Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Many millions of dollars were at stake for Diana—some said as much as $15 million, though she denied it was that much—and the sum was riding on whether or not she could convince Mary and Cindy to do this one, short tour with her (about thirty shows over three months). During the early winter months of 2000, the situation rapidly deteriorated with Mary. She was offered $2 million. However, she was also told that she would be allowed to have nothing to do with the planning or execution of the show. All she had to do was show up, wear some terrific Bob Mackie gowns that she would not have to pay for, and sing the Supremes’ hits, the arrangements of which she also did not have to finance. Diana thought it was a sweet deal. Mary didn’t; in fact, she was insulted by it. After all, since 1970 Mary had continued the Supremes without Motown’s support. It was Mary who represented the Supremes when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Diana was a no-show. It was Mary who accepted the trio’s star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, again with Diana a no-show. She had been battling Motown for almost thirty years to be able to use the name Supremes, and now, all of a sudden and with just a snap of the fingers, Diana was able to do so overnight? To Mary, this was beyond comprehension. For her to now be told that all she had to do was be on time for rehearsals made things even worse. It wasn’t so much about the money, she insisted, as it was about equality, about principle.

  All of this emotion coming from Mary Wilson was difficult for Diana to accept. In her mind, the tour made good business sense and wasn’t supposed to be the catalyst for any kind of disturbance between her and Mary. The fact that she would even share a stage with her after her book was, Diana felt, a huge concession. Therefore, for Mary to now become obstreperous was really pushing things.

  Meanwhile, as these negotiations were taking place, Diana’s divorce from Arne was finalized in February 2000. She was distraught about it and possibly not thinking clearly when it came to Mary and the proposed reunion. She still loved Arne, she said, and was having a terrible time getting over him.

  Still, despite whatever was going on in her life, Diana fully realized that a so-called reunion would never be able to happen without Mary Wilson. Since Cindy had aligned herself with Mary, Diana wasn’t going to be able to recruit her, either—unless she satisfied Mary. Maybe the offer had been too low, she decided. Maybe Mary had a point. Therefore, through the tour’s promoter, she offered Mary another $2 million out of her own pocket for a total of four million. Again, Mary rejected the offer. Now, Diana and everyone else in her camp was truly flabbergasted. After all, by her own admission, Mary earned about $1 million a year, working hard on the concert trail. The amount Diana had offered her was four times that much, and for just a few months’ work. Mary felt, though, that any proceeds from the tour should be divided more evenly, that she and Cindy should get if not a third each, an amount closer to it. However, even if Diana was getting $15 million, which Mary believed and which Diana denied, $4 million was almost a third of that amount. So, when Mary rejected the offer, Diana was finished with her for good. Unfortunately for Cindy, that meant that she was out, too. It’s unclear how much Cindy had been offered, but Mary said it was a lot less than what was on the table for her.

  One day in Diana’s home office in Connecticut, a very close friend of hers—a person she has known for many years—suggested that the show should just go ahead without Mary and Cindy. “Well, hmmm.” Diana thought, finger to her lips. “That’s an idea, isn’t it? I wonder … I mean, could it work? Yes,” she decided, “I think it could. But … hmmm.” She was unsure. She decided to call the one person who might best understand her dilemma—Berry. He knew both women well—Diana and Mary. What should she do? “Look, Black,” he told her, according to her later recollection, “at your age [she was fifty-six], don’t do it if you don’t think you can have fun with it. But, I say if you want to sing your songs, and you can have fun singing them again, then go on and do your tour. It’ll be great.”

  Diana then remembered a handwritten letter she had received from Oprah Winfrey earlier in the year. Written on 10 January 2000, it said:

  Dear Diana,

  I was flipping through the TV over the holiday trying to figure out how to work my satellite gadget and came across an Ed Sullivan special featuring all of the major Supremes performances. I was mesmerized, taken back to a younger self seeing you for the first time and everything that moment held for me—the possibilities for a future beyond poverty to something beautiful. You represented that beauty and more important, hope for me—hope that my life could be better, that I could do better. You were my angel. Please know that I still think of you often and hold you in the light.

  Love, Oprah.

  As she thought about it, Diana began to wonder if maybe the tour might be more about the image and influence of the Supremes and what it had meant to people like Oprah than about the specific characters who had been in the group. She later said that she considered cancelling the tour, but that she decided that she wanted to sing her songs and she wanted to do it for her fans. So, the tour would go forward, somehow. The question now: was it possible for the group’s former lead singer to mount a Supremes tour … without the Supremes? If anyone thought she wasn’t at least going to try, that would have been a person who didn’t know Diana Ross very well.

  A return to love?

  After Diana Ross left the Supremes back in 1970, Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong continued the group with other singers, all extremely talented women and all signed to Motown as official members of the Supremes. For her new tour, Diana now decided to recruit two of the cream of that crop: Lynda Laurence from Philadelphia, who was a member of the Supremes from 1972 to 1973, and Scherrie Payne from Detroit, who had worked with the group from 1973 to 1977.

  Obviously, these were not fake Supremes, as many in the media would later claim. Not only had they toured and performed as Supremes in top venues such as Madison Square Garden and Caesar’s Palace, they had appeared on network television programs with Johnny Carson, Sonny & Cher, Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Hope and others. In Scherrie’s case, she was actually the final lead singer of the group. Payne, Laurence and another singer they recruited had worked for the last twenty years as the Former Ladies of the Supremes. Diana knew both women casually and had reacquainted herself with them in 1998 when, at the invitation of former Motown A&R director Mickey Stevenson, she attended one of their concerts in Las Vegas. She mentioned to them at that time that one day she might like to tour with them. Well, apparently, the time had come. Scherrie and Lynda eagerly accepted her offer, and why not? What a great opportunity for them.

  A major cable network tie-in for the tour was to be a VH1 Divas special broadcast. Divas was an annual program that was, at the time, one of the most important to the network in terms of advertising revenue and ratings. The show featured major female artists performing separately and apart in a charitable effort to raise funds for the VH1 Save the Music Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring instrumental music programs in America’s public schools and to raising awareness of the positive impact that music participation has on students. The Divas series lasted from 1998 to 2004, when the network finally decided that it was becoming just too difficult to book women for the program.

  If anything, VH1 had learned the hard way that divas are often not easy to deal with, and their experience with Diana Ross in 2000 went a long way to proving it. That year, the network decided to build an entire show around Diana in order to get her to agree to do it. She had declined an invitation to appear two previous years. When presented with the opportunity of a complete tribute on VH1, Diana decided to go along with it. She asked for Donna Summer and RuPaul to be included as performers, and the network also booked Faith Hill, Mariah Carey and Destiny’s Child. It would be, Diana thought, a good way to position herself with her new tour, and also introduce Scherrie and Lynda to the viewing audience. However, she wanted to be involved in every aspect of the production, and would only
agree to the show if everyone understood her involvement to be total. She made that position very clear with the very first press release that was to be sent out by the network, a rudimentary statement that was merely for the purpose of announcing VH1’s plans for the show.

  As agreed, the network’s publicist, Rachel Lizerbram, sent the release over to Diana for her review. The next morning, she retrieved a very firm message from Diana telling her that the release was all wrong. Lizerbram recalled: “You just don’t expect to hear Diana Ross addressing you on your voice mail telling you that your work is unacceptable.” Diana sent the release back to the network with large, sweeping slashes through most of it. “At that point,” concluded Rachel Lizerbram, “I knew this was going to be a very long road.”

  A couple of days later, VH1 executives met with Diana to discuss their advertising campaign. The company had put together an elaborate and colorful campaign that featured a poster of the different singing divas as comic book superhero characters. The lead poster carried the headline “The Divas Are Coming” with text that described “a night like no other, when the planet’s mightiest voices put aside their differences to fight for a common cause.” The company also spent a small fortune on a cartoon commercial, utilizing the same concept. VH1 executives Monica Halpert and Wayne Isaac went to Diana’s office for the meeting. With Diana seated before her, Halpert dramatically unfurled the poster and waited for a response. Diana’s eyes filled with tears, and not of joy. “She was moved,” recalled Halpert, “in a bad way.”

  “This is so not the direction I want to go with,” Diana said. After she described what she had in mind, the VH1 team did what Monica Halpert described as “a 180-degree about-face” to change the concept. The result was a giant, red-tinted poster of Diana in action with lots of hair and large accompanying text that read “DIVA DIANA.” Then, below it: “Divas 2000—A Tribute to Diana Ross.” Halpert said, “It wasn’t as energetic but it was certainly something that she could live with.”

  On the evening of the show, Diana wanted to be sure that everything went as planned, though there really hadn’t been much rehearsal at all for anyone. The walk onto the red carpet, though, was an important way to start things. Diana got out of her limousine looking quite diva-like in a floor-length white fur coat beneath which she wore a slinky red silk gown. The photographers went berserk with flashcubes popping all around her as she walked down the carpet. Posing and preening, she even spun around a few times, holding her fur out behind her with the characteristic mane of hair swirling all about her head. Indeed, no celebrity had ever enjoyed the red carpet treatment more than Diana Ross; she never looked better or seemed more in her element.

  “I was at ‘talent check-in,’” recalled VH1 production member Tanya Y. Jennings during a later VH1 special about the Divas 2000 program. “And everyone was, like, ‘Okay she’s coming. If anyone speaks to her you must address her as Miss Ross. Nothing else, nothing less. If you do not say Miss Ross, you are fired.’”

  John Kelley, senior VP of communications confirmed, “My staff and I were all instructed to address Miss Ross as Miss Ross.”

  Carey Fetman, the wardrobe designer, added, “Everybody was running around [saying], ‘Miss Ross!’ ‘Miss Ross!’ ‘Miss Ross!’”

  Finally, after the opening acts, Diana made her stunning entrance onto the stage in an orange, yellow and black gown with a gold fringe from the knees to the floor, her hair outrageously teased—with purple highlights!—and wearing giant, gold hoop earrings. She had not wanted the show to be broadcast live, as Divas had been in the past. Rather, she insisted that it be taped in advance in case there were problems. Perhaps it was for the best because the show was full of problems, mostly due to the lack of rehearsal time and a dreadful sound system. Diana had insisted that the network use a specific system that she liked and, in order to give her a level of comfort, the VH1 executives agreed. Ken Erlich, the executive producer, later called it a “big mistake.” It was, apparently, a flawed system and caused no end of problems for her and all of the other artists on the program. There were countless delays, feedback problems and, at one point, Diana simply stopped the show while everyone scrambled about trying to figure things out. “This does not please me,” she said with a look indicating that she meant business. “It took those moments longer to play out,” said VH1 executive Wayne Isaac, “than any moments in my entire life.”

  For her part, Diana was not even close to being at her best on this important night, sounding thin-voiced and seeming disoriented. It was not a good showing for her. Nothing was more discouraging than hearing her sing what was supposed to be a heartbreaking song like “Touch Me in the Morning,” all the while doing a shimmy and yelling to the director, “Get the fringe, Steve!” She’s so much better than that as a performer, an artist who has really cared about her songs. It was as if so much was going on around her, she just didn’t have her wits about her.

  Then, without any warning to the production staff, she decided to go into the audience and perform a number, which caused chaos since the audience was not lit properly for broadcast and cameras were not in place for it. While walking through the bleachers, she hugged and kissed her fans, conversing with them, coaxing them to join in on her song and accepting their love. Meanwhile, the people on the VH1 production team were pulling their hair from their heads, strand by strand. However, even they had to later admit that the studio audience loved every second of it.

  Despite all of the problems—it took four and a half hours to complete what was to be a two-hour broadcast!—VH1 was heartened by the fact that the show, when broadcast on 11 April 2000, became one of the highest-rated, most successful programs in the history of the channel. VP John Kelley said, “the New York Times felt that we delivered in the Divas concert in the year 2000 in a way we had never delivered before because it was the quintessential diva behavior on the part of one performer.” Indeed, the Times reporter wrote, “Diana Ross lived up to her billing as the ultimate diva.”

  On the program, Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence ably performed a couple of Supremes hits with Diana. During subsequent interviews, Ross then made it clear that there was no longer to be a reunion tour. In fact, the show was to now be called Diana Ross and the Supremes 2000: Return to Love. She said, “It’s about the music, about the fans … not about the individuals.”

  Not surprisingly, Mary Wilson was very unhappy about this turn of events and not about to take any of it lying down. On 20 April she appeared on ABC’s 20/20 charging that Diana had always been selfish and “never wanted to share.” She said, “For once in my life, I’m going to think about me. And how degrading this is. How degrading.” The next night, Barbara Walters gave Diana a chance to rebut Mary. Ross said, “We could have offered her the moon and she wouldn’t have been happy.” She charged that Mary had been identifying herself as a victim for years, was perpetually unhappy and that there was nothing that she—Diana—would ever be able to do about it. Diana even alluded to the fact that she “contributed to her [Mary’s] life when she was having difficulty,” probably referencing the loan she gave her in 1981 to buy a house, and, “She has forgotten that.”

  A hurt and dejected Mary Wilson did more of the same kind of interview in the weeks to come. No matter how much Diana tried to insist that she wasn’t trying to foist a phony reunion off on the public, Mary’s stance in the media kept suggesting that this was exactly the case. An additional problem was that the public still remembered Diana’s detention by the police in London a year earlier. She had been portrayed then as an out-of-control diva by the media—and she did, as she admitted, “get loud.” Many people still had reservations about her behavior as a result of such coverage, so the latest scandal did nothing to ingratiate her to her critics. By the first week in June, public and critical opinion was so much against Diana, in fact, some in her camp suggested that she might want to consider canceling the tour altogether. “Absolutely not,” she said at what was called a “morale meeting”
of the entire troupe. “We have all worked too hard to let that Mary ruin this thing for us,” Diana said as she was getting ready to leave the room. “It’s totally unfair to everyone, the company, the fans, the girls [Scherrie and Lynda]. No, the show goes on,” she concluded. Then with her usual “Okay. Gotta run. Love you. Bye” she was gone. Her determination left everyone else feeling almost as sure as she was that the tour should proceed as planned.

  This author attended the opening night of the Return to Love tour in Philadelphia at the First Union Spectrum on 14 June 2000, reviewing for overseas publications. When the three Supremes finally began to gingerly walk down the steps holding hands and wearing Bob Mackie–designed sequined and mirrored gowns—Diana in the middle—it was a thrilling moment. Like prisms in a spotlight, the three of them filled the arena with rainbows. At the first sight of these “new” Supremes, the cheering audience immediately rose to its feet. In that moment it seemed as if most of the people present had fully resigned themselves to the notion that they weren’t going to be seeing a reunion show, but one that still held the promise of a very good concert. “Say a prayer, will you, please?” Diana had asked Scherrie while holding her hand at the top of the massive silver staircase. By the time they finished the opening song, “Reflections,” it was as if the prayer had been answered.