Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Although Berry Gordy was waiting for the movies to come to him, he did not neglect television. It wasn’t difficult for him and Mike Roshkind to strike a deal with ABC-TV for Diana Ross’s first solo special. The time was right; the public was intensely curious to see how she was faring as a solo artist and her number-one record “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” guaranteed a strong audience for the show. A one-hour tour de force was scheduled to prove to a nationwide audience that Berry’s protégée could make it on her own and that a corporate mistake had not been made in lifting her from the Supremes. The show’s centerpiece was made up of three fascinating silent film sequences in which Diana portrayed—in full makeup and costumes—Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and W. C. Fields. Rubber-faced and animated, Diana mugged her way through the sequences, displaying an amazing flair for comedy and timing. It had been the happy surprise of the hour.

  At this same time, Jay Weston was continuing to mount his Lady Sings the Blues project. He’d just signed a pact with Sidney J. Furie to direct the film and, since Berry had turned him down repeatedly, began negotiating with Diahann Carroll to play the lead. He had no intention of ever meeting Berry again.

  Toronto-born Sidney J. Furie had become internationally known because of The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine. He had also directed Marlon Brando in The Appaloosa and Frank Sinatra in The Naked Runner. When Sidney asked who Jay had in mind for the starring role in the film, Jay mentioned Diahann Carroll. It was then that Sidney said the most amazing thing: “You got the wrong Diane. It should be Diana Ross!” What an ironic twist of fate. It was as if circumstances kept conspiring to get Diana into this movie.

  As it happened, Sidney Furie had seen the Diana! television special and, like much of the viewing audience, was taken by surprise by the silent-movie spoof. “It was obvious to me: if you can play comedy, you can play drama,” he said, years later. “‘That girl Ross, she’s an actress,’ I told Jay. ‘I’m absolutely convinced of it.’ And Jay said to me, ‘Well then, damn it. Let’s just go and get her for it, once and for all.’”

  “Why pick a girl who can’t really act?”

  “So, you fellas wanna play a little pool?”

  By now it was May 1971. Berry Gordy, Jay Weston, Sidney Furie and William Morris agent Joe Schoenfeld—who happened to represent both Jay and Motown—were in Berry’s expansive office at Motown, located now at 6464 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, in a meeting to discuss Lady Sings the Blues. They retreated to the conference room, which contained a pool table, Berry with tape recorder in hand. He taped all of his meetings for posterity.

  Gordy selected an expensive cue stick and began chalking its tip. He didn’t offer one to the others, though. So, it was clear that he was going to be the only one playing pool. “See, here’s the only problem,” he began, “Diane can’t really act. At least, I don’t think so.” As he set up the T on the table—the balls in a perfect triangle formation—he asked, “I mean why her? Why a girl who can’t act?”

  Just to be clear: Berry didn’t really feel that way. He actually wasn’t sure if Diana could act or not. He was in no position to evaluate anyone’s acting skills. Musical skills, yes. Acting, no. However, in the worst-case scenario, she couldn’t act—and that’s where he wanted to start with these movie executives … just in case.

  “Berry, what’re you talking about?” Sidney asked. “What about that TV special? I know she has the ability just from seeing that Chaplin thing with W. C. Fields and Harpo. Hey, man, trust me. She can act!”

  “That was acting?” Berry asked, incredulously. “No kidding?” He bent over, took his best shot and busted the T. The balls went sailing across the baize-covered table.

  Sidney explained that, in his view, comedy was more demanding than drama, and since Diana Ross had such a natural flair for the former, she could probably fare well in the latter. “I actually think she could be nominated for an Oscar in this kind of role,” he enthused, “a classic Hollywood role.”

  “No shit?” Berry asked. He took another shot.

  “No shit!” piped up Jay Weston.

  “Yeah, no shit,” repeated agent Schoenfeld.

  Berry then recounted the story of Diana’s acting debut on the Tarzan TV program broadcast on 12 January 1968, which starred Ron Ely. The episode was taped months earlier on location under a scorching sun in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and was intended as a dramatic vehicle for Diana. The plot involved three nuns, Sister Thérèse (Diana) from a small African village, Sister Martha (Mary) from Chicago and Sister Ann (Cindy) from Pittsburgh, all of whom return to Thérèse’s village in the hope of building a hospital there.

  “The opening had the girls in this canoe paddling down a river, three beautiful nuns coming back to the village,” Gordy explained to Furie and Weston, all the while continuing his solo pool game. “They’re singing ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore,’ and Diane’s squeezing a box accordion for accompaniment—funniest damn thing I ever saw. The script called for the canoe to be knocked over by a hippo. Diana was to be rescued by Tarzan, and the other two were supposed to swim to shore. So, on shooting day, I said, ‘Look, no way am I gonna let Diana Ross get knocked into freezing water. We’ll need a stand-in for that one scene.’”

  Berry angled up another shot and continued his game … and, ever the raconteur, his story:

  So, anyway, there were poor Mexican people all over the place. We lined up a bunch of them, and I picked out three that were kind of shaped like the Supremes. “You! You! And you,” I said. “Wanna make some money? Dinero? Dinero?” They said, “Si! Si! Si.” So, we put them in these heavy nuns’ habits, sat them in the canoe, set the thing to sailing and then tipped that baby over. Splash! The three of them fell into the water. So, we’re waiting and waiting and waiting and, Jesus Christ! They never came back up! Everyone started panicking. “What the hell’s going on?” the director asked. That’s when it hit me. I turned to him and said, “Holy shit! Did anyone ask if they could swim?”

  Berry started laughing and slapping his thighs. His guests joined him.

  So Diane was on the sidelines screaming, “Save ’em! Save ’em! Oh, my God! Save ’em!” And the director was yelling, Keep filming, this is great stuff!” And the next thing I know, the guy who plays Tarzan jumped into the lake and actually rescued them. It was pretty damn terrific. We kept a lot of it in the show!

  “Anyway,” Berry concluded, “Diane wasn’t good in that role. When we saw how bad she was, we were glad she wanted to be a singer and not a nun.”

  “Yeah, but that was then and this is now,” Sidney Furie insisted. “She can do it. Trust me. The girl is a natural. She is magic. She is Billie Holiday, I can feel it.”

  For Berry, intuition was everything. It’s how he operated … from his gut. There wasn’t much more to say, anyway. Berry had pretty much made his mind up about things before the meeting. He sized up the last play of his game. Then he took an angle shot, banked the white cue ball off several sides and sank the black eight ball into the corner pocket, an almost impossible shot. “You know what?” he remarked with a wide grin. “You got yourself a deal. Let’s make a movie, fellas!”

  It’s official: Diana will play Lady Day

  In July 1971, Berry Gordy received the preliminary screenplay for a Billie Holiday biopic, Lady Sings the Blues, from Sidney Furie and Jay Weston. “He called me and was nervous that this might be too heavy-handed for Motown and Diana,” Sidney Furie said. “But I told him I didn’t want to make a serious, deep, important movie. I wanted to make a piece of entertainment that would make big money for all of us. He agreed. Anyone who knows Berry knows that there is no color in his eyes but green, the color of money.”

  Berry called Diana into his office, and recorded the meeting so that he could later send it to the producer and director.

  “Are you sure, Black?” Diana asked. “I mean, this is not me at all, this kind of movie, I mean.”

  “Look, Diane,” Berry said. “What I think is that if Barbra St
reisand was a black woman, this is exactly the kind of movie she would make.”

  “You really think so?” she asked.

  “I do.”*

  “But, Black, why are there so many scenes?” she asked, thumbing through the script. “I mean, this is so long. How am I ever going to remember all of this? Why can’t there just be four or five scenes?”

  Berry laughed. “Because this is a movie, Diane. A movie has fifty, a hundred scenes. Two hundred! And you’re gonna be in every one of ’em, Black! But listen, don’t worry about it. They want you. They want you bad! Jesus Christ, they came to me three times with this goddamn thing!”

  Originally, Lady Sings the Blues was to be episodic, dealing with each of Billie’s relationships with her three husbands. However, early on, Berry decided that the three relationships were too confusing. At his insistence, then, Furie and Weston agreed to combine all three characters into one—Louis McKay—for dramatic unity. “But that’s not truthful,” Diana argued. “It’s not the way it happened.”

  “The hell with being truthful,” Berry told her. “Check it out: white people don’t worry about changing the facts to make good movies. Why should we be saddled with it just because we’re black?” Diana had to agree.

  In the end, though, Berry wasn’t happy with the script, written by Terence McCloy, at all. Therefore, he hired Suzanne dePasse and Chris Clark—two women who had never before written a screenplay—to rewrite the entire movie. It’s ironic in retrospect that Chris, who had long been Diana’s rival for Berry’s affection, would end up with the job of rewriting her big, debut movie—but, as far as Berry was concerned, this was not the time for emotional complications. He just wanted to get the script written and felt dePasse and Clark were the best ones at Motown for the job.

  The semi-revised screenplay—it would be altered all the way up to filming and then throughout it—was then submitted to every movie studio and source of financing in Hollywood. No one wanted it. It quickly became apparent that the rest of Hollywood wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Ross and Gordy’s entry into the filmmaking community as were Weston and Furie. With the exception of the occasional Sidney Poitier film, black films and black screen stars were not considered moneymakers then, and, despite Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry, some still doubt their commercial potential. Moreover, until the early 1970s, the black woman’s image on the screen had been largely confined to broad Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen–like portrayals. Lena Horne had really been Hollywood’s only black screen legend, and even her screen image as a mulatto temptress never really elevated her to the kind of celebrity enjoyed by the white glamour girls of her era. Often her scenes were shot in such a way that they could be edited from movies when they were shown in the South.

  Coincidentally, though, at about the time Lady Sings the Blues was being shopped around town, Hollywood was realizing a huge and untapped box office market existed in the black community. A genre of films referred to as “blaxploitation movies” had emerged in the early 1970s—movies such as Superfly with Ron O’Neal and Shaft starring Richard Roundtree. Though these films were, for the most part, pretty dreadful, propagating stereotypical images of black life with each frame, black moviegoers would bring Hollywood studios big box-office profits just the same.

  Frank Yablans received his copy of the script of Lady Sings the Blues on the first day of his new job as president of Paramount Pictures. He loved it, and he loved the idea of Diana Ross in it. He immediately called Jay Weston and offered him a deal. By six o’clock that evening, Yablans had agreed that Paramount would finance the film to the tune of $2 million. (Today it would cost at least fifty times that to do the same film.) However, anything more than that had to be guaranteed by Berry Gordy. He decided to take a chance and risk it, and just hope the film would not go over $2 million. His credit on the on-screen opening would be: “Berry Gordy Presents Diana Ross as Billie Holiday.”

  It was really happening: Diana Ross was about to star in a movie.

  The time had come for Berry to let Diana meet the men in charge. “I remember very well the first time I met her,” Sidney J. Furie recalled.

  It was at Le St. Germaine restaurant just down the street from Paramount Studios. She and I had lunch alone. I thought she was the most incredible thing I had ever met. So charming and magical! I told her I wanted to make a movie like Funny Girl except for the fact that the people in it would happen to have black skin. As we sat there chatting and drinking expensive French white wine, I fell in love with her. And I told her that by the time we were finished with this film, she would fall in love with me, too.

  Not surprisingly, when Motown announced that Diana Ross was about to star in the life story of Billie Holiday, film critics, jazz purists and Holiday fans around the world lashed out against what they saw as outrageous casting. The rail-thin Diana certainly bore no resemblance to the buxom Billie, and she had nothing in common with her musically. It also seemed to outsiders that she simply hadn’t had enough life experiences to draw upon to bring Holiday’s tortured existence to the screen. To a certain extent, that was true. She and Holiday were very different in terms of their upbringing and lifestyles. On some levels, though, Diana could certainly relate to the prejudice Billie faced. She was a black woman and had lived the black experience, no matter what the public thought they knew about it. Diana certainly understood and could relate to white prejudice against black people. Still, Paramount’s publicity department would face a huge challenge in attempting to overcome the hostility surrounding her casting in Lady Sings the Blues.

  Diana was deeply hurt by the negative reaction to her forthcoming film debut. “My God, what had I done to deserve this total resentment? And from my own race and people?” she remembered asking, years later. “There was such a total ‘No, you can not do it’ that it frightened the hell out of me.” Indeed, she called Berry late one night and said simply, “Get me out of this!” However, he told her that it was too late—it really wasn’t—and that she should toughen up, take the flak, turn it around and make it work for her own benefit. Of course, true to her core personality, she would do just that. First, she got angry—How dare they question my ability?—and then she went to work to prove her critics wrong. She studied the situation, asked questions and took action. On the cover of her copy of the script, she wrote, “The most important thing in my life is to have my baby. [She was pregnant at this time with Berry’s child, which she would have in August 1971.] The second most important thing is this movie.”

  Recording the Lady soundtrack

  Months before shooting was scheduled to begin, Diana immersed herself in the Billie Holiday legend in preparation for the recording of the soundtrack album to Lady Sings the Blues. The thought of singing blues and jazz was intimidating to her at first—so much so that someone suggested she simply lip-synch in the film to Holiday’s recordings. Diana quickly rejected that idea as an insult to her own artistry. It was, actually. She decided that her goal would be not to imitate Billie Holiday but rather work to capture the strong moods, hues and interpretative genius that she—Billie—had brought to her records.

  Gil Askey had been working with the “new” Ross-less Supremes at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas when Berry decided to pull him out of that engagement to work on the soundtrack of Lady Sings the Blues. With years of experience as the Supremes’ musical conductor—he was the man who put together their groundbreaking show at the Copa in 1965—Berry felt he was the perfect choice to put together a Billie Holiday soundtrack for Diana. He instructed Askey to choose eighteen Holiday songs he believed Ross could handle, and then give her tapes of all of them to study. “Every night, Diana would lie in bed with her earphones on and listen to that music,” Gil recalled. “For weeks, she would fall asleep with Billie Holiday’s music in her head. She got into Billie by osmosis, a brilliant way to go about it.”

  Berry and Gil then recruited many of the same musicians who had actually worke
d on Billie Holiday’s recording sessions—including trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, bassist Red Holloway and guitarist John Collins—for the Motown recording dates. The double-album soundtrack to Lady Sings the Blues would contain some of Diana’s best work by far. Many women had attempted to cover Billie Holiday’s music over the years—Peggy Lee, Judy Garland and dozens of others have recorded songs like “I Cried for You” and “God Bless the Child” using their own style and approach. Though technically proficient, their performances never seemed fully to capture the humanity that was Holiday’s. Hers truly was a voice of experience. Perhaps only Carmen McRae approximated the range of emotion unique to Billie in her interpretation of Holiday’s music and, noted one music historian, “That’s because Carmen didn’t imitate, she loved.”

  In her book Secrets of a Sparrow Diana wrote of Billie Holiday:

  What I mostly heard was a tremendous pain coming from deep inside this talented woman, but I don’t think the pain was a part of her natural being. I think the pain came from her drug addiction because it was absent from her earliest performances, the ones she did before she became drug-addicted. When the pain was not present, what was left was a very interesting and unique sound. Even when she was older and her voice had begun crackling, if you listened carefully beyond the crackling, that incredible sound was still there.

  There are those who claim that Diana was successful with her Holiday recordings because she had grown to love Billie Holiday as much as Carmen McRae did. At the time she recorded the album, though, nothing could have been further from the truth. When Diana first went into the studio with those songs, she hadn’t filmed the movie yet and knew only a small part of the Billie Holiday story. By way of mimicry, or maybe, as Gil Askey believes, osmosis, or even genuine empathy for what little she had learned about Holiday up until this time, the final result is convincing. Diana didn’t attempt an imitation of Holiday’s timbre, but she did emulate her nuances and phrasing with great accuracy. In “You’ve Changed,” the resemblance is uncanny. Berry recalls, “I told Gil to pull back a notch from Billie Holiday and leave a little Diana Ross in there because her future’s got to extend beyond this picture.”