Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “It was a very strange call,” Diana would say years later. “She said she was ready to go back to singing. The next thing I knew, she was gone.”

  Indeed, on 22 February 1976, Florence Ballard Chapman died of a heart attack at just thirty-two. There were rumours of drug use. They’re untrue. With the exception of prescribed medication, she had insisted that she never did drugs—never even smoked pot. Her mom, Lurlee, explained it this way: “She died of a broken heart. That’s all there was to it.”

  Mary immediately made plans to attend the funeral, as did Diana. Motown paid for everything. Later, Diana would set up a trust fund for Florence’s three daughters.

  Before she died, some of Florence’s fans had wanted to send money to her in an effort to help her through difficult times. This author was entrusted with her address and would forward the letters and cash to her in Detroit. To think that her fans were supporting her and Motown clearly was not seemed a heartbreaking notion, but it was also the truth. Florence would send all of her benefactors thank-you cards. About a month before she died, I received a handwritten note from her in the mail. She wrote:

  Tell Mary I love her. And Diane, too. (She’s not so bad! Ha Ha Ha.) I’m very sure I will be back on my feet one day. I have some exciting plans and will write soon to give you the good news—I hope! Until then, always remember—we really were SUPREME!!!

  Love,

  Flo

  Diana and Bob divorce

  In the summer of 1976, Diana Ross was working at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Just before going onstage, she wrote on her dressing-room mirror with soap, “You can have it any way you want it.”

  Her mind was made up.

  Following that engagement, while appearing at the Palace in New York in June, she filed for divorce from Bob Ellis Silberstein. “I simply don’t want to be married anymore,” she explained, not really saying much. In an interview a couple of years later with Barbara Walters, she also mentioned that it seemed to her that Bob had a problem when people accidentally called him Mr. Ross. “I don’t think he admitted it, but I think finally it did get to him. It’s just something that … it’s not fun.” When asked if that’s what broke up the marriage, she said, “I think, yes.” Of course, it was much more complicated than just that. In truth, Bob had spent his entire marriage wedded to two people: Diana Ross and Berry Gordy. Even when Berry wasn’t in the picture, he wasn’t far from it.

  Once, during one of Diana’s early 1970s Waldorf-Astoria appearances in New York, Bob flew in to be with his wife. Berry was also present. It seemed as if the three were inseparable. After the show one night, the Silbersteins slipped away to a bar inside the hotel called Sir Harry’s. The two were sitting in a corner booth having what appeared to be an intense conversation when a young man approached asking if he could take a photo—that young man being this author, barely a teenager but already quite the pest journalist and working for a newspaper in New York called The Black American. “Not now,” Diana said sternly. “I am sitting here with my husband. Can’t you see that? Now, just go away!” I left, and did so eagerly. As I was leaving the bar, I ran into Berry. “Is Diana in there?” he asked me. I nodded. He saw my camera. “So, did you get some good pictures for your paper?” he asked with a knowing smile. “Well, no,” I said, “she’s sorta busy right now with Bob.”

  “What?” he asked. “Come with me.”

  We walked back into the bar, me very reluctantly following Berry, and approached the Silbersteins. When Diana saw me, the expression on her face indicated that she just might leap out at me from her booth.

  “Let this guy have a picture, Diane,” Berry told her. “Come on. It’s for The Black American.”

  “But, I told him—”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Berry said, “what is the big deal? You smile. He clicks. He goes. And it’s over.”

  The argument raged on from there, with me standing next to Berry and not saying a word and Bob sitting next to his wife, also silent. Finally, Diana relented. “Okay, take the picture,” she demanded of me. She angrily ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Just take it. Now.” She forced a smile. I took the picture.

  “Good,” Berry said. “So, send me a copy of the article, will you?” he asked, patting me on the back. “Now, get lost, kid.”

  Berry then sat down with the couple. As the waiter came by, he ordered a martini. Diana and Bob looked at him angrily. She lit another cigarette. I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  “My wife belongs to that company,” Bob complained shortly before the divorce. “She is totally dominated by a man who has never read a book in his life. I just can’t stand it anymore to hear them calling Stevie Wonder a genius. Whatever happened to Freud?”

  “Whether he knew it or not, Bob was in a great deal of pain,” Diana would observe, years later. “The pressure of his trying to overcome Berry’s importance in my life was too much. Berry was too demanding; I was too confused. It was a messy triangle. I wished he had been stronger so that instead of becoming twisted up in the confusion he could have freed himself.” One wonders if she meant that she wished he had filed for divorce? Certainly if she couldn’t find a way away from Berry, how was he going to do it? “I felt torn apart,” she continued, “not happy with Bob, not happy with Berry. I knew I would eventually have to leave them both if I wanted to find peace.”

  Ironically, just as Diana was getting ready to divorce Bob, her mother, Ernestine, had found new love at the age of sixty. It was a surprising, bright spot in a very dark time for Diana, knowing that her mom was finally happy in a relationship. “She came to me in 1976 and said she didn’t want to be tied to me anymore,” Fred Ross recalled. “I think we divorced in 1977. That was the year she married a man named John Jordan. Nice man. She was happy. So, I was happy for her. The kids all liked the guy …”

  Meanwhile, divorcing Bob was one of the rare important decisions Diana made that she would have doubts about with the passing of the years. “She really did love him,” said a relative of hers. “He was a casualty of the ongoing war between her and Berry, really. It was a shame that the marriage had to end. But if you think about it, it never really had a chance, did it?”

  Even a few years later, Diana had to wonder about the wisdom of her decision. She felt that perhaps she and Bob should have worked their way through the tough times. “We only had one bad year, you know?” she said (it was uncertain whether she was referring to their first together or their fifth and last). Later, in her nightclub act, she would introduce her hit record “Remember Me” by saying, “If I had to live my life all over, I wouldn’t change a thing … well, maybe one thing.” She confided to one longtime associate that that “one thing” was her divorce from Bob. “I do regret it,” she said. “I think that, perhaps, I made a mistake letting him go.”

  Even if her personal life was in turmoil, she had never been hotter as a solo artist. “Theme from Mahogany” was nominated for an Academy Award, and she performed the song live via satellite from Amsterdam for the Oscar telecast. A smash album simply titled Diana Ross was fueled by the disco-flavored “Love Hangover,” which hustled straight to number one and earned her another Grammy nomination. She won a special Tony Award for a record-breaking engagement on Broadway at the Palace Theater, and became the first performer ever to star in her own one-woman ninety-minute TV special for NBC. It’s no wonder that Billboard magazine named her “The Entertainer of the Century”!

  A million bucks before breakfast

  When one thinks of Diana Ross’s films, it becomes ironically clear that they seem to have mirrored her life experiences at the time she was making them. When people thought of her as a pop confection with the Supremes and little more that that, Lady Sings the Blues came along to redefine her image in the public’s view—not only as an artist but as a thinking and involved African-American woman who could easily relate to the black experience. That had always been true of her but, apparently, it took a blockbuster movie to convince the world
of it. Then, when she was trying to come to terms with her romance with Berry Gordy and his impact on her life, she played a woman in Mahogany who was attempting to reconcile her past in the ghetto and the man she had loved there with her future in Rome as a successful model and designer. In 1977, just when Diana was trying to find herself and answer the question “Who is Diana Ross?” a movie role came into focus for her that was as appropriate as it was unlikely for her.

  By this time—mid-1977—Motown had acquired the hit Broadway musical The Wiz as a film property through a production deal with Universal. The Wiz—an all-black fantasy conceived by Ken Harper and Charlie Smalls—is based on L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wizard of Oz, which had already been adapted in a variety of stage and film versions, the most notable, of course, being the Judy Garland classic of 1939. In the black Broadway rendition, the role of Dorothy went to a youngster named Stephanie Mills, barely a teenager at the time.

  Motown’s concept was to surround an unknown actress playing Dorothy with major stars essaying the other characters; Stephanie Mills was campaigning hard for the lead role. Diana first heard about the movie while having dinner with Suzanne dePasse. When actor Ted Ross joined them briefly at their table, he and Suzanne began to enthusiastically discuss the venture, in which he had already been cast to reprise his stage role as the Lion. Diana, who had seen The Wiz twice on Broadway and loved it, became interested. “Darn, I would love to be Dorothy,” she said to Suzanne, who told her that it probably wasn’t possible because it was being projected as a low-budget film and then changed the subject.

  According to Diana, that night she lay awake thinking about both The Wiz and The Wizard of Oz, “maybe even dreaming, I’m not sure.” At two in the morning, she rose and watched a videotape of the Garland original. Then, she telephoned Berry. By this time it was about five o’clock.

  “I want to play Dorothy,” she said succinctly.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Black! I want to play Dorothy in The Wiz,” she repeated.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Of course not! I’ve been watching The Wizard of Oz and I had this dream or something about being Dorothy and—”

  “Forget it,” Berry said, cutting her off. “What are you, nuts? You’re too old to be any damn Dorothy. Now go to sleep.”

  With that, he hung up on her.

  Though Diana thought Berry had completely dismissed her idea, he had too much confidence in her instincts to totally disregard the call. He immediately called Rob Cohen.

  “The phone rang and I jumped awake, my heart beating wildly,” Rob recalled, “because I knew it was Berry, and I knew something was up. It was his secretary Edna telling me to please hold. So, I held for fifteen minutes lying in the dark while Berry did business with someone else on another line. At five in the morning! I swear to God, the man never slept. Suddenly Berry got on the line. No hellos. Just straight to business.”

  “Man, I was on the phone with Diane a second ago,” Rob recalled Berry as saying, “and she had a dream or something that she played Dorothy in The Wiz. So what do you think about that?”

  The thought of casting Diana in The Wiz had never even occurred to Rob, but he didn’t have to think long to make a decision about it. “Well,” he began, “there are a lot of reasons why it’s wrong. And one reason why it’s right.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Universal will pay her a million dollars to do it,” Rob answered. “And it’ll mean getting this movie made.”

  “And what’s wrong about it?”

  “She’s too old. I mean, Christ, she’s in her thirties,” Rob said, pulling no punches. “This character is one of America’s beloved icons and to cast Diana Ross in the role may, in fact, be condemning the movie to being hated, even if it turns out to be a great film.”

  “That’s the same goddamn thing I told her,” Berry said, laughing. “But she’s going to be insistent about doing it. I can tell. You know how she is once she’s made her mind up about something.”

  “Well, yeah, but she’s too old,” Rob maintained, “and also—”

  Berry cut him off. “Hey. Wait a minute. Did I hear you right? Did you say a million bucks?”

  Rob remembered that he was suddenly on the spot. The million-dollar figure was one he had offered facetiously.

  “Uh, yeah, that’s what I said. One mil.”

  “You mean to tell me you can get Diana Ross one million bucks to do this goddamn thing?” Berry asked incredulously.

  “Well, I, uh—”

  “Look, you get her a million, and I’ll tell her she can do it.”

  “But—”

  Berry hung up.

  Rob said that he spent the next hour pacing the floor. At 6 a.m. he started making telephone calls. After not very much persuasion, Tom Mount, one of the executives in charge of The Wiz at Universal, told Rob that, yes, the studio would be interested in having Diana do the film—and that Universal would, in fact, pay her $1 million. Rob then called John Badham and asked how he would feel about directing Diana in the film. Badham said he thought it was a terrible idea, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. “You can have her, but I don’t want her,” he said, according to Rob. “Look, she’s all wrong. If Diana Ross is in, I’m out.” So that took care of John Badham; he left the project and went on to direct Saturday Night Fever. Rob then called Berry back to tell him about Universal’s offer of a million dollars to Diana, and about John Badham’s quitting on the spot.

  Before Berry even had a chance to call Diana to tell her the good news, she was on the phone to him. She later recalled: “I told him that I absolutely believed in Dorothy and in her search to find who she is, and that it seemed so very parallel to who I am. I thought that identity would carry over to anybody who watched the picture, whatever their age, sex or color. And that it was something I really wanted to do.”

  Even though he knew that Universal had come through with big money for it, Berry still felt it would be a mistake. He saw nothing in the role for Diana. The more he denied her, though, the more she pushed it. He still didn’t tell her about the offer, though. “You are just too old,” he again insisted.

  “I am not too old,” she shot back. “It’s ageless. It’s right for my career.”

  “Jesus Christ, Diane.”

  “Berry, I’m serious.”

  Finally, he had to laugh. “Okay. Well, guess what?” he said. “I already worked it out.”

  “What?!”

  “You’re Dorothy, Diane. The role is yours. And, guess what else?”

  She was almost afraid to ask.

  “Universal is going to pay you … Are you ready?”

  “Berry, please!”

  “One million dollars, Diane,” Berry announced. “They’re gonna pay you one million dollars to do this movie. One million dollars!”

  She squealed into the telephone.

  And so it was to be: Diana Ross would play Dorothy in The Wiz. The deal was set … and it wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet!

  The Wiz

  As it happened, The Wiz would turn out to be a pretty bad movie. Berry was right; Diana was too old. When Judy Garland filmed The Wizard of Oz in 1938, she was sixteen; Diana was thirty-two by the time she started principal photography. Actually, when news of the casting was announced, most critics felt that Berry was once again—as they said he had done with Lady Sings the Blues—giving his princess something else she wanted without any consideration to practicality or realism. This author attended the press conference announcing the official cast on 15 July 1977 in the outdoor plaza of the Music Center in Los Angeles. I asked Diana about Berry’s possible involvement in the movie because he wasn’t present at the press conference. “Well, this is a Universal Pictures–Motown production,” she reminded me, seeming annoyed by the question, “so, obviously, Berry will be involved. He is Motown, you know?” Actually, as it would happen, the most interesting thing about The Wiz—besides the great story of how the deal wa
s practically sealed before breakfast—is the fact that Berry would not participate in it. Indeed, after he helped to finalize the deal for Diana, he backed away from the project and wanted nothing more to do with it.

  Berry had a couple of reasons for not wanting to direct or produce The Wiz with his star Diana. First of all, as he had said, he didn’t think it was a good vehicle for her. A bigger reason, though, was that he had threatened that he was never going to make another movie with her after Mahogany—and he, apparently, meant it. Actually, what he told her was that he would not invest in any more of her films. However, the money for The Wiz wasn’t coming from him; it was Universal’s. Still, he had not been able to get past her walking out on him in Rome. Was he punishing her? Maybe. Whatever the case, word of his absence from the production pretty much amounted to the best news Diana had received in some time. It would be the first major project in which she would be involved without him … and she was said to be elated about it.

  As earlier stated, The Wiz was originally budgeted as a small film. Once it became a star vehicle for Diana Ross, though, it became a major project for everyone. Sidney Lumet, who had just finished working with Richard Burton on Equus, was hired as the director, replacing John Badham. Lumet decided that the best way to make the film work would be to turn it into a modern-day Manhattan fantasy, so, to that end, New York locations would be utilized. The budget was up to $30 million before they even got started, three times the total for Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany combined.

  Screenwriter Joel Schumacher’s script had Diana playing a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher living in Harlem who gets caught up in the vortex of a blizzard and, as a result, ends up in Oz, a souped-up New York City, with her dog Toto. Once there, she somehow convinces the Scarecrow (nineteen-year-old Michael Jackson), the Lion (Ted Ross) and the Tin Man (Nipsey Russell) that the qualities of knowledge, courage and compassion which they hope the Wiz will bestow upon them are actually characteristics which they already possess. Richard Pryor played the Wiz and Lena Horne, the Good Witch.