Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  They drove in silence for a time, with the muffled sobs of Diana occasionally heard. As they neared their first stop, the post-Oscar Governor’s Ball in downtown Los Angeles, Diana tried to compose herself. She used a handkerchief handed to her earlier to check that her mascara wasn’t askew. She was looking down at the cloth, checking for what makeup had rubbed off, when she saw them: the embroidered initials FR. The gift she had brought her father all the way from Europe so many years ago had come to good use. She caught Fred’s eye. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “Oscar, anyway”

  The day after losing the Academy Award, Diana Ross didn’t even want to get out of bed. She was that devastated by the disappointment. It was a good thing, or so she told Suzanne dePasse, that she was scheduled to embark on a European tour later in the week to promote the movie abroad. She was happy to leave the country and didn’t want to have to explain to anyone else in America how she felt about losing the award.

  As soon as she returned to the States after her tour, Diana’s recording career was quickly reactivated by Berry. “Touch Me in the Morning” had been put on the back burner while he concentrated on Lady Sings the Blues propaganda. Instead, he released “Good Morning Heartache” as a single, Diana’s only single release in 1972, which did not become a hit on the pop charts. After he again heard a finished version of “Touch Me in the Morning,” he decided it was too long and that Diana should go back into the studio and record a double-track fade-out. However, Diana hadn’t been wild about the song the first time she recorded it. Plus, she just wasn’t in the mood.

  “She went into hiding when she got back from Europe,” Ron Miller, the song’s writer and coproducer, remembered. “She was sure that she would go into the supermarket and everyone would point at her and say, in singsong fashion, ‘Na-na, na-na, you didn’t get it!’”

  Indeed, some in her circle thought she was being self-indulgent. They had eagerly accepted it when she put her heart and soul into the film and then touted her brilliance at “becoming” Billie Holiday. But, when it was over and she didn’t win an Oscar, everyone just wanted to move on from it. It wasn’t that simple for Diana, though. She had invested so much of herself in that role and movie, she was crushed when she lost the award and there was nothing she could do to get past it. Berry understood her disappointment, but he felt that the best thing she could do was to refocus on her recording career. Eventually, Diana agreed to call Ron Miller and arrange studio time for more work on “Touch Me in the Morning.”

  Ron remembered Diana as being despondent when she called him. During the conversation, the two discussed the party she had hosted the night before the awards show. “You remember the promise you made me,” Ron asked her, “about the dog?”

  “I do,” Diana said. “You told me that if I lost I should call him Oscar anyway.”

  “Well?” Ron asked.

  “So, I kept my promise,” Diana said, forcing a chuckle. “The dog’s name is now Oscar Anyway.”

  A new recording date was then scheduled to finish the song. Ron recalled: “Berry came to the studio with Diane, along with half his family for support. It was the first time she had come out of hiding, so the tension was unreal. Berry had warned everyone not to dare say a word about the Oscar. ‘Don’t mention it, or she’ll blow up and leave,’ he told me.”

  Diana tried to record the new ending to the song. But, after about a dozen halfhearted takes, her performance remained inadequate. Finally, Berry turned to Ron and said, “Man, this song ain’t shit!”

  “The session was going down the drain and so was the enthusiasm for my song,” Ron recalled. I knew I had to think fast to save it. Once Berry lost faith in a song, that was it. It would never come out.”

  In a desperate moment, Ron did what he later called “the unthinkable.” He stopped the session and asked everyone in the studio, “Does anybody in this room remember who won the Best Actress Oscar last year?” At the question, somebody groaned loudly. Ron believes it was Berry. As it happened, the winner had been Jane Fonda for her performance in Klute, but no one knew it. Ron then walked out of the studio and came back a few moments later with a security guard, to whom he asked the same question. The man shook his head; he didn’t know the answer either.

  “There!” Ron said. “Now can we finally get on with our work?”

  There was silence. Diana smiled and rose from her chair. She went back into the recording booth, where she then went back to work to finish this pesky little song.

  When “Touch Me in the Morning” was finally released (in May 1973) it was off to a slow start, but began to catch on after about a month. Eventually it went to number one, stayed on the pop charts for over five months, and was nominated for a Grammy award—making at least some of the angst surrounding it for so long worthwhile.

  A Touch Me in the Morning album followed, on which Diana seemed to be defining a new, more mature image. She dug into the material on this record and performed it as if she’d suddenly remembered her station in life as a recording artist. Her rendition of songs such as Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue” are sensitive and almost dreamy.* The recording career back in gear, her next single, “Last Time I Saw Him,” hit number one on Billboard’s Adult contemporary chart. Then, next up was an album with Marvin Gaye. It amounted to a real headache for everyone involved when these two artists got into the studio. A big problem occurred on the very first day. Most people at Motown knew that Marvin rarely recorded without a marijuana joint in hand. Diana tried to reason with him about his habit before the first session, which producer Hal Davis recalls as having been a cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Don’t Knock My Love.” She was pregnant, she explained, and didn’t want to inhale his smoke. She was sitting in a rocking chair in front of a mic, and Gaye was standing next to her. Producer Davis recalled: “Because she was expecting and, also, because she was sitting down, she was having trouble singing and breathing correctly. The smoke from the marijuana wasn’t helping. But Marvin just told her, ‘I’m sorry, baby, but I gotta have my dope or I can’t sing.’”

  “What kind of crap is this?” Diana exclaimed as she walked out of the recording booth. When she appealed to Berry, sitting at the sound board, he acted as if he was completely helpless about the situation. Exasperated, she reached into a bowl of fruit sitting before him, pulled a cluster of grapes from it and hurled them at him. Then, she did what all true divas do in a moment like that: she turned and walked away. After that particular incident, it was clear that for the rest of Diana & Marvin the two stars would have to record their parts separately. Years later Marvin commented: “During this album [Diana] was on pins and needles. She was pregnant and her marriage seemed shaky. I could have been a little more understanding. But I’m afraid I went the other way.”

  Hal Davis had hoped that Diana and Marvin would be a match made in heaven. One can’t help but wonder, though, if his final assessment of the experience isn’t reflected in one of the album’s singles “My Mistake.”

  How do you follow a Lady?

  Lady Sings the Blues changed the way people perceived Diana Ross; indeed, she had surprised her critics as well as herself. When she began acting it was a turning point for her, personally as well as professionally. Her new venture provided her with a sense of self-satisfaction she said she hadn’t experienced as a recording artist. While performing in front of a camera on the set of Lady, she felt more freedom to express her own creativity than she did when recording in the studio. For years, she sang the way she was told to sing by producers, recording the song as many times as necessary until it was deemed satisfactory. Of course, she was always able to inject her own personality and imagination into her music, but Motown was a structured environment in which the artists weren’t given a lot of freedom to do what they wished with their own recordings. In Lady, even if she was asked to play a scene a certain way she still had the freedom to use her own judgment in expressing nuances and making choices—she had more control. As an a
ctress, she was also forced to finally crack that fragile, well-crafted facade that had been devised by Berry’s A&R department so many years ago and, in the process, explore a wide range of human emotions and feelings. The heartbreak, anger and sense of despair associated with Billie Holiday’s story inspired Diana to take a deeper look at her own personality. She started to become a more introspective person and began to examine her actions, rather than just act impulsively. Of course, there was a flip side to such insights. She began to realize now more than ever, for instance, that Berry Gordy was still controlling her, that she continued to allow it and that her resentment about it was growing … daily.

  Many critics felt that Lady Sings the Blues would be Diana’s springboard for a long and fruitful acting career. Given the success of her first film and her now-proven box office appeal, she too was fairly certain that more acting opportunities would come her way. Unfortunately, her possibilities seemed somewhat limited by Berry. “She was over- managed, and the great material being submitted for Diana was not being considered,” said Jay Weston, producer of Lady.

  Berry didn’t want to work with outside producers. For instance, after Lady I wanted to remake Sabrina, a Paramount property, as a musical for Diana. I wanted to do it with an interracial twist, and have her star with Jack Lemmon. Lemmon was very excited about it. But Berry said, “Forget it.” Diana was never even consulted, I’m sure. It would have been a great property for her, but by this time I was shut out, as were all of the other Hollywood producers interested in her. He only wanted to work in-house with him as the producer-director, I assume, or someone else at the label, at least. She didn’t even know of what he was turning down on her behalf, I’ll bet.

  It was during this time—spring of 1973—that Berry brought Rob Cohen, a twenty-three-year-old white whiz kid, into the firm to head up Motown’s film division. Cohen, who had worked previously for 20th Century Fox, would be responsible for seeking out properties for Diana and bringing them to Berry for his approval and then in-house Motown development. Rob recalled:

  Like a lot of white people, I came to think of powerful men to be cut out of the Kennedy mold. I always thought the real leaders and visionaries went to Harvard, which is why I went to Harvard. I patterned my idea of leadership and manliness after the Kennedy brothers and, in turn, expected the leaders of the entertainment world to be just like them. So, when I met Berry, this black man in tennis clothes who had this kind of crazy energy about him and surrounded himself with wacky hench-men, I was shocked. He was one of the real moguls of show business, but what was he?

  When he heard what I wanted in return for working for him—an ironclad contract, big money and the kind of respect where I would not be some kind of glorified white-boy script reader—he howled with laughter. He thought I was ballsy and he liked that. “I’m a very rich man,” he said, “and if that’s what it takes to get you here, you got it.”

  So, from twenty-four to twenty-nine, the major male figure in my life was Berry Gordy. In some ways we were chalk and cheese—I was a white, middle-class, Jewish, Harvard graduate, and he was a black Golden Glove champ, high school dropout. He made his own rules. He looked at the world differently and, after a while, had me looking at it differently, too. He inspired me to want to kill myself to do the best for him.

  Berry introduced the man he had entrusted with her film career to Diana one evening at a cocktail party at Gordy manor. Diana wasn’t happy about the hiring of Rob Cohen. She felt that Suzanne dePasse should have been awarded the job rather that some young white wunderkind. dePasse was also upset by the hiring. “The work you did and the amount of credit you got, for a long time were not commensurate, in my opinion,” she said of her earlier days at Motown. “I really wanted to play a part in the movie business, and there were other people running it … white men from the outside who did not have a sense of who we were and what we ought to be doing.”

  “At my first meeting with Diana, we did not become bosom buddies,” Rob Cohen recalled.

  She was not charming. She was aloof. She was already feeling constrained by Berry’s will and desire, and now here I was—one of Berry’s boys—watching over her. She would rather have dealt with Suzanne, a woman she had already developed a rapport with and, in a sense, I think, a woman she could control. “How do you follow Lady Sings the Blues?” she asked me with an arched eyebrow. I told her, “Well, that’s why I’m here, to do just that.” Everybody wanted to do bio films with her. I was getting calls every day: “We want her to do Bessie Smith.” “We want her to do Dinah Washington.”

  Rob and Berry were definitely navigating new terrain in attempting to field film roles for a major black actress in white Hollywood. It had seldom been done before, and their options really were limited—especially since Berry wanted to have control. “Come up with something,” he told Rob one day during a meeting. “What do you have in mind for Diana?”

  “Okay,” Rob said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  “No,” Berry said. “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” Berry commanded. “I’m paying you for ideas. You damn well better have one. Now.” It was as if he was telling his writers and producers to come up with a hit record for Diana … and “Now”—only he wasn’t even giving Rob Cohen a week sequestered in a Detroit hotel room to do it.

  Rob, feeling on the spot, fumbled a moment. Then, riffing off the top of his head pretty much as a musician might do with the noodlings of a great idea on the piano, he started pitching ideas. He told Berry that he felt Diana should play the same kind of ambitious woman that she was in real life—a person who was a role model for young black people. “I want Diana Ross to do a film that’s inspirational,” he said, vaguely. It was a hollow sentiment, but a good place to start.

  Rob continued by saying that he had recently read a script by Bob Merrill—the Broadway lyricist who wrote Funny Girl—about a New York girl who meets a politician who stutters. She assists him in getting over his speech impediment and, in the meantime, goes on to become a famous fashion model. Richard Harris was Merrill’s choice for the male lead, and Barbra Streisand the female. Streisand, however, thought the idea was too madcap, which—considering some of her films—was really saying something. Berry liked the concept, though, and thought it had potential. “Just do me a favor and don’t ever tell Diane that Streisand turned this thing down,” he told Rob, “because if she ever finds out, you can forget about it. She’ll never touch anything Streisand turned down.”

  Rob then flew to New York and met Bob Merrill. Over a series of meetings, the two decided to make some sweeping changes to the original concept. “I want to do a Joan Crawford movie, a tearjerker, but with Diana Ross as the star,” Rob told Bob. The two men then began “spitballing” about what it was that Diana possessed that wasn’t musical in nature, but yet still integral to her persona. The obvious answer, of course: her glamour. In fact, there were few black celebrities as beautiful and better able to express it as Diana Ross was in the 1970s. So, the two men decided to develop a story around such glamour and—to raise the stakes a bit—not have her sing a single note in the entire film just to prove to any skeptics that she really was a great actress, that her work in Lady Sings the Blues was not a fluke.

  Rob Cohen remembered:

  Bob and I thought we should do a film about a black woman who wants to be a fashion designer but has a crummy job just to pay the bills. She also has a black boyfriend who’s a politician—and this would be Billy Dee Williams again because … why not? He wants her to devote herself to his cause. But all she wants is to get up, out and away from the misery and poverty of her background. Eventually, she meets a fashion photographer who wants to turn her into a model, but he’s off his rocker, totally nuts. Still, she goes to Europe with him and, once there, becomes a big-shot high-fashion model. But, in the end, she realizes that she misses her boyfriend and feels empty inside. She then comes to understand that she has no roots in Europe, that her roots are more
important than she had previously thought. So, what does she do? She goes back to the ghetto, back to her man … and they live happily ever after. In that one, single conversation, we pretty much had the premise of a film Bob Merrill then decided he wanted to call Mahogany—and that basic concept never changed one iota from that moment to the day it finally opened in the movie theaters. We had our Diana Ross movie. Mahogany.

  Rob and Bob had what they thought was a terrific movie vehicle for Diana Ross. The question now at hand was how to best present it to Berry? From the brief time he had known him, Rob understood that Berry did not enjoy reading movie treatments. Instead, he would often pass such material on to one of his flunkeys, who might then veto it rather than have to actually sit down and read it. Few people at Motown wanted to read—with the possible exceptions of Suzanne dePasse and Chris Clark. Generally, the company was made up of creative people whose best ideas came from brainstorming over fast food and beer—pretty much like Rob Cohen and Bob Merrill had just done with Mahogany. Eventually, though, someone has to read a script. Or, maybe not. Rather than try to force Berry to do so, Rob decided that the best way to present the story would be to do it as an audio-visual experience. Bob Merrill offered to read the script aloud to Berry. They would hire an illustrator to draw storyboard art of Diana and Billy Dee acting out different scenes in the proposed script. Merrill would write a musical score and hire a pianist to play it. Someone else would flip the storyboards. It was all a bit like planning a show-and-tell function at an elementary school … but with a Tony-award-winning Broadway writer doing the showing and the telling. It was definitely an unorthodox way of presenting a film concept to a potential producer and star. However, Rob Cohen was dealing with unorthodox people … and he really wanted to get this movie made.