Diana Ross

• 1. Introduction

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  Diana Ross was born on the 26th of March 1944, and her very name was an accident. Her mother intended to call her Diane, but whoever filled out the birth certificate made a mistake, and the name Diana stuck on paper. Her family and every Detroit friend she ever had kept calling her Diane for years. It was not until 1965 that she quietly adopted the official version, surprising even her closest bandmates in the process.

  By then, she was already one half of a phenomenon. Ross had helped carry the Supremes to twelve number-one pop singles on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, a record that still makes the group the best-charting female group in history. Between 1964 and 1981, Ross sang on eighteen number-one singles in the United States. After going solo, she added six more chart-toppers and sold over one hundred million records worldwide.

  She also made film history. Her debut screen performance earned her a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination, making her the first African-American actress nominated for an Oscar for a debut film role. Billboard named her the Female Entertainer of the Century in 1976, when she was thirty-two years old.

  How did a girl from Detroit's Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects become the most charted female artist in U.S. history? And what did that rise cost her, and the people around her? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Detroit Roots

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  Ross grew up at 635 Belmont Street in the North End section of Detroit, near Highland Park, Michigan. One of her neighbors there was a young Smokey Robinson, a connection that would prove more consequential than anyone could have predicted. Her household held six children: Diana and her two sisters, Barbara and Rita, and three brothers, Arthur, Fred Jr., and Wilbert, who was also known as Chico.

  When Ross was seven, her mother Ernestine contracted tuberculosis and became seriously ill. The family sent the children south to Bessemer, Alabama, to live with their maternal grandparents. Their grandfather, the Reverend William Moten, pastored the Bessemer Baptist Church. Ross's initial performances were there, singing in that church under her grandfather's roof.

  After her mother recovered, the family reunited in Detroit, eventually settling in the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects on St. Antoine Street, where they moved on Ross's fourteenth birthday in 1958. Ross enrolled at Cass Technical High School in downtown Detroit, a four-year college preparatory magnet school. Her ambition at the time was fashion design, and she took classes in clothing design, millinery, pattern making, and tailoring. She layered modeling and cosmetology classes onto that schedule in the evenings and on weekends. In 1960, Hudson's downtown Detroit department store hired her as its first African-American bus girl. She also earned extra money doing her neighbors' hair. Ross graduated from Cass Tech in January 1962, but by then a different future was already in motion.

• 3. Building the Supremes

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  At fifteen, Ross joined a vocal group called the Primettes, whose other members included Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Betty McGlown. The group came to Ross's attention through Primes member Paul Williams, who brought her to music manager Milton Jenkins. After the Primettes won a talent competition in Windsor, Ontario in 1960, Tamla Records A&R executive Robert Bateman invited them to audition.

  Ross had already been working her old neighbor Smokey Robinson for a connection to Motown. Robinson agreed to arrange an introduction, on one condition: the Primettes had to let him take their guitarist, Marv Tarplin, for an upcoming tour. Tarplin would end up playing in Robinson's band for more than thirty years. In her autobiography, Secrets of a Sparrow, Ross described the arrangement as a fair trade.

  Berry Gordy himself described being stopped cold the first time he heard Ross sing. In his autobiography, To Be Loved, he recalled heading to a business meeting when Ross's voice singing "There Goes My Baby" stopped him in his tracks. He asked the group to perform it again, then told them to finish high school first.

  The group spent time at Gordy's Hitsville U.S.A. headquarters every day, offering hand claps and background vocals for Motown recordings. During those early years, Ross served as the group's hairstylist, makeup artist, seamstress, and costume designer.

  In January 1961, Gordy agreed to sign them, on the condition they change their name. Motown secretary Janie Bradford asked Florence Ballard, the only member at the studio at the time, to pick from a list of options. Ballard chose Supremes reportedly because it was the only name on the list that did not end with the suffix "ette". The other members were not impressed. Ross worried the name would be confused with a male vocal group. A male vocal group was, in fact, already named the Supremes. Gordy signed them under the new name on the 15th of January 1961.

  By late 1963 the group had their first chart entry, "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes", which peaked at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. Gordy then made Ross the lead singer. In June 1964, while on tour with Dick Clark's Cavalcade of Stars, the group scored their first number-one hit with "Where Did Our Love Go". Between August 1964 and May 1967, Ross, Wilson, and Ballard sang on ten consecutive number-one singles, all of which also reached the U.K. Top 40.

• 4. Friction at the Top

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  Success inside the Supremes was not evenly shared. Ross increasingly dominated media interviews, answering questions directed at Ballard or Wilson. She pushed for higher pay than her colleagues. Her adoption of the birth-certificate name Diana in 1965 came as a surprise to Ballard and Wilson, who had only ever known her as Diane.

  Florence Ballard was fired from the Supremes by Berry Gordy in July 1967, following difficulties with comportment, weight, and alcoholism. Gordy replaced her with Cindy Birdsong, who had been singing with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. Gordy then renamed the group Diana Ross and the Supremes, a restructuring that made it easier to charge higher performance fees, treating the billing as a solo star backed by a group.

  Gordy had actually considered pulling Ross out for a solo career as early as 1966, but held back because he felt the group's success was still too valuable to sacrifice. In the meantime, he drove Ross relentlessly. According to her autobiography, the demands fed an anxiety that led Ross to develop anorexia nervosa. During a 1967 performance in Boston, Massachusetts, Ross collapsed onstage and had to be hospitalized for exhaustion.

  By mid-1969, Gordy had settled on a departure date, and Ross began recording solo material that July. A planned Supremes finale, "Someday We'll Be Together", was credited to the group rather than to Ross alone. It became the Supremes' final number-one hit on the Hot 100 and the final number-one single of the entire 1960s.

  Ross made her last appearance with the Supremes on the 14th of January 1970 at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

• 5. Films and Solo Peaks

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  Ross's first major solo film role in 1972 was a biography of singer Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues. Jazz critic Leonard Feather, who had known Holiday personally, praised Ross for expertly capturing the essence of Lady Day. The film opened that October and earned Ross both a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, making her the first African-American actress to receive an Oscar nomination for a debut film performance. The Lady Sings the Blues soundtrack reached number one on the Billboard 200, staying there for two weeks and selling two million units.

  In April 1974, Ross became the first African-American woman to co-host the Academy Awards, alongside John Huston, Burt Reynolds, and David Niven. That same year, during her first solo world tour, she became the first entertainer in Japan's history to receive an invitation to the Imperial Palace for a private audience with Empress Nagako.

  Her second film, Mahogany, in 1975 reunited her with co-star Billy Dee Williams and featured costumes Ross designed herself. The production was troubled: original director Tony Richardson was fired, Gordy took over direction, and Ross left before shooting was complete, forcing Gordy to use his secretary Edna Anderson as a body double. Time magazine's review of the film chastised Gordy for squandering one of America's most natural resources. Nonetheless, the film's theme song reached number one in the U.S. in January 1976, giving Ross her third solo chart-topper.

  The Wiz, released in October 1978, had been a $24 million production. It earned just over $21 million at the box office, producing a net loss of $10.4 million for Motown and Universal, even accounting for CBS pre-buying broadcast rights for over $10 million. At the time it was the most expensive film musical ever made. The failure ended Ross's film career and contributed to Hollywood's pullback from the all-black film projects that had thrived during the blaxploitation era.

  Her most successful solo album came in 1980. Diana, composed by Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, produced "Upside Down" and "I'm Coming Out". Ross then recorded the duet "Endless Love" with Lionel Richie, which became her sixth and final number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100, in a span of fifteen years.

• 6. The RCA Years

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  After more than twenty years at Motown, Ross received only $250,000 as severance when she left. RCA Records offered something dramatically different: a $20 million, seven-year contract giving her complete production control. Before signing, she allegedly asked Gordy whether he could match the offer. Gordy said it was impossible. Ross signed with RCA on the 18th of May 1981. At the time, it was the most expensive recording deal in music history.

  Her first RCA album, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, released in October 1981, sold over a million copies. Ross also established her production company, named Anaid Productions, which is Diana spelled backwards. In early 1982, she sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XVI and appeared on Soul Train.

  On the 6th of May 1982, Ross received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her next album, Silk Electric, featured a Michael Jackson-written and -produced song called "Muscles", which became a Top 10 Grammy-nominated success and carried the album to gold certification.

  On the 21st of July 1983, Ross performed a free concert on Central Park's Great Lawn, broadcast live by Showtime with the proceeds intended for a playground in her name. A torrential downpour hit midway through and stopped the show after forty-five minutes. The following night's concert proceeded without rain, but the storm had destroyed the merchandise meant to raise money. When journalists reported the two concerts' costs, Mayor Ed Koch criticized the project publicly. Ross responded by handing Koch a check for $250,000 at a mayoral press conference. The Diana Ross Playground was built and opened three years later.

  Her 1984 album Swept Away included the Lionel Richie-written ballad "Missing You", composed as a tribute to Marvin Gaye, who had been killed earlier that year. Her 1985 album Eaten Alive, produced by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, included a collaboration with Michael Jackson and Gibb on the title track, and the single "Chain Reaction" reached number one in the U.K., Australia, South Africa, Israel, and Ireland.

• 7. Legacy in Numbers and Culture

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  In 1993, the Guinness World Records cited Ross as the most successful female charting artist in the history of the United Kingdom. She had scored a top-75 U.K. hit single for a record thirty-three consecutive years, from 1964 to 1996. According to WhoSampled, her music has been sampled more than 754 times and covered more than 399 times. Her voice from "I'm Coming Out" was sampled for the Notorious B.I.G.'s 1997 number-one hit "Mo Money Mo Problems".

  The character of Deena Jones in Dreamgirls was inspired by Ross. Motown: The Musical, which opened on Broadway on the 14th of April 2013, dramatizes Berry Gordy's romance with Ross and his building of Motown Records.

  Ross is the only female artist to have reached number one as a solo artist, as the other half of a duet with Lionel Richie, as a member of a trio with the Supremes, and as an ensemble member on the USA for Africa recording "We Are the World". In 2021, Billboard ranked her the 30th greatest charting artist of all time on the Hot 100. Combined Supremes and solo hits place her among the top five artists on that chart from 1955 to 2018.

  Her honors include the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in both 2012 and 2023. That second Grammy made her the first woman to win the award twice, the latter as a member of the Supremes alongside the late Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard. Ross also holds two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one as a solo artist and one as a member of the Supremes, a distinction held by very few performers. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked her number 87 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.