Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  At the appointed hour, Betty, Mary and Florence showed up at the house, and then the four nervous girls took a bus to Hitsville. They must have composed themselves on the way, because Janie Bradford, who met them at the studio, recalled their poise that morning. “They were four very confident girls in their white skirts, matching scarves and bobby socks, acting pretty much as if they were the hottest thing to ever happen.”

  When the time arrived for their audition, Hitsville talent scout Robert Bateman and record producer Richard Morris ushered the Primettes into a back room; Smokey was there but he stayed in the hallway rather than make the girls even more anxious with his presence. Standing in a semi-circle, the Primettes then sang “The Twist” and then “Night Time Is the Right Time” both a cappella and with Florence singing lead. She gave it her all, hitting the high notes, holding them with perfect pitch, selling the song … giving the total entertainer’s package. Florence, even at such an early age, was what people in the music business called “the real deal,” and that much was evident from her audition. Berry walked into the room. Just five foot seven inches, he was a short guy with a big presence and the girls were instantly intimidated. He had a baby face with large, very intense, practically hypnotic brown eyes. He wore his hair in a short-cropped natural hairstyle. His attire was casual: a white turtleneck sweater, black slacks. As Florence sang, he walked in and out of the room, seeming remote, distracted and wholly uninterested. He left the room. Then, toward the end of the second song, he sauntered back in. Diana announced, “We have one more song we’d like to do.” The four then began a timid version of the Drifters’ hit song “There Goes My Baby,” this time with Diana on lead.

  Fully confident and never thinking about any limitation or how she might be compared to the bigger-voiced Florence, Diana just stood in the middle of the room and let it rip with a voice that was at once whiny, nasal and piercing. It was also bursting with emotion. The sound stopped Berry in his tracks. Now, he seemed fascinated; his eyes narrowed slightly as he assessed Diana’s exuberant performance. Florence was a big and loud singer. But big and loud could be found on any street corner in Detroit so being another one of them didn’t make Florence very unusual. Diana Ross? Now, she was unusual. Not only was her voice unique, her look—all popping eyes, flashing teeth and bony frame—was something that a person just couldn’t turn away from—or that seemed to be Berry’s immediate reaction to her. At least he finally stopped and listened to the group. After Diana was finished, Berry leaned over to Bateman and whispered in his ear.

  “Okay. So, can you do that one more time, girls?” Bateman asked.

  “Sure,” one of them answered. Diana then counted off four and began again, singing in her high-pitched tone while her partners provided harmonic oohs and aahs. After they again finished, Berry finally introduced himself.

  “So, you sing through your nose?” he asked Diana.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she answered, now suddenly seeming nervous. “If you want me to, I guess I can.”

  “You already do,” he said, laughing. “Sit down and we’ll talk,” he suggested, motioning to four wooden chairs. The girls sat down before him, each leaning forward to hear his every word. When he told them they weren’t “too bad,” they immediately jumped up and squealed with delight. “But you’re not too good, either,” Berry hastened to add, which did calm them down. He wanted to know their ages. He learned that Mary and Diana were sixteen, Florence, seventeen and Betty, eighteen. Berry shook his head solemnly. “Well, that’s too bad because you, you and you are too young,” he said, pointing to Diana, Mary and Florence. “So, come back when you’re through with high school, and we’ll see about things then,” he suggested.

  Berry was getting ready to leave the room when Florence spoke up. “But, hey, wait a second,” she said. “We won the contest, you know?” She was referring to the Detroit/Windsor Freedom Festival. “And that guy right there,” she continued, pointing to Bateman, “said for us to come down here, and so here we are. Now, you’re telling us you don’t want us? What kind of stuff is that?” She was loud and ballsy, and her attitude immediately rubbed Berry the wrong way. He turned and walked over to her, put his face right next to hers and then cut her down with two words: “Get lost!”

  “But—”

  “Look, girl, I’m the boss and I said good-bye.” Berry then opened the door and waved them out of the room. He smiled to himself, probably knowing that this would not be the last he would see of the four of them. As the girls were walking out, Diana happened to notice that Florence looked as though she was about to once again open her mouth. Diana dug her fingernails deep into her friend’s arm and pulled her along, all the while chastising her to “Be quiet! You want to ruin our chances forever?”

  Once outside the room, Diana whirled to face Florence. “So, why didn’t you tell us what happened the day we won that contest?” she demanded to know. In that moment, according to what Mary would remember, she actually looked as if she were going to go for Florence’s throat. Though not easily cowed, this time Florence seemed taken aback by Diana’s accusatory tone and demeanor. “I decide for the Primettes,” Ballard managed to say with a faint show of bravado. She looked to Mary and Betty for support, but none was forthcoming, as if neither girl wanted to end up on the wrong side of this little power struggle. “Talking to Hitsville, that’s too important for you to decide for yourself,” Diana told Florence. “You should’ve told me about this. Why didn’t you?”

  “’Cause I forgot, all right?” Florence mumbled.

  Once Diana was able to detect weakness in Florence’s position, she really lit into her. “Well, don’t you ever forget anything so important again,” she told her, angrily. “Don’t you dare ever forget!”

  Mary and Betty just watched the scene unfold, both a bit frightened by it. “We thought, oh, wow, this girl is really something else,” Mary later said, referring to Diana. “I think we were a little anxious about her, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.”

  The four friends then walked silently toward the front yard of the Hitsville building, the argument between Diana and Florence too fresh to let go of yet. Still, Diana and Florence tried to rectify things. They didn’t want to dislike each other. They sensed that they were on to something exciting and didn’t want to ruin it—as long as they understood each other. They also couldn’t bring themselves to leave the premises. Instead, they sat in the reception area and just stared at the recording artists, producers and songwriters coming and going from the building. What would it take, they wondered to each other, for them to be a part of all of this excitement? It was then that Diana made what would turn out to be a fateful decision for the group. “We’re coming back here every day until something happens for us,” she said. “And Berry Gordy? He’s just going to have to get used to seeing us around because we’re not giving up. Agreed?” They agreed, and wholeheartedly. “Berry Gordy was not the only one who knew what he wanted,” Diana would say many years later. “I have never been able to take no for an answer, and he definitely had not seen the last of me. In fact, it was quite clear to me that the relationship had only just begun.”

  The first recording sessions

  Just as sixteen-year-old Diana Ross had vowed, the Primettes soon became a permanent fixture at the Hitsville building. “From their audition onward, those girls were always in sight,” Robert Bateman once recalled.

  “I’d hear them in the kitchen,” Ernestine Ross recalled, “and they’d be saying, ‘You ask her, Mary.’ ‘No, you ask her, Diane. She’s your mother.’ ‘No, you ask her, Florence.’ And I’d come in and say, ‘All right, I know you want a quarter for the bus. Here it is. But, now how are you going to get home?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, don’t you worry about us.’”

  “We’d get all dressed up in our prettiest dresses,” Diana recalled, “and we were pretty cute kids; we had ponytails and we flirted and I wasn’t so skinny then. We’d always manage to get a ride home with some of
the boys. There were a lot of sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds recording with the company then, so everybody was nice to us and let us hang around. We’d pester everybody to teach us things about singing, and eventually, just to get us off their backs, they would.”

  Toward the end of the summer of 1960, Betty McGlown decided that she wanted to stop singing and instead get married. Diana felt that Betty was making a mistake, but it was her life and her choice, and her mind was made up about it. Mary and Florence attended Betty’s wedding without Diana, and also began to question the logic of having Diana in the group at all. She had proved to be a bit more trouble than they had expected when they recruited her at Paul Williams’s suggestion. In the end, however, they decided to keep Diana around rather than have to replace two girls in the group. In short order, they found someone for Betty’s spot, a tall, light-skinned girl and a decent though not spectacular singer named Barbara Martin. Barbara never really felt like a part of things, though. She was the new girl and hadn’t been through what Diana and Mary had up until that point, so the two never really took to her. It would just be Diana and Mary from this time on whenever there was a problem to solve. Still, they needed a fourth girl professionally, and Barbara filled the bill. Once she was properly ensconced, the Primettes were then contacted by someone from another local record label, Lu-Pine, and asked to record a couple of songs: “Tears of Sorrow” with Diana on lead, and “Pretty Baby” with Mary on vocals, and an introduction by Florence. It wasn’t Hitsville, but at least it was a start, they’d decided. When the 45 was released, it failed in the marketplace. Indeed, it seemed that things were not going well.

  In the fall of 1960, back at Hitsville, Berry Gordy booked studio time for a blues singer named Mable John, the first female solo artist he had signed. She was a small, lovely, dark woman with big, luminous eyes. Background singers were needed for her recording session, for which Gordy was to be the producer. “Let’s give those young girls a shot,” he decided, referring to the Primettes. “What have we got to lose?”

  “They were real determined,” Berry Gordy told writer David Ritz when thinking back on those days. “They were anxious to please, to work hard. And they had all the ingredients. They were young, bright, maybe somewhat shy but very determined and energetic. They were captivating, they had energy, dynamism. And they had the sparkle of Diana Ross.”

  When the girls got the news, the four of them jumped up and down in the studio hallway, embracing and laughing. “This is it,” Mary said. “This is the chance we’ve been waiting for.”

  On the day of the session, Mable John positioned herself in the small phone-booth-like cubicle in which all of the lead vocals to Tamla’s songs were recorded. The Primettes were in the same studio but outside the booth, standing behind two microphones next to a black concert grand piano. The four girls, each dressed in a neatly ironed white skirt and blouse, stood on clusters of tangled wire cables that seemed to go nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Mable John recalled:

  First, Berry made it clear to the Primettes that this session was only a test and that it did not mean they would be signed to the label. It was clear from the beginning that Diane was the leader, the in-charge, take-charge type. Mary had the better ear for harmony, but if there was a question about anything it was directed to Diane. I also noticed right off that Diane was a flirt. She was attentive to anything Berry wanted, asking a lot of questions, soaking up information. During a break, she actually had the nerve to ask me, “So, what do you really think of him? Is he fair? Is he honest?” As if I was going to tell her otherwise. She was very direct, though. A bottom-line kind of girl.

  Diana’s eyes were pinned on Berry’s face for most of the time in the studio, as he directed the group in how he wanted them to sing their parts of the song. After the session was over, the teenagers embraced each other, jumping up and down with joy and laughing. They were doing exactly what they had set out to do, and the victory was a sweet one. If anything, it served to further bond them as a group. If they had got this far, what else might they be able to achieve? When they finally left the studio, it was in single file with Diana at the rear. Just before they walked out the door, Diana turned and gave Berry a wink over her shoulder. Then she executed a saucy little hip maneuver for his pleasure. Berry did an incredulous double-take. “Hey! Did that one on the end just wink at me?” he asked the recording engineer.

  “Yeah, man. The skinny chick is flirting with you, Berry.”

  “Well, shit, man. What do you make of that?”

  Diana was sixteen. Berry was thirty-one. Frankly, he didn’t know what to make of it.

  Later, Berry and Mable sat in the control booth and listened to the final product. “So tell me the truth,” Berry said to her, according to her later recollection. “What do you think of those four girls, the Primettes? I mean, they’re sort of interesting, aren’t they?”

  “Well, the one named Diane is something else,” Mable answered. “You’d better watch out for her, Berry. And I ain’t lyin’.” Mable and Berry were close friends; she was one of the few people at the company who could chide him and get away with it.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You know what I mean,” she answered.

  Berry’s brown eyes crinkled and he cracked up, laughing.

  Years later, Mable John recalled,

  Berry and I agreed that she was the type of kid who probably knew what she wanted and how she was going to get it. Years later, you heard a lot about how he thought of the four girls as equals from the beginning. Well, don’t believe it. From that first session on, Diane demanded attention from Berry. She was always in his face saying, “Let’s do this!” and, “Please, Berry, let’s do that!” The next thing I knew, they were doing background vocals and handclaps for Marvin Gaye and then for everyone else at the label. They were becoming part of the family, not because they were that talented but because they were so determined. She was so determined.

  “You know what? I think I’m going to sign that Ross kid to the label,” Berry told Mable a couple of weeks after the first session.

  “Oh yeah? And what about the other girls?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah, them too,” he answered.

  “Now, don’t go breaking up the group, Berry,” Mable warned him playfully. “They look like nice girls. Don’t mess with them, now.”

  “Who, me?” Berry asked with wide eyes.

  “Yeah, you.”

  After that first recording session for Berry Gordy, the Primettes continued, as they had in the past, to go to Hitsville every day by walking, taking the bus, hitchhiking or doing whatever it took to get there. With the passing of just a few weeks, they learned that if they spent enough time at the studio, something always came along for them. There seemed to always be musical tracks that needed accompanying handclaps and, now and then, background vocals to be added to them as well. Soon, they were being paid a small salary for their work, though it wasn’t always easy to get their money. After a couple of free sessions, Florence started to complain that she was “tired of working for free.” The girls were a little depressed one day, and Florence came to rehearsal with applications to join the navy, which she had cut from a magazine. “I’m sick of Detroit,” she said. “I want to move on, so I’m joining the navy.” The girls were surprised. “You ain’t joinin’ no navy,” Mary told her. “Oh yes I am, and so is Diane,” Florence said. She looked at Diana and, right on cue, Diana played her part. “It’s true,” she said with a poker face. “Florence and I are joining the navy.” Then, she and Florence dutifully filled out their applications and promised Mary and Betty that they would soon be gone. It was a fun fantasy, and of course they would never do it. Days later, they threw away their applications. Or, as Mary later put it, “I told ya’ll you weren’t joining no navy.”

  A few weeks later, the Primettes got their chance to be, as Diana put it, “in.” On 1 October 1960, they were booked into the Hitsville studio to record a ballad called “A
fter All,” which was to be produced by Smokey Robinson. The song wasn’t released because Berry felt it didn’t meet his standards of quality. (In the years to come, much of what the Supremes recorded would go unreleased for precisely the same reason.) It was interesting, though, because all four girls had a lead verse, which was unusual. It’s actually the only time Barbara Martin sang solo on a record.

  Two more months passed. Finally, on 15 December, the girls were back in the studio again, this time recording “I Want a Guy,” with Berry as producer. Two new staff writers at the company, Brian Holland and Freddie Gorman (who was also the Ross family’s mailman!) had written the song—not their best effort, especially listening to it today. Gorman remembered, “Diana heard me playing the song one day in the studio and said she wanted to record it. Berry agreed to it. Later, I walked into the room where they were rehearsing it. Diana was seated at the piano with Brian with the other girls gathered around her. They had to stand. That’s when I knew who was boss.”

  During rehearsals for “I Want a Guy,” Diana sang in her nasal, oddly pitched tone. Though the finished product couldn’t have been more mediocre, Berry was still heartened by it. A week later, he gave the Primettes the good news: he was offering the group a recording contract with Tamla—and Diana a job as his secretary. In a 1983 interview, Diana recalled, “I was still in high school and I remember I had an art class and I made these cufflinks for him. I guess I won him over by being so kind to him, because the truth is, I wasn’t a secretary. I couldn’t even type or take shorthand.”

  Although Diana was soon known around the company as “the new secretary who thinks she can sing,” she knew how to make the best of an opportunity. Anyone walking by her desk would inevitably hear phrases from her such as “Oh, Mr. Gordy, you are so talented!” or “Oh, Mr. Gordy, how’d you get to be so smart?” Of course, every now and then, when the timing seemed appropriate, she would ask when her group was to get another opportunity to record. Finally, Berry gave in, again.