Smokey Robinson is once again speaking about having a “beautiful” affair with Diana Ross that “just happened” while she was an up-and-coming singer while he was with his first wife.
“I was married at the time,” he admitted to The Guardian in a piece published Thursday. “We were working together and it just happened. But it was beautiful. She’s a beautiful lady, and I love her right till today.”
“She’s one of my closest people,” he continued. “She was young and trying to get her career together. I was trying to help her. I brought her to Motown, in fact. I wasn’t going after her and she wasn’t going after me. It just happened.”
Now this isn’t the first time that Robinson has spoke about this affair publicly. As we previously reported, Robinson, whose famously sang and wrote for himself and others (like The Temptations and The Supremes), said that the affair lasted way “longer than it should have.”
During a new interview with Vlad TV, Robinson recalled how he first met Ross and learned about her ability to sing. The singer said, “I didn’t even know she could sing.
When I found out she could sing was when–she moved away from the from the Block, she moved to a place called the Brewster projects and after we started Motown she called me one day and she said, ‘Smoke I got this group you know and I want you to hear us so you can sign us up at Motown.’ So I said ‘OK’, I didn’t know she was a singer till then.”
He also noted that the affair went on for too long, especially because he was already spoken for at the time.
He said, “Yes…it lasted probably longer than it should because I was married at the time. This happened later, after I got married, after I got them signed up at Motown. That’s when that started.”
Elswhere, Diana Ross has been married twice. Besides her fling with Smokey Robinson, she also had a relationship with Berry Gordy, which resulted in the birth of her first child, Rhonda.
About two months into her pregnancy with her first born, Ross married another music executive, Robert Ellis Silberstein, who helped raise Rhonda. However, she would not learn until she was an adult that Berry Gordy was her birth father.