Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Producer Rob Cohen remembered:

  Joel, Sidney and Diana had an interpretation of Dorothy that was sort of on the neurotic side. In their telling of it, Dorothy was to be a scared adult, a peculiarly introverted woman, nothing like what John Badham and I had first envisioned. But Joel and Diana were involved in EST at the time, and Diana was very enamoured of [its founder] Werner Erhard, so before I knew it the movie was becoming an EST-ian fable full of EST buzzwords about knowing who you are and sharing and all that. I hated the script. But, it was hard to argue with Diana about it because she was recognizing in it all of this stuff she had worked out in EST seminars.

  While working on The Wiz in New York, Diana leased a house on Long Island with her three children (Rhonda was then six, Tracee, five, and Chudney, two). During rehearsals for the movie, she lived at the Pierre Hotel while an apartment at the Sherry Netherland was being refurbished for her by famous designer Angelo Donghia. “Finally, she was away from Berry, at long last,” Rob Cohen recalled. “It was not Berry’s money, it was Universal’s money. Diana had told him, ‘Look, if you want me to stay at the company then let me go and do my own thing and stay the hell out of it.’ It was liberating. I remember having deep discussions with her about it; she was determined to break free, to do the movie, to have a life.”

  “For the first time, I feel grown up,” Diana said at the time. “I am responsible for more aspects of my life than I ever was when I lived in Los Angeles. I still depend on Berry for many things, but slowly I am also finding that I can handle just about anything that comes my way. It’s like Dorothy in The Wiz—I believed that I could be independent and, though it scared me to death, I found that I could—that I had it in me all the time.”

  Diana enjoyed New York’s pace and rhythm. Or, as she later told me,

  What was happening to me in California was that I was becoming a recluse. And I was too young not to have any fun. I decided that I was going to deal with my life, be public, and know that everything happening to me would be positive, not negative. I decided to stop being so afraid that someone would interrupt my meal in a restaurant and ask for an autograph.

  Rehearsals for The Wiz started in July 1977. Filming at the Astoria Studios in Queens began in October and wrapped in December. When the movie was finally released, in October 1978, it was to generally mediocre-to-poor reviews. If anything, the film proved that even oceans of money, publicity and promotion couldn’t guarantee a blockbuster Diana Ross movie. “It was a big dream that got away,” Rob Cohen said of The Wiz. “A brilliant idea gone wrong. The knowledge that two years of my life, $23 million of Universal’s money, thousands of man-hours of labor, and the hopes and dreams of everyone involved had gone into a movie like this one, which didn’t stand a chance, made me absolutely sick.”

  After The Wiz, Rob Cohen left Motown Productions.

  I loved Berry, but I wanted to move on and get away from the pressure of dealing with Diana’s movie career. It was getting harder and harder to come up with properties for her.

  We had tried to cast her in Tough Customers, a film where she would have played Stephanie St. Clair, the girlfriend of gangster Dutch Schultz, a fine script. But we couldn’t find a white costar who would take second billing to her, or even costar with her. She would not accept second billing herself. Worse, no way could we find a studio to back it. I have to say it: The Wiz hurt Diana Ross’s bankability. It really did.

  In the years to come, Berry would write off The Wiz as something not to be remembered. For instance, in the Motown 25 special of 1983, it wouldn’t even be mentioned. In his 1994 memoir, To Be Loved, the only mention of it is in a list of films Motown Productions made in the 1970s; he doesn’t write one single word about it, treating it worse in his book than Diana had Mahogany in hers!

  Considering that Berry Gordy had not wanted her to make The Wiz, it had to have vexed Diana, at least on some level, that things turned out as they had with it. To date, she has not made another major motion picture—and The Wiz was more than twenty-five years ago! If The Wiz is to be it for her film career, what a sad and unfortunate ending to what might have been … especially considering her astonishing achievement with her filmic debut, Lady Sings the Blues.

  Part Five

  MISS ROSS

  “Miss Ross to you”

  In January 1979, Diana Ross, who was about to turn thirty-five, took another giant leap toward total independence from Berry Gordy by establishing her own offices, albeit in the same building as Motown, on Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. This was a pivotal, life-and career-defining move for her. Though she knew that it would take some time for her to really cut the ties that had bound her for so long to Berry—and she really wasn’t sure that she wanted to do it completely, anyway—she was at least now able to see what she might be able to achieve on her own.

  She’d had everything done for her for so long—for nineteen years, actually—what made her think she could do anything at all for herself? Still, she knew she had to try. Motown would still be involved in all aspects of her career from recording to television to concert appearances; she knew it and even wanted it. However, all such business would now pass through her own office, thereby giving her an opportunity to, finally, take note of just how those affairs were being run. Suzanne dePasse, her good friend at Motown, would prove to be of great assistance at this time. She would be able to run interference with Berry, thereby giving Diana at least an illusion of autonomy. “Why does she need her own offices?” Berry asked Suzanne. Of course, he knew the answer. In some ways, he was probably just as frightened as Diana of what the future might hold. He still didn’t want to completely lose her, or so he said at the time.

  On 8 February 1980, Diana sent a letter to all of her business associates on gold-embossed stationery with a graphic of her in the top left-hand corner of the page. It was just one eye, half a nose and half a mouth in a box but, still, it couldn’t have been more identifiable.

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  All future invoices and/or statements should be directed to my office—Diana Ross Enterprises, Inc.; 6255 Sunset Blvd, 18th Floor, Hollywood, CA 90028. I wish to express my sincere appreciation for your patience and cooperation in this matter. If you need any assistance and/or information, please call my office, collect.

  Sincerely,

  Diana Ross

  It didn’t take long for Diana to set certain ground rules for the first five staff members she decided to hire—and in doing so she would run into some trouble. Of course, she’d had assistants in the past, but now things were different. This was an office environment, her first, and she wanted it to be run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. She also wanted respect, especially since she’d begun to feel the lack of it recently from some of the Motown staff members who felt they’d known her too long to remain formal with her. Therefore, her female administrative assistant would lay down the law to anyone who came to work at the office: “Call her Miss Ross. Never call her Diana. And never Ms. Ross. She hates that.” Diana was, of course, well within her rights to want to be addressed in such a way. “Even I call Berry Mr. Gordy in public,” she would say. “There’s nothing wrong with simple respect.”

  Of course, with the passing of the years, the “Miss Ross” business would become a subject of mockery in relation to Diana. It’s easy to understand the reasons why. From the beginning, she was adamant about the title, to the extent where some people in her circle were actually a little nervous about what might happen to them if they forgot to use it. “It’s Miss Ross to you,” she would remind anyone who tripped up and called her Diana—or, worse, the informal Diane. Generally, though, most people have at least a modicum of common sense and would have called her “Miss Ross” anyway, if only out of simple courtesy. It’s when memos had to be passed about outlining such silly rules that her reputation was adversely affected. Also, one would think that—considering how much has been made of the Miss Ross admonition over the years—her spokespeople would never d
are make such a request of a reporter today. But, as of this writing in the year 2006, they often still do! Behind her back, in 1979, her staff even began to mock her and call her Miss-Ross-To-You, a tradition that would be handed down to employees for years to come.

  “Did Miss-Ross-To-You call yet this morning?”

  “Better not leave for lunch because Miss-Ross-To-You is on her way up.”

  It’s understandable that some people would forget to use the title. After all, Diana had been famous for more than fifteen years, always putting forth an image of accessibility in her concerts—like all entertainers who hope to forge a real communication with their audiences. However, that said, the concert presentation she was performing in 1978 and into 1979 was a whole lot more “Miss Ross” than it was “Diana” in tone. Before the show, Diana’s flawless ebony face appeared on a giant screen, center stage. A close-up revealed her in full movie star makeup, a jeweled turban cocked on her head, and mouthing the words to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”: “If you need me, call me …” Then, in a full-length shot, the projected image showed Diana descending a long white staircase that seemed to originate from somewhere on the other side, probably very close to the maker himself. At the precise moment that the reel Diana reached the bottom step, the real Diana then walked out of the screen and toward the cheering crowd—wearing, of course, the exact same silver lamé gown, turban and full-length fox-lined coat that she’d had on in the movie. It was fantastic. After the first few numbers, she stood center stage, dripping with furs and jewels, and she joked, “People ask me, ‘Whatever happened to little ol’ Diane Ross from the Brewster Projects in Detroit? Whatever happened to that girl?’ You know what I say to that? I say, ‘Who?’”

  At the conclusion of the show, her six athletic dancers—one of them being her brother Chico—then carried her on her back “into” the screen … and from there the projected image had them hoisting her all the way up to the heavens, where she would, apparently, reign for all time. Arguably, if you still wanted to call her Diana and not Miss Ross after that kind of audacious presentation, you had some nerve.

  During this time, many different employees were hired to live with Diana in the Maple Avenue home and oversee day-to-day operations there when she was in town from New York, where she spent a great deal of time in 1979. Diana didn’t particularly enjoy having strangers around her and her home certainly wasn’t big enough to ensure total privacy for either her or her employees. It was difficult for her to maintain the formality she felt important in order to be the boss and see to it that the work got done. She loathed insubordination, and everyone who worked for her knew it.

  She’d start the day on a happy note with her standard, chipper greeting: “Hi, hi, hi.” But, often, it would go downhill from there. By the time she got to the end of the day and her usual parting lines—“Okay. Gotta run. Love you. Bye.”—there were sometimes bad feelings all round, the result of some very loud disagreement. One former employee put it this way.

  I would sort of get caught in the moment as it was happening and think to myself, “Okay. Diana Ross, this woman I loved when I was a teenager, is now screaming at me, and she’s so close to my face I can actually feel her breath on my nose. Is this really happening?” Then, ten minutes later, after she had gotten it all out of her system, it was, “Okay. Gotta run. Love You. Bye.” For me, it was just a job. But for her, every second was filled with a weird kind of … drama.

  Often, Diana was at her wits’ end as to how to handle someone who, in her viewpoint, simply would not take direction from her. At one point, she requested that people working closely with her take EST classes. She felt that Werner Erhard’s courses had done her so much good, she wanted to surround herself with people who shared the same philosophies. The problem was that after employees graduated from such classes, they were usually so independent that they no longer wished to yield to her desires. Instead, they often ended up getting in trouble with her for talking back or asking soul-searching, EST-like questions that she may have been asking herself at this time but certainly didn’t appreciate hearing from her staff. For instance, one woman who had just taken EST training came into work one morning and had the temerity to ask Diana, “Why are you always so angry? You’re the star. You have nothing to be angry about.” Of course, that was her last day. Indeed, a person has to have at least some common sense to work for a major pop diva.

  In the offices of Diana Ross Enterprises, Diana’s employees had the responsibility of coordinating her tour schedules, solving her personal problems, dealing with Motown on promotion for her records, and assisting her with anything else she needed. Even though she lived and worked in New York a lot of the time in 1979, she always phoned her California office fifteen minutes before her employees had to report to work at eight o’clock. She wanted to see who had the initiative to arrive early, and who did not. Everyone had to stay until six, and she would call a few minutes before that hour to make certain everybody was still there. When she was in town and on her way up to the eighteenth floor one of the parking attendants would phone ahead from the garage to warn her staff, “Miss Ross is headed up there. Better watch out!”

  There were two other interesting cardinal rules at Miss Ross’s new office: first of all, no one was to play any classic Motown music; second, there was to be no mention of the Supremes. Indeed, the subject of her former singing partners remained painful to her. She definitely wasn’t one to remember the past as she looked toward the future. In fact, one of her employees was once searching for something in the cupboard underneath the sink in her private bathroom—or maybe he was snooping?—and made a fairly startling discovery: a stack of gold records that had been awarded to the Supremes, all in their pristine glass frames … and stashed away next to the cleaning supplies.

  Ryan O’Neal

  After Bob Ellis Silberstein, there really weren’t that many men—if any—in Diana Ross’s life. She was extremely busy trying to organize her business affairs while touring, recording and raising her children. One gentleman did come along in 1979, though, a person to whom she would find herself attracted, and that was the handsome actor Ryan O’Neal.

  About a year earlier, director John Boorman had submitted a movie treatment to John Calley, head of Warner Brothers, for a film that was to be titled The Bodyguard. It was considered a possible vehicle for Diana and Ryan. Calley sent the eight-page treatment to Ryan, who read over it quickly and said that he thought it was an interesting idea. He definitely wanted to appear in it, he said, especially if Diana Ross could be recruited. Was it possible? After Calley sent the material to Motown Productions, Suzanne dePasse forwarded it on to Diana’s office. She read it and was intrigued.

  In its earliest incarnation, The Bodyguard was envisioned as a musical drama about a black superstar singer who begins receiving death threats and therefore decides to hire protection—a bodyguard. She interviews dozens of men for the job—most of whom are black and solidly built—but ultimately chooses a white guy, not because of his physique but because of his sharp instincts. Later in the story—and this, according to the treatment—the singer is rehearsing her act when shots ring out from the darkened, empty theater. She clutches her chest and drops to the floor, dead. The shooter takes off. The bodyguard goes after him, but doesn’t capture him. Then, from the wings but still hidden by shadows, steps the real superstar. It had all been a plan concocted by the bodyguard: he had hired a double of the singer in order to lure out the assailant. (Too bad the doppelgänger had to be knocked off during the course of such a dumb ploy but, arguably, there are so few real divas in the world, her death would not be in vain.) Danger thus confirmed, the bodyguard convinces the real superstar to leave town with him … for her own protection, of course. While on the lam, they are overcome by mutual attraction and fall crazily in love. It was actually a pretty good idea for a movie, even if, obviously, it needed more than a little tweaking. Diana liked it, as did everyone around her.

  Diana Ross
had actually known Ryan O’Neal for a few years; she and Bob owned a Malibu Colony beachfront home close to his. She had liked the sandy-haired, blue-eyed actor from afar and, in late February 1979, called him to discuss the movie. At this time, Ryan was almost as well known for his affair with Barbra Streisand as he was for his career. Besides his relationship with Streisand, though, he had also dallied in tempestuous romances with a wide array of beautiful showbiz luminaries, including Joan Collins, Barbara Parkins, Ursula Andress and Bianca Jagger.

  Without Berry and Bob in her life, Diana was, admittedly, lonely. Therefore, when she met Ryan, she couldn’t help but be somewhat attracted to him. He was handsome and sexy, highly intelligent, interesting … and interested in her. In just a couple of weeks, they became quite close.

  Ryan found Diana to be captivating. He admired her determination and ambition, and also thought she was a tad eccentric. For instance, her insistence that all of her employees call her Miss Ross fascinated him; he thought he had seen it all when he was with Streisand, but even she hadn’t insisted that her employees call her Miss Streisand. What he had with Diana was, for him, fun but not necessarily serious. That was fine with Diana, who wanted to take it at a slow pace, anyway. She would have one of her female assistants accompany her and Ryan on their early dates and tell her, “If anyone asks, you say he’s your boyfriend.”