Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Mary’s life changed dramatically when she was nine and her natural mother, Johnnie Mae Wilson, came to claim her. Not only did she discover that the woman she thought was her aunt was really her mother, but also that two unruly “cousins” were actually her siblings. In 1956, after living in a series of run-down apartments, Johnnie Mae—who was illiterate—finally found a home for her family in the Brewster Projects. Mary’s natural father, Sam Wilson, was a drifter and compulsive gambler who had spent time in jail on charges that were never clear.

  The parents of Mary and Florence, who had been unable to overcome financial and racial obstacles, always put the traditional Southern values of family loyalty and cooperation above everything else. Of course, this wasn’t necessarily the case in the Ross household. Fred and Ernestine Ross were well educated, focused and directed. As a result, the Ross family stressed Northern ideals of competition and achievement. By the time she was eighteen, Diana had become a lot like her father: more remote, stubborn, suspicious and—as much as she disliked the quality in Fred—practical. She remained mystified by the bond many of her colleagues at Motown developed between them, especially evident on the first Motor Town Revue.

  Three days after the Revue left Detroit in the winter of 1962, the Supremes’ fourth Motown single, “Let Me Go the Right Way,” which Berry had produced for them, was released. Even though it bore the distinction of being their first record to make Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart, it would not find much commercial success. With the exception of a guy known as Singing Sammy Ward, the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas were the only two groups on the revue who didn’t have a hit record to sing for their audiences. As a result, as Motown legend has it, the Supremes were dubbed “the no-hit Supremes” by their label mates, which made them feel bad and also must have made them wonder why their counterparts weren’t called “the no-hit Vandellas”!

  As the tour progressed, every couple of days the entourage would stop at a cheap motel to take much-needed baths and wash their clothing. No inconvenience mattered to the youngsters, however, because they were so excited about their new lives and promising careers. They didn’t actually recognize they were paying their proverbial dues, but even if they had, they would have gladly met the bill. As the tour continued into the South, the young Motown stars were confronted by extreme cases of racism that made indelible impressions on all of them. By 1962, the boycotts, sit-ins and freedom marches that had started in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott were still affecting the South. Freedom riders—black and white college students from the North—had traveled southward by bus and, in an effort to enforce integration, were also unknowingly paving a path of anger and hatred for the Motown tour.

  In Macon, Georgia, when the revue bus broke down, local service station attendants refused to service it when they realized that it carried black performers. Finally, a compassionate peace officer convinced the workers to repair the vehicle, but they did it while muttering obscenities.

  In South Carolina, the rickety Motown bus broke down right in front of a prison house. “All we could see were black hands clutching at the iron window bars, and before long they all started pleading with us to help them,” Mary Wilson recalled. “We girls hung back, afraid to get close, but the Tempts and Miracles went up and shook hands with the prisoners through the bars. ‘Isn’t there something we can do for these fellows?’ I asked one of the musicians. ‘Are you kidding?’ he replied. ‘We’d better get this damn bus fixed and get the hell out of here before they throw us in there with them. They don’t care about innocence or guilt down here. That’s how they treat niggers in the South.’”

  “In practically every city, we couldn’t find a restaurant that would let us come in the front door,” Diana remembered. “And we were determined not to have to use the back door.” Most of the restaurants had take-out windows in the back for the black patrons not permitted in the front door, or allowed to sit down inside with the whites. At one stop, Bobby Rodgers of the Miracles became engaged in a shouting match with a restaurant owner who had refused to allow the performers to use the establishment’s front entrance. It almost ended in tragedy. The proprietor reached for his pistol just as Rodgers scrambled onto the bus and it screeched off. “Diane was wide-eyed and scared,” Bobby Rodgers later recalled with a laugh. “She was quiet—all the Supremes were when these things went down—just sitting back, waiting to see who was going to be the first to get killed.”

  As difficult as it was to find safe restaurants in which to dine, it was virtually impossible to find gas stations that would allow the artists to use the bathroom facilities. Florence, who had never been to the South before—and who said later that she never wanted to go back—once remembered:

  We all needed to go bad, and so we stopped at a gas station. The Miracles got out of their car and came over to the bus and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll handle it!” They went in and asked if we could use the bathroom and the next thing I knew they were running back to the bus, followed by a white man with a shotgun. I grew up with white people living right next door, and I never saw anything like that before. “These white people in the South are crazy,” Diane said.

  Eventually, we made a deal with the guy. He said we could use his bucket. We had no choice. Everyone cleared the bus, and whoever had to would go into the bus and do his business in the bucket, come back out, empty it behind the gas station in the woods and then clean out the bucket for the next person, using a watering hose.

  “Made me wonder if I wanted to be a star, after all,” Florence concluded, “but the most vivid memory for me was the day we all got shot at in Birmingham.”

  What happened was that after the show in Birmingham, on 9 November at the City Auditorium, the troupe was boarding the bus for the next stop when, suddenly, they heard a popping noise. Mary Wells fell to her knees on the steps of the bus. “Oh Lord! Help me, Jesus! I’m hit!” she screamed out. “I’ve been shot!”

  “Girl, you ain’t been shot,” Diana shouted back at her. “Those are just firecrackers.”

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  “No, it’s rocks,” one of the Vandellas exclaimed. “Somebody’s throwing rocks at us!”

  “That ain’t rocks,” Choker Campbell, the show’s bandleader, shouted at them all. “Them’s bullets!”

  “Jesus!” Diana exclaimed. “Duck, everyone. Duck!”

  By now, everyone was in a mad scramble to get back onto the bus and out of shooting range. But Mary Wells—who hadn’t really been hit but was just scared—refused to get up, thereby making it impossible for anyone to get past her and onto the bus for safety. “Out of the way, girl,” Martha Reeves hollered at her. Everyone else joined in: “Move, Mary!” Mary said, “I’m not getting up,” and she meant it. Mary Wilson laughs at the memory today, but when it was happening it wasn’t so funny: “Everyone tried to push her out of the way, but it was impossible.” Finally, some of the fellows managed to move her from the steps. It took just about thirty seconds for the bus to fill up with scared young Motowners and then it took off, barreling down the street and away from danger. The next morning, the driver found bullet holes in the front of the vehicle.

  Of course, the racial bias was as obvious in the venues as it was in the streets. Most of the theaters in which the artists performed were segregated establishments with blacks relegated to the balconies and whites seated on the floor level. Sometimes, blacks were seated on one side of the theater, whites on the other. In Macon, one theater hosted a “Colored Folks Night,” which meant that, for one evening only, blacks were allowed to sit on the first level with whites. This was a rare occurrence, though. Segregation was the norm, so much so that in some theaters a rope would be stretched from center stage all the way down the middle aisle to the back of the theater: blacks on one side of the rope, whites on the other. If that didn’t impress upon ticket-holders that there was segregation, nothing would. Some of the singers complained of not knowing which side of the rope to sing to, fearful of givin
g too much attention to one side and thus angering the other. During these kinds of shows, Diana would stand at center stage with her feet firmly planted at the point where the rope began. As she sang, she would look straight ahead, trying not to offend either side. It’s astonishing, when one really considers it, that Diana Ross has seen this kind of segregation in her lifetime. After the passing of federal civil rights legislation in 1964, many of the Motown artists would return to these same theaters and find the ropes now gone and the audiences integrated.

  When the tour got to South Carolina, a musician named “Beans” Bowles located an accommodating motel called, appropriately enough, the Heart of the South, in which the troupe could wash up and spend the night on comfortable beds. Once settled in, some of the singers, including Diana, donned their swimsuits with the intention of taking a dip in the pool. Diana, a skilled swimmer, couldn’t wait to take a running dive into that pool, followed by everyone else. But the Motown stars soon began to realize that for each black person that cannonballed into the pool, one white person got out of it. Before they knew it, the Motown artists had the entire pool to themselves. “Oh, to hell with them,” one of the Marvelettes decided of the whites. “We don’t need them in our pool, anyway.”

  But then a strange and wonderful thing happened. Many of the whites who had left the pool had actually got out so that they could go back to their rooms for something. As it happened, the local disc jockeys had been playing the Motown stars’ records all week to promote their concerts, and when the hotel guests realized who the black folks were in the pool, they were excited, not insulted. Before the youngsters knew what was happening, they were surrounded by their new, white fans, all thrusting pens and papers at them—wanting their autographs.

  Indeed, it would seem that they were making a difference.

  “Just a little bit softer now”

  Most people who knew Diana Ross well at this time knew that she was nothing if not an ambitious and driven young woman, determined to make it in show business and rarely, if ever, willing to take no for an answer. So, imagine dropping a person like that right in the middle of a show that featured an entire roster of recording artists, all from the same label and most of whom were having much more success in their profession than her. Is it surprising that she ended up competing with them for attention? Indeed, from all accounts, Diana became intensely competitive while on the Motor Town Revue. Mickey Stevenson, who was Motown’s artist and repertoire director, recalls, “This kid would rehearse with an energy that was uncanny for an eighteen-year-old performer. Then, she would give it all she had on stage. If it didn’t go well in front of the audience, she would be extremely upset after the show and cry a lot. Then, she would go off on her own and rehearse whatever it was that didn’t work, whatever bothered her about her performance. The next night, she’d have it right.”

  What really incensed the others was when Diana began to appropriate bits and pieces of their performances and then include those nuances in her own presentation. She would watch all of their performances from the wings or from the audience, take mental notes about what worked for them, and then incorporate those very same ideas into her own act. Of course, she must have realized that stealing from the others would not make her very popular with them. However, in balancing the notion of unpopularity with the artists against the idea of unpopularity with her audiences, she knew what she had to do …

  “Just a little bit softer now, just a little bit softer now,” she sang one night while motioning for the band to tone it down. Then, after her voice had dropped to almost a whisper, she would begin to raise it again and bring the band right up with her: “A little bit louder now. A little bit louder now!” The problem was that this was Smokey Robinson’s bit, not hers. The other problem was that the Supremes were such a minor act on the bill, they went on early in the show. So when Smokey finally got out onto the stage as a headliner, it appeared that he was stealing from her. He wasn’t very happy about it, either. He telephoned Berry: “I said, ‘Hey, man, look, I don’t mean to be petty, but Diane, she’s stealing my act. I mean, she isn’t even being coy about it, she just took it.’ And Berry said, ‘Look, you’re the star of the show. She’s so low on the totem pole, she’s fighting for her life out there. So just come up with something else and let her have that one.’ I said, ‘All right, but is there any way we can lock her in her dressing room during my act?’ We had a good laugh …”*

  Diana didn’t necessarily think she was better than anyone else on the tour. In fact, she was afraid that she wasn’t good enough. She would spend her whole career worrying about, as she told Barbara Walters in 1978, “not being good enough … messing up and people finding out about it.” It wouldn’t take much for her to just fall into a place where she would be completely immobilized by her own fears and insecurities. The only thing she could do to prevent that from happening was construct a facade of blithe invincibility and make sure others never found out how insecure she was about her ability. If they knew, she would never be able to go on.

  “You don’t say anything bad about me, and I won’t say anything bad about you,” Diana told the others. Admittedly, she didn’t always hold to that promise but, still, those were her words. They were all teenagers, and they acted like it. Diana and Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes always managed to amuse over their silly arguments about who in the troupe wore dirty underwear. Diana and Mary Wells got into it when Wells suggested that Diana wear a girdle “because you jiggle so much.” Diana accused someone else of stealing her shoes. Sometimes, though, the rowdiness got out of hand. At one point Gladys and Diana were feuding over a criticism Gladys had made of the Supremes’ dresses. “They’re so tacky,” she said, “and, really, it’s embarrassing to all of us.” Before she went on stage that night, Gladys was handed a note by one of the theater employees: “Diane is gonna kick your butt after the show.” Gladys just rolled her eyes. “Oh, that Diane,” she said.

  Many years later, Gladys said that she never knew what to expect from Diana in those days.

  Once we were riding along in the bus and she said to me, “Gladys, you are so lucky. You came out with ‘Please Mr. Postman’ and it was an immediate hit. I’m sure that we could have a hit but the lady who helps Berry pick the songs for release [Billie Jean Brown] hates me. So she won’t release my best stuff.” She started crying. The next thing I knew I was comforting her, crying with her. “Oh, don’t worry,” I told her, “you’ll have your hit, too. Just you wait.” And there we were, boo-hooing because she didn’t have a hit, and I did. Diane was very complicated.

  The maiden tour of the Motor Town Revue finally wound down with a ten-day engagement at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, commencing on 7 December 1962. The Apollo was one of the most famous theaters in the world, especially in relation to black entertainment. Just as playing the Palace was the ultimate goal of white performers, appearing at the Apollo was the dream of most young black entertainers at the time; pioneering soul stars such as James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson practically made the Apollo their home.

  Apollo audiences were known to be brutally frank. If they liked a performer, he or she would soon know it from the crowd’s vociferous response. However, if they were not impressed—and it did take a lot to impress them—the entertainer would know that as well, by the sound of boos and hisses. The Motown artists were as nervous as they were excited about the opportunity to appear at this venue. For the Supremes, the first big disappointment came when they ran out to look at their names up on the theater’s marquee and discovered that they weren’t even on it. They weren’t advertised as being performers on the show. Instead, they were one of the acts that had been relegated to “… and many, many more” status. Florence placed a telephone call to Berry and demanded to know why the group had been omitted from the show’s billing. He told her not to bother him with something so petty. “You’re lucky to be there at all,” he said, referring, no doubt, to the fact that they s
till didn’t have a hit record.

  Diana Ross remembers her first performance at the Apollo Theater as a career highlight. She has been quoted as saying, “I was so happy, I just couldn’t stop laughing.” However, Mickey Stevenson has a different memory.

  The Apollo audiences didn’t really like Diane and the Supremes, mostly because they were more sophisticated than what those audiences were probably used to. Opening night was very heavy for Diane. The audience was very cool. She was upset. I remember Berry saying to her, “Look, don’t worry about it.” She came back with, “But they didn’t like us. They didn’t like me!”

  Berry reassured Diana by explaining to her once again the theory behind his Motown movement, the “crossover” strategy he always had in mind for his artists. “We have to teach them to accept our brand of sophistication,” he said.

  “She listened and maybe even agreed,” Stevenson concluded, “but she was still very upset.”

  It wasn’t really surprising that the Apollo audiences found the Supremes difficult to relate to because they were really nothing at all like their colleagues on the Motor Town Revue. The Contours had acrobatic choreography to accompany their gruff and soulful harmonies. The Marvelettes jumped all over the stage as if their feet were on fire, dancing their way through a medley of songs, each of which was well known. The Supremes would take the stage and croon their latest single, a slow country ballad that the audience had never heard of called “My Heart Can’t Take It No More.” They were sweet with tight harmonies, low-key in demeanor. True, their leader had a nasal sound and popped her eyes a lot, but she was so unique you couldn’t stop looking at her. Her voice cut through the crowded theater, too, like a knife through butter. Also, Mary and Florence didn’t try to impress with their footwork like the other acts; rather they just swayed in unison, throwing in a step or two just for variation but, definitely, making it clear that they were singers and not dancers. In that regard, their harmonies soared, Florence on top, Mary on the bottom. If the song called for a three-part blend, Diana slipped into the middle. In totality, the sound was pretty close to perfect. They weren’t great, not yet. But they weren’t terrible either. They were just … different—but certainly everyone at Motown already knew that about them.