Michael Moves in with Diana
On 1 October 1969, as his father and brothers were being shuffled from one hotel to another by the Motown brass, it was decided that Michael Jackson would move in with Diana Ross in her Hollywood Hills home. ‘It was a calculated thing. I wanted him to be around her,’ Berry Gordy explained. ‘People think it was an accident that he stayed there. It wasn't. I wanted Diana to teach him whatever she could. Diana's a very influential person. I knew that Michael would pick up something just by being around her. Diana had said that he sort of reminded her of herself at age eleven. Michael was anxious and interested, as well as talented, like Diana was when I first met her. She was sixteen, then.
‘I asked her if she minded and she didn't. She wanted him around. It was good for her to have someone else besides herself to think about. It was just for four weeks, the month of October.’
As much as she may have wanted to help, Diana was so consumed by the demands of her own career, she probably wasn't prepared for the role of surrogate mother. Still, she gave it everything she had, treated Michael like a son and became attached to him. However, Michael's lifestyle in the Ross household must have seemed to be everything he had been brought up by his mother to shun as wicked. Nothing else really mattered in these surroundings, it seemed, but show business. ‘You are going to be a great, great star,’ Diana would remind him over breakfast. ‘Now, eat your cereal.’
Though Diana remained at home during the month of October, she was extremely busy. She was about to leave The Supremes and embark on a solo career. Meanwhile, she and Berry were having a tumultuous romance. Michael, no doubt, heard many arguments between the couple, and then probably watched as they smiled and cooed at one another for the sake of reporters. He was learning a lot about show business public relations, but only time would tell how he would be affected by it.
Michael attended school during the day and recorded in the studio until late at night, but had noted that during the time he lived with Diana Ross, she found time to teach him about art. ‘We'd go out, just the two of us, and buy pencils and paint,’ Michael wrote of his time with Diana in his autobiography. ‘When we weren't drawing or painting, we'd go to museums.’
Michael's fascination with Diana – some would later see it as an obsession – would last for many years. As well as a mother figure when his own was thousands of miles away, she was an accomplished performer; he studied her constantly. ‘I remember I used to just sit in the corner and watch the way she moved,’ he recalled of Diana. ‘She was art in motion. Have you ever seen the way she works her hands? I was,’ he struggled for the right word, ‘enthralled by her. All day long when I wasn't rehearsing my songs, I'd be listening to hers. I watched her rehearse one day in the mirror. She didn't know I was watching. I studied her, the way she moved, the way she sang, just the way she was. Afterwards, I told her, “I want to be just like you, Diana.” And she said, “You just be yourself and you'll be a great star.”’
Michael, at age eleven, did have some lonely moments living in the Ross home while she was away at work; he missed his mother and talked to her on the telephone constantly, running up Diana's phone bill.
Katherine was troubled by Michael's life during that time, according to one family friend, a woman who asked for anonymity because she is someone in whom Katherine still confides. ‘Katie truly was concerned about Diana Ross's lifestyle and how it might influence her son,’ said the friend. ‘She didn't want her son to be corrupted by Diana or her show-business circle of friends. Also, she knew very little about Diana. She knew her as a star with a reputation for being egotistical and self-involved. The whole time Michael was away from her, Katie could only imagine what was going on in the Ross household and how Michael was coping with it. Her imagination ran wild. It was a time of great concern, wondering what kinds of values Diana Ross was passing on to her son.’
Perhaps making matters more difficult for Katherine, Diana seemed reluctant to talk to her directly. When Katherine would telephone to check in on Michael, she would have to talk to one of the household staff if Michael wasn't available. Diana would usually not come to the phone.
If Katherine was distressed about the possibilities of wild parties at the Diana Ross residence, she need not have been. Diana was a serious person, not a party girl. She would go to bed early in order to be up on time for her many appointments. If anything, she passed on to Michael a work ethic that would serve him well as a youngster. She wanted to be an example to him, and she was sure to not allow him to see anything but her best side.
‘I got to know her well,’ Michael would say many years later, ‘and she taught me so much by example. I remember she would be in the recording studio until all hours of the morning, get home, have a costume fitting, a rehearsal, lunch, a TV show, and then she would crash for maybe two hours. Then back in the studio. I remember thinking, I don't have it bad at all. Look at her. And she's Diana Ross!’
Success!
Stardom for The Jackson 5 was just around the corner, but with a detour or two along the way. When ‘I Want You Back’ was released in October 1969, it wasn't an immediate hit. The song entered Billboard's Top 100 at number 90. Motown's promotion and sales department had to continually encourage disc jockeys to play it and record stores to stock it. Then, finally, ten weeks later, on 31 January it shot to number one, displacing B. J. Thomas's ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’.
With ‘I Want You Back’, Berry Gordy, Deke Richards, Fonce Mizell and Freddie Perren managed to launch Motown's latest find with a blast, and the record label into a new and exciting decade. A precocious yet completely adorable and endearing Michael led his older brothers into the hearts, homes and stereos of middle-class white America. The rousing single also found success on the black or rhythm-and-blues charts.
As with the successful Supremes' formula of the sixties, The Jackson 5 sound presented a wholesome, non-threatening soul music, easily digested and readily accepted by all races of record buyers. Though the record was only number one for a week in America, it went on to sell an amazing 2,060,711 copies in the United States, and another four million abroad. In the UK, the song peaked at number two and remained on the chart for thirteen weeks, selling 250,000 copies.
‘The pros have told us that no group has ever had a better start than we did,’ Michael Jackson has remembered. ‘Ever.’
Once ‘I Want You Back’ was released, The Jackson 5 had an image makeover. Motown's famous charm school – the artist development classes held in Detroit to turn street kids like The Temptations into savvy show people – was no longer in business now that the company had relocated to Los Angeles. All of the image-changing work now had to be done by whomever Gordy could coax into helping the cause. Suzanne dePasse – now president of Motown Productions – became responsible for repackaging the youngsters. Stylists with Colourform models worked with them to come up with the best haircuts and stage outfits for each group member. Suzanne and the boys went shopping for the most outrageous outfits they could find – and some of them were truly atrocious, with wild colours and designs. Yet, oddly, it all worked. It was the seventies, after all.
18 October 1969, marked another major milestone for The Jackson 5: their first appearance on national television, on The Hollywood Palace, hosted by Diana Ross. (The Supremes were there, too, though Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong didn't get much air time that night.) Backstage, Joseph kept peppering his boys with last-minute advice, the way he always did before they performed. Michael once recalled that it was usually easy to tune Joseph out; he'd said the same things a hundred times before. This evening, Joseph was even more intense, according to Jack Lewis, a set designer on the ABC programme.
‘Joe paced back and forth backstage like a lion,’ he remembered. ‘There's no doubt in my mind he was more nervous than his kids. The boys were excited about the break. Diana Ross kept going backstage and having private conversations with Michael. She patted him on the head a lot, which I noticed annoyed J
oe.’
Diana wore a white midriff-baring halter and white slacks which emphasized her reed-thin figure. Her hair was pulled into an elaborate topknot; her shoulder-length silver earrings flew to and fro when she danced with Michael backstage before the show. ‘Come on, get down!’ she said, beckoning him. ‘You're the man! You're the man!’ Michael did a quick James Brown spin and collapsed to the floor on his knees, then back up again in a flash. ‘I'm the man,’ he said, laughing. ‘You got that right.’
Berry Gordy was backstage too. Right before they went on, Gordy pulled all of them together in a huddle and had an impromptu conference. Then when he finished, Joe – not to be outdone – did the same thing.
From behind the curtain, they heard Diana's introduction: ‘Tonight, I have the pleasure of introducing a young star who has been in the business all of his life. He's worked with his family, and when he sings and dances, he lights up the stage.’
At that moment, Sammy Davis, Jr., came bounding out on to the stage for a comic bit. He supposedly thought Diana was introducing him, but she explained that she was actually referring to – and then she made the introduction – ‘Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5.’
At that, the curtain opened and The Jackson 5 bounded out, singing the Sly Stone composition, ‘Sing a Simple Song’. The fellows were dressed alike in the costumes they had worn for their debut appearance at the Daisy: pale, lime-green, double-breasted, wide-lapelled, sleeveless jackets with matching bell-bottom slacks and suede boots in exactly the same shade. Their shirts, with the full-gathered sleeves, were gold. (While many observers assumed that these outfits were paid for by Motown, actually they were purchased off the rack by Joseph and Katherine back in Gary.)
As they sang, according to set designer Jack Lewis, Joseph Jackson and Berry Gordy became embroiled in a heated argument, backstage.
‘What's this “Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5” stuff?’ Joseph demanded. ‘No one told me about that. No one cleared that with me.’
Berry shrugged his shoulders. ‘It wasn't written that way on the cue card,’ he explained. ‘Diana just blurted it out. She's that way. She does what she wants to do. Been trying to tell her what to do for years,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘It ain't gonna happen.’
‘Well, I don't like it,’ Joseph fumed. ‘All the boys are equal. We're not singling Michael out from the rest. It'll just cause problems.’
‘But, look, Joe, he's obviously the star.’ Berry said, not taking his eyes off the performance. ‘Come on! Look at him. You gotta be kidding me?’
‘No, they're all stars,’ Joseph countered.
‘Well, it's too late now,’ Berry said, shrugging his shoulders, again. Then the two of them watched the rest of the performance, Berry with a big smile and Joseph with a sour frown.
When the brothers finished their next two songs – ‘Can You Remember?’ and ‘I Want You Back’ – the applause, led by Diana, was generous. They made a solid impression, there was no doubt about it.
After the show, there was pandemonium backstage, with the boys whooping and hollering, slapping one another on the back, jumping up and down and hugging each other. Joseph was in the middle of it all, enjoying a sweet moment of victory with his sons.
Diana walked into the backstage area and went right to Michael. ‘I am so proud of you,’ she enthused. ‘You are the best! Just the greatest. You're gonna be a big, big star.’ She took such pride in Michael's achievement; one might have thought she was his actual mother, not just a figure-head in his life. Then, she turned from her ‘son’.
‘Will someone please get me a towel?’ Diana asked no one in particular. She raised her voice. ‘There should have been a towel back here waiting for me. I want a towel. Now, where is it? Somebody?’
‘I'll get you one, Miss Ross’ Michael offered. He disappeared for a moment and came back with a fluffy white towel.
Diana smiled and took it. ‘Thanks, Michael,’ she said, patting him on the head.
He beamed and ran off.
Berry walked over to Diana and, as Jack Lewis listened, he asked, ‘What was with that introduction, “Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5”?’
Towelling off her bare shoulders, Diana looked at Berry with a proud expression. ‘Oh, I threw that in myself,’ she said. ‘Pretty good, huh?’
‘I figured. But the father was really pissed off about it,’ Berry said.
Diana looked at Berry as if he were daft for caring what ‘the father’ thought… ‘So what?’ she asked. ‘Here, take this,’ she said, handing him the towel as if he was her assistant instead of the president of her record company. ‘Michael! Oh, Michael,’ she called out as she walked away. ‘Now, where is that boy?’
Not since Sammy Davis, Jr., had the world seen a child performer with as innate a command of himself on stage as Michael Jackson. Both as a singer and dancer, young Michael exuded a presence that was simply uncanny. After this youngster was heard recording Smokey Robinson's plaintive, bluesy ‘Who's Loving You?’ the question among Motown's staffers was ‘Where did he learn that kind of emotion?’ The answer is that he didn't have to learn it, it just seemed to be there for him.
Producers were always astonished at how Michael would, in between recording sessions, play games that pre-teen children enjoy such as cards and hide-and-seek, and then step behind a microphone and belt out a song with the emotional agility and presence of an old soul who's seen his share of heartache. Equally amazing was the fact that, aside from listening to demonstration tapes of the songs sung by a session singer to give him direction on the lead melody and Deke Richards' constant prodding to clean up his diction, Michael was pretty much left to his own devices in the studio. When he was told to sound like a rejected suitor, no one in the studio actually expected him to do it, to understand the emotion involved in heartbreak. How could they? After all, he was eleven.
‘I'll tell you the honest-to-God truth. I never knew what I was doing in the early days,’ Michael confessed to me once. ‘I just did it. I never knew how to sing, really. I didn't control it. It just formed itself. I don't know where it came from… it just came. Half the time, I didn't even know what I was singing about, but I still felt the emotion behind it.’
Producer Deke Richards used to have to sit Michael on top of a trash can in order for him to sing into the boom mike above him. Jermaine and Jackie would stand on either side of Michael – Marlon and Tito rarely recorded backing vocals in the early days since neither had a knack for harmony – and sheet music would be positioned in front of Michael's face on a music stand. From the control booth, all Richards could see in the studio were Jermaine and Jackie standing on either side of two sneakers dangling at the sides of a trash can.
When Michael and his brothers became professional performers, there were probably a million youngsters with as much raw dancing talent. What set Michael apart from the schoolyard hoofers was his execution, undoubtedly gleaned from years of observing headliners in the rhythm-and-blues revues in which he and his brothers used to appear. The kid had an eye for what worked.
From legendary soul singer Jackie Wilson, Michael mastered the importance of onstage drama. He learned early on that dropping dramatically to one knee, an old Wilson tactic, usually made an audience whoop and holler. However, for the most part, watching young Michael at work was like observing an honour student of ‘James Brown 101’. Michael appropriated everything he could from the self-proclaimed ‘hardest-working man in show business’. Not only did he employ Brown's splits and the one-foot slides, he worked a microphone bold-soul style just like Brown – passionately jerking the stand around like a drunk might handle his girlfriend at the corner pool hall on a Saturday night.
Michael also pilfered James Brown's famous spin. However, back then, the spin didn't go over nearly as well with a crowd as Michael's version of another dance of the day that Brown popularized, the Camel Walk. When Michael strode across the floor of American Bandstand during The Jackson 5's first appearance on that
programme, even the audience of pretty white teenagers got caught up in the frenzy of excitement.
From Diana Ross, Michael got not only a sense of style, but an appreciation of power. Diana had a quiet authority, the power of presence. He'd observed how people reacted to her when she walked into a room. She was revered. She was given deferential treatment. She had a special power. He liked that.
There was one other thing Michael got from Diana: his early ooohs. Michael's early vocal ad-libs were almost always punctuated with an oooh here or there; not a long-drawn-out oooh, but rather a stab, an exclamation mark. Diana used this effect on many of The Supremes' recordings. Michael delighted in it and put it in his grab bag of influences. Indeed, for little Michael Jackson, every little oooh helped.
At the beginning of November 1969, Berry Gordy leased a house for the Jackson family at 1601 Queens Road in Los Angeles. Michael moved out of Diana Ross's home and in with his father and brothers. A month later, Katherine, LaToya, Janet and Randy joined the rest of the family. Motown paid for their flights, their first plane ride.
As they arrived at the house, the boys were waiting on the front lawn. Michael was the first to throw himself into his mother's arms. ‘But you got so big,’ she exclaimed. Tears streamed down her face as she hugged each of her boys in turn. Jackie, ever the tease, lifted Marlon up and tossed him in the air. ‘Me next, me next,’ three-year-old Janet squealed.
Katherine would recall that, once inside the house, she took a long look around the living room. It was so large – twice the size of the entire house in Gary – that she was dumbstruck. ‘It ain't Gary, that's for sure,’ Joseph told her with a proud smile. Then Joseph had Katherine close her eyes. He led his wife out to the backyard patio. ‘Okay, you can open them now,’ he told her.
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