Most people know that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy had a successful professional relationship that included hit songs with The Supremes on his Motown label and memorable on-screen performances, like Ross’ portrayal of Billie Holiday in the Gordy-produced film, “Lady Sings The Blues.” The pair also had a romance, despite their nearly 15-year age difference, that produced a daughter.
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“She was my baby,” he told Barbara Walters in an interview. “I loved all of my artists, but I was in love with Diana Ross.
But for Gordy and Ross, their professional relationship would be the thing that would end their romance, as Gordy has said he never wanted anything stop Ross from becoming the star she was meant to be.
This is the love story of Berry Gordy and Diana Ross.
Meeting Berry Gordy
Diana Ross first met Berry Gordy in the early 1960s when she and her girl group, The Primettes, auditioned for his label, Motown Records. Although Gordy thought they were talented, he wanted the group to finish high school before getting into the music business. He waited to sign them to the label in 1961 and changed their name to The Supremes.
Taking the Lead
Although their relationship didn’t start out as a romance, Berry Gordy made it clear that he preferred Diana Ross as the group’s lead singer.
“Of course, favoritism was charged. And it was perhaps favoritism, because Diana was a favorite of mine. But she had the talent to justify that favoritism,” Gordy told Rolling Stone in 1990.
Eventually, that favoritism caused problems within the group and led Florence Ballard, who felt she was a better lead for some of the group’s songs, to walk away from The Supremes forever.
Falling in Love
Gordy said that as he and Ross grew closer, he fell in love with her talent and her ambition and decided her wanted to do his part to help her career take off.
“I wanted to make her the biggest star in the world, and she believed in me enough to let me do that,” he said in an interview.
Total Control
Diana Ross trusted Berry Gordy with her heart and her career, giving him the power to make decisions he thought were in her best interest because she knew he loved her too much to steer her wrong.
“I’m very lucky to have Berry,” she told Rolling Stone in 1973. “He decides what’s best for me to do. I give him total responsibility for those decisions…He takes the time to really make sure he doesn’t make a wrong decision for me. He’s had this kind of a relationship with every other group, but I’m the only person that’s really let him have total control.”
“She Was My Baby”
Despite a nearly 15-year age gap, Gordy and Ross found themselves in a romantic relationship. But while they were in love, they both understood that Ross’s career came first. Gordy said he and Ross promised each other that they would never let anything that happened in their personal life get in the way of her being a star.
“Diana and I are the same kind of people. She wanted what I wanted, and we saw it up there, and we set out to get it,” he told Barbara Walters. “And we vowed that we would never let our personal relationship affect it. I loved her, but I wasn’t selfish enough to want to marry and take her out of what I knew she had to have. She had to have that stardom up there.”
“Try it Baby”
As Diana Ross’s star power grew, Gordy knew their relationship might not be able to grow with it. He wrote about it in a song, “Try it Baby,” which was recorded by Marvin Gaye in 1964,
He sings:
“Now you’re moving on up, pretty baby;
You’re leaving me behind.
Everybody seems to love you;
Oh, you’re doing just fine, fine, fine.”
From Music to Film
Diana Ross left The Supremes in 1970, but she kept working with Gordy on her music and her acting career. Gordy produced two movies Ross starred in, 1972’s “Lady Sings The Blues” and 1975’s “Mahogany.”
Their Beautiful Nickname
As Gordy and Ross grew closer, he said they decided to share a nickname that while simple, had a very special meaning.
“We are going to call each other Black, because that’s beautiful,” he told CBS in a 2021 interview. “Black is beautiful, and so your name from now on is going to be Black, and you’re going to call me Black. Black means love…And we did that for the rest of her career.”
The Child They Share
Although they never married, Gordy and Ross share a child together, Rhonda Ross Kendrick. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Gordy said he didn’t know Ross was pregnant, because it happened after they’d officially decided to end their relationship. Ross went on to marry another man and it wasn’t until years later that they learned the truth about who Rhonda’s father really was.
“When she had the child, we had no idea that she was mine,” he said. “And then as the child was growing up…Diana and I discussed it, and we realized that it was indeed my child.”
Learning the Truth
Kendrick, who was raised by Ross’ then-husband and manager Robert Ellis Silberstein, was almost 13 years old when she learned that Gordy, the man she and her siblings always considered like an uncle, was her biological father. But, as she told the New York Post in 2015, she had a feeling something was different between her and her younger sisters, Tracee Ellis Ross and Chudney Ross.
“The bottom line was, I looked just like [Gordy], and my sisters looked just like their father, a 6-foot-tall Jewish American man,” she said.
So Many Things
When Berry Gordy got his well-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Diana Ross was by his side. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Ross described the person she knew and loved for so many years.
“There’s so many things. He’s a very, very good friend, a lover, a mentor, a leader, a visionary for me, for dreams that I had and all the others,” she said.
Love of His Life
Berry Gordy has admitted that Diana Ross was the love of his life. But he
“I was more in love with her becoming the biggest star in the world, so when we broke up, it was because of that,” he said.“I said, ‘If this is going to get in the way, I can’t do it.’”
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