Page 2 - Mark Ribowsky News Today

The Supremes: Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard in 1967 Credit: Alamy On August 5, 2000, esteemed broadcast journalist Barbara Walters was sitting at her desk at ABC News’s Time Square HQ when her mobile phone chimed. It was Diana Ross, Motown legend and, so went the gossip, a diva among diva.  Ross spoke quietly but firmly. The previous night, ABC’s 20/20 news magazine show had broadcast an interview with Ross’s former Supremes bandmate Mary Wilson. Visibly unhappy, Wilson h...

Phil Spector’s art created the world he couldn’t create for himself: a tortured, toxic and finally murderous man crafting hit after hit about idealized romance

But Spector was different. At the start, on The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him is To Love Him” -- a rephrasing of the epitaph from his father’s gravestone that Spector turned into a Hot 100 No. 1 in 1958 -- his sound was not so very far removed from the other recordings of the day, many of which carried the spacious aura of the rooms in which they were cut, investing early rock and pop with the mystical sense that new frontiers were being explored. Eventually though, he recognized how to mak...