“The first time I heard a Billie Holiday record T thought, ‘What's so great about Billie Holiday?’ I wasn't into jazz. “I was surprised how good I was too.” She will never really know if “that first time I could have done so well in some other role.” It is not that she admired the woman she was to play. Nowhere in the be wigged nightclub appearances of 28‐ year‐old Diana Ross had there been a hint of the 15‐year‐old under‐fed child scrubbing whorehouse steps or an inti mation of Lady Day, high on heroin and safe at last, playing childlike games with her piano player until safety abruptly ends. Nothing in her background prepared critics, audiences, or Hollywood studios for the range of her performance in her first motion picture. My purpose was and to make audiences happy, not to walk onstage and make my audience unhappy.” I almost wrote him, ‘Dear Jesus Christ, you know so much, you tell me how you know what I am.’ “She defends herself against accusations of lack of soul in her music by saying, “We were the Supremes. “The Princess of Plastic Pop,” a maga zine writer labeled her. This is the Diana Ross who glided smoothly in 1970 to television specials and sang Barbra Streisand ballads at the Waldorf Astoria and dozens of other nightclubs frequented by white businessmen spend ing $100 a night of expense account money. This genteel lady sipping tea with her 15‐month‐old daughter sitting beside her and her new baby sleeping upstairs is the Diana Ross who came out of Detroit's Black Bottom through Motown's Artist's Development School - where she was taught to modulate her voice, sit with her legs crossed, and shake hands with a firm grip - to sell 25,000,000 records as lead singer of the Supremes. Nowhere is there a trace of the panic, the impotence, the hard‐shelled but soft centered assurance crumbling into drugged dependence that made her Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues” such an extraordinary performance. With her tight red velvet pants and her beautifully coiffed hair curled into neat ringlets, she is-every inch of her 5 feet 4½ inches, every pound of her 110 pounds - a Beverly Hills matron. Reflected back at this mo ment is Diana Ross, her black feet dis appearing into the thick white rug of the pit. In the conversation pit, there is a fireplace covered with half a hundred tiny mirrors.
Gazing into the silver piano one can see white walls and 30‐foot‐high ceilings and a tapestry of Marilyn Mon roe by Andy Warhol. THERE is a swimming pool and a tennis court, an antique chess set, bottles of banana liqueur, and a mirrored piano in the living room.
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