There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  • • •

  By the early 1980s, in addition to my various print outlets, I had a syndicated radio show called The Inside Track and was the host and interviewer on two cable television shows: Radio 1990 and Nightflight. At this time MTV had just started but wasn’t available on cable everywhere in the U.S. (thus, the “I Want My MTV” campaign). But the USA Network carried the two shows I was on and I interviewed so many people for both the radio and the cable TV shows that I’ve lost count. I talked to, among many others, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Robert Plant, Chrissie Hynde, Pete Townshend, Steven Tyler, Joan Jett, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones from the Clash, Sting and the other two from the Police, Keith Richards, Billy Idol, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Boy George, Marianne Faithfull and everyone else who passed through New York City. One of the people I talked to and became friends with was Freddie Mercury. I don’t remember this, but my husband Richard recalls that when we were in London in 1972 with Lou Reed and David Bowie at the gay club El Sombrero, Freddie Mercury, who at that time was selling secondhand clothes in a stall at the Kensington Market, joined us and told us he was starting a band called Queen. I eventually got to know Freddie through Tony King, or Elton John, or Elton and Queen’s manager, John Reid, or Linda Stein (who co-managed the Ramones with Danny Fields). I wasn’t really a fan of Queen’s music, but I loved Freddie. I especially thought it was hilarious when he performed Liza Minnelli’s “Big Spender” onstage. One night in 1984, after Freddie and I had done an interview for Radio 1990, he invited me to a party at his New York apartment at 425 East 58th Street. I arrived with Fran Lebowitz, we walked in, and immediately saw that we were the only women in a roomful of young gay men—all of whom were watching slides of their Provincetown vacations.

  Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury eventually became friends. Michael visited Freddie backstage at Queen’s L.A. Forum shows, and they recorded some songs together. One of them—“State of Shock”—wound up on the Jacksons’ Victory album with Mick Jagger singing on it instead of Freddie. Another never-released demo was called “There Must Be More to Life.” That song is complete with strings and shmaltzy lyrics. While it’s hard to imagine Freddie, who once reportedly celebrated a birthday hanging naked from a chandelier, having much in common with Michael, there is no question that they had a real mutual affection. Freddie smoked. Michael didn’t. Freddie slept with boys. Michael, supposedly, did not. (Once, when I asked Michael if he was dating anyone, he said no. He said he liked girls, but that he wasn’t interested. I expressed some mild surprise, and he said, “Oh, you think I’m one of those? No, I’m not.”) Michael and Freddie respected each other’s talent and theatricality. Michael loved “Another One Bites the Dust,” and told Freddie it had to be the single from Queen’s The Game album. In 1984, in one of my talks with Freddie, he was wearing red and black satin boxer shorts and a black embroidered kimono, and was smoothing avocado skin cream on his legs. He told me he didn’t consider himself a prima donna. But, he said, he did have tantrums. After all, he said, “I’m a musician”—as if that explained everything. Which, of course, it did. He said that if something wasn’t right, he’d throw things, and was capable of destroying a hotel room in about three seconds. “Sometimes, even my own apartment,” he told me. “But it got to be a bit expensive; all those Lalique glasses being thrown about.” He said he didn’t think rock and roll was limited, that he could do anything he wanted. (Today, I think how amused he’d be to hear Queen’s “We Will Rock You” or “We Are the Champions” played as anthems at sporting events.) “I’m a trouper, honey,” Freddie told me. “Underneath all this drag is a business brain.” He had that in common with Michael. Talking about their friendship, Freddie said, “Three or four years ago Michael used to come and see our shows at the L.A. Forum. I guess he liked us and he kept coming to see us and then we started talking and we used to go out and have dinners. Now, I think he just stays home and doesn’t like coming out at all. At least that’s what he says. He tells me whatever he wants, he can get at home. Anything he wants, he just buys it.” I said I thought that kind of isolation was scary. “I know,” Freddie said, “and that’s not me. But that’s his bag. I’d be bored to death. I have to go out every night. I hate staying in one room for too long anyway, I just like to keep moving. Maybe it’s because he started very young. I mean sometimes when I’m talking to him I think, my god, he’s only twenty-five and I’m thirty-seven, but he’s been in the business longer than I have, because he started so young. So, we can talk to each other on a very good parallel, because he has the same sort of experiences that I have.”

  • • •

  On February 23, 1988, I went to Kansas City for the opening night of Michael’s “Bad” tour. His manager Frank DiLeo arranged for me to visit Michael’s suite at the Westin Crowne Hotel after the show. Alone. There were no handlers present, no family members, no animal companions, no child companions, no bodyguards—unusual for a Jackson visitation. For Kansas City, his suite was lavish, the size of a small apartment. But as I entered, let in by a security guard who waited outside the door, Michael was nowhere to be seen. “Michael?” I called, as I walked around. After a few minutes, I heard giggling from behind a door. The twenty-nine-year-old Michael Jackson was playing hide-and-seek. Finally, he appeared, wearing black trousers and a bright red shirt, his semi-straightened hair pulled back into a loose ponytail with a few strands falling over his face. He hugged me. He was taller than I’d remembered, taller than he appeared in photos. And while his giggling continued, I remember thinking at the time that his hug was a hug from a man—not a boy. There was nothing sexual about it, it was just strong. Then he pulled back, looked at me and said, in the lower and more “normal” of the two voices he could produce at will, “What’s that smell? What’s that perfume? I know that smell.” I laughed and said, “Oh Michael, you don’t know this perfume. It’s an old drag queen perfume from the 1950s.” At the words “drag queen” he started giggling and repeated it: “Drag queen . . . hahahahahaha!!! No, I know it. It’s ‘Jungle Gardenia,’ right?” I was taken aback. How did he know that? I told him that the only people who ever recognized this perfume were Bryan Ferry and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes. Well, I said, I guess you’re not as la-la as they say you are. The words “la-la” cracked him up and he repeated it . . . “La-la . . . hahahahaha!” A week later I sent a case of twenty-four bottles of “Jungle Gardenia” to his hotel suite at New York City’s Helmsley Palace. And on March 2nd, I stood backstage in the wings at the Grammy Awards live telecast in Radio City Music Hall, while Michael waited with a gospel group, about to perform “Man in the Mirror.” Looking at me he whispered, “Thanks for the smells. . . . I’m wearing it now.”

  • • •

  At some point in the 1990s, either Michael himself, or Elizabeth Taylor, anointed him with that ridiculous title, the “King of Pop.” In 2009, before the writer Dominick Dunne died, he told me that he once went to Elizabeth Taylor’s house for lunch and Michael came, bringing Elizabeth a huge sapphire ring as a luncheon gift. From the 1990s on, Michael’s life had more Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in it and less Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. Then, probably around the time of the child molestation charges or possibly before, Michael stopped talking to the press altogether—except for one time to Oprah Winfrey, and another ill-advised TV special where he went shopping like a maniac in some tacky Las Vegas mall. (Watching that on TV, I remembered how, over twenty years earlier, Michael had told me he purchased a Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce. He knew how to drive it, he said, but he didn’t like to be photographed in it because, he told me, “It’s too show-offy. I’m not like that.”) Both of those TV interviews were attempts to rehabilitate his image. Neither worked. The phone calls to me stopped, probably because I wrote for the New York Post, the first publication to call him “Wacko Jacko.” Even those he had once trusted he felt he could trust no more. He was paranoid. Rumors had him hooked on painkillers because of burns suffered from a p
yrotechnic misfire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. He was reportedly holed up at Neverland—his combination home/amusement park. In July 1995, he emerged and attended a press conference in New York’s Bryant Park to announce the nominations for the MTV Awards. Michael was nearly an hour late, stayed for two minutes, wore lipstick and pancake makeup, and appeared nervous. It seemed to me that his confidence was gone. In his high, breathy, “public” voice, he announced the winner of the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award—R.E.M.—said he was honored by his own eleven nominations, thanked “Mayor Giuliano,” murmured that he loved New York, posed for photos, refused to answer questions, and fled through the back door. At the actual award show that September, people felt sorry for the technicians because Michael had 140 inputs going into the boards (most bands used 30) to get the sound he wanted before it was mixed down into what was heard on TV. He tied up the Sony Studios for two weeks of rehearsals, reportedly never showed up, but continued to pay his dancers and choir members. He sealed off Radio City Music Hall to rehearse. His performance on the award show was replete with the wind machines, chest-baring and constant crotch-grabbing and crotch-thrusting that marked much of his 1990s stage work. It became fashionable to slam him; his bad press was constant and relentless. It was possible he was a drug addict. Then he admitted he was a drug addict. But many felt that he made that up—and even made a brief visit to some phony European rehab facility—to get out of a grueling concert tour. He was accused of being a pedophile. He insisted he was a victim of extortion. It was possible he was sexually attracted to young boys. It was possible too, that it wasn’t sexual at all, that he really just enjoyed eating candy and playing with water balloons. Or, that he wanted a family he wanted, as opposed to the one he fled from but could never totally shed. In 1996, Diana Ross told me, “I haven’t seen Michael or spent any time with him in years and I know nothing of who he is anymore. I know the little boy that I introduced on the Ed Sullivan show, so [to talk about him now] is hard. Careers can just be devastating for young people. They’re forced to live with security around them all the time. If you look back at child stars, well, it takes its toll.”

  *

  On March 19, 2001, at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Michael Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Jacksons had been inducted in 1997; now Michael was getting in for his solo work. Wearing tinted glasses, a long white jacket with gold embroidery on the pocket and a black wig, he carried a cane (he had broken his foot, he said, dancing down some stairs). He was heavily made up. Waiting to go onstage, leaning against the wall in the kitchen of the Grand Ballroom—which serves as the “backstage” for this event—Michael was surrounded by huge bodyguards as well as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach who, at that time was, for lack of a better word, his “spiritual” advisor. I caught his eye. “Lisa?” he said. We started to move towards each other and his bodyguards put their hands on my shoulders to start to push me back. “NO! It’s okay,” he said to them forcibly—in that other voice, not the whispered one, not the public one, but rather the one reserved for the lawyers or the record company executives. “I know her. She’s my friend.” It was the last time I ever saw him.

  • • •

  In 2002, the MTV Awards were held on August 29th, Michael’s birthday. Britney Spears was going to give Michael a cake onstage. In her speech, she called him the “artist of the millennium.” Then Michael came onstage, appeared confused, and “accepted” the nonexistent “Artist of the Millennium Award.” It was embarrassing. But I knew that no matter how whispery and out of it he seemed—or was—he also was totally capable of segueing immediately back into that other voice—the one that belonged to the control freak, the perfectionist.

  On December 30, 2006, Michael Jackson was the only star of any magnitude to show up in an Atlanta church for James Brown’s funeral. And, no matter what was going on in his life—the child molestation allegations, the child molestation trial, the plastic surgery, the drugs, the bizarre public persona, the dangling his baby over a hotel balcony—musicians loved him. From Beyoncé to Justin Bieber, they’ve all asked me what he was like. Athletes loved him. Charles Barkley said that when Michael Jackson died, it was like a death in his family. At every photo shoot with a musician that we did over the last decade at Vanity Fair, we played “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” (still my favorite Michael Jackson song). It always put people in a good mood. Black musicians especially, most of whom grew up with Michael’s music (or their parents did), refused to believe the child molestation allegations. He was theirs. When he and his brothers—and the Supremes—were on the Ed Sullivan TV show in the 1960s, as Oprah Winfrey has said, all across America, in black households, families would crowd around their TV sets, call their friends and yell, “Colored on TV!”

  *

  In 2008, Suzanne de Passe and I came up with the idea of doing a Vanity Fair tribute for Motown’s 50th anniversary. We weren’t sure exactly which year was the 50th—it could have been fifty years after Berry Gordy first borrowed money from his family to start the company, or it could have been fifty years after he released the first record on Motown. Basically, it was whenever Berry Gordy decided it was. Vanity Fair’s editor in chief Graydon Carter wanted me to do an Oral History of Motown. So I went to Los Angeles many times to convince Berry Gordy it was a good idea and, basically, to kiss the ring. Born in 1929, Berry Gordy Jr. has been described as brilliant, charismatic, a genius, mentor, gambler, philosopher, gangster, ladies’ man and father figure. In the mid- to late 1950s he was a young songwriter who wrote hits for Barrett Strong (“Money”) and Jackie Wilson (“Lonely Teardrops”). At the age of five, Berry, the second youngest of eight children, took classical piano lessons. Later on, he worked in his father’s plastering business, sold cookware, served in the Korean War, worked at the Lincoln-Mercury plant, opened and closed an unsuccessful jazz record store, and tried to sell his songs. In the Detroit of the 1950s, Berry went to nightclubs to see Oscar Peterson and Charlie Parker and once met Billie Holiday. Motown had been the only black-owned music company in the 1960s, in a business dominated by white-owned record and distribution companies. In the 1960s, Motown had more than one hundred Number One hits and revolutionized American popular music. When people who know him talk about him, Berry Gordy is referred to either as “The Chairman” or “Mr. Gordy.” When I talked to him, I always called him—and still do—Mr. Gordy. I told Mr. Gordy that I thought his music did as much to bring the races together as the civil rights marches did. In the early 1960s, when the Temptations toured the southern U.S., a rope down the middle of the audience separated blacks from whites. By the time the group returned in 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King had recorded his “I Have a Dream” speech for Motown’s Black Forum label, that rope was gone.

  *

  When I first met with him about the Vanity Fair piece, I told Mr. Gordy that when I was a teenager, I snuck out of my house to go see Thelonious Monk. He asked me to name a Thelonious Monk recording other than “Round Midnight.” I said “Blue Monk,” “Misterioso,” and “Crepuscule with Nellie,” and I guess I passed his test. After much discussion, Mr. Gordy agreed that he would cooperate with a Motown Oral History for Vanity Fair. He said he would talk to the artists to insure their co-operation. We knew Stevie Wonder would be difficult to pin down—he always was. Diana Ross seemed to be MIA. We agreed that it probably would be futile to try to get Michael. Then, as I moved forward with the project, I was handed a contract that basically stated Mr. Gordy would own the quotes and have approval of the finished piece. This, of course, was unacceptable to Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, and me. I went back to Mr. Gordy’s house with Suzanne at eight in the morning on Mother’s Day, 2008 (only for him would I get up at that hour), and we went through it all again. I explained that journalism didn’t work that way, this was publicity, he would not own the quotes. Finally, he agreed—again—to participate. When I returned to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I got a phone c
all from one of his lawyers, stipulating that there was just one little piece of paper I would need to sign before we could go ahead with this story. I refused. I called Suzanne and told her the story was cancelled. I called Annie Leibovitz and told her not to bother to fly out to L.A. to take photos. I went down to the desk to pay the bill. When I got upstairs, my phone was ringing. Mr. Gordy was on the line. He said he was sorry to hear that I had cancelled the story. But, he said, he paid people to protect him. No, I told him, you pay people who rip you off and appeal to your paranoia. Dead silence. Well, he said, he was sorry to hear that I felt that way. I said I was sorry too, that we could have had fun doing this story and I was sorry he didn’t trust me. He replied that it wasn’t that he didn’t trust me . . . at which point I interjected: Well, Mr. Gordy, I said, here’s the problem—I no longer trust you. Dead silence. I was certain that very few people, if any, had ever talked to him this way. But I had been to L.A. at least three times to see him, the magazine had already spent a fortune sending me out there, and I had nothing to lose. After a minute or two of silence, he said, OK, let’s do it. I insisted that I would sign no papers. He agreed there would be no papers. And so, we proceeded, over the next few months, to talk for many, many hours on tape about his, and Motown’s, history. He is a charming, delightful man. We became friends. And on my birthday, he came into his library carrying a cake, singing “Happy Birthday.” (And I didn’t even have a camera.) Berry Gordy was reluctant to say too much about Michael; by that point Michael was probably as much of a mystery to him as he was to everyone else. But Smokey Robinson told me, “I’ve known Michael since he was ten or eleven. He is the best who ever did it. The singing and the dancing and the records, the whole package. But somewhere . . . he just got lost. It’s easy to do.” Jermaine Jackson wanted the Jacksons to be included in the Vanity Fair piece, but Annie Leibovitz and I didn’t want to photograph or interview the brothers without Michael. We got a message from Jermaine that we needed to contact Michael’s “spokesman,” a Dr. Tohme Tohme, who only had a P.O. box address somewhere in California. I wrote a letter requesting Michael’s participation. We never heard back.