Diana Ross: A Biography

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Diana’s children Rhonda, Tracee and Chudney did not have an easy adjustment when, six months after the wedding, Diana enrolled them in the same private Swiss prep school, Le Rosay, which was attended by Arne’s children. The school is international in its student body—Arabs, English, Germans, French, Scandinavians—but blacks are definitely in the minority. Switzerland was—is—still a homogeneous country and people who are not Swiss may appear more exotic than they would in other countries. “Even if you are Diana Ross’s children, if you go down the slopes or to a restaurant or out at night, unless you have a label on that says, ‘I am Diana Ross’s child,’ they don’t know who you are and may be standoffish,” said one friend of Diana’s.

  Though Arne’s children by his marriage to Filippa had many friends in Verbier and were able to introduce Diana’s offspring into their social circle, it was still not easy for her daughters. In what seems like a peculiar decision, Diana had her own children give up their father’s name of Silberstein and enrolled them in Le Rosay under the surname of Ross. Diana has never explained her decision. It has been speculated that perhaps she did so to ensure that when her daughters are introduced they can be instantly identified as being the children of a celebrity.

  “In Scandinavia now, they have gone totally matriarchal,” explained a friend of Diana’s. “The children there often get the mother’s name unless you say otherwise. Personally, I’m all for it. If you want to be really practical about it, you always know who the mother of a child is—but maybe not the father.”

  “Of course, I love my father,” one of the girls reportedly said from Switzerland, explaining the name change. “But there was too much confusion.”

  Indeed, today the girls are known as Rhonda Ross, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Chudney Ross.

  It is not known how Bob Silberstein felt about his children’s new last names. However, considering that he long ago dropped Silberstein in favor of his middle name of Ellis, it’s likely that the issue of surnames didn’t much matter to him as long as he still had the loyalty and love of his three daughters, which he, from all available evidence, continued to enjoy.

  By the spring of 1987, Diana was pregnant with Arne’s child and thrilled by this surprising turn of events given her age, forty-three. She told a friend that the child had been conceived the previous Valentine’s Day in Paris. Diana called it “an unexpected pleasure,” which suggests that perhaps she didn’t actually plan the pregnancy. It had been twelve years since she gave birth to her last child, Chudney. “I hadn’t really thought about being too old to have a baby until people kept saying I was,” Diana admitted. “And I just screamed, ‘I am not old. Give me a break.’”

  Diana had always wanted a son. Therefore, when medical tests revealed that the baby was a boy she was so excited she telephoned many people who hadn’t heard from her in years to tell them, “I’m finally going to have a son!” Still, she was not eager to discuss her pregnancy with the press. A reporter in London who interviewed her wrote, “Diana Ross is visibly pregnant, but any reference to this condition will constitute grounds for instant termination of the interview. Similarly, questions relating to the contents of Dreamgirl are definitely not on the menu. It is crucial that she not be upset in any way.”

  The pregnancy was difficult; Diana called it “dreadful.” But it ended well: Ross Arne Naess was born on 7 October 1987. Still, Diana was extremely excited to be a mother again and, apparently, she and Arne wanted the family to continue growing. When the tabloid Star first broke the news in early August 1988 that she was expecting again, most people were simply amazed. Not even those closest to Diana suspected she was even pregnant. She had really dropped out of sight for this pregnancy. Amazingly, later that month, an official announcement was made that not only had she been expecting, she’d already had the boy, her second in ten months: eight-pound, sevenounce Evan Olav, born on 26 August 1988.

  After Ross and Evan were born, Diana was determined to jump back into the record-selling pop music world. Her record deal with RCA had expired and, truly, there was no interest in renewing it from either party. She was disappointed in the company and in the way they had promoted her most recent product, and the executives there had grown tired of hearing about it from her. But, the purpose was served. She had been able to break ties with Berry, had received a substantial amount of money to do it, and also had some pretty good hit records in the process. She was thinking about possibly returning to Motown. “I’m in love with all the power at Motown,” she had said toward the end of her RCA commitment. “I’m crazy about Suzanne dePasse and her entire staff. I’ll always care about Berry. Going out on my own has made me value how good Motown was to me. It made me see that they did a whole lot.” But, as she would soon learn, if she went back to Motown, it would not be under Berry’s tutelage.

  In July 1988 Berry Gordy—who was fifty-nine—sold Motown Records to MCA Records and the investment group Boston Ventures Ltd. for an incredible $61 million. Not included in the transactions were his music publishing divisions, Jobete Music and Stone Diamond, and the film and TV operation Motown Productions, which would soon be big in the television ratings game in 1989 with the critically acclaimed CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove.

  The last few years had not been good to Motown: it was becoming more difficult to introduce new artists and get radio airplay for their records, and most of the major acts had defected to other labels, leaving Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Lionel Richie as the label’s star acts—and all three had become erratic record sellers. It was reported in the New York Times that Motown’s annual sales had dropped from $100 million (in the salad days of the 1960s and 1970s) to $20 million in the late eighties. Still, the sale of the label to MCA was a poignant affair for many Motown aficionados because, truly, it was the end of an era.

  In February 1989 Diana re-signed with the new Motown Records. “It’s like the queen returning home,” observed the new company president. Actually, Diana had just signed a deal with MCA records and had one single release, “If We Hold On Together,” from the Steven Spielberg animated film The Land Before Time. When MCA acquired Motown Records everyone thought it was a good idea to reunite her with her catalog of hits. However, without King Berry on his throne, the queen’s return somehow seemed anticlimactic; their fans may have yearned to have the two working together again, making magic happen as they did in the 1960s and 1970s, but that simply would not be possible. Berry was finished. Diana was on her own now, more than ever.

  Unlike when she signed with RCA and her recording career was at a peak, this time Diana did not receive a multi-million-dollar check. Instead, she was given an unspecified amount of stock in Motown as an incentive to sign with the label on 10 February 1989. By becoming a stockholder, she helped fulfill the 20 percent minority ownership specified by Berry Gordy in the sale to MCA. If it had been up to her, though, she would have been running Motown by this time. “Really, when they were looking, I was like, ‘Why didn’t anybody ask me?’” she told writer Judy Wieder. “Nobody asked me! I called and told them, ‘I could run this company!’”

  Her return to Motown was, just as it had been at RCA, a mixed bag of artistic successes and commercial disappointments. Her 1989 album, Workin’ Overtime—the first of four Motown albums and a box set under her new contract—was a disappointment, however. With this record, she was going for youth culture with songs leaning toward a hip-hop and house sound. Somehow, she seemed miscast in this new role at the age of forty-five. Some listeners, of course, enjoyed Workin’ Overtime—her vocal performances were strong on it even if the material was uneven—but none of the album’s songs cracked the Top Pop 100. In the end, this album would end up being her poorest-selling and lowest-charting record of the last twenty-one years.

  Her second Motown album after her return was 1991’s much more promising Force Behind the Power, which was a return to a more adult-sounding pop/soul concept. The title song was written and produced by Stevie Wonder. The album would be quite su
ccessful in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world, where Ross would enjoy five Top 40 singles from it, the biggest being the ballad “When You Tell Me That You Love Me.” However, Motown ruined its chances in the States. The company held up the compact disc’s release, and Diana ended up promoting it—singing eleven of its songs in an expensive new touring act—before it was even on the shelves! She toured for a grueling four months promoting this album that no one was able to buy, a total waste of her time; and she wasn’t at all happy about it.*

  In 1993, Motown released a box set of her music called Forever Diana—Musical Memories, which was released to coincide with her autobiography, Secrets of a Sparrow. The box set could not have been more of a disappointment. It was compiled with not a shred of imagination. The less said about it, the better. The previously mentioned autobiography was also a frustration, especially after Mary Wilson’s revealing Dreamgirl. Diana just didn’t want to write the whole story—no mention of Rhonda’s paternity, for instance.

  In the light of both Mary’s book and this author’s Call Her Miss Ross, critics wanted Diana to address certain criticisms, but she was determined not to do so. Some might say that she ended up doing exactly the kind of book she pitched to Jackie Onassis ten years earlier, one with “no personal details, whatsoever.” In fact, though the book is on the preachy side, it’s not totally superficial—what she had to say about Berry, for instance, and the way he treated her over the years was actually quite insightful. It was also interesting to hear her point of view about the Supremes: that she had been the one treated badly by her partners. Still, critics savaged it. “There’s only one way to read it,” wrote Jess Cagle from Entertainment Weekly, “with friends … aloud.”

  In a sense, when it comes to an endeavor like this one, perhaps Diana couldn’t win, anyway. For instance, she wrote very little that was critical of Florence Ballard; in fact she was quite complimentary about Florence’s looks and talent. It had been previously well documented in several publications that Florence had begun to drink. However, when Diana mentioned it in her book, the Ballard family became very upset and took their complaints to the press. Soon, one of Florence’s daughters was on national television in tears, crying, “She called my mother a drunk!” (She did not.) Florence’s sister Patricia then called Diana “high and mighty.” She also said, “[Ross] was the one who had fits, outrages, tirades, threw gowns across the room …” Imagine what she might have said if Diana had told the whole story.

  Chico in trouble

  From 1992 to about 1996, there were persistent news reports that Diana’s youngest brother, Chico, was addicted to drugs. According to the reports, he had been financially cut off by his famous sister, thereby forcing him to live on the streets. It seemed difficult to comprehend; Diana and Chico had always been so close. He had lived with her when she first moved to Beverly Hills and, in fact, Diana and Bob had practically raised him. Therefore, these reports were surprising to anyone aware of the close family history. Still, since lurid stories had appeared in newspapers all over the world about the matter, I decided to track Chico down and interview him personally to learn the truth.

  When I interviewed him in the summer of 1992, it was at a Denny’s restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. He was thirty-six at the time, very thin and not looking well. He was nothing like the exuberant youngster I first met when he was about sixteen at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, or ten years later when he was a dancer in Diana’s show. Much to my surprise, he told me he now was buying bicycles at garage sales, fixing them and then reselling them for fifteen dollars each in order to make money. Apparently, from what he told me, Diana had been paying the rent on his apartment—$600 per month—until his landlord called to tell her that he was dealing drugs from the location. That’s when, according to him, she stopped.

  “What happened,” he explained, “was that Diane got this call from my apartment building manager.”

  Then, she [Diana] called Barbara in Detroit, very upset. Barbara called me and she said, “Look, this is the deal. You’ve been selling dope, pimping, prostituting out of your apartment. Diana is upset about it and she’s going to stop paying the rent.” That’s when I got evicted.

  As Chico told me this story, I had the uneasy feeling one gets when one hears one side of a family squabble knowing full well that there must be another side to it that could be—and, in this case, probably was—very different.

  He continued:

  Some people called Diane and said, “Hey, what’s up with Chico? Why is Chico living on the streets?” So, Diane apparently called members of my family to try to find me and see what was up. But, I had no phone, so no one could call me. I was living on the streets, you know? So, apparently she called Berry, and said, “Look, we got to find Chico.” Suddenly, there were signs popping up at every payphone on Sunset Boulevard: “Chico, call this number.” “Chico, call this number.” It was Terry Gordy’s number [Berry’s youngest son], who had once been one of my closest friends. Finally, I called the number and ended up in touch with Diane’s secretary who said, “Your sister is going to be in town and wants to meet you at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Cool, I thought, I’ll meet her.

  When I got there, Diane said, “Guess what, Chico? The whole family is here and they want to talk to you.” Man, it was a surprise attack. Everybody was there, Fred—my dad—Barbara—everyone but T-Boy and Rita. My sister [Diana] had set up this intervention and flew everyone in for it. Then, she really let me have it. She was saying that a rehab she wanted me to go to in Marina Del Rey was her last attempt to help me. I told her I was not addicted to drugs. I used them, yes, but I was not addicted. She thought I was on cocaine but no, I had stopped doing coke years ago because I didn’t like what it did to my friends. Smoking a little grass, yeah. I would drink a little, once in a while.

  In truth, as Chico later admitted to me, Diana had been dealing with his problems for many years. “Basically I got a contract with Warner Bros records with a group called FBI,” he explained. “It was me and [Motown producer] Norman Whitfield’s boys. But I blew it. I fell in love with a prostitute, a madam—one of the biggest in California—and left Los Angeles and went to San Francisco and stayed with her and her daughter. I then did whatever I could to help her and her daughter survive,” he concluded, vaguely. I wasn’t sure what he meant and he didn’t wish to elaborate. However, it didn’t sound good.

  A final straw, he said, happened when he returned to Los Angeles and was living in the apartment for which Diana was paying rent. Apparently, one night when he was taking a bath he somehow broke the tap in his bathtub. When water started pouring out of it, he stuck a flannel in the opening thinking that would stop the flow. Instead, it just forced the water into the walls, which ended up flooding the entire ground floor of the building. “The apartment manager took total advantage of Diane on that one,” he said.

  They remodeled the whole bottom floor of the building, and Diane paid for it, straight out. She was mad about it. But that pissed me off, too. I couldn’t believe she fell for it. Terry [Gordy] and I would talk about his father and my sister and we would say, “You know, it’s been like thirty years since they had to struggle. Maybe they just don’t understand it anymore.”

  After I interviewed Chico, I felt conflicted about him and his story for some time. I simply couldn’t fathom how he could end up in such a sad state. There was nothing I could think of to do but give him some money and hope for the best for him. Then, I regretted giving it to him for fear of what he might do with it. If Diana Ross wasn’t giving him money, how in the world would she feel about him getting it from, of all people, me—her unauthorized biographer? It was all very troubling, especially since Chico looked just like his sister—same large eyes, same big smile.

  I was also concerned about writing the feature. I worried that I didn’t have the whole story; it was obvious that there was more to it than what Chico told me. When I called T-Boy, Chico’s brother, in Detroit to ask him abou
t the situation, he was direct with me.

  “Look, man, this has been going on for years. You are coming in during the seventh inning of the ball game. Don’t expect to understand it with only two innings left,” he told me. “Diane has been round and round with Chico on this thing. She’s scared to death. But she feels she had to go the tough love approach with him because he’s out of control. The family agrees with her. You want my advice? Don’t write the story. Just drop it, brother. Please.”

  In the end, I decided to take T-Boy’s advice. In light of some of Diana’s recent problems, though—which will be explained later—it now seems that Chico’s sad story has at least some relevance. I found him to be personable and vulnerable. With that winning Ross smile, he made me want to pull for him. It was also clear that he still loved his sister, especially when he told me this story:

  Man, I think this was when I was about eight or nine. The Supremes were on the road, and Diane and I were so close she was missing me something terrible. So, one day I got a phone call from Berry. He said, “Chico, I’m flying you down to Puerto Rico to surprise your sister.” I was so happy, I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” So, I asked my mom and then got on the plane feeling like a real big shot. I flew down to San Juan. When I got there, I met Berry and we made a plan. He put me in a seat in the lobby of the El San Juan hotel with my back to the door, and he said, “Now, no matter what happens, don’t turn around. You promise?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So, I’m sitting there and sitting there and finally Diane comes into the lobby and I hear her say, “Berry, that little boy over there, my God! From the back he looks just like Chico.” And I’m sitting there, just grinning and my heart is pounding so loud I’m afraid she will hear it. And Berry says, “Oh, please, Diane, every little boy you see you think is Chico. That ain’t no Chico over there.” And she says, “But that boy really, really looks like Chico from the back, Berry.” And she walks over to me and taps me on the shoulder. “Little boy, turn around,” she demands. But I didn’t do it, just like Berry told me. So, finally she says, “What is going on here?” and comes over and stands right in front of me. Man, when she saw my face, oh my God! She just burst into tears. And she grabbed me and hugged me so tight. We were both crying, and Berry came over and then he was crying. “I love you so much,” she told me. “Thank you for bringing him here, Berry,” she said. “Thank you so much.” It was a moment I’ll never forget. Man. I’ll never, ever forget it …