LADY SINGS THE BLUES Motown/Paramount

I had to be darkened down so the show could go on in dynamic-assed Detroit. It’s like they say, there's no damn business like show business. You had to smile to keep from throwing up. ,

Billie Holiday

Started my life In an old, cold

run down tenement slum My father left,

He never even married mom I shared the guilt that momma knew So afraid that others knew I had no name ...

“Love Child” — The Supremes

There is a moment of improbable terror when Diana Ross sings that final line, a peak of tension that contains everything that made Motown great. Even if it isn’t her own story, Diana Ross must have lived in the same kind of anguish: those supperclubs and the show-tunes were the product of the same refusal of one’s past. The Supremes Sing Rogers and Hart wasn’t false. It had as much to do with who the singers were as Holland-Dozier-Holland or Smokey Robinson did, even if white bohemia hated what night club Motown told it about black reality in the 60’s and 70’s.