the best advice, you know that?”

  The two men laughed.

  “We’ll just see what happens,” Berry concluded. “Yeah. Forget Diana. Forget Diana. Forget Diana,” he repeated, almost like a mantra.

  As fate would have it, Mahogany was a hit as soon as it was released to the public. As is usually the case with Diana Ross, her fans came through for her, and in droves. The Loews State Theater in Manhattan was forced to stay open around the clock in order to accommodate the huge crowds. In fact, the film broke the opening-day record at the Loews, which The Godfather had held for five years.

  Despite the film’s critical assessment—“The worst reviews in the history of the world,” Berry later observed—some of Diana’s notices were actually very good. For instance, Charles Champlin wrote for the Los Angeles Times: “She is out of the Mayer thirties—a genuine movie queen who wears her heart and soul close to the surface … the absolute essence of the star as symbol of enviable escape from the humdrum ordinary ball.”

  Berry brought Mahogany in at almost double the $2 million budget allotted by Paramount (which means that—like with Lady Sings the Blues—the additional money came out of his own pocket), but in the end it was a profitable film, if not an outright blockbuster. Though it isn’t a brilliant movie, it is a touching one. People do seem to remember it fondly, some if only for a striking montage sequence during which Diana models a number of her most interesting creations, complete with a variety of wig and makeup choices. “I’ll admit that if I had been the producer or director, I might have made some different choices,” Diana has said about the film. “All in all, I have no regrets.” Typical of her maddening tendency toward not being candid about the unhappiness of her life, she concluded, “The whole experience was good for me.” In fact, “the whole experience” obviously wasn’t good and had all but totally destroyed her relationship with the man who’d been the most important in her life, the one person who had believed in her from the beginning of her career. Yet, not a single word about any of the problems she had with Berry on the set of Mahogany can be found in Secrets of a Sparrow. It’s as if she didn’t want to commit any of it to history. Or maybe, like a lot of us, she just doesn’t want to think about the bad times of her life and times … let alone write about them.

  Mommy

  In “Good Morning Heartache” in Lady Sings the Blues Diana Ross sang, “I tossed and turned until it seemed you had gone / Now here you are, with the dawn.”

  It was now November 1975, almost the end of a difficult year spent recording, touring and promoting Mahogany. Because she was pregnant, Diana didn’t feel well for most of the time. Shortly before the baby was to be born, she took refuge in the master bathroom of her Beverly Hills home and, while Bob slept, she sat on a settee and cried. She couldn’t seem to stop sobbing because her life, as she would later tell it, felt so completely misaligned. “Emotionally, everything seemed out of whack,” she said. When Bob heard her crying, he went to her to see what he could do to help. “I finally told him that I wasn’t happy with my career, my life or my marriage,” she later revealed, “that nothing seemed to be working the way I wanted it to. And yet I was feeling all this guilt because I had everything: beautiful children, a warm home, a good job, love.”

  Indeed, Diana really was a woman who seemed to have it all. However, privately—as is often the case with celebrities—her real life was a very different story. She wasn’t particularly happy in her marriage and still felt controlled by someone who had once been the love of her life. She felt that she had no real identity. Or, as she would later explain, “Even today I’m not sure what I was crying out for that night except that up to that point I had simply been doing what I was told and letting other people think for me. I’d never really looked inside myself for answers—or even questions.”

  On 5 November Diana gave birth to another girl. She and Bob had an intuition that they would have a boy and planned to name him Robert Jr. When it was a girl, the nurse suggested Courtney, which made Diana think of the spicy fruit relish, chutney—and, somehow, the baby ended up with the name Chudney.

  One thing that never failed to give her comfort was the fact that Diana knew she was a good mother. It was in the raising of her family, she would say, that she found the most self-confidence. She was influenced by Ernestine Ross in the way she related to her own children and, in years to come, none of them would ever have a critical word to say about her—at least not publicly. “I like to spend as much time with them as I can,” she would say. “I don’t mind if I spoil them by giving them a lot of love. If loving them means spoiling them, that’s just too bad.”

  This is not to say that the children did not have governesses, nursemaids and other people whose job it was to help raise them. However, Diana was meticulous in her instructions to such staff members. A memo to a new governess who was hired in May 1975 is telling. At this time, Rhonda was four and Tracee, three. The typed memo is entitled “Governess Daily Program as Per Miss Ross” and details what Diana expected for just about every moment of the day, beginning from waking the girls up at 7 a.m. to putting them to bed at 8:30 p.m.

  “She is Mommy before she is anybody else,” Tracee Ellis Ross—her stage name, now, as an actress—told Oprah Winfrey many years later in 1996, “and I really did, thanks to her, have a very normal childhood. Mommy was there to go to all of the school things and everything she could do without making it difficult for us,” she would recall. “And I think that’s why I’m okay and able to have a normal life now and try to figure out who I am, because she’s given me the opportunity. I feel like my mother gave me some really special little light inside, and now it’s my job to make that light shine.”

  Rhonda has recalled, “She would fly to the West Coast early in the morning and, somehow, be back at night for dinner. I don’t know how she did it. And we would be at dinner and the phone would ring, a pet peeve of hers. Imagine. She had flown all the way across the country just to have dinner with us and one of us would want to talk on the phone during the meal! So she would say, ‘Not now! Tell the caller that we are in the midst of dinner.’ For years I thought the word was ‘mist,’” she laughs. “I thought that we had been in the mist of dinner.”

  Despite any ongoing problems in their marriage, Diana and Bob posed for a loving People magazine cover in January 1976. The photo spread featured the couple at home with the children. The reporter made a note of the Silbersteins’ “cook, English secretary, yardman, housekeeper and nanny” to look after the family. Diana’s brother Chico was still living with her, as was her sister Margarita’s son, Tommy. Margarita was separated from her husband and her job with the airlines kept her away from home, so Diana and Bob took the boy in. “When these family photos were published, fans couldn’t help but notice that Tracee and Chudney looked so much like Bob, whereas Rhonda looked nothing like him, at all,” said Joe Layton, the man who conceived her stage shows at this ti
me. “I remember being with Diana when she was looking at these pictures, and I can still recall the concern on her face, as if she was thinking, “My God, this is really, really obvious, isn’t it?” Even I had to wonder what was going on there.”

  Love, Flo

  In “Theme from Mahogany” Diana Ross asked the musical question, “Do you know where you’re going to?” It would seem that her former singing partner from the Supremes, the ever-troubled Florence Ballard, never found the answer. As it happened, life did not get much easier for her after she was fired from the group and, in fact, it just seemed to get progressively worse. In January 1975, the saddest news yet about Florence made headlines across the country: “Ex-Supreme broke and living on welfare!” read the Associated Press report. Accompanying the story were photographs of the dejected-looking former Supremes star posing in front of a framed photograph of herself, Diana and Mary, all three wearing shimmering, red-sequined gowns. It had been taken during their 1967 performance on the Rodgers and Hart TV special which, she said, seemed like a lifetime ago. Just eight years later, she was thirty-one years old and the divorced mother of three, with no career and no prospects, and being supported by a governmental program called ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), a form of welfare.

  It’s not that Florence hadn’t at least tried to set things straight for herself. Five years earlier, she had filed a surprising lawsuit against Motown, Berry, Diana and the Supremes’ corporation charging that she had been “maliciously ousted” from the group. It was the first the public had ever heard that she’d been fired. Over the years, people just assumed that Motown was telling the truth when the label claimed she had left the group in order to marry and raise a family. With this legal action, however, she made it clear that this had not been the case, and she wanted $8.7 million. Unfortunately for her, the suit was dismissed when it was ruled that her release from the Supremes was legally binding. A judge decided that unless she could return to Berry the roughly $150,000 she had received, she would have no case against him or anyone else. She couldn’t; her attorney had taken every dime of it. Then, to make matters worse for her, Florence’s marriage was in trouble; she and Tommy would finally separate in 1973.

  For the most part, Diana and Mary didn’t have much to do with Florence after that fateful night in Las Vegas when Berry ordered her off the stage. They were busy with their own lives and careers and, as often happens between friends who no longer have a commonality other than memories—and some of them bitter, in this case—they drifted apart. Of course, Diana and Florence were certainly not close at the time that Florence was fired, anyway. Letters and occasional telephone calls from Mary kept Florence abreast of what was going on at Motown. Occasionally, Florence’s name did come up, though. For instance, when the Supremes—with Diana’s replacement Jean Terrell—opened at the Grove in Los Angeles in 1971, Diana and Ernestine went to see the show. Diana had earlier sent a basket of flowers to the group to wish them well, with an accompanying card that read, “Girls! Have fun. It’s just a game. Love, Diana.” She and her mother were backstage speaking to Mary when Diana mentioned Florence. “Have you talked to her?” Diana asked Mary. “No,” Mary answered, sadly. “You?” Diana shook her head, no. Ernestine, according to witnesses said, “I think you two girls should try to stay in touch with her. It’s a shame because people think that women can’t get along, you know? I would like to think they’re wrong. I would like to think that the Supremes can get along.”

  “But Mary and I do get along, Mama,” Diana said, putting her head on Mary’s shoulder.

  “Thank you for coming to see our show, Diane,” Mary said, and she really seemed to mean it. She ran her fingers lightly over the top of Diana’s hair—she was wearing a very short “natural” style at this time. Then, Diana called Cindy over and the three of them posed for pictures together, seeming much happier than they had when they were working together.

  As it happened, after Diana left the Supremes in 1970, Mary had it especially tough. Berry lost all interest in the act, his real purpose for the group seemingly (and not surprisingly) satisfied with Diana’s ascension to superstardom. The “new” Supremes had some memorable hit records, but the group’s career lost its momentum without Motown’s support. Mary would then have to push forward with her own lawsuits against Berry and, like Florence, would fight for years for even the basic right to use the name Supremes. Making matters worse, she ended up in an abusive marriage to Pedro Ferrer. It’s certainly not as if she was in much of a position to act as Florence’s savior at this time. However, Diana’s was a very different story.

  In 1974, when word got out among close-knit Motown circles that Florence might lose her home if she didn’t meet her mortgage payments there wasn’t much—if any—assistance being offered by anyone. It was Diana Ross who did some research and learned that Florence only owed a few thousand dollars on the home. She couldn’t believe that Florence would lose her property over such a small amount of money, and she worried about Florence’s children. Therefore, she made arrangements to pay off the house. Maybe it would, somehow, set things straight between them. She had never been happy with the way things had been left with Florence, even if most people in her life believed she had let it go. She hadn’t. Unfortunately, Florence’s estranged husband, Tommy Chapman, interfered with the process of taking care of this important debt. He wanted the check made payable to him and not to the bank that held the mortgage. Diana and Tommy didn’t trust each other, and Florence wouldn’t return Diana’s telephone calls. In an atmosphere charged with such mistrust and animosity, there seemed no way to accomplish anything productive. Frustrated, Diana abandoned her intention. “She just hoped that Florence would know that she had tried to help,” said a relative of hers, “and would contact her if things were not otherwise handled. I wish she had got through to her. I think it would have not only done Florence a lot of good, but Diane, too.”

  It’s very possible that Florence didn’t even know that Diana had tried to help her. In 1975 she told her memoirist, Peter Benjaminson, “I said to myself, if Diane had been in the predicament that I was in, I would be right there to help her. And to this day, if she ever should fall into a bad predicament, I would still help her as much as I could. But, I guess she felt different.”

  After Florence was forced to move her family out of the home—by this time she had a third daughter, Lisa Marie—Jet magazine contacted her to do a feature about her ongoing financial crisis. It was a startling cover: Florence, posed in front of the boarded-up home in which she used to live, seeming overcome by loneliness and fear. She was wearing a coat—some sort of fur—probably one of her only treasures from the good old days. Motown aficionados and anyone who had ever enjoyed the Supremes’ music were stunned by the image, but it said it all about Florence’s life at a time when much of the public was wondering what had become of her. “I keep saying to myself, well, at least couldn’t I have kept my house for the sake of my children?” Florence was quoted as having said. “Couldn’t that have been paid for, somehow? And it tears me up inside. How could I have it all, and then nothing?”

  In August 1974, Mary arranged for Florence to visit her in Los Angeles. She then brought her onstage during one of the Supremes’ shows at an amusement park called Magic Mountain in Valencia, just outside Los Angeles. By this time, Diana’s place in the group was being occupied by a great singer from Detroit named Scherrie Payne. However, Cindy Birdsong—Florence’s replacement—was still reliably present, and better than ever. The sight of Florence on stage with the Supremes was a heartbreaking one, though. She had never stopped drinking and the effects of alcohol abuse were now quite evident: any warmth and softness in her face was all but gone. She looked hardened, tough. Not well. Still, the audience was thrilled to see her. She didn’t sing; she just danced a bit with the other Supremes, and played a tambourine. Then, with tears in her eyes, she stood in a soft blue spotlight before a couple of thousand people, all of whom were standing and applauding.
That night, she went back to Mary’s house, had too much to drink and cried herself to sleep.

  “I talked to Diane just the other day,” Florence told this author after she returned to Detroit that year. “I just felt like I wanted to talk to her. I called around and got her number in Beverly Hills, and I just called her.”

  Florence remembered that the phone rang three times before a male voice on the other end answered very formally, “Miss Ross’s residence.”

  “May I speak to Miss Ross, please?” Florence asked politely.

  “Whom shall I say is calling?” he intoned.

  “Florence … Florence Ballard.”

  “Who is this, really?” the person on the other end demanded impatiently. “Miss Ross is extremely busy and certainly has no time to—”

  “Just tell her it’s Florence.”

  Suddenly, Diana picked up an extension.

  “Blondie? My God. Is it really you?”

  Florence recalled that the two of them enjoyed the nicest conversation they’d had in years. Mostly, they discussed motherhood, their children and Diana’s career—nothing really significant or key to their strained relationship, at least not that Florence remembered.

  “I saw that new movie, Mahogany,” Florence recalled having told her.

  “Did you like it?” Diana asked.

  “Not really,” Florence said. “You looked great, girl. But, that ending! To go back to the ghetto after seeing the world and being the toast of the town. That would never happen.”

  Florence would later tell Peter Benjaminson that she and Diana spoke for about an hour. They hadn’t talked, Florence said, since 1971. She said that Diana seemed “more relaxed, more earthy.” She also realized, she admitted, that she had been at fault at least some of the time, causing the problems between herself and Ross. “I used to say to myself, ‘How could we have grown up together, and then turn out to be not liking each other?’ I was stubborn. I told some people to go to hell …”