Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  There had been some dispute between Berry and Diana about her first solo record, which was written and produced by longtime Motown staff members Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. Because it had a waltz rhythm, Berry was unsure of its commercial appeal. However, Diana was drawn to the message of unity and brotherhood. Not only did it feel right for the times, she could sense that—as Lester suggested—much of the public viewed her as egocentric for having left the Supremes. She wanted to start her career with something that had a worldly and benevolent point of view. Despite disagreeing, Berry let her have her way with it. Even though it wouldn’t be a huge record, it still seemed somehow memorable when it was released in April 1970.

  In May that year it was time for her Las Vegas opening, at the same Frontier Hotel in which just five months earlier she had made her last appearance with the Supremes. Las Vegas certainly was a place of memories for Diana and Berry—some thrilling and others not so pleasant. It was a nervous time, and on the day of the opening things got a lot tenser.

  Berry was awakened during his afternoon nap in his suite at the Frontier Hotel by a telephone call from Motown vice president Mike Roshkind. “We got a big problem,” Mike told him, according to Berry’s memory.

  “What are you talking about, Mike?” Berry asked. “Opening night is tonight, baby. Diana Ross at the Frontier Hotel. This is what it’s all about. We got no problems.”

  “Oh yeah, we do,” Mike said. “No reservations for the show, Berry.”

  “Pretty funny, Mike,” Berry said.

  “I’m not kidding, Berry. It’s five hours before she goes on and we got about thirty reservations, out of, what? A thousand seats? It’s not good, BG.” (His friends and staff members often called Gordy BG.)

  “Get over here, now,” Berry said, slamming down the phone. Mike arrived within about thirty seconds.

  Berry couldn’t believe his ears. He had thought that launching Diana as a solo star would be risk free. “She’s not really taking a big chance because people are buying her like mad,” he told the press. “Vegas is buying her, Miami is buying her, the Waldorf in New York. Like the stock market, she’s up now because everything she’s done has been a total success. If Diane is going to do it, she’s going to be the best out there. She will be sensational if she does nothing but stand up there and sing.” In many ways, Berry’s optimism was not misplaced because, after all she was Diana Ross. However, it was not to be as much an overnight success story as he thought. Making matters a bit more complicated for him emotionally, the new Supremes—Mary and Cindy with their new lead singer, Jean Terrell—had an instant hit record with their first release, a song called “Up the Ladder to the Roof.” They’d had a stunning debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. “Yesterday was yesterday,” they sang, “nothing can stop us now,” from The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. Consequently, their new record actually sold more copies than Diana’s! “The Supremes were an instant sellout,” says Shelly Berger. “Diana was not. We were worried.”

  “Listen to me,” Berry said to Mike, “if Diana walks out there and sees thirty people in the audience, I’m a dead man. She’ll lose all confidence in me. Not only that, she’ll lose it in herself, too, and we can’t afford that, either. So we can’t let that happen.”

  “Oh Jesus, BG,” Mike said. “Okay, let me think. Let me think.” He started pacing in one direction, Berry in the other. After about five minutes, Berry got an idea. “It’s brilliant,” he promised. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll tear twenty-dollar bills in half, see? And we’ll go out onto the strip and give people half the bill. And we’ll tell them that if they come to the show, they’ll get the other half.”

  Mike laughed. “Come on, Berry. This is serious. She’s gonna kill us if we don’t get an idea and fast.”

  “I’m serious,” Berry said. “I’m not kidding. We got five hours,” he said, opening up his wallet and throwing a pile of money on the bed. “Start tearing, Mike. Start tearing.”

  Picture it: the president of Motown and his VP walking up and down the Las Vegas strip and handing out ripped twenty-dollar bills to strangers, all the while promising them that they’d get the other half if they would only come to Diana Ross’s opening night. It worked. The place was packed an hour before show time. Berry then went to the hotel cashier and, using his years of gambling credit at the hotel, secured $10,000 in twenties from the hotel. He then went into the showroom and gave everyone in the audience a twenty-dollar bill, collecting the torn halves from the patrons. At the end of the night, the room was full—and Berry had bags of ripped twenties, which he’d collected from the crowd.

  Diana never knew a thing about any of it. Luckily for him, word of mouth on the show was strong enough to bring people into the theater on their own for the rest of the engagement. Still, they weren’t full houses. “We need more promotion,” Diana told him, “or someone needs to do something because there aren’t enough people out there.” He somehow managed to keep his mouth shut.

  Heartbreak

  If Berry Gordy felt insecure about his standing with Diana Ross at this time—as he demonstrated by his fear of her reaction to the poor ticket sales in Las Vegas—perhaps it was with good reason. As they strategized her new solo career, Diana and Berry were having serious problems in their personal relationship.

  After she left the Supremes, most people in Diana’s inner circle assumed it would be an ideal time for her and Berry to get married. They had been together for five years. If Berry had married Diana while she was still a member of the group, it would have caused even more complications—and things were bad enough already. There would have been no way she could have continued a working relationship with Mary or Cindy and especially Florence. Also Berry had other girlfriends. He was a connoisseur of fine women, and everyone knew it. It wasn’t as if he tried to conceal it. In many ways, he treated his women well—he gave them money, security, fame, good times … children—but according to many of the women he was involved with over the years, he would stop short of total fidelity.

  There was one woman in Berry’s life in particular who had become the constant subject of intense discussion with Diana. She was Chris Clark, a stylish and statuesque blonde who was extremely talented and was someone in whom Berry had an intense interest. She recorded some terrific music for Motown, though none of it was commercially successful. It was hurtful, at least as some saw it, for him to be so blatant about his relationship with Chris; Diana’s throat would tighten at the mere mention of her name. However, by his actions Berry’s position seemed clear: Diana would have to accept his fascination with Chris because it had nothing to do with her; it was none of her business … and that was pretty much the end of it. His assignations with Chris didn’t mean he loved Diana any less—in his view, anyway. To be fair, Diana also expressed interest in other men—as she had in NFL football player Timmy Brown off and on since before she and Berry even began their affair. Suffice it to say, there were countless arguments about trust and fidelity over the course of Diana’s five romantic years with Berry, and such blowups must have taken quite a toll on her self-esteem. After all, Berry was as much a father figure to her as he was her lover, and she couldn’t help but feel rejected by him—much the same way she had long felt rejected by Fred. “On some level, I wonder if she felt she wasn’t good enough for Berry,” said Ernestine Ross’s friend Mabel Givens. “There were years of tears over this. I heard her once say, ‘How much more can I do? What else can I do to prove how much I care?’”

  At this same time—in the spring of 1970—Diana purchased a modest five-bedroom home in Beverly Hills at 701 North Maple Avenue. She paid about $350,000 for it from film producer Donald L. Factor—grandson of the late cosmetics manufacturer Max Factor—and his wife Paula, who had just divorced him in March. The property is located in what is known as the Beverly Hills flatlands, a very exclusive, very wealthy and—at the time—very white area of Los Angeles. Diana loved the house, despite its angular, forbidding a
ppearance—no windows in the front, only skylights above. When one walked into the house, one was faced with a living room two stories high. There was a glass-and-silver-plated grand piano, a silver, mirrored fireplace, a sunken living room splashed with hot-pink cushions, an Andy Warhol tapestry of Marilyn Monroe and a life-size poster advertising the Supremes’ 1965 Lincoln Center engagement plastered on a gleaming white wall beneath the ceiling skylights. The large bedrooms were upstairs on a mezzanine floor.

  As soon as she moved in, she put her own imprint on it. She designed an additional wing—a two-car garage with a huge guest room atop it with its own entrance that led to the pool. The addition also included a sauna, which in all of her years there she was never able to operate properly. Once, she and Berry were in the sauna and nearly roasted to death. “Please, let’s never do this again,” Berry offered, laughing. “Agreed,” Diana said. She also built a recording studio, which she had constructed to her own specifications. It would be the source of years of frustration for her, though, in that the acoustics were never right. It got to the point where Berry refused to listen to anything she recorded in her home studio.

  The front door was an imposing block of solid wood, and beyond that was an uninviting steel gate. However, the entrance could be easily accessed from the street, which suggests how different security and privacy concerns were in those days—no iron gates, no guards. A person could just walk up to Diana Ross’s front door, push the buzzer and … there she’d be. Mad as hell, but there she’d be. Actually, there was a camera at the front door with a monitor in the kitchen. When that buzzer sounded, Diana and her household staff would all run into the kitchen and huddle in front of the screen to see who was calling. “Do you know that person?” Diana would ask, scrutinizing the fuzzy image. “No, do you?” they would ask her. “No! It must be another fan!” It didn’t take long for such intrusions to become quite tiring, as one might imagine. At one point, an employee put a sign on the front door that read DIANA ROSS DOES NOT LIVE HERE. That didn’t help much.

  Diana’s mother, Ernestine, and her brother Wilbert Alex—Chico—came to live with her and keep watch over the new place while Diana embarked on her first solo tour; Aunt Bea was present as well. Ernestine and Fred were separated at this time, their relationship no worse, but also no better. He was still distant and remote and, after so many years of separation, there seemed no chance that they would ever reconcile. “He made his bed and now he has to sleep in it,” she told one relative when she left Detroit to move in with Diana. However, it would mischaracterize things to say that she was sad about the way things had evolved in her marriage. She knew and understood her estranged husband and, somehow, accepted his emotional limitations. That didn’t mean that he didn’t exasperate her, however. Diana said at this time that she had offered to buy Fred a new car as a birthday present, “because I’ve never really done anything for him.” Fred declined the offer. “Save your money,” he told her sternly. “Put it away. One day you might need it.”

  “He’s like that,” Diana said sadly.

  Meanwhile, Chico enrolled in Beverly Hills High School. Diana’s sister Barbara—Bobbi—was now married. She had dropped out of college to have two children but was now reenrolled and looking forward to becoming a doctor. Margarita (Rita) was also married; she and her husband had one child and lived in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fred Earl was in the Air Force and stationed in Texas. Diana’s younger brother Arthur, T-Boy, was still in Detroit.

  “Ernestine didn’t travel much but she and many of the family members were at the shows in Framingham and also in Vegas,” said Mabel Givens, “but not Fred.”

  Ernestine, by this time, felt sure that Diana and Berry would not marry. She wanted Diana to have a husband and children and, as much as she liked Berry, she knew that after all this time, it was not going to happen. She told me, “Look, it’s been, what? Five years? I mean, how much longer does he expect Diane to wait? I think she should find someone else. I have tried to talk to her about it, but she starts crying and becomes so upset I can’t get very far with her.” So, yes, Ernestine was definitely trying to influence Diana to end it with Berry.

  “I want to have a family and be able to grow up with my kids, but I have to come right out and tell you that the whole marriage thing is going right out the window,” Diana despaired in a 1970 interview. “I know that I can’t have children without getting married even though it’s getting to be very popular. It’s just not the kind of thing for me and it wouldn’t make my mother very happy, and I’m concerned with my mother and the things that make her happy.”

  “This was the one frustration in her life at this time,” said Cindy Birdsong, who herself would marry in May 1970. “We sometimes talked about how many children we’d have, how wonderful it would be to have a family. That was important to her, and missing. She had everything she wanted—power, fame, money—but not a child, and I do think she was determined to have one.”

  Throughout the first six months of 1970, Diana and Berry continued to argue about the terms of what had become a tug-of-war relationship. Often he was anything but diplomatic. For instance, one evening in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, Diana spent more than an hour in front of her makeup mirror applying her show-business paint with careful accuracy. Then she slipped into her Bob Mackie–designed gown, a colorful outfit resplendent with pink, red and orange feathers and sequins. It was way over the top in terms of fashion, but very Diana—and very Bob Mackie. Right before going onstage, when she most needed her self-confidence, she stood before Berry for final inspection. He studied her. “You know what?” he said, scrutinizing her. “You look just like a big chicken in that getup.” The tears came quickly—it didn’t take much these days—and she ran back to her dressing room. Of course, everyone else at Motown also suffered because when she was unhappy, everyone was unhappy. “I thought that I was not going to survive their relationship, personally,” recalls Suzanne dePasse, “because it was that volatile. It was that combustive.”

  Meanwhile, during all of this turmoil, Diana’s first solo album for Motown—produced by Ashford and Simpson—was readied for release. Harry Langdon was responsible for taking the photographs for all of Diana’s early solo album covers, as well as for press purposes. Rather than have Diana appear on the cover of her first solo album, Diana Ross, in standard Ross regalia of sequins, beads and swooping wig, the photo selected showed Diana in cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt, eating an apple and barefoot. Harry shot it with a wide-angle lens, which distorted Diana’s image and made her appear even thinner and more angular. She appeared to be about fifteen years old. It was an odd and memorable choice for an album cover.

  Years later, Harry Langdon recalled that the photograph had been taken after he and Diana finished a long, twelve-hour glamour session. As Diana was leaving the studio in her street clothes, he called her back to the set for a couple more candid photos, just for fun. She was sitting on the floor, eating the piece of fruit and singing “Baby Love” to one of his assistants, when Harry snapped the photo. She was still in full makeup from the photo session, and wearing a short wig. He certainly never intended that the picture be used for any official purpose. He just took it as a lark. He then made a mock-up of a billboard utilizing the very strange picture with accompanying text that said “40 Million Copies Sold.” After it was done, he sent the layout to Berry as a joke. When it was delivered to Berry by messenger, he wasn’t sure if it was serious. In fact, he didn’t know what it was, and he called Harry to a meeting at his home.

  When Harry got to Berry’s Bel Air estate, he was escorted by Suzanne dePasse into a huge conference room. Sitting around a long table and wearing suits and ties were all of Berry’s Motown executives. Suzanne also took a chair, as did Harry. Fifteen minutes later, Berry came strolling in wearing a jogging outfit and holding a golf club. He sat at the head of the table and immediately got down to business. “We’re here to discuss this,” Berry said, and he whipped out the layout of Harry�
�s billboard and smacked it down on the conference table. Langdon squirmed. He suddenly realized that the meeting was about him and his crazy gag.

  “Now what I want to know,” Berry began, turning to Harry, “is why, after the millions of pictures you took of Diana Ross and all the money I spent to have you take them, you would think that this is the photo we should use. Why, she looks like some kid here. No gown. No glamour. What is this?”

  Harry didn’t know what to do, but he knew that with all eyes on him he wasn’t going to just say, “Well, actually, I sent this to you as a joke. Funny, huh?” Instead, he thought quickly and said, “Well, Mr. Gordy, Diana Ross has been so successful with all of the extremely fortunate people in the world, I wondered what it would be like to appeal to her own people? The black people in the projects and the people who don’t have the money to see her perform? The people who can only buy her records? Here, in my photo of her, she looks like one of the masses. She’s one of them.”

  “She does look like one of them,” Berry agreed. He passed the poster around. Though everyone nodded their heads, they still had skeptical expressions on their faces.

  “So, that’s why,” Harry said, finishing up, “I think we should use this picture not only on the billboard but also on the cover of the first album.” He added the last part as a little flourish. He’d gone so far with the impromptu idea, why not go all the way?

  There was a long pause as Berry mulled over Harry’s words and everyone waited for his decision. Finally, he started to applaud. “You know what? That’s a great idea,” he said, grinning. “You see, this is what we need around here,” he told the others. “We need creativity. We need to think in a way no one ever thinks. Diana Ross is known for her glamour so of course people would think that on her first album as a solo artist she would look like … Diana Ross. But, no. Thanks to this man,” he continued, motioning to Harry, “on her first album, she will look like … this. No gown. No nothin’. Just shorts and a T-shirt, eating a piece of fruit. Now, that’s genius.”