Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  At this same time, Diana was dating Gene Simmons, a member of the rock band Kiss, a group known at that time (and still today) for its bizarre stage makeup. On stage, Simmons dressed like a fire-breathing, vampire-costumed ghoul and was known for the way he would lap his snake-like tongue at his audiences. He wore twelve-inch-high platform boots, each shaped like a demon’s mouth complete with bladed teeth. Part of the gimmick during the time he and Diana dated was that the group was never seen in public without its makeup, so whenever the guys ventured out into the world it was with handkerchiefs covering the lower halves of their faces. She would sometimes wear a handkerchief too, so that was … odd. Her friends really didn’t know what Diana was doing with this guy; it just seemed like a rebellious move on her part to be involved in a relationship that would be perceived by her public as being “edgy.” Simmons—all six foot two of him with a ruddy face, deep dark eyes and thick black hair—was someone Diana met through her friend at that time, Cher (whom he also dated). Whatever the true nature of her relationship with him, one thing is certain—he was pivotal in her decision to leave Motown.

  Gene Simmons, as it happened, was a brilliant and confident businessman. Often, Diana would confide in him regarding her problems at Motown, and he would always give her the same advice: “Get the hell away from there. What are you, nuts?” He didn’t have the history with the company that she had, so he really couldn’t understand why she would stay with a label that didn’t pay her what he believed she was worth. He felt strongly that she was letting her relationship with Berry cloud her business judgment, and he was worried about her too. “You only have one chance, one sliver of a moment to cash in when you’re in this business,” he told her, according to his memory. “And this is it, baby. You may never be hotter than now. You have to go for the money.”

  In December 1980, Gene suggested that Diana allow one of his representatives to talk to Berry and explore with him how much money he might be willing to pony up for her new contract. So, one morning, Berry got a visit from this person, a heavyset rock and roll manager type. He said he represented Diana, and was willing to give Berry an opportunity to match a $20 million offer she had recently received from a competing label. One can only imagine Berry’s reaction to this “opportunity.” He would later say, “My mind was reeling,” probably understating his response to having someone he did not know try to do business with him on behalf of Motown’s biggest star. He thanked his visitor for the offer, said it was interesting and that he would get back to him after he spoke to Diana about it. When he talked to her, she was pretty specific about her needs. She said she wanted to negotiate a new contract in which she would have total control over her career—and she wanted a lot more money than she’d ever gotten in the past. She also wanted to exclude him from decisions regarding her personal life. If she couldn’t have those guarantees, she wanted to make arrangements with another record company. At this point, it did not seem that she really had a $20 million offer in hand; Berry’s visitor may have been bluffing.

  For his part, Berry felt Diana already had enough freedom and that some of her solo decisions, like starring in The Wiz, had proved to be bad moves not only for her but for Motown. He didn’t mind her moving to New York and had even tolerated her romances with Ryan O’Neal and Gene Simmons. He accepted the fact that she was purposely excluding him from creative involvement in her albums—even though that was really tough on him—because, as he told friends, he felt all of this was just a phase. “She’ll come around,” he said. In the end, Berry was always one to look at the bigger picture. No matter how free Diana thought she was, she was still under contract to him and to Motown. There was always hope for the future, he felt.

  Diana told him that she was exploring her options and asked if he would meet with her—and her “representative.” He did. It went well, Berry thought. “It’s not about money,” he told Diana. “It’s about us. You and me. And Motown, and the way we have handled you. I’m telling you, it would never be the same for you anywhere else.”

  “You could be right,” Diana agreed.

  Weeks passed, and the negotiations with Motown did not go well. The company was simply not used to dealing with Diana in an urgent manner. She had always re-signed her contract, and the feeling was that eventually she would come to her senses. What was the rush? There was a certain amount of stonewalling going on, at least as she saw it. Backstage at one of Diana’s Caesar’s Palace shows in Las Vegas in early 1981, Diana and Berry had a disagreement about what was going on with Motown. “Listen,” she said. “We need to hammer out a new contract if I’m going to stay here.”

  It sounded like a threat. Berry was already not feeling warmly toward her just by virtue of the fact that she had made it clear that he had to step up to the plate. The way he saw it, he owned the plate. In fact, in his view, he owned the whole ballpark!

  Now that Berry had had time to think things over and confer with Motown’s sales department, he was more clear about how he felt. His position was that Diana’s sales had been inconsistent. In many instances she would follow a major hit with a series of commercial disappointments. For instance, “Touch Me in the Morning” sold more than a million and a half copies in May 1973. The next release seven months later, “Last Time I Saw Him,” sold less than a million. Then, four months after that, a song called “Sleepin’” sold, maybe, just 50,000 copies! The recent string of hits could very well be, he suggested, a fluke. Who could predict such a business?

  Berry also pointed out to Diana that her studio costs—the amount of money it took to record one of her albums—were very high. This, too, was true: she was uninterested in a lot of the songs she was made to sing at this time and thus took a long time to get through them. But, in her defense, she was working with Michael Masser on a lot of the material and he drove her absolutely crazy by making her record bits and pieces of songs over and over again—all the while driving up the studio time. In fact, he pushed her so hard, she said, she was reluctant to work with him again. (A real shame, that, because he had truly produced some of her best records.)

  On top of all that, Berry pointed out that the cost of promoting her records was also exorbitant—but that was Motown’s problem, not hers. Because of her erratic sales, though, Motown could never make a profit or even break even, or so Berry said. His view was that since Motown had always covered her expenses even when the company was losing money, now that her sales were finally up again, she should remain loyal.* In terms of prestige, certainly it was a coup to have her on the label, but he wasn’t going to beg, that much was clear. “Look, Black, if you can get a better deal somewhere else,” he said, his tone somewhat dismissive, “then, fine. Go on and get it.”

  His remarks were swallowed by silence; it was a short discussion.

  “I just don’t understand him,” Diana later told Nancy Leviska, Berry’s former girlfriend. The two women were backstage after a concert in Las Vegas. It’s interesting that they had become friends, considering their places in Berry’s life, but the two women did grow to understand and even like each other. Each had a child by Berry—Diana had Rhonda and Nancy had a son named Stefan. According to Leviska’s memory, she and Diana were sipping cocktails talking things over. “Does Berry really want me to leave?” Diana asked. “Because if he does, I will. Do you think that’s what he wants?”

  “I think it would absolutely kill him if you leave, Diane,” Nancy told her. “My gosh! I can’t even imagine Motown without Diana Ross.”

  “Hmmm,” Diana said, thinking. “I’m not sure that I can imagine Diana Ross without Motown. But a lot of things have happened in my life that I could not imagine.” Then, after a beat, she grimaced and added, “It’s just that it was Berry who made those things happen.”

  “Correction,” Nancy interjected. “You two made it happen together. You’re a powerful woman, Miss Ross,” she added with a wink. “Don’t underestimate yourself and what you’ve done with your life. This is business as much as it
is personal.”

  “You’re right,” Diana agreed, tears welling in her eyes. She gave her unlikely confidante a soft smile. “I do think I need to make more money at this time,” she concluded. “I’m so afraid that this is my time, that this is my moment and I’m gonna miss it. You know what they say about striking when the iron is hot?” she asked. “My gut tells me that this is what I need to do.”

  Another acquaintance, John Whyman, also discussed the matter with Diana in Las Vegas. “Diana said that Berry kept telling her that she wasn’t selling records,” he recalled. “She confided that by 1980 she was practically bankrupt. I think she may have been exaggerating, but she was definitely having some financial problems.”

  Other associates don’t seem to think Diana was exaggerating at all, and some contend that her public would have been surprised to learn how little money Diana really had at this point. It’s really not clear who was responsible for this situation—if her royalty rate at Motown was too low for her status in the industry, or if she wasn’t receiving proper payments from the company on time … or if she was the victim of her own extreme spending habits. Considering that she was still living in the same house she bought in 1970 for $350,000 and just had a beach house in Malibu worth about $500,000, it seemed to a lot of people that she was living well within, or maybe even below, her financial means.

  In 1992, many years after she left Motown, she made a statement to Lears magazine that strongly suggested that she didn’t leave the company a wealthy woman: “I felt very lost and alone. I didn’t have much money. I had to go to a bank and borrow to pay my taxes. I thought they had been paid. I kept saying to myself, ‘You may not have much money, but you’ve got your name, Diana Ross. That’s who you are. That’s what you worked so hard for. That’s a starting place.’” It’s difficult to imagine that after all she’d achieved in her life and career, she was, by the beginning of the 1980s just at “a starting place” in her life, but if the quote is accurate—and she never disputed it—that certainly seems to be the case.

  Diana was also as concerned with personal power and self-awareness as she was with any financial problems she was having at the time. “All of a sudden I felt like, here I was, thirty-seven years old, with three children and through a divorce, but not yet able to take full responsibility for my own decisions,” she told this author in 1981. “You see, I don’t want to have to pick up the phone and call Berry, Motown or anybody else if I want to buy a car. I want to know where my bank accounts are!”

  In the spring of 1981, Diana teamed with singer-producer Lionel Richie for what would be the biggest hit record of her career, “Endless Love.” Franco Zeffirelli had contacted Richie to write the theme song to his film Endless Love, starring Brooke Shields. The title tune was planned as an instrumental, and after it was finished Zeffirelli suggested that Richie write lyrics to it and that perhaps Diana could record them. Eventually, the performance became a duet. “At first it wasn’t a Motown single,” Diana recalled of the song. “I didn’t come into the picture until later; Lionel’s agreement was with Polygram [Records and Pictures]. When I got into the picture, Lionel and I agreed that it was only fair that Motown get the single. I was really pleased with it because it was one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever recorded.” She had a tough time working with Lionel, though. He was customarily late for the sessions, and nothing galls her more than a person who can’t find a way to be punctual.

  Although the film proved dreadful, the song was one of the biggest records of 1981. “Endless Love” claimed the number-one spot on the charts and, amazingly, remained there for nine weeks. It was nominated for an Academy Award, and Diana and Lionel performed the song at the Oscars presentation in 1982. The song was also nominated for several Grammys, including Record of the Year. Though it lost both the Oscar and the Grammy, “Endless Love” is still one of those timeless, classic Diana Ross songs.

  Diana had just enjoyed the biggest record of her entire career—and she was no longer technically signed to Motown! Certainly, she was in a more powerful position than ever before. With Diana as a free agent, show business was abuzz with the possibilities. Many music industry moguls considered this a golden opportunity to sign her to their own labels. The late Neil Bogart, who launched Donna Summers’s career for Casablanca Records, offered Diana $15 million to sign with his newly formed Boardwalk Records. David Geffen, Cher’s former boyfriend, who had signed John Lennon and Yoko Ono to his new Geffen Records, matched Bogart’s offer. Polygram also came up with a substantial proposal. Then RCA did the almost unthinkable: it came up with $20 million, just as Gene Simmons’s representative had bluffed to Berry earlier. She was not only flattered but filled with new confidence. She finally realized how much she was worth, and she wanted at least that much money.

  Berry said that he could not afford to match any of the offers. It’s unclear what he offered her. He hasn’t said, and neither has she. One of her family members says it was “about $3 million.” Hopefully, that’s not true; if so, it was really a lowball offer and if he had any sense he ducked when he proposed it to her. One thing is certain: he kept telling her that if she felt any gratitude for what he had done for her over the last twenty years, she would stay with Motown. That kind of sentiment was actually beginning to exasperate Diana. “What he did for me?” she would later exclaim. “What about what I did for him? What about what I did for Motown?” She certainly had a point.

  Deciding to leave Motown was easy for Diana. Doing it was not. She was ending a professional relationship with Berry, but she didn’t want to lose him as a friend, even though their friendship had certainly become strained during the last few years.

  To whom could she turn? She didn’t know anyone who could give her objective advice, so she called Smokey Robinson who, as a vice-president of Motown, arguably had his biases. They met and, not surprisingly, he urged her to stay with the company that had made her a star and not be so concerned about money.

  After that meeting, she still wasn’t sure—but later that night she had a moment of clarity that would change everything. One of her family members tells this story:

  “She called me from Los Angeles. She was in bed,” says the relative.

  And she said, “You know, I just met with Smoke [Smokey] and I started thinking about him and about Berry, and where we came from and where we are now. And I’m thinking and thinking and thinking about these guys, and then Stevie came into my head. Berry, Smokey, Stevie … and then Marvin … and I’m thinking, wait a minute. Why is it that all these men are so rich and I’m not? And Mary’s not. And Florence wasn’t. And Cindy’s not? And Suzanne [dePasse] isn’t. Then it came to me. My gosh, is this a men’s club?”

  I asked her if she thought she’d been cheated at Motown? She said, “No, absolutely not. Up until now, I feel like it’s totally even. He [Berry, presumably] did for me. I did for him. And we’re even. Another second from now, it won’t be even because my perception of this whole thing might change.” I knew then that her mind was made up. She was ready to go.

  The next day, Diana met with Berry to give him the news. When she showed up at his front door with a grim expression, he knew what was coming. The two convened in his library. She sat down next to him on the sofa. “Berry,” she began, “this isn’t easy for either of us …”

  “When she called me Berry instead of Black, I knew she was leaving,” Berry later recalled.

  Twenty million dollars. How could she turn it down? She deserved it, she told him, and she really wanted his blessing.

  “If RCA is willing to give you that kind of money, Diane,” he told her, “then I guess you should take it.”

  As the two of them sat there, Berry wished the conversation would change course. Diana certainly had the ability to say, “Forget it, Black. I could never leave Motown. What was I thinking?” and then throw her arms around him, with all being forgiven. She could have credited him with all the acclaim that he rightly deserved, and they could have reminis
ced for hours about the last twenty-plus years of their lives. They could have laughed about all those days on the road, from dusty supper clubs to the grandest of theaters. However, that simply wasn’t to be the case. Berry had seen her slipping away for years and he had to know it was just a matter of time before she was gone for good. Truth be told, he had often reinforced the sense that she needed him to survive—and, for a long time, she did. However, that Diana was now gone from him. The girl who had once been concerned with what was so wrong with her had apparently had a grand realization somewhere along the way that nothing was that wrong … and it was time, now, to prove it.

  As cordially as they could both manage, the meeting ended, and without a miracle occurring. Indeed, she was gone.

  In March 1981, it became official. Diana signed a seven-year contract with RCA for $20 million, said to be the most lucrative recording contract up until that time. Thus ended Diana Ross’s golden years at Motown … and, some might argue, Motown’s golden years as well. Berry was heartbroken by Diana’s decision, though he would rarely discuss it. On some level, though, he had to know that this moment would one day arrive. Now that it had, one of the only things he and Diana Ross shared was that neither knew the answer to a very important question: Who was one without the other?

  The RCA years

  If Diana Ross learned anything at all during her twenty-one years at Motown, she learned that public relations and image concerns are very important in her line of work. She immediately decided that she wanted her decision to leave Motown to be perceived only as part of a growing experience, not based on finances or anything else that would seem cold or practical. “I don’t think that children leave home because there’s something wrong, exactly,” she told me in an interview at this time. “There are just other areas of who they are that somehow need to be expressed. Berry has been the most influential person in my life, yet at a certain point all of the things he taught me I had to be able to experience myself in order to know what they’re really about. Berry bought my house for me, my car, picked my movies, my songs. There was a point in there when I thought, wait, I can pick my own songs, can’t I? I can pay my own taxes. I can do these things but, more importantly, I must do these things.