The “normal life” that Michael repeatedly said he longed for was slipping further and further into impossibility. He had tried to follow Marlon to Emerson Junior High but being mobbed in the hallway made that difficult. Girls lined up outside his classrooms, trying to get a look at him through the tiny glass windows in the doors. A jealous boy made a death threat and that was the end of Michael’s public school experience.
He had turned fourteen the month the album Ben was released and finally hit puberty around the same time. Reporters began to catch on to the lie about his age. Rumors about his sexuality were spreading by the time he turned fifteen. Publicly, Joe and his other sons countered with the laughable story that Michael was so promiscuous they had to keep the groupies away from him. The other male members of the Jackson family persisted in trying to convince Michael it was time to surrender his virginity. According to his sister Rebbie, one of them had tried to shake Michael’s sexuality loose with some Jackson-style shock therapy, locking him in a hotel room with two adult hookers who left him scared, shaken, and still a virgin. The prostitutes were pretty rattled themselves; Michael had resisted their attempts to undress him, they said, by picking up his Bible and reading passages from Scripture aloud to them.
The loneliness that would become an increasingly chronic condition for Michael worsened year by year. He felt abandoned by his older siblings, who were all using marriage as an excuse to get places of their own and escape Joe’s oppression. Rebbie had been the first to go, just eighteen when she announced that she intended to marry another Jehovah’s Witness named Nathaniel Brown. Joe was adamantly opposed. Rebbie was a looker who had the biggest voice of all his children, and the richest, except for Michael’s. She possessed everything she needed to be a star, Joe said, but instead the girl wanted to marry a man who was even more religious than her mother and become a housewife. For one of the very few times in her life, Katherine had opposed her husband and supported the marriage. Tito left in 1972, marrying at age eighteen—just like his older sister—a pretty seventeen-year-old of mixed black and Hispanic background named Dee Dee Martes. The wedding of nineteen-year-old Jermaine one year later made big news because the bride was Berry Gordy’s oldest daughter Hazel. The year after that, twenty-three-year-old Jackie married Enid Spann, a mixed black and Korean beauty whom he had been dating since she was fifteen. In August 1975, shortly before Michael’s seventeenth birthday, his eighteen-year-old brother Marlon secretly married a young fan from New Orleans named Carol Ann Parker, but didn’t tell his parents about it until four months later.
The Jackson 5 was by then in an increasingly steep professional decline. After scoring consecutive #1 hits with their first four single releases, the group’s fifth release, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” would peak at #2. The Jacksons sent one more song to the top of the charts later in 1971 with “Mama’s Pearl,” but the group managed to chart in the top twenty only three times in the next several years, with 1971’s “Sugar Daddy,” 1972’s “Lookin’ Through the Windows,” and 1974’s disco number “Dancing Machine.” Both at Motown and throughout the record industry, the Jackson 5 were regarded as a dwindling resource. Joe and his four oldest sons all blamed Motown’s refusal to let the members of the group mature as artists. Though they played their instruments onstage, the music on their albums was still being made by either Motown’s sizzling in-house studio band, the Funk Brothers, or by the Wrecking Crew at Hitsville West. The Jacksons had produced at least an album’s worth of material at their home studio in the Hayvenhurst compound but Gordy’s reluctance to let them perform their own songs either in the studio or onstage meant that not one of those songs had been heard by the public.
The group was being squeezed between Gordy’s money-grubbing resistance to sharing songwriting royalties with his artists and the opinion of the man who was really running Motown, Ewart Abner, that the Jackson 5’s time had passed. Michael was becoming as frustrated as his brothers. His third and fourth solo albums, Music & Me and Forever, Michael, had peaked on the pop charts at 93 and 101. Joe was furious that neither Michael’s solo albums nor the newest Jackson 5 albums were receiving much promotional support from Motown and began to tell his sons they should leave the label. The executives and producers at Motown insisted that Joe’s obnoxious attitude and clumsy incompetence were the problems; nobody wanted to work with the Jacksons because nobody wanted the stress and irritation of having their father around.
Amid the mounting tensions, sixteen-year-old Michael amazed everyone by phoning Berry Gordy personally and demanding a meeting, at which he let the Motown chief know just how unhappy he and his brothers had become. Gordy flattered and cajoled but made no promises. Joe and the other Jackson brothers were indignant when they learned that Michael had “gone behind our backs.” Though outwardly apologetic, Michael was inwardly thrilled. He had asserted himself as never before and in the process won more respect from Gordy than his father ever did. It was the first of many indications to come that, for all his apparent social and sexual timidity, he could be as aggressive as necessary when it came to business. Things were different between him and his brothers—and especially between him and his father—from that day forward. Still, Michael went along with Jackie, Tito, and Marlon when they voted to leave Motown and let Joe look for a better deal at another label. Jermaine was excluded from the vote, and not just because he was out of town at the time: His marriage to Hazel Gordy had divided his loyalties and his brothers feared that he might stick with his father-in-law if things came to a head.
By the summer of 1975, Joe had negotiated a deal with CBS Records that provided the Jacksons a ten-fold increase in their royalty rate, a $750,000 signing bonus, and a $500,000 “recording fund,” plus a guarantee of $350,000 per album, more than they had received for their most successful releases at Motown. The Jackson brothers were also given the right to choose three of the songs for each album, and to submit their own compositions for consideration, something Gordy and Abner had never permitted. Still, Michael said, he only signed the CBS contract after Joe “cajoled” him “with the promise that I’d get to have dinner with Fred Astaire . . . My father knew that I loved Fred with all my heart. He knew I would sign without reading the contract . . . It broke my heart that he did that. He tricked me.”
Jermaine, though, not only refused to sign the CBS contract but immediately informed Gordy that the brothers were leaving Motown. He would be the president of the company some day, Gordy told his son-in-law. “I believed in Berry, not Joe,” Jermaine explained to a reporter. At Gordy’s insistence, Jermaine left the Jackson 5 thirty minutes before a scheduled performance at the Westbury Music Fair. Michael was nearly as upset as Joe when they learned that Gordy had successfully separated one of the brothers from the family. The difference was that Michael believed some of the blame was his father’s.
Berry Gordy wasn’t done making his displeasure felt among the Jacksons. His opening salvo was the announcement that a clause in the group’s Motown contract gave him ownership of the name “Jackson 5” and the brothers would not be allowed to use it at CBS. Gordy also enlisted Jesse Jackson to raise whatever fuss he could about CBS “stealing a black act from a black record label.” Finally, he sued Joe Jackson, the Jackson 5, and CBS for $5 million. Gordy let it be known that Motown would also begin compiling albums from some of the 295 unreleased Jackson 5 recordings that were still held in Motown’s vaults. Joe and Richard Arons were convinced that Gordy would go as far as having them killed; the two actually began checking under the hood for bombs before they would start their cars and took roundabout routes whenever they drove in Los Angeles in order to avoid Gordy’s supposed assassins.
Now recording for CBS subsidiary Epic Records as “The Jacksons,” the brothers replaced Jermaine with fourteen-year-old Randy, and one year after signing with the company they celebrated the announcement that the five of them, along with their three sisters, were about to become the stars of the first television variety show in American histo
ry hosted by a black family. The Jacksons would run on CBS television for less than a year and was ranked last in the Nielsen ratings at the time of its cancellation in March 1977, but the show was seen as seminal nonetheless, launching the career of the one Jackson who showed any ability as a comic actor, ten-year-old Janet. She was subsequently hired by Norman Lear to play the role of Millicent “Penny” Gordon Woods on his sitcom Good Times.
The Jacksons was also the title of the brothers’ first album for CBS. It went no higher than #36 on the charts, possibly because Gordy had confused the public by releasing his own Jacksons album, the weak Joyful Jukebox Music, at almost the same time. Jermaine’s first solo release for Motown, My Name Is Jermaine, did far worse, peaking at 164 on the top two hundred. Billboard called the album a bomb. Disgusted that Joe reveled in Jermaine’s failure, Michael began to look for some way to get time away from his family and his father to think about where his career was headed. The opportunity to do just that came along in the summer of 1977 when he was offered the role of the Scarecrow in the all-black cast of The Wiz, a musical film based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that would be directed by Sidney Lumet. Shooting would take place in New York at the Astoria Studios in Queens.
Production of The Wiz was burdened from the start by the casting of Diana Ross as Dorothy, a role most of the public identified with Judy Garland’s performance in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. Ross was thirty-three, twice the age that Garland had been when she played the twelve-year-old Kansas farm girl. Stephanie Mills, the young actress who had been Dorothy in the Broadway production of The Wiz, had just signed a recording contract with Motown and was the preferred choice for the part, but Ross wrested the role away from her, overcoming even the resistance of the film’s producer, Berry Gordy.
The Wiz was a commercial disaster but not due to any fault on Michael’s part. He’d pushed himself hard during the 1978 production, collapsing with a burst blood vessel after nearly dancing himself to death on set—the critics took notice and Michael was credited with the film’s one really strong performance. Joe had vigorously opposed Michael’s decision to act in The Wiz, fearful that becoming a movie star would set the Jacksons’ lead singer even further apart from his brothers. Michael’s decision to go to New York and work on the film anyway was the boldest declaration of independence that he had made up to that point in his life.
Michael was now openly questioning his father’s abilities as a manager. Joe’s abrasive personality was already making relations difficult with the producers and executives at CBS, whose help the Jacksons needed if the group was to make a comeback. Lots of people in the record business by then didn’t like Joe, in part because he refused to hide his disdain for people with light complexions. That bothered Michael almost as much as Joe’s tendency to repeatedly go for the short money, the sure thing, instead of planning for the long term. His father’s foremost concern continued to be the Jacksons franchise, even as it was becoming increasingly clear to everyone at CBS that Michael’s solo career was the future. Jermaine’s absence from the group was making that fact obvious. The pretense that the brothers were a package of major talent had gradually dissolved as Jermaine’s solo career at Motown floundered. His second album, Feel the Fire, had performed even worse than the first, evidence for many that backing his little brother was the best use of Jermaine’s singing voice. Jackie’s sweet but thin high tenor had been exposed in the one solo album he was allowed to record for Motown, Jackie Jackson, which failed to chart. Tito continued to be no better than a journeyman guitarist, and everyone knew that Marlon, the funniest and friendliest of the Jackson brothers, was just along for the ride. Joe wanted that ride to continue for all his sons, but especially for himself, and had never offered more than lukewarm support for Michael’s solo career, which he foresaw as the demise of the group. Joe did battle with CBS to win the company’s approval for a new album that the Jacksons would write and produce, but for him that meant all the boys, equally. CBS executives, though, were beginning to recognize that Michael wasn’t simply the best singer and dancer among the Jacksons, but also the best writer. The one notable song on the Jacksons’ second album for CBS, Goin’ Places, had been “Different Kind of Lady,” a jittery R & B/disco hybrid penned by Michael that was hugely popular in the dance clubs in both Los Angeles and New York. Even as CBS’s new president, Walter Yetnikoff, confided to other company executives that he was inclined to drop the Jacksons from the label, he was urged by some of them to let Michael put together a solo album of his own compositions.
Michael’s increasing confidence in his abilities as an artist was undercut by the shame he felt about his appearance. Around the time of his fifteenth birthday, he had begun to suffer severe acne. He was already self-conscious about his looks, especially his wide nose. Nothing wounded him more during this period than the expression of disbelief he so often saw in the faces of those who were introduced to him at the Hayvenhurst house. Strangers “would come up and ask if I knew where that ‘cute little Michael’ was,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times music writer Robert Hilburn. People actually shook their heads when they realized that “cute little Michael” had been replaced by this awkward teenager with erupting skin. He began refusing to leave the house when he didn’t have to, and was unable to look people in the eye when he was forced to go out in public. His mother would say that the difficulties of this period, in particular the blooms of acne that circled his face from forehead to chin, actually changed her son’s personality: “He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. He was quieter, more serious, and more of a loner.”
Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, it struck Michael hard that he had never in his life made a real friend. His attempt to rectify that confused everyone around him, especially the members of his family. At the 1974 American Music Awards ceremony, Michael and Donny Osmond had served as cohosts with six-year-old Rodney Allen Rippy, a child actor who had appeared in several feature films, including Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, but was best-known for a series of sickly sweet Jack in the Box commercials that had featured his frustrated attempts to get a grip on a Jumbo Jack. The boy had been taken aback when Michael asked for his phone number, and was stunned when the pop star began to call him every Saturday morning, at exactly ten o’clock. They were buddies, nothing more, as Rippy would take pains to make clear later: “Michael would give me advice about how to handle myself in show business, about smiling at people and shaking their hands. It was just stuff like that we talked about. Very ordinary. It absolutely amazed me that Michael Jackson was interested in what was going on in my little world.”
Even among those who did not know that Michael’s best friend was a boy who had just started elementary school, questions about his sexuality were proliferating, and he took these more and more personally. He was especially stung by the false rumor that his father was having him injected with female hormones to keep his voice high. In the months before moving to New York to work on The Wiz, he had attempted to normalize his image by dating Tatum O’Neal, then a thirteen-year-old Oscar winner for Paper Moon with a woman’s body and a wild thing reputation. They’d “taken up,” as Michael would put it, after an encounter at On the Rox, a small satellite club attached to the Roxy on Sunset Strip, where they happened to be seated at adjacent tables one evening in the spring of 1977. Without warning or introduction, Tatum had reached out to hold Michael’s hand as she sat with her father, actor Ryan O’Neal, while Michael chatted with a pair of publicists from Epic Records. For him, this was “serious stuff,” Michael would explain: “She touched me.” Their first date was the next evening, when Tatum invited Michael to a dinner party hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, where the girl suggested they go hot-tubbing together—naked. Michael insisted on swim suits. “I fell in love with her (and she with me) and we were very close for a long time,” Michael would write later in his “autobiography” Moonwalker. That wasn’t exactly how O’Neal recalled the re
lationship. Tatum told friends that Michael could barely bring himself to speak to her, let alone make sexual contact. The affair, to use the term loosely, would finish in an infamous fizzle during a party at Rod Stewart’s house in Beverly Hills. According to a story that was repeated throughout Hollywood and reported later in the tabloids, O’Neal and a female friend of hers had tried to pull Michael into bed with them. He had not only refused sex, it was said, but dashed from the house blinking back tears, chased by the taunts and jeers of other guests. Whispers about the young man’s sexuality grew into a murmur of innuendo and ridicule that would increase in volume over the next decade.
The worst part for Michael might not have been how he left the party, but his realization that he had nowhere else he wanted to be. The closed circle of his family was making him feel more and more claustrophobic and life at the Hayvenhurst house had become all but unbearable. His brothers had married, but their brides were never really admitted to the Jacksons’ inner circle. Katherine referred to them collectively as “the wives,” as if to make clear they weren’t quite the same as those she called “the family.” Michael was still phoning Rodney Allen Rippy every Saturday morning but longed for someone to share his thoughts with on the other days of the week. Instead, he was forced to substitute the rats and snakes and birds he kept in cages in the playhouse.
Untouchable Page 10