Smokey Robinson Says He Cheated on His Wife With Diana Ross for a Year: ‘It Was Beautiful’
"I was trying to help her. I brought her to Motown, in fact," he told the Guardian. "I wasn't going after her and she wasn't going after me. It just happened."
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Diana Ross would (probably) very much like to be excluded from this narrative.
Smokey Robinson, 83, rather gleefully revealed in a long interview with the Guardian published Thursday that he had a year-long affair with the legendary soul singer, 79, while he was married to his first wife, singer Claudette Rogers Robinson.
“I was married at the time. We were working together and it just happened. But it was beautiful,” Robinson said. “She’s a beautiful lady, and I love her right til 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.”
Robinson noted that Ross ended the affair out of guilt. “After we’d been seeing each other for a while, Diana said to me she couldn’t do that because she knew Claudette, and she knew I still loved my wife,” he said. “And I did. I loved my wife very much.”
This prompted the Motown singer, who is promoting the release of his first album in nearly a decade—which, importantly, is called GASMS and is “utterly filthy,” according to the Guardian—to pontificate on the nature of monogamy in general:
“You asked me what happened when we get older, and we get wisdom in life. I learned that we are capable of loving more than one person at the same time. And it has been made taboo by us. By people. It’s not because one person isn’t worthy or they don’t live up to what you expect – it has to do with feelings. If we could control love, nobody would love anybody. Nobody would take that chance. Why would you put your heart out there for somebody to be able to hurt you like that and make you able to have those feelings?”
The Guardian hilariously asked Robinson if he’d had other affairs—like, say, with Aretha Franklin, specifically—and he responded, “No, just friends. I do admit when I was about 15 I had a crush on her.”
To the reporter’s retort of “who wouldn’t,” Robinson, whom I personally will always love for having gifted us the funniest Cameo of all time, responded: “Hehehe! Yeah, she was fine!”
Just incredible octogenarian gossip, no notes.