Diana Ross's stairway to heaven
By Blanche McCrary Boyd - Village Voice - 16 octobre 1978
Diana Ross appeared live at Radio City Music Hall this week, but her show didn’t begin that way. It began with fluid emerald green abstractions projected onto an enormous screen. Out of this in-the-beginning watery milieu [[which looked like the back of an aquarium) emerged, not the real Diana, but a quick-cut black-and-white slide show of her. Then the black-and-whites gave way to color closeups, and Diana’s huge, red lipped mouth sang, “If you need me, I'll be there.” The audience went oooo0000, ready for the visitation. A stairway to heaven appeared on the screen, and through a slit in the base slipped the living Diana, in a burst of light. I sprawled back in my seat. It was masterful. Here, I thought, is a woman who is certain she’s larger than life.Modern American stardom has many problematic aspects, but two are undeniable: getting there and staying there. The scramble to the top of the celestial stairway is a basic and much-chronicled myth, from Billie Holiday to Elvis Presley to Jimmy Carter. America is where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, where Lula Smith becomes Carson McCullers, Norma Jean becomes Marilyn Monroe, and Zimmerman becomes you-know-who. So maybe you have some magic shoes or maybe you earn it, but what do you do after shazam and you’re up there in the sky, light years away? You can’t wish upon a star when you are one. Mick Jagger feels shattered, Dylan’s self-love is in vain, John Berryman jumped off a bridge. Billie and Marilyn did it with drugs. Elvis died on the toilet. Getting to the top is hard enough, but staying up there doesn’t look like any fun at all. A mature, sustained phase—well, we have no American myth for that.“I wanted to do something cozy and intimate,” the tiny Diana said, shining in her silver clothes against the firmament, making light fun of the way she'd filled Radio City with her presence. She moved to the edge of the stage and sat down. A trick of perspective, and it felt like a trick. Just folks, right? When she sang “Ready for Love” with invisible backup singers, I got even more disturbed. In a context where image and reality were being deliberately fused, I suddenly wondered if the backup singers were canned. Maybe this wasn’t Diana Ross at all, Maybe she was mouthing the words to her own songs. I thought of cloning. I thought of those people who've had themselves surgically altered to look like rock stars. The Elvis imitators. Beatlemania.But when Diana preceded "Touch Me in the Morning” by saying, with the in intimacy she’d mocked before "I would like to dedicate this to each and every one of you,” my garish, mistrustful notions stopped. I shivered at the warmth, the personal quality in her voice. While she sang, I was lying cozily in bed and a sexy lover was waking me up real slow. Then it was the aquarium again, and Diana Ross was a little angel fish, a kissing gourami, and I was a kid with my face pressed against the soothing glass. In the aisle beside me, the rapt ushers were kneeling like supplicants.I’m mixing metaphors for a reason. The evocation of multiple images, the tapping of raw fantasy, is crucial to the kind of stardom Diana Ross aspires to and in fact embodies. It was no accident that the screen sometimes showed kaleidoscope motifs or that it once opened briefly like a childhood magic shoebox to show us that the backup singers were real. During her hour-and-a-half show, Diana managed to trigger in me images of Tom Jones, Marilyn Monroe, Alice in Wonderland, an exotic tropical bird, a sensitivity-training phony [[she tried to make the audience hold hands), an ice cube in a pale blue glass in a dark bar, my Mommy [[she told the story of The Wiz with broadly acted gestures as if we were children, and it was better than “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”), a pearl pendant on a black velvet backdrop, a child, a teenager, a bride, a ritual sacrifice, and Billie Holiday. Ross’s Radio City Music Hall show demonstrated that she has solved the problem of what to do tat the top. Her sense of stardom is calculated, deliberate, and nearly apocalyptic; her show was a tour de force of narcissism. She makes Bob Dylan seem selfless.
Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany are both movies about born-special girls rising through the rest of us like something richer, truer, and finer. “I’m-the intelligent one,” Diana had said on the 1965 Supremes at the Copa album, comparing herself to “the quiet one,” Florence Ballard, and “the sexy one,” Mary Wilson. A lot of people were irritated when Ross left the Supremes, as if she had done something immoral or tasteless; it can be argued with some accuracy that her solo records lack the verve and originality the Supremes’ discs had. But Diana Ross’s portrayal of Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues was intelligent and moving; that she was a black star playing a star in a big money movie broke new ground racially as well; and her cover of Holiday’s songs was sustained and brilliant. Lady Sings the Blues proved that Diana Ross was too big to stay with the Supremes. Mahogany, however, was a self-basting turkey. Perhaps dazzled by her still burgeoning talent, Ross made the mistake of designing the clothes for the world-class designer who gives it all up for love. It’s probably good that she discovered something about limits; I doubt if she’d make a good brain surgeon either.
But Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues conclusively demonstrated that Diana Ross could act a certain role with great success: the child/woman as star. Ross is 34 now, but it seems inevitable that she should have been chosen to play Dorothy in the film version of The Wiz. Stephanie Mills, who plays Dorothy on Broadway, is still a teenager, but she’s starting to look too old.Diana Ross’s charisma, like Marilyn Monroe’s, relies ‘on a combination of childlike innocence and sharply focused sexuality. At the very beginning, with “Baby Love,” she evoked the naive lust of teenagers. Listening to the song now, it seems a key to the girl/woman identity Ross would develop, then magnify and magnify and magnify. Monroe had a lush, almost freakishly sexual body to go with her childishness; Ross has a sexy, accomplished voice to go with hers. But Ross knows her stardom doesn’t rest simply on that voice. There are a lot of excellent vocalists around [[like Sarah Dash) who haven’t figured out how to focus themselves. Ross thinks of her persona as a great instrument, and she plays it like a virtuoso.
A smorgasbord of new Ross products is now available. Besides the Radio City show, The Wiz will open this month, and there are three new albums. I haven’t seen the film version of The Wiz yet, but Ross’s singing on the cast album is more delicately textured than Mills’s is on Broadway. If you’re one of those folks who thinks a Coke should cost a dime and Diana Ross shouldn’t have set out on her own, there’s a Motown reissue of her with the Supremes called Where Did Our Love Go. Eight of the 12 cuts on this album are already available on the earlier reissue Anthology, although ‘He Means the World to Me” is hard to resist. Ross is the new solo album. A new Holland-Dozier-Holland tune and an Ashford and Simson one are both nice: “Sorry Doesn’t Always Make It Right” has an interestingly country feet to it. Nothing else stands out particularly, but it’s rich, surging Diana in her mature phase, every jet comfortably open. On stage at Radio City, Diana Ross said, “People ask me, what ever happened to that girl from the Detroit Brewster projects?” She paused. “You know what I say? I say, who?” The show ended with four of the male dancers, who grinned frantically during all their numbers as if they were desperate Miss America contestants, carrying Diana like an offering back into the screen, up the stair to heaven.
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