Diana Ross

I would have been about a month older than eight the night “We Are the World” was recorded, and when it came out a few months later, I knew perhaps half the people in that room, more or less. (There are some I still don’t know.) Did I know who Diana Ross was yet? I’m not sure. She was standing next to Michael Jackson, who I definitely knew, and Stevie Wonder, who I’m pretty sure I knew. I knew who she was within a few years of that, but I can’t say when I first learned. I might’ve known the Supremes and not connected her to that woman.

Diana Ross was born in Detroit, Michigan, and originally lived next door to a kid named William Robinson Jr., nicknamed Smokey Joe. Her mother—who actually named her Diane, the name the family and her old friends still use regardless of what’s on her birth certificate—contracted tuberculosis, and Ross went to live for a while with her maternal grandparents in Alabama. When her mother recovered and she returned to Detroit, she studied fashion, modeling, and cosmetology. At fifteen, she and her friends created a girl group called the Primettes. They got an audition in exhange for letting her old neighbour and his group sign their guitar player, a trade they both still consider fair.

Ross recorded her first album at sixteen. First went on TV at twenty. Appeared in her first movie at twenty-one. And she’s still going now, sixty years later. All in all, it’s not terribly surprising that her personal life has been a hot mess pretty much that entire time. She’s been married twice, had multiple affairs, had a relationship with Gene Simmons—who was apparently dating Ross’s friend Cher when the pair got together—and what with one thing and another not had the happiest personal life going. But then, did she ever truly even have a personal life?

The other Supremes are none too fond of her, either, though I think it’s safe to blame both Ross and Berry Gordy for the whole thing. From what I can tell the atmosphere inside Motown was toxic as hell; well, that happens when an organization is basically someone’s personal fiefdom. It is, however, true that Gordy’s manipulations would have been unsuccessful had not Ross been as talented as she was. Maybe she was never the world’s most talented actress—I have actually seen Mahogany and can say that pretty definitively—but her singing talented was undeniable.

Even now, I can hear her voice in my head. Astonishing to realize that, as of right now, Steven Spielberg has one more Grammy than she does—she’s been nominated twelve times and never won. Between the Supremes and her solo career, she’s had more top-ten songs than just about anyone in music history. Diana Ross is an icon, whatever else you can say about her. She has clearly known what she’s wanted and gone for it, and that probably didn’t leave much room for her to be a nice person.