Michael was making such admissions more often in interviews, as if he wanted people to understand how strange he was, how strange his life had been, and how strange the world they lived in was to him. “See, my whole life has been onstage,” he explained to Gerri Hirshey when she interviewed him for Rolling Stone, “and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations, and people running after you. In a crowd, I’m afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage.”
CBS president Walter Yetnikoff had been quick to recognize Michael’s vulnerability and quicker still to exploit it. “He had no social skills,” Yetnikoff would recall later. “Sometimes I felt like he was still six.” On his first visit to the CBS corporate headquarters, Yetnikoff remembered, Michael interrupted a meeting to say, “Walter, I have to tinkle. Can you take me to the potty?” At another meeting, Michael confided how hurt his feelings had been by Joe. “He said, ‘You know, I’ve accomplished a lot,’” Yetnikoff recalled. “‘And my father has never told me that he’s proud of me.’ And I became Daddy, and I said, ‘Come here, Michael, let me give you a hug and tell you how proud everyone in the pop music field is of you.’” Soon after, Yetnikoff began to point out that if he really wanted to show Joe who he was, breaking away from the Jacksons to continue his solo career was the way to do it. It was exactly what the young star wanted to hear.
Michael returned to Los Angeles in spring 1982 prepared to impose his will. The Hayvenhurst house had been demolished at his instruction during the Triumph tour and rebuilt into a Tudor mansion with beveled glass windows and clinker brick chimneys. On the grounds, he assembled his first full-scale menagerie, buying black and white swans for the ponds out back, a pair of peacocks named Winter and Spring, two llamas named for Louis Armstrong and Lola Falana, a couple of deer he called Prince and Princess, a giraffe he dubbed Jabbar, and a ram he named Mr. Tibbs. All the animals slept in a stable at night but were free to roam during the day. Neighbors would complain about the stench when summer came.
The centerpiece of this early attempt to create an environment tailored to his fragile psyche was a small-scale version of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. (with its own candy store) next to the garage. Even as he fussed over every detail of the Hayvenhurst house reinvention, though, Michael’s bedroom on the upstairs floor of the house continued to look as if he had just moved in or was about to move out. Books and records remained stacked in knee-high piles and clutter was everywhere. He never bothered to put a bed in his room, preferring to sleep on a thick green rug by the fireplace. His one effort to personalize the space was a multicultural collection of five life-size, female mannequins—one white, one black, one Asian, one Latina, and one Middle Eastern—all of them elaborately dressed in the latest fashions. He gave the mannequins names and introduced them as his friends.
His mother complained that Michael never seemed to eat and La Toya, whose room was just down the hall, swore that he never turned the lights off at night. Michael was up reading long after she went to sleep and she was often awakened at two, three, or four in the morning by the sound of him laughing hysterically at a Three Stooges video he had seen ten times before. He was working in there all the time, too, though, filling the notebook he carried with lyrics, humming melodies into a tape recorder, or studying the songs other writers had submitted to him, like a mad scientist locked up in his laboratory.
The recording of the new album began at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles during April 1982. He and Quincy Jones gradually winnowed a list of thirty songs down to the nine that would appear on the album. Michael had decided that “Thriller,” a spooky, feral number enlivened by the catchy hooks that were songwriter Rod Temperton’s specialty, would be the title track. “This is going to be a big album,” Jackson declared more than once during the engineering sessions, and Jones suspected that might be true. “All the brilliance that had been building inside Michael Jackson for twenty-four years just erupted,” Jones told author Alex Haley in an interview for Playboy magazine. “I was electrified, and so was everyone else involved in the project.” Musicians and engineers were so caught up in the drama of it all that during one recording session they kept cranking the volume up higher and higher until suddenly the speakers overloaded and burst into flames. “Only time I saw anything like that in forty years in the business,” Jones said.
Yet immediately before Thriller’s release on November 30, 1982, Jones was among those who warned Michael not to expect too much. The country was in the midst of the worst recession in more than twenty years and record purchases, like every other form of discretionary spending, had dropped off dramatically. Selling two million units would be a big success in this market, Michael’s comanager Ron Weisner advised him one day when engineers were putting the final touches on the album. Michael sputtered in fury for a few moments, then stalked out of the studio. The next morning, he phoned Walter Yetnikoff and said that if the people he trusted had so little faith in him, he didn’t want to even release the album. Yetnikoff played him perfectly: “Who cares what they say?” the CBS Records president told Michael. “You’re the superstar.”
Thriller’s release two weeks later was a tsunami that caught the entire music industry by surprise. The first song from the album released as a single was the weakest cut on it, Michael’s sugary duet with Paul McCartney on “The Girl Is Mine,” which rose to #2 on the Billboard Top 100. The second single, “Billie Jean,” was a song into which Michael channeled his disturbances with astounding skill and unnerving passion. Randy Taraborrelli popularized the notion that “Billie Jean” was inspired by an obsessed female fan who had tried to convince him to join her in a double suicide. Plastic surgeon Steven Hoefflin claimed that “Billie Jean” had been inspired by a beautiful young woman Michael spotted in a crowd gathered at the gates of the Hayvenhurst compound. Hoefflin said that Michael told him he’d been in a car with two of his brothers and wrote the entire song during that drive, later sketching the girl’s nude form and giving it to Hoefflin as a gift.
Michael himself would insist that he wasn’t thinking of any one girl in particular when he wrote “Billie Jean” (in three minutes, according to Hoefflin), but had created a composite of the especially persistent groupies whom he and his brothers had encountered while touring over the years. This claim probably had some truth to it, but in the end “Billie Jean” was more about Michael himself, as if he’d observed his own impending nervous breakdown and responded by creating the most danceable therapy imaginable. Katherine was as much a catalyst of the lyric as any groupie or fan, the mama who warned him to “be careful who you love.” The girls Joe and his brothers had used and discarded on the road floated like ghosts through the lyric and so did the young women who had tempted Michael along the way.
“I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it,” Michael said of “Billie Jean.” He was so consumed by the song, Michael recalled, that he failed to notice his Mercedes catch fire on the freeway one day while he was driving to the recording studio, and was alerted only when a young motorcyclist waved him over. Quincy Jones didn’t get “Billie Jean,” though, and wanted to keep it off the album. When a stunned Michael insisted it remain, Jones suggested changing the title to “Not My Lover,” because he worried that listeners would think Michael was referring to the tennis player Billie Jean King. Jones then demanded that Michael cut the song’s lengthy percussive introduction. That was the part that made him want to dance, Michael said; it stayed. The dispute between the two turned nasty for a couple of days, but might ultimately have served “Billie Jean.” Jones instructed engineer Bruce Swedien that if Michael insisted upon opening the song with thirty seconds of drumbeats, then they had to be the most memorable drumbeats anyone had ever heard—a “sonic personality,” as Jones described it. Swedien, who usually mixed a number just once, mixed “Billie Jean” ninety-one times in order to create the percussive platform from which the song arose, adding a bass drum cover that came in after the first four bars
of kick, snare, and hi-hat, then taps on a flat piece of wood that were filtered in between the beats. Swedien’s removal of reverberation from the opening drum sequence gave “Billie Jean” a stark, emotionally naked quality that grew gradually into a kind of euphoric hysteria as notes were doubled by a distorted synth bass that turned sharply staccato, underlaid by a deep echoing throb.
Michael’s voice came in softly, accompanied by finger snaps as it increased steadily in volume and intensity. By the time the violins and guitar solos entered, a seemingly random series of shouts, screams, and spectral laughs (overdubs made by Michael singing through a cardboard tube) began to sound in the spaces between notes, like a sort of viral insanity trying to gain entry to the listener’s mind. Michael accompanied the eerie, disembodied chatter with a series of what sounded like musical hiccups, as if he were trying to cough up some evil spirit, while the propulsive bass line just kept moving ahead toward some inexorable reckoning that everyone who heard the song knew would not have a happy ending. Michael would never again deliver a song that was either so relentless or so revealing.
People moaned and shrieked when “Billie Jean” first began to be played in the clubs of Los Angeles, as if the song had infected them with a compulsive fusion of madness and glee, pouring onto dance floors and demanding that it be played again. The level of sexual display it inspired was unprecedented. Reviewers called the song “scary,” “bizarre,” and “eccentric,” then added that they absolutely loved it. “Billie Jean” went to #1 on the pop charts almost overnight and stayed there for weeks, followed shortly by “Beat It,” the first true rock song Michael had ever recorded, a cut included on the album because he wanted to prove that no genre was beyond his grasp. Quincy Jones had suggested trying the song and recruited Eddie Van Halen to contribute a guitar solo that sounded like the flapping wings of a metal bird in a wire cage. By March 1983, Michael was among the handful of performers who had ever placed two songs in the top five at the same time. The critical mass that created would sustain Thriller commercially for sixteen months, as seven of the album’s nine songs were released and became top ten singles, from the edgy “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the symphonic “Human Nature” to the sassy “P.Y.T.,” which was the biggest hit among black audiences. By April 1983, Thriller was selling as many as 500,000 copies per week and putting up numbers the music business had never seen before, recession or no recession. Michael became, as Rolling Stone put it, “quite simply, the biggest star in the pop music universe.”
That star was about to go supernova. On March 25, 1983, two weeks after “Beat It” reached #1 on the pop charts, an invitation-only audience at the Pasadena Auditorium was present to watch the taping of the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever NBC television special. Like Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye, Michael had nearly refused to participate in the program, which was meant to honor Berry Gordy. The gradual realization of how poorly he’d paid them had alienated many of Gordy’s Motown stars, forcing the proud mogul to make a series of pleading phone calls. Michael withheld consent until he was promised a solo spot after he performed with his brothers, and even then refused to sing one of his Motown hits, insisting instead that his solo would be “Billie Jean.” Much as he wanted to say no to that, Gordy knew he couldn’t. He would be glad he didn’t.
Jermaine was back with his brothers when the Jackson 5 went on before an audience that had already sat through performances by Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. The Jacksons’ “reunion” began with Michael singing lead on “I Want You Back” and built momentum right up through his moving duet with Jermaine on “I’ll Be There.” The brothers exchanged hugs before the adoring crowd, then trotted offstage—all except Michael, who seemed to hover in darkness for a moment, until the spotlight settled on him. He looked different than people remembered him. He had always been slender, but now he was lithe. The macrobiotic diet he’d adopted and whatever dermatology treatments he was receiving had vanquished his acne. His skin was lighter, but still dark, his nose a little narrower, but not altered in a jarring feminine way. His high, stiff Afro had settled into soft curls.
The costume he wore would become a trademark ensemble, but that night was the first time anyone had seen the sequined black jacket (borrowed from his mother’s closet) with spangled silver cuffs that matched his shirt and the black tuxedo pants hemmed above the ankle to show off his glittery white socks and shiny black Bass Weejuns. And of course there was the rhinestone-studded glove worn on his left hand. He seemed diffident at first, as if unsure what to say or do, speaking softly as he paced the stage, restlessly shy, and thanked the audience for letting him share those “magic moments” with his brothers. No one watching could have imagined that every bit of what he did or said was rehearsed. “Those were the good songs,” Michael said, as he approached a curtain at the edge of the stage and grabbed a black fedora from someone’s hand. “I like those songs a lot,” he continued, moving back toward the center of the stage. “But especially I like . . . the new songs.”
Louis Johnson’s splatting bass guitar riff from “Billie Jean” kicked in at that moment, as Michael stuck the fedora on his head and began a rhythmic pumping of his pelvis so pronounced that it looked almost cartoonlike. An audience that consisted mostly of music executives, music writers, and music makers sat rapt, mouths open, palms on cheeks as they watched Michael Jackson translate the language of his song into dance. There were people present who would swear that he levitated when he brought his performance to a climax with his unveiling of the “moonwalk,” a reverse toe-to-heel glide that moved him—magically it seemed—backward across the stage, before he finished by spinning into a pose balanced on the very tips of his toes. What he got in return was more than a standing ovation. People actually climbed onto their chairs to applaud him. Weeping and laughing, members of the audience congratulated one another for having been there to see it.
The rapture of the crowd was palpable even through a television screen when Motown 25 aired on May 16, 1983. The day after Michael Jackson’s performance was seen by an audience of fifty million Americans—more than had ever viewed a musical special before—he found himself standing atop the Mount Everest of adulation, alone at a summit of fame and fortune that no solo performer other than Elvis Presley had reached before him. And he wouldn’t have to come down for at least another year.
Billboard listed Thriller as the #1 record in the country for an unprecedented thirty-seven weeks and the album remained on the charts for two solid years. Everyone who was anyone wanted to meet Michael Jackson. The matinee idols of his youth reached out to him from every direction. Fred Astaire wanted Michael to come over to the house and teach him the moonwalk. Elizabeth Taylor phoned to ask for tickets to his next concert appearance. Marlon Brando invited him to drop by for lunch.
The crazy velocity of it all kicked into a still higher gear in December 1983 when the “Thriller” video premiered. The project had been initiated when Michael saw the film An American Werewolf in London, then phoned the movie’s director John Landis to say, “I want to turn into a monster. Can I do that?” Landis brought makeup artist Rick Baker along to his first meeting with Michael and the two showed the star a big book of Hollywood creatures. Michael was frightened by the images, Landis would recall—“he hadn’t seen many horror films”—but nevertheless asked the director to write something that featured a combination werewolf–cat person character. CBS balked at the extravagant script for the video that Landis submitted. Nearly a year after its release, the Thriller album was beginning to slip down the charts and shooting from this script would cost a fortune. Landis persuaded Showtime and MTV to ante up the money for the video’s budget and began putting together his cast and crew.
MTV’s participation in the production was yet another triumph for Michael. Only a few months earlier, he had broken the young cable network’s de facto apartheid when MTV began playing his “Billie Jean” video, one of the first starring a black performer it had ever aired in
heavy rotation. Now MTV was cofinancing his new production. Along with Rick Baker, the creative team assembled by Landis included choreographer Michael Peters, composer Elmer Bernstein, and horror film veteran Vincent Price. Landis wanted Playboy centerfold Ola Ray to play Michael’s sexy, strutting date in the video, but knew he would have to run the idea by his star, who seemed confused when the director asked if it was okay to cast a centerfold in the part. “I don’t think he even knew what I was talking about,” recalled the director, who was amazed once again by Michael’s naïveté, but relieved to obtain his consent. The most difficult conversation Landis had with Michael came when the director explained a scene in which Michael asked Ray to go steady, then presented a ring, warning her, “I’m not like other guys.” Michael didn’t understand his dialogue was supposed to be a laugh line.
The premiere of the fourteen-minute “Thriller” video at the end of November 1983 was a Hollywood event that rivaled the release of the biggest budget theatrical film, with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, and Cher all in attendance. Made on a budget of about $500,000, “Thriller” became the highest selling music video ever, eventually shipping nine million copies, and continued to hold that position for the next quarter century. Music videos were never the same after its release and neither was MTV, which began to play more and more black performers. Sales of the Thriller album climbed again after the video’s release and Michael Jackson’s stardom seemed to have crossed some sort of cultural threshold. There had never been a success on the order of the one he was experiencing.
Untouchable Page 12