Diana Ross

Diana Ross is one of the recurring stars in Andy Warhol’s diary, appearing not only as a singer but as a collaborator in the overlapping worlds of performance, portraiture, fashion, and celebrity publishing. The entries move between her command of a stage and the more exposed moments around it: a difficult rehearsal, a portrait commission, a contract for a smaller venue, or a concert halted by a storm. Through these contrasts, Ross emerges as both the maker of a public image and a person navigating the labor and pressures behind it.

A star in Interview’s orbit

Warhol’s attention to Ross belonged to a wider investment in Interview, which by 1976 had become a glamorous magazine whose celebrity coverage brought a steady supply of recognizable and newly visible faces to its offices. In that setting, a magazine cover or photograph could be more than publicity: it could become material for another performance. At a 1978 concert, Ross told Warhol that she had taken the idea for a stage sequence from an Interview photograph showing men carrying her down a staircase. Onstage, she emerged from a large screen and descended an elegant staircase, surrounded by laser beams. The image had traveled from magazine photography into live spectacle, then back into Warhol’s diary as an account of the show.

At another concert, a plane passed overhead with lights spelling out “Welcome to my show.” The gesture made the scale of Ross’s public presence literal: the performance extended beyond the stage and into the sky above it. Yet Warhol also noticed the choices and sensitivities involved in controlling that image. He suspected she disliked her cover because, in his view, it made her look “too black.” The diary records this as his inference, not as a statement Ross made. The moment nonetheless shows how a published portrait could become a site of interpretation and disagreement, even for a star whose image was central to the magazine’s appeal.

Warhol’s 1981 encounter with David Hockney offers another glimpse of Interview’s working method: Hockney was videotaped and then interviewed. Ross’s continuing connection to the magazine and to Warhol’s portrait work places her within this same circulation of interviews, images, and public recognition. The diary treats the magazine not simply as a record of fame but as one of the places where fame was actively produced.

Portraits and professional exchange

In February 1979, while Fred Hughes was away in Berlin, Ross called Warhol to ask him to make a portrait of her and her children. She said her manager would follow up, leaving Warhol to handle the matter himself. The request joined a personal image to a family grouping, but it also belonged to a professional practice that was a significant source of Warhol’s income. He regularly made commissioned portraits, and the commission was part of a system in which celebrity and private identity could share the same painted surface.

The procedure was carefully constructed. Warhol photographed a sitter about sixty times with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected a small number of images, and worked with a screen printer to make enlarged acetate versions. He chose and cropped an image, adjusted its features, and transferred it through a silkscreen process onto canvas. Assistants prepared canvases with colored backgrounds in advance; the placement of screened details over painted areas produced the shifting effect associated with his portraits. Ross’s commission therefore involved more than simply recording her likeness: it passed her image through a sequence of selection, retouching, color, and reproduction.

In August 1981, Warhol was still painting backgrounds for a Ross portrait and wondering what color to use, adding that he wondered whether she wanted to be black or white. The uncertainty is his, and the diary does not report Ross’s answer. In October, she came to see the portraits, loved them, and told him, “Wrap them up.” They all fitted into her limousine, and a check reached Bob’s place by five o’clock. She also wanted Warhol to do the cover for her next album. The quick movement from viewing the pictures to payment and a further commission makes the encounter a compact account of their working relationship: portraiture brought them together, and one successful project opened the possibility of another.

Concerts, crowds, and private gatherings

Warhol’s accounts of Ross’s performances repeatedly set her public command against the social bustle around it. At a 1978 concert at Universal Amphitheater, he watched her arrive backstage, greet him warmly, and take a shot of brandy in her coffee before going onstage. The elaborate entrance, staircase, and aerial message belonged to the polished production; backstage, she was also a person preparing to perform and responding to the people around her. Near the end of the show, she apologized for a slow musical number from The Wiz, saying, “Forgive me, audience.” Warhol thought the audience had not noticed the difference, but he recorded the apology as part of her care for the performance.

Afterward, Ross cried and wanted another rehearsal. Berry Gordy refused to pay for one, and Ross wanted Sue Mengers to take her side. Mengers said the dispute was not her area and left with Warhol. The sequence shifts from the ease of a successful stage entrance to the effort and disagreement behind the production. Ross’s tears and wish to rehearse again do not cancel the spectacle; they reveal the work and uncertainty that the spectacle concealed.

Her celebrity also shaped the rooms she entered. At a midnight concert featuring Ashford and Simpson, the audience mobbed Ross when she appeared, while four bodyguards accompanied her. Later, at a Studio 54 party, she rode with Warhol and Steve Rubell in Rubell’s Mercedes, squeezed between them because she was afraid of his driving. In November 1978, the attention of the crowd and the intimacy of the car ride coexist in the diary’s account: Ross could draw a mass audience and still appear in an informal social circle moving between dinners and clubs.

At a later dinner at Halston’s house, Warhol described Ross as wearing very tight black trousers and being so thin she could hardly sit comfortably. She talked throughout the evening and touched him. She said she had turned down Cher’s offer to take part in a television special, explaining, “That’s not my scene right now.” The diary preserves her decision as a small but distinct act of choice: she was not simply available for every project proposed to her. Her circumstances and interests could change, even as others continued to treat her as a constant presence in entertainment and social life.

Travel, advice, and changing professional ties

In 1982, Ross appeared at a dinner with Barry Diller, Bianca Jagger, and others. Warhol tried to make Diller laugh, asked him to dance, and finally succeeded by praising his film Venom. The next stop was Calvin Klein’s apartment, which Warhol described in detail. Ross accompanied the party, moving through the same network of artists, executives, and performers that surrounded Warhol’s social life.

That December in Aspen, Ross arrived at cocktails wearing a newly purchased cowboy hat and large white shoes. At dinner, she danced on top of the table, and everyone wanted to dance with her. The contrast with the disciplined staircase entrance at Universal Amphitheater is striking: in one scene she performs within a carefully staged production; in the other, a party gathers around her spontaneous dancing. Both versions are public, but the diary registers different kinds of control and ease.

Warhol also offered Ross advice about her career and friendships. On the way to Atlantic City in January 1983, he urged her to marry Barry Diller and to make more films. Ross responded that she could not take a girlfriend’s man, referring to Diane von Furstenberg. They also discussed her former friendship with David Geffen. Ross recalled that Geffen had helped her when her mother had cancer, taking her to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center when she did not know what to do. Their later rupture, she indicated, was connected to Dreamgirls, which Geffen produced and which was about a group resembling the Supremes. Ross said she had initially considered suing but did not. The exchange reveals a history of personal loyalty and professional grievance that the diary does not resolve; Warhol’s advice meets a more complicated account from Ross herself.

The Atlantic City trip also joined Ross’s career to the business of performance. She had signed a lucrative contract to appear at the Golden Nugget and had not played a small room before; she wanted to see the venue. Warhol traveled with her, bringing a print of her portrait for the casino’s owner, and they took a helicopter paid for by the Golden Nugget. The excursion places the portrait, the contract, and the live show in one chain of professional exchange: Ross’s image could be presented to a venue even as she assessed the room where she would perform.

The storm in Central Park

The diary’s most vivid Ross episode is the July 1983 concert in Central Park. As the sky darkened and rain began to fall, the storm interrupted the performance. Warhol described Ross singing with her hair blown by the rain and imagined how a covering might have allowed her to continue and the children in the audience to stay. The concert stopped for safety because of the lightning, and the performance was to be attempted again the next day. Ross cried; Barry Diller tried to calm her, while she said she had waited twenty years to do this.

Warhol saw the scene as both beautiful and disastrous, comparing it to a dream, a hallucination, and a great movie scene. That response is revealing: the storm’s interruption became, in his account, part of the spectacle rather than merely its cancellation. But Ross’s tears keep the scene from being only an aesthetic image. The diary records a performer whose long-awaited public event was cut short, and whose desire to continue exceeded the dramatic beauty Warhol found in the rain and lightning.

Afterward, Warhol gave Ross a Diamond painting while she watched tapes of the concert. When Barry Diller arrived, Warhol praised the performance, and Diller teased him for liking disasters. The exchange folds the storm into the diary’s recurring tension between celebrity as image and celebrity as lived event: the interrupted concert became something to watch again on tape, to discuss, and even to turn into a joke. Ross’s place in Warhol’s world rests on both sides of that tension. She is the commanding star whose image moves from magazine to stage and canvas, and the working performer whose ambitions, decisions, and disappointments remain visible behind the image.