Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “My mother always knew the truth about Rhonda,” said Chico Ross.

  I think Diane told her way back. My mom was just totally supportive in whatever decision Diane wanted to make in her life. I don’t think our father knew, though. He may have suspected, but I would be surprised if Diane ever told him. That wasn’t their relationship, for her to tell him something like that. And he’s the kind of man who would never have asked. My mom and dad were separated and my mom remarried, so I don’t know that she ever told Fred either. I guess it’s possible, though. I know that Diane always intended to tell Rhonda the truth, and she would have told her sooner if it had been necessary. Eventually, the time had come.

  Would Rhonda be angry with Diana? Would she feel betrayed? Mother and daughter had such a strong relationship, Diana felt that she just had to trust that Rhonda would be able to come to terms with the revelation. Therefore, she sat Rhonda down and basically said, “I know you have a lot of questions and that you haven’t gotten the answers you’re looking for. So, here’s the truth.” And she told her.

  Rhonda recalled: “Of course it was shocking, I wouldn’t say devastating, but shocking.”

  If anything, Rhonda now says, she felt reborn into a new life. It was as if all of the puzzle pieces of a life that didn’t seem to make sense to her suddenly fell into place and she understood much more about herself. She’s musical, like Berry. She looks like Berry—Berry is five foot seven inches, and she, as his daughter, will never be tall like her siblings. It all made sense. She had always loved Berry—she and the girls called him “Uncle BB.” She went forward to forge a relationship with him, as he did with her. Meanwhile, she stayed close to Bob, and remains close to him today. It sounds easy, but for a thirteen-year-old girl, it likely was not. Very typical of her, her mother and grandmother, Rhonda doesn’t dwell on the difficulty of it all, just the happy result.

  Berry Gordy at that time had begun living a more private, almost hermit-like existence in Los Angeles. He still owned Motown, but much of the drive and determination that had fueled him for so long was waning. He had even considered selling the label, possibly putting the past to rest. He was living an extremely comfortable life, but one that still included the ghosts of days gone by. His relationship with Diana remained difficult for him to discuss. There was regret, without a doubt. Though divorced with seven children, the memory of Diana, the love of his life, lived on in his heart.

  As a result of the recent revelation, the relationship between Berry and Rhonda deepened—and it felt right. Rhonda felt a connection to her past, and knew she was the product of a loving yet tormented relationship. And Berry finally had something he had always wanted—a deep and undeniable link to Diana. He and Diana had created so much together. Now, with the truth revealed, Berry would say that he felt his place in Diana’s life was somehow more real. She may have tried to push aside her connection to him, but Berry’s love for her had never faded. And now, no one could deny it, or take it away from him. He and Diana were, without question, family.

  Arne

  “They tell me that it will be hard to find a man strong enough to love my own strength and independence, and not worry about being Mr. Diana Ross,” Diana once told syndicated columnist Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Huffington) in an interview. “But I disagree. I know absolutely that that man is somewhere out there. Just because some special things, some special relationships, take longer to find, doesn’t mean that they can’t be found.”

  In the summer of 1985, Diana vacationed in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, enjoying a break before the demands of recording sessions for a new album she was getting ready to record, to be produced by Barry Gibb and called Eaten Alive. One morning she and her children went to the pool to begin their day of relaxation but, as soon as they got there, it began to rain. Diana, in a big red floppy hat and wearing large sunglasses, took refuge under a small balcony, where she sat in a chair and watched her three daughters make new friends in the swimming pool. It was hot and humid—typical Bahamian weather—so the children were having fun despite the raindrops. At one point, a gentleman walked over to where Diana was sitting, pulled up a chair and sat himself down right next to her. It was a little too close and, perhaps feeling her space invaded, she rose and went to her bungalow without even looking at him. Eventually all six children (her three and his—a son, Cristoffer and two daughters, Katinka and Leona—today, a pop singer) ended up in the Ross bungalow taking shelter from the now pouring rain.

  Later in the day, when the sun came back out and the children ran to the beach, Diana finally met their father—Arne Naess (pronounced Ar-na Nãs). He was charming. He invited them all to dinner that night in order to thank her for having kept an eye on the children. Diana wanted to go gambling that evening and was just going to send the children without her. However, something made her change her mind and, at the last minute, she decided to join them—in the elegant dining room of a private club in Layford Cay. Over dinner and wine, Diana became completely enchanted by Arne as he told his amazing stories of mountain climbing, deep-sea diving, skiing and other adventures. This man, in his late forties with thinning hair and conservative bow tie just happened to be one of the most loquacious and charming men she’d ever met. The fact that he had only a vague idea of who she was—he said he may have once seen her with the Supremes but wasn’t sure—somehow made him even more attractive to her. The next morning, before Diana left, the families took pictures together; she and Arne promised to stay in touch—and she knew that they would keep that promise.

  Arne Naess, who was seven years older than Diana, was born Arne Raab on 8 December 1937. He was the only child of a Norwegian mother and German Wermacht officer and ski-jumping coach. He moved to Norway in 1945 at the age of nine with his mother, Kikki—a physiotherapist and member of one of Norway’s most prominent families—when his parents divorced. Kikki, who dedicated herself to raising her child alone, took her maiden name back when she left Germany. His uncle, Arne Naess, after whom he was named, is the famous mountaineer, ecologist and philosopher who, in 1950, led the expedition that made the first ascent of Tirich Mir in Pakistan. The senior Naess’s publications included Scandinavian classics such as Is It Painful to Think? and Communication and Argument: Elements of Applied Semantics. Arne’s surname was changed to Naess in 1947. His uncle Arne then stepped in as a father figure, raising the boy as his own. It was he who inspired Arne with his own love of the mountains.

  In the 1970s Arne made his first of many fortunes as a shipping broker working for another uncle in New York, Earling Naess. In just two business ventures, he made 100–200 million Norwegian kroner, roughly $30 million. “He makes his money by buying fast and selling fast,” noted one Norwegian reporter. “He has amazing instincts and always has a hunch as to when to sell for a big profit.”

  Naess once observed, “People used to say, ‘After meeting with Arne, count your fingers before leaving the room.’ But I have always been more concerned about collecting experiences than property and money.”

  Naess had been preparing to climb Mount Everest for seven years, finally attaining his goal just before meeting Diana. He led a Norwegian expedition to Nepal and retraced the steps of Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 journey up the icy face of the world’s highest peak. The team included famous British mountaineer Chris Bonnington. He got up there in record time, too, ten days. “My ambitions are like a mountain without a summit,” he said at that time. “When you have the top in sight, there’s always another peak just over the rise, further on and higher up.” All of this was thrilling to Diana, a new world she knew nothing about. What sort of man did these kinds of things? She couldn’t help but be fascinated by such a person.

  He said that the climb gave him new purpose in his life. “If one seeks the weak points in me,” he said, “one can find them in my desire to risk life and limb.” After that expedition Arne became incredibly popular in Norway, though he always acted as if he despised the publicity. He said that he preferred a
private life and would often retreat to the three-story chalet he owned in the exclusive town of Verbier, Switzerland, surrounded by the Alps. He also owned his own island called Taino in Tahiti, a 370-acre paradise that he purchased back in 1972. The island is near the late Marlon Brando’s isle of Tetiaroa and was considered by Arne’s friends to be, as one put it, “his folly—where he would go and have great fun with beautiful Tahitian girls.” By the time he met Diana, his worth was said to be in the area of $100 million.

  Arne had been once married, to Filippa Kumlin. His three children, Cristoffer, Katinka and Leona, were sixteen, thirteen and ten, respectively at the time their father met Diana Ross in 1985.

  When Diana appeared at Caesars Tahoe in Nevada, Arne flew in to surprise her. As she entertained, Arne turned to one of Diana’s aides backstage and whispered, “I have never heard her sing before.”

  “You’re kidding,” said the aide.

  Arne watched and listened. “You know, she’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  Soon, Arne began showing up in the front row at her concerts in London, Stockholm and Paris. The attraction between Arne and Diana seemed immediate. When the king of Norway offered Arne a knighthood, Arne asked Diana to be at his side. The press soon heard about the whirlwind romance, but Diana, who was under the mistaken impression that Arne valued his privacy, was terrified of scaring him off with the publicity she always seemed to generate. Actually, though, Arne secretly loved the attention. To him, the media sensation he caused in his home country of Norway when he climbed a mountain or made a savvy business deal made the sense of personal achievement somehow even more fulfilling. In many ways, he was an interesting match for Diana. He was European, had a Continental veneer that Diana found attractive and was very wealthy. He was incredibly smart, and philosophical in his approach to life like his brilliant uncle. In other words, he wasn’t a Hollywood type like Ryan O’Neal or Gene Simmons. Arne had status, power, money and royal connections. He was also sensitive and caring, really quite a catch.

  In a couple of weeks, the two found themselves having dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles called Jimmy’s Tavern. It was their first real date and, over smoked Irish salmon and seared Kobe beef, Diana felt herself falling for this man. She was so excited about Arne, in fact, that she wanted her best friend Suzanne dePasse to meet him, immediately. It was one in the morning when she telephoned to tell her that she wanted to bring him over. There was no answer. These two were a perfect match, as they soon learned, because they were used to having their way no matter the obstacles, whether it was climbing a mountain or singing in the middle of a rainstorm in Central Park. They did what one might expect them to do: they just drove over to Suzanne’s in the middle of the night and rang her doorbell. Suzanne let Diana in as Arne waited outside.

  “I want you to meet this guy,” Diana said. “You’re gonna love him.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Suzanne asked her. “I am not going to meet any man now, in the middle of the night in my pajamas.”

  “But I’m just so excited…. Are you sure?”

  Yes, Suzanne was sure. “Some people in this world actually sleep at night,” she told her friend.

  “Okay. Gotta run. Love you. Bye.”

  Diana and Arne then went to a disco and danced the night away. He had plans to go to New York the next morning and said he would fly back to Los Angeles that same night if she would agree to have dinner with him. She agreed, of course, and from then on the two were constant companions.

  However, there were also differences between them from the beginning, and sometimes they were a little troubling. For instance, Diana loved the grounds at her home in Connecticut. It’s what drew her to the property—about ten acres of lush farm greenery, with Japanese maple trees along fragrantly flowered walkways. It’s really quite palatial—once a stone quarry rich in rare bluestone. She couldn’t wait to share it with Arne because he’s such an outdoorsman. She hoped he would find it to be a meditative place, as she did. He really wasn’t that impressed, though, when he first visited her. “This isn’t really nature,” he told her as they walked the bucolic grounds, “because, look at it. It’s all artificial. It’s manicured, manufactured. Real nature is the forest, the mountains, the lakes.” She was a little crushed. She wanted him to be excited about the place where she hoped they would live together. He wasn’t and, in fact, in the years to come he would spend very little time at the estate in Connecticut. Arne liked what he liked, lived his life his own way and was never going to be the type of man who would compromise his desires … for anyone.

  Paparazzi nightmare

  At the beginning of it, Diana Ross was very protective of her romance with Arne Naess, wanting to give it time to season before she would speak about it publicly. She did not wish to answer any questions about her new beau and definitely didn’t want to have photographs of them appearing in newspapers and magazines—not until she could be sure of how he felt about her and her fame.

  In September 1985, the Oslo press reported that Diana and Arne would get engaged when she took time off from the Scandinavian leg of an upcoming European tour, and that they might make an official announcement in Paris. Therefore, the press was waiting for them when the couple got to France. Diana and Arne and her three daughters arrived at the Plaza Athenée Hotel in Paris in a black limousine, accompanied by two bodyguards and a secretary. As soon as the contingent arrived, the bodyguards approached one waiting photographer, Erik Poppe, and warned him not to take any pictures. Poppe ignored them and began shooting anyway. As Diana, Arne and the girls headed out in their limousine, four photographers were in hot pursuit of them in two cars. When Diana’s limousine stopped at a red light, one of the photographers jumped out of his car, ran right up to Diana’s and quickly snapped a photo of her angry countenance through the window. Now, she was truly livid.

  At the next red light, the black limousine stopped, the door flew open and out jumped an enraged Miss Ross. She ran up to the startled photographer’s car, reached right into his open window and grabbed his camera. Then, with one swift motion, she hurled it to the ground and smashed it to bits. “There!” she exclaimed. “How do you like that?” Then, her work done, she scurried back to her limousine and got back into the vehicle. The light changed and it screeched off, headed back to the hotel. But now that the photographers had been duly challenged, they continued to followed her. Once the limousine pulled up to the hotel, the paparazzi jumped out of their cars and began taking copious pictures of Diana, Arne and the children as they walked to the hotel.

  “At that point, Diana just flipped out,” recalled photographer Alain Masiero. “She took off her shoes and started trying to beat the photographers with them.” Hiding their faces, Rhonda, Tracee and Chudney ran inside the hotel. Masiero said, “But she [Diana] didn’t want to stop fighting. She ran after me to hit me, but tripped and fell. There she lay, sprawled on the ground.”

  As Diana tried to collect herself, Masiero snapped off a few shots of her lying in the parking lot in her stocking feet with her high heels in her hands. “Get away from me,” she screamed at him. “Look what you’ve done. Just look at what you’ve done! Is it so important to you? Is the goddamn picture so important to you?” She was still yelling at him through her tears as Arne finally helped her up and into the hotel.

  The next day, photos of a wild-eyed Miss Ross swinging her high heels at the lensmen were published in newspapers all over Europe, as were the pictures of her sitting on the ground sobbing, shoes in hand.

  It was an upsetting scene. Today, of course, in an even more heightened atmosphere of tension between celebrities and paparazzi, a huge lawsuit would no doubt be the consequence of such an altercation. Arne found the dramatic and somewhat violent exchange between star and media strangely fascinating. Obviously, he’d never witnessed anything quite like it before. Though he sent a personal apology to the photographer from Oslo who’d been hurt by one of Diana’s bodyguards, his biggest concern, as he would
later tell it, was for the woman he was growing to love. He didn’t know that such an altercation with paparazzi was an anomaly for Diana. It certainly had never happened before—and also has not happened since. Of course, she had never tried to control the stalking press before, either. She usually just let them take their pictures and then went about her business. Sometimes, she even posed. In truth, she loved having her picture taken. She had a lot of issues in her life, but the matter of posing for photographs was not one of them. Now, in trying to control something that few celebrities have ever really been able to manage, she was left mortified by a surprising chain of events. In the process, someone to whom she had become very close had to bear witness to a scene that was seared with anger. It would take some time for her to get past it. She would never forget it, though. Neither would Arne.

  Michael Jackson sends his regrets

  The wedding between Diana Ross and Arne Naess was scheduled for February 1986 in Switzerland. Of course, it promised to be a spectacular affair, and first on Diana’s guest list was her longtime friend and protégé, Michael Jackson. She even considered asking Michael to give her away. She and Michael had been very close for years. However, Diana noticed that he’d been acting strangely recently. She had extended many invitations to him to visit her at her home in Connecticut, but after Thriller became a major hit for him in 1984, he started to decline her offers and spend more time with Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and other such female stars. In turn, Diana began to distance herself from Michael. She was worried about him, she said, because he seemed to be getting stranger with the passing of years.