Sunday Telegraph interview
Her new album supposedly marks the emergence of a softer and more reflective Diana Ross. Really? As Strawberry Saroyan soon discovers, this is one diva with her superiority complex firmly intact
To read about Diana Ross is, often, to read about a sort of dragon lady. The heated fights with colleagues, the haughty insistence that she be addressed as Miss Ross (even now, when she's in her sixties), the habit of smiling scarily as she fends off journalists' questions.
'People like myself, how they feel about love and life, that feeling comes through their music and their songs'
But could it be that time has mellowed the diva? Although Ross still has the face and legs of a woman half her age, she is 62. And her latest album, I Love You, out this month, reflects it.
Not only does her voice sound richer yet less pristine - there are hints of darkness and vocal imperfection, where she used to be all perk and sunshine - but the mood is unapologetically sentimental.
'I was looking through a family photo album, and memories started to flood in about the last 35 years of my life,' she says of the genesis of the album. 'I thought, "I want to start putting something together for other people, for their memories."'
The 15-track CD is an appreciation of the classic pop era, composed of covers including 'The Look of Love' and 'You Are So Beautiful'. ('I Love You', a breathy ballad, is the only original song.)
Ross says she hopes that people will play it at weddings, anniversaries and on Valentine's Day. 'I wanted to do something that was special to me, which had to do with positive love songs,' she adds, laughing. 'I didn't want to do songs about love lost - "Oh, pity me", "Oh, sad".'
But her sweetness-and-light routine doesn't last long. We are sitting in a room above a rehearsal studio in north Hollywood where Ross is preparing for a concert in Italy.
She is dressed from head to toe in black - parachute pants, strapless top - and her hair retains its signature floating quality, resembling chocolate candyfloss.
She wraps a purple pashmina around her shoulders, and the unflappable icon look is complete. But she goes cold at the notion that this is her first studio album in seven years.
'Now, who said that?' she barks. It's in the press material accompanying the album, I tell her. 'Not true,' she snaps. 'The creative process for me is always going on. I go in the studio and I might make a children's song or a spiritual. I'm always recording.'
Maybe, I suggest, her record label, EMI, was simply trying to make the new album an event. 'I guess you might be right,' she concedes, before adding, 'It's an event for EMI.' (In a less defensive mood, Ross admitted that she's had a tough time finding a recording home at all since she and Motown parted company in 2001. 'Nobody wants me,' she told a reporter in 2004. 'It's weird.')
I've been told by her publicist that Ross wants to focus on the present, and on her music at that, so I wonder what to ask her about next. Her possible role on Desperate Housewives, rumoured in the press? ('You can't believe everything you read. I have never been approached by the people on Desperate Housewives,' she says.)
Her album, Blue, a collection of jazz standards recorded in 1972 during her Lady Sings the Blues period, which was released for the first time this summer in America? ('I don't think Blue is being released in Europe,' she tells me. Actually, it is: the album was released here in June.)
Finally, I bring up Dreamgirls, the forthcoming film version of the musical about a trio of female soul singers in the 1960s. Beyoncé is playing the role based on Ross, and I've read that the singer set up a shrine to Ross in her trailer.
'This interview is not about Beyoncé, and with that I have no comment,' she replies, her smile wide and her teeth set tight. She will, though, talk about Beyoncé's music - she enjoys it - and says she admires Alicia Keyes, Mary J Blige, Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera, too.
'I was getting ready to give advice and support to any of them that wants that,' she says. 'Because Mariah Carey used to always ask, when I would spend time with her, how to have longevity. So I am available to discuss what it takes
Ross isn't particularly expansive when it comes to what she'd offer up during such sessions - other than to say she'd lead by example: 'I'm an extremely organised person. I think I have a good work ethic' - but there is no doubt that she has a wealth of experience to draw upon. The second of six children, Ross grew up in Detroit, her mother a teacher, her father a factory worker. She started singing in a Baptist choir.
'I wasn't one of those real church singers,' she says. 'But people like myself, how they feel about love and life, that feeling comes through their music and their songs.'
What also came through early on was her ambition. In 1950, with her friends Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard and Betty McGlown, Ross formed The Primettes, a sister group to the local doo-wop group The Primes (some of whom later became The Temptations).
'Florence started singing "Night Time is the Right Time" and we started chiming in,' Wilson has said of the group's first jam session. 'It just clicked.'
In 1961, the group (which by then had lost McGlown and gained Barbara Martin) was signed by Berry Gordy, the head of Motown, and he changed their name to The Supremes.
Martin left not long after, and the trio began blazing up the charts like mercury in the summertime: The Supremes hit number one ten times in the next three years, with classics including 'Where Did Our Love Go?', 'Baby Love' and 'Stop! In the Name of Love'.
Ross and Gordy became an item, and in 1964 Gordy named her lead singer. By the time he changed the group's name to Diana Ross and the Supremes in 1967, Gordy and Ross had even bigger plans for her in place.
In 1970 Ross went solo, and garnered a number one of her own off her debut album with the song 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough'.
In 1972 she added film star to her list of accomplishments, starring as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues and receiving an Oscar nomination for her performance.
Throughout the decade she continued to act, appearing in Mahogany and The Wiz, but also transformed herself into a sexy disco goddess who gave Donna Summer a run for her money, with hits such as 'Love Hangover'. In the 1980s success continued: 'Upside Down', 'I'm Coming Out', the Lionel Richie duet 'Endless Love', and the Bee Gees-penned 'Chain Reaction' were highlights.
By 1993 Ross had created some of the most iconic music of the previous three decades.
But Ross's personal life and professional relationships were more complicated. Wilson and Ballard objected to Ross's emergence as the dominant force in The Supremes, and frustrations boiled over in 1966.
During rehearsals for an American television show that year one of Ballard's earrings reportedly fell off on stage and Ross crushed it with her stiletto heel. Ballard lunged for Ross's two earrings - which she succeeded in tearing off - and bodyguards had to break the women up.
After Ross's departure from the group bad feelings continued to simmer and in 1983, during a reunion of the group for a Motown television special, a disagreement on stage led to Ross giving Wilson a shove, though Wilson was by no means blameless.
Things briefly looked up when Ross announced a Supremes reunion tour, called Return to Love, in 2000. Ross had supposedly signed on Wilson and Cindy Birdsong, who had replaced Ballard in 1967, to join her.
But it all broke down in acrimonious rows over money, and Ross eventually toured with two lesser-knowns, Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence, who had sung with The Supremes in the 1970s. After several lacklustre dates, the tour ground to a halt.
'It's like the Beatles having a reunion and Sir Paul McCartney not inviting George or Ringo,' Wilson said at the time.
Then there was the difficulty of balancing work and family. One thing Ross has learnt, she says, is that 'taking time for self is very important, time to regenerate. Because I would find that there were years that I would work so hard that I would finally end up getting sick. And if I'm not well, I can't take care of the people that work for me. I can't take care of my kids.'
By the mid-1970s, she had three children, including a daughter, Rhonda Suzanne, whom she didn't publicly admit was fathered by Gordy until 22 years later on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Her other two daughters, Tracee Joy and Chudney Lane, were fathered by Ross's first husband, the music promoter Robert Ellis Silberstein, whom she married in 1971 (and who believed he was Rhonda's father until 13 years after their wedding).
Ross has said she struggled as a single parent after divorcing Silberstein in 1976. 'You make the decisions alone, but the truth is that you really want the support of the other half.'
But, by the late 1980s, she had a routine down. In 1985 she'd met the Norwegian shipping magnate Arne Naess, when their children began playing together on a holiday in the Bahamas. Naess, who had no idea who Ross was, suggested they have dinner that evening, and the two were married five months later.
Thereafter, she spent much of her time in Connecticut raising her sons from her marriage to Naess, Ross and Evan, in surprisingly traditional fashion. 'I had people supporting me in my life,' she says, meaning nannies. 'But mostly I raised them. I like to go to the market. I like to cook. And living there allowed me that. It's a real life, and you can have one. I had a low profile.'
Of course, that profile is raised whenever Ross gets into trouble. In 1999 she was arrested in London for fighting with a female security guard at Heathrow, after the woman searched her in a way that struck Ross as a bit too intimate
Then her marriage broke down very publicly - Naess announced that he was leaving her during an interview on Norwegian television. (Ross thought the two were still working things out, but the fact that they spent so little time together, with Ross based in America and Naess in Europe, was blamed for the break-up. Naess subsequently died in a climbing accident.)
A stint in rehab followed, amid reports of depression as well as alcohol and prescription-drug abuse. But her troubles seemed far from eradicated later that year when she was stopped for driving the wrong way down a busy road in Tucson, Arizona. She couldn't recite the even numbers between 1 and 30 or write the alphabet, and giggled and fell over when officers asked her to stand on one foot. Later, she was sentenced to two days in prison for drink-driving.
Gingerly, I bring up the Heathrow incident. Ross is surprisingly game. 'Here's what happened,' she says, pushing her hair back and planting her black-booted feet firmly in front of her. 'In America, when you're going through the airport, you're searched with something they call a wand.
I had never experienced that going through the London airport. They didn't use a wand; they used their hands. And I have never had anybody touch me this way.' Ross puts her hands to her chest. 'She touched my breasts. She touched…' Ross puts her hands on her privates. 'You know?
'And I understood that I had to be searched but I said, "Why do you have to do that?" And she said, "Because it's my job," and went about doing it again. And I panicked. And then I got loud.' Ross giggles. 'And I got angry.'
Ross was told she'd have to file a written report if she wanted to complain, which would entail her missing her plane. She tried to walk away from the incident but wasn't allowed to do so. But she didn't grab the woman, as reported? 'No,' she replies firmly. 'No, no, no.'
How about the Tucson incident, I ask. But Ross stops me. 'See, I don't want to get into this. The article is about my music. It's not about the peaks and the valleys I'm going through.'
What would she like to talk about? Ross suggests fashion, and she does speak about it for a bit - 'I went to school for costume design. I'm a seamstress. I know how to knit. I know fabrics!' - but soon tires of the topic. In the end, she seems happiest to discuss family.
'By the way, me and my children are all close to my husband's children,' she says at one point, meaning Naess's three children by the Swedish designer Filippa Kumlin d'Orey.
'We are all bonded together as a family,' Ross continues. 'It's wonderful. We call ourselves the Ross-Naess bunch.' She giggles again. 'You know, like the Brady Bunch? We even wrote a song about it.'
She breaks into the familiar television tune. The Ross-Naess bunch!'
Suddenly, the dragon lady seems like little more than a goof - and, for one moment at least, a pretty likable one.
Photograph by Randee St Nicholas
Dress by Bob Mackie
'I Love You' is released this month
