She has a reputation as a fearsome diva, but Diana Ross prefers to talk about make-up, how she's a pussycat when it comes to men - and cooking chicken, writes Laura Barton in Paris
Paris, early afternoon, and Miss Ross is at the Christian Dior fashion show. Back in her hotel suite, her minions flutter through the rooms carrying bowls of cream orchids from small mahogany table to small mahogany table, and debate where our interview, now two hours late, ought to take place. Someone hums Baby Love persistently, nervously under his breath. Eventually, a telephone chirrups: "She's three minutes away!"
Diana Ross's diva reputation is fearsome. The tales of fur coats and limousines, Lear jets and tantrums might well have threatened to eclipse her singing career were it not for the fact she is also in possession of one of the most honeyed voices in musical history. And at the age of 61, the legend of her 24-carat belligerence persists. A Greek TV crew who interviewed her earlier this morning whispered to us on their way out that Miss Ross, as she likes to be known, instructed them to "come back and try again". Awaiting her arrival, one certainly feels very much like the fly entering the spider's sticky parlour.
She returns in a grim mood. An argument drifts through from the adjoining room. "I'd like you to explain your actions to me!" Miss Ross is hot-voiced. "I am not exclusive to Estee Lauder!" A flunky scuttles through to where we sit, eavesdropping furiously, and prattles slightly too loudly, until the storm has passed. Moments later, Ross totters into the room on leopard-print platform heels. She is long and whippet-thin in a low-cut red top and skintight black trousers that make her legs look like liquorice. Around her face sits the trademark huge, dark frouff of curls, from the depths of which she delivers a smile of pure-spun sweetness, and a girlish little laugh. "Have you been waiting long?" she purrs.
And so we sit, acres of orchids and expensive chintz between us, as she explains her new range for the MAC cosmetics company; Ross has recently been appointed the company's new "Icon", a role previously occupied by Liza Minnelli. Her hand wafts vaguely over the display of pink lipsticks, pink powder compacts, and pink brushes beside her. "I spent really a lot of time selecting my colours," she says.
Of course one does not want to talk powder puffs with Diana Ross. One wants to ask her about all the juicy, scandalous stuff - infighting with The Supremes, her husbands (the last of whom thoughtfully announced the end of their marriage on national television, tipping her into a long depression), her battle with drink and drugs, and whether it is really true that she once jumped into a swimming pool wearing a fur coat and evening gown. And of course Ross knows this too. She gazes knowingly across the table, and then fills up the air with talk of matte lipstick and eyeliner. Meanwhile, the PRs sit, two looming buzzards in the corner of the room, ready to swoop should I ask her anything about her personal life, her alcoholism, her prescription drug addiction, her arrest and subsequent imprisonment for drink driving, the tussle with a security guard at Heathrow, or the Michael Jackson trial, at which she is a witness for the defence. Indeed, prior to the interview I have been handed a sort of prix fixe menu of interview topics, which extends only as far as make-up, fashion, and her recording career.
So what is it, once the lipgloss spiel has all dried up, that makes her an icon? She gives a trickle of a laugh. "I'm an icon, or a diva, or a soul sister, or a queen. Labels," she flings the word out before reeling it back in, "I have never gotten into the label thing." But are there any particular requirements to be considered for the candidate of Icon? She chews the question over, slowly. "Icon. I guess it means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. Icon. What is an icon? When someone is iconic it means they have established a certain kind of legacy possibly, and I think it does come with time. It's something in the arts, I feel. Maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be in the arts exactly. I'm not really sure. But I don't think you are born an icon."
Diana Ross was, in fact, born Diana Earle in 1944. The second of six children, she grew up in the Brewster housing projects of Detroit. Diana Ross, the icon, however, was born under the custodianship of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr, who signed her and her friends, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson, to his label at the beginning of the 1960s, as The Supremes. They would become one of the most successful groups of all time, with hits such as Where Did Our Love Go?, Baby Love and You Can't Hurry Love. But in 1970, Ross abandoned ship and launched a solo career, again under Gordy's stewardship. Their relationship, which would ultimately spill from professional to personal, and produce a daughter, had long had a trace of the Eliza Doolittle about it - he tutored her in deportment, etiquette and the fine art of gracefully extracting oneself from a limousine; he promoted her to lead singer of The Supremes, much to Ballard's chagrin, and once she was solo gave her the pick of the Motown songbook.
"I don't think getting in and out of a limousine has anything to do with being an icon," she says when asked about those early years spent under Gordy's watchful eye. She does not mention him by name, referring only to having had "good mentors", at a time when she was "green, a child, listening and learning".
With age, and, perhaps, with a life spent catering to the demands of others, has come the ability to assert herself. "I'm not afraid now," she says. "I was afraid before. But I'm not afraid to say what I feel now . . . It's taking a stand for yourself, not being a pushover." There is a crocodile glint to the smile.
Does she consider herself to be a tough cookie? "It's accordin' to who I'm with," she says, with a seductive little rumple of the lips. "If I'm with a man I'm soft and buttery. But I'm not one of anything - I don't believe that the diva persona is the only persona that I have. And I know that I wear many different hats - I'm a parent, I am in business and I think I'm a teacher, and I'm a nurse sometimes. So, if a diva is a combination, if I can hold that along with all the other things that I do and am, then, you know, it's all right."
Ross is not strong on anecdotes. Instead, she will hand you a mild-mannered life philosophy, so that 25 minutes in her company becomes like a brief flick through the Little Book of Calm. She has an impressive ability to say precisely nothing, but to deliver it in a breathlessly earnest fashion, as if delivering an Oscar acceptance speech.
Take, for example, her account of her average day: "I rise early because I'm an early riser and I go to bed early," she says, with gravitas. "Though when I'm working, my shows don't even start until nine o'clock . . . But I get up early and I go to bed early, cos I really like to get my rest . . . I'm always reading something that has to do with family. Always something that's going to make me better, or something I'm going to learn something from."
She smiles, and for one sparkling moment I think she is going to tell me about martinis and glittering cocktail dresses. But no. "I cook!" she cries. "Pretty basic cooking. I can do pastas and I like to cook chicken. My food is very tasty . . . And I make salads, and you know, I can cook almost anything. I like clean food - in other words, it's basically broiled chicken."
Strangely bewitching as all this is, when told in Ross's gently undulating voice, I am profoundly aware that the only peek into the glamour of her life has been the information that when she first hit the big time, she bought her mother a house and then bought herself a car.
She does not want to discuss her marriages to estate agent Robert Ellis Silberstein, and to Norwegian shipping magnate and mountaineer Arne Ness, who died in a climbing accident last year. So instead we talk about her children - she has three girls and two boys, the youngest is 16 - and the difficulty of growing up as the offspring of a singing legend. "They know that it's been hard because there's certain things that I can't do with them; when my daughter was really young and she was going to gymnastic camp, I couldn't go there with her because she said, 'Mom, I really want people to like me for myself, not because I'm Diana Ross's daughter.' And that made it hard for me, but I understood."
More recently, she has been cautious about helping her son as he attempts to break into show business, because she does not want, for his sake as well as hers, to be perceived as a "stage mom". But her children, she says, are her proudest achievement.
Ah, but what is she least proud of? The PR's foot wags anxiously and Miss Ross smiles knowingly across the table. "I don't ever think that way. I won't even entertain the thought!" She laughs. "See, there's nothing that you can do that doesn't lead to something positive. I think it's all a part of life's journey. No matter what it is, it's good, it's part of the work you do here, it's part of the lessons learned. So it's all good. It's not bad. I don't think I even know that word. I try," she says softly, "to be a good example. To be an example. To be the example. The best I know how to be. And I am a real person, I make mistakes. You know, I'm not Santa Claus." - (Guardian Service)
Diana Ross plays Cork on July 3rd as part of the Live at the Marquee series