The Enigma: Diana Ross’s Unstoppable Drive (2024)

“I believe that I am better emotionally equipped to handle a performance than an intimate business meeting or a one-on-one encounter,” the legendary Diana Ross writes in her 1993 memoir, Secrets of a Sparrow.

This may be the understatement of the century. The iconic singer, and star of famed films including Lady Sings the Blues (which got her nominated for a best actress Oscar) and The Wiz has long had a reputation for being a “diva,” someone whose infamous demands were outshone only by her magnetically joyful talent.

Secrets of A Sparrow is a lyrical, at times frustrating biography, long on poetic platitudes but short on specifics. There is an undercurrent of defensiveness which runs throughout—understandable when one remembers the systemic racism, sexism, and persecution Ross faced as she rose her way to the top. “It seems that with every achievement, with every move I have made, no matter how great or small, someone was always there to try to bring me down,” she writes.

Though Ross reveals few secrets, not even touching on her reported romances with Smokey Robinson, Ryan O’Neal and Gene Simmons, her character emerges in ways she may not have intended. Ross comes across as a misunderstood, curious genius: sensitive, brave, anxious, oblivious, and utterly unknowable. “My separateness, my aloneness, has always been here and is here now,” she writes, “a recurring theme that has continuously run through my life.”

Her Eyes on the Prize

“My story has often been referred to as classic ‘rags to riches,’ but in truth, that description doesn’t fit me at all. For starters, the Rosses were never raggedy,” Ross writes in Secrets of a Sparrow. “I was brought up to have ideals, to believe that anything was possible, and that hard work was part of that.”

Diana Ross was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 26, 1944, the second of six children. Her mother, Ernestine, named her Diane, but a mistake on the birth certificate changed the name to Diana. Ross describes herself as an unstoppable force, a “small waiflike child with vibrant energy, vital, curious, full of piss and vinegar, and wildly excited to be alive.”

The Rosses were a determined, upwardly mobile family who believed in higher education and excellence. Their guiding light was warm, loving Ernestine, whom Ross describes “as bright as the sunlight that poured in her yellow kitchen windows, as sweet as home-cooked jelly.”

But in her typical obtuse way, Ross hints at bad childhood memories she hopes are “not true.” These seem to concern her father, Fred, “smart, proud, confident, refined, respectful.” Ross admits to competing with her siblings to be her father’s favorite, but never getting there. “I could never get close enough to touch him, and I’m not sure why,” she writes.

According to Diana Ross: A Biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli, her battle of wills with Fred intensified in 1958, when future Temptation Paul Williams noticed Diana’s unique voice while she was singing on the stoop with other teens in the Brewster Projects. He introduced her to fellow Brewster teen Florence Ballard, who was putting together an all-girls group called “The Primettes.”

Against Fred’s wishes, Diana joined the Primettes. In 1960, neighborhood friend Smokey Robinson secured the Primettes an audition with Berry Gordy, the head of an upstart label called Motown. When Berry told them they were too young, Ross formulated a plan. Every day after school, the girls raced to Motown and refused to be ignored. “Singing became my life. I lived, ate, drank, and breathed it,” Ross writes. “It was all that I cared about. I had a dream, and I was completely determined to make it real.”

Hitsville, USA

The girls’ persistence paid off. On January 15, 1961, the group—quickly renamed The Supremes—signed with Berry Gordy, and soon solidified into a tight trio. There was founder Florence Ballard, whom Ross describes as “tall, proud and beautiful,” whose vocal power matched her carriage. Then there was Mary Wilson, whom Ross describes somewhat dismissively as “the sexy” one who liked to “wiggle her hips.”

The starry-eyed teens found themselves in the midst of a musical revolution. Ross rhapsodically describes the scrappy innovation at Motown’s “Hitsville, USA.” It was an old family home Gordy had converted into a multipurpose headquarters, where every room was used to record. Ross wryly recalls “singing my heart out beside the toilet bowl in that famous bathroom and thinking, ‘I guess show business isn’t as glamorous as I thought it was.’”

But the disconnect between Ross and the other members of Motown seems to have begun almost immediately. Her memories of the “family” atmosphere at Motown are comically different from Motown employees’ versions of events in Taraborrelli’s biography.

Ross admits that from the start, The Supremes, nicknamed “the girls,” were coddled. She garners the reader’s sympathy when she reiterates how young she was in those early days, and how she felt scared and out of control. But many other Motown have been less generous: they say Ross was overly competitive and aloof. Taraborrelli says that during one Motown review, Martha Reeves, lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas, chased Ross backstage after she discovered Ross had allegedly tried to one-up her group. Per Taraborrelli, the Supremes locked themselves in their dressing room while Reeves pounded on the door.

Wilson finally opened the door, and an irate Reeves confronted Ross. “Quite simply,” a laughing Reeves told Taraborrelli years later, “I told Miss Diane Ross that I felt like scratching her eyes out for what she had done to us.”

Fire and Ice

The Supremes scored their first #1 hit in 1964, with “Where Did Our Love Go.” They were soon one of the hottest groups in the world. Many saw them as a creation of Berry Gordy’s genius, much to Ross’s understandable annoyance.

“I can’t really give him any credit for the sophisticated elegance that we embodied,” she writes. “That’s who we already were. Berry Gordy did not have to ‘create’ young ladies from ghetto teens, like some inner-city Eliza Doolittles. We were already ladies who had been brought up right.”

Ross’s conflicting emotions about Gordy and their two-decade romantic and professional partnership make for some of the most raw and honest passages in Secrets of a Sparrow. “He and I could sail along on the identical wavelength, riding the surf so perfectly in communion that we left everybody else on the shore, or we could clash so dramatically that the treacherous seas we left in our wake would be hazardous for any craft,” she writes.

But Ross also describes Gordy as controlling and emotionally abrasive, obsessed with turning her into the superstar he knew she could be. Contrary to many reports, Taraborrelli writes that from the start Gordy singled out Ross as the breakout star of The Supremes, recognizing that her tireless work ethic matched his own. He was also madly in love with her. According to Taraborrelli, the two consummated their relationship in Paris in 1965, after an abortive attempt when an intimidated Berry could not perform.

By the 1970s, Ross felt that Gordy had become a “genius gone mad.” According to Taraborrelli, when Ross became pregnant with Gordy’s child, she didn’t tell him but quickly married first husband Bob Ellis (her daughter Rhonda would not find out “Uncle BB” was her biological father until she was a teenager). The tension came to a head during the filming of 1975’s Mahogany. While shooting in Rome, Gordy, who was directing the film, kept making a pregnant Ross run up and down the Spanish Steps. Driven to the brink, Ross could take no more. Taraborrelli writes:

Diana hauled off with everything she had in her and slapped him right across the face. There was a loud smacking sound. His sunglasses flew into the air. “Hey! What are you doing?” he asked, flustered. “What the hell is going on with you?” “I hate you. I hate you,” she screamed. “That’s what the hell is going on.” With that, she ran off the set.

Where Did Our Love Go?

“Florence’s life was always shrouded in mystery for me,” Ross writes of the tragic Supreme, whose demise was unfairly blamed on her breakout bandmate. “When she was happy, it was contagious. Everybody was happy. When she was unhappy, everybody around her felt miserable. She was terribly moody, constantly up and down. And she was hard to figure out; we could never really understand what drove her moods.”

By all accounts, the outspoken Ballard was hurt and upset that Berry had made Ross the lead singer of the Supremes instead of her. By the late 1960s, both Ross and Taraborrelli write that Ballard was mentally unstable, drinking too much and disappearing for long stretches of time. She was finally let go from the group in 1967 and was replaced by Cindy Birdsong.

Ross was close behind, leaving in 1970 after what she felt were years of betrayal and jealousy. “The girls treated me very badly,” Ross writes. “They had gone against me with a vengeance...I had been tormented, treated as if I were invisible, talked about behind my back when my back wasn’t even turned.”

But while Ross soared to solo stardom, Ballard sank into poverty and alcoholism. She died in 1976 of a heart attack at the age of 32. At Ballard’s chaotic and infamous star-studded funeral in Detroit, the 2000 unruly mourners were shocked when Ross showed up with four bodyguards and pushed through to the front pew. As the Reverend C. L. Franklin (father of Aretha) gave the eulogy, Ross asked for the mic, and beckoned an embarrassed Mary Wilson to her. She began to speak. Taraborrelli writes:

“I believe that nothing disappears and Flo will always be with us,” Diana announced solemnly. She handed Mary the mic. “I loved her very much,” she barely managed to say. The two women looked down at Florence Ballard’s silver-colored casket and said a silent prayer.

Many of the mourners were appalled—and in her own book, Ross is unusually contrite about her action that day. “I was in a lot of emotional pain, but for a short time I tried to take charge. I guess it was my nature to try to be responsible and to organize chaos, but in this case maybe that was a bad thing to do,” she writes. “I got a lot of bad press later, but I only did it because I wanted to make things right for Florence. I finally gave up. I didn’t go to the cemetery. I just got into my car feeling terrible and went home to grieve alone.”

“It’s Miss Ross to You”

In 1980, Ross left Motown and signed with RCA. She was a bigger star than ever. “The woman she presented onstage was more her mother’s daughter, offering sentiments that her audience received with open arms,” Taraborrelli notes. “In her private life, though, she often seemed removed and aloof, like her father.”

With no Motown PR machine to protect her, Ross’s stringent demands on employees and partners increasingly became gossip fodder. She was unapologetic. “I demand perfection from myself,” she writes. “And the best possible job from all those around me.” Taraborrelli claims that Ross’s daughter Tracee Ellis Ross worked as her mother’s spy, jotting down employees’ mistakes in a notebook she carried everywhere.

Sometimes this obsession with perfection would spill onto the stage, like it did one day at Wembley Arena, when Ross became frustrated with the sound system. She stopped the show, screamed at the crew, and knocked one of the sound monitors off the stage with a kick one reporter later said was “worthy of Pelé.”

But if Ross was hard on her employees and colleagues, her searing descriptions of the nervousness and stress she placed on herself make the reader truly feel for her. When a Heathrow agent roughly patted her down in an airport in 1999, a furious Ross grabbed her back. “She reached out and touched the female guard,” Taraborrelli writes, “saying, ‘There. Now, how do you like that? This is how it feels to be touched that way.’”

The Boss

“To some, I probably seem ready to fight, but that’s a misinterpretation,” Ross writes. “I am simply overcoming my insecurities, which I have been dealing with for years and have learned to cover. The older I get, the better it all feels, but letting it just flow is not yet an easy thing for me, and it never has been.”

If this protective shell has often made Ross misunderstood in professional life, her confidence as a mother and the pride she takes in her five children are bright spots of Secrets of a Sparrow. As Taraborrelli notes, she is an exceptional parent who is grounded and warm with her children in a way she has never been with the outside world. “The greatest gift that my kids give me is the reminder that I’m not so great,” Ross writes. “I’m just ordinary.”

Indeed, this was proven in the early 2000s, after the breakdown of Ross’s marriage to daredevil Norwegian millionaire Arne Naess. She was charged with DUI and went to rehab, only to emerge stronger than ever, still performing and growing at the age of 79. “I am excited by things I don’t know,” she writes. “Life for me is a learning spree.”

The public may never truly know Diana Ross’s softer side, but that seems to matter to her not a whit. “To my children… and those who love me,” she writes, “even though I really don’t want you to find out who I am through the words in this book, I hope that you know who I am through our times together and our lives together and the love that I feel for you.”

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