You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

by Jermaine Jackson

  In six years, according to Joseph, we had recorded more than 400 songs at Motown and we released less than half that number. There is an untapped archive out there somewhere. I hadn’t been counting. All I knew was that it felt like thousands and thousands of hours spent in the studio, plus all that time on stage and travelling the world. It had given us the most fun, the most memorable and happiest times of our lives. If I could claim them back at an auction and relive them today, I would.

  THE WEEKS OF SEPARATION WERE – until June 2009 – the hardest of my life. The sense of detachment and loneliness was profound. I didn’t feel like I had lost my right arm; I felt like I had lost every limb. I had Hazel, of course, but the brotherhood was intrinsic to who I was and everything I knew. When it was ripped away, I felt something tear.

  What made it worse was that the brothers didn’t speak to me for six months of 1976. Only Mother maintained contact, via phone, reassuring me that I just needed to give everybody time. But it still felt like ex-communication, and I suspected Joseph was behind it because he stopped my weekly allowance and share of royalties – no doubt to teach me a lesson about family.

  Occasionally, the house phone rang and it was Joseph. ‘How are you doing, Jermaine? How you living? How you eating?’

  They were crazy questions, considering how well I was living, but I never took his taunts at face value. Deep down, Joseph was checking that I was okay and hiding it behind his hard front. At least, that was how I read it.

  Hazel said she watched me wander lost and aimless for the longest time, but it remains a blur to me. ‘Your depression was real bad,’ she says, assisting my memory today. ‘You just walked up and down the beach by yourself. You walked and cried, and there was nothing anyone could do to get you out of that hole. All I could do was hold your hand and let you cry.’

  I wish I could say that a bout of melancholy was the extent of the trauma, but it wasn’t. The stress made my hair fall out and I developed a bald spot bigger than a 50-pence piece on the top of my head. I went to see a dermatologist and an ‘emotions doctor’ and they both asked if there had been a recent trauma in my life. I must have found the only two specialists in Hollywood who didn’t read newspapers.

  But the fans didn’t miss a trick and they were quick to banish me. On several occasions, I had Jackson 5 fans approach me in public and say, ‘I don’t want your autograph. You left the group – you betrayed your brothers!’

  Let me tell you, when you’d known only adulation and praise, and you’d loved those fans back, that was a hard upper cut to the jaw. The upside to a dark period as an artist is that, sometimes, those moods can be translated into song and it was my first experience of loneliness that inspired me to write ‘Lonely Won’t Leave Me Alone’, released on my Precious Moments album in 1986. But I think the song that best speaks about this time and the years that followed is ‘I’m My Brother’s Keeper’. I turned over my hurt to that song, like one of those old diary pages that you wrote as a kid: ‘It’s been five years or more since we’ve sung our song/And I wonder why we took so long/Through all the pain and the tears that I cried/Our dream never died inside …’ All I can say is YouTube it. It will always be the song that reminds me of the Jackson 5 split.

  ONE AFTERNOON, HAZEL DECIDED TO GET me out of the house and take me shopping down Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills. While out, we bumped into Barry White’s right-hand man Gene Page – the composer and producer whose deft touch and arrangements underpin most of Barry’s pillow-talking songs. That evening, Barry was having a party and Gene invited us along. It would be one of the most meaningful introductions of my life.

  Barry lived in Sherman Oaks and his vast garden – all dense and tropical with a stunning waterfall – was filled with guests and industry names. Barry, a smile as big as his girth, greeted us at the door and stayed with us the whole evening, sitting in the library. We became friends for life, and I was at his side in his final days.

  He was a wonderful man with the biggest heart, and so wise. He knew what it took to reach into the souls of people with his lyrics and in time, we would share a passion for motor homes, horses and sitting up late to watch The Ten Commandments over and over. We watched that classic so many times that we knew the script backwards.

  Barry’s advice about my own minuscule moment in history was invaluable. I lost count of the hours that I bored him with my dilemma, even after the decision was made. ‘This is a test of character,’ he said, ‘standing up for what we believe in. You’re good-hearted, J,’ he added, ‘so follow that heart. You have my support and your brothers will come around. There is family and there is business – don’t confuse the two.’

  Barry’s advice ultimately came good. By the end of 1976, I was invited back into the family fold and the subject was, typically, rarely discussed. I think both sides realised that we could have handled matters better, but we put our artistic politics to one side for the sake of family.

  Being a constant visitor to Hayvenhurst again made me realise that although things could change around us, nothing altered between us. We even found room to laugh. Michael would play a demo of the Jacksons and I’d listen intently, looking all serious. ‘It’s good … There’s just one thing that’s missing,’ I’d say.

  ‘What? What you think it needs?’

  ‘My voice.’ Only part of me was joking. My sense of detachment was vocal, too.

  MICHAEL LOVED LIFE AT THE BEACH and at the ranch. He stood in the tranquillity of Hidden Valley and in the ocean breeze of Malibu, and said the same thing in both: ‘Never sell this place.’ The secluded privacy of those locations appealed to him. That was presumably what appealed to my neighbours, too: actors Ryan O’Neal (four doors down) and Beau Bridges (directly next door). It was during my morning runs on the beach that I used to wave at Ryan’s daughter, Tatum, as she stood on the balcony. She was a 13-year-old child star at the time, having won an Oscar at the age of 10 for Best Supporting Actress in Paper Moon. I told Michael there was ‘this real pretty girl’ living nearby and, coincidentally, he started showing up at the beach house more and more at weekends. But here’s the ironic thing: they waved at each other but never spoke until they bumped into one another in a club on Sunset Strip.

  ‘It‘s meant to be,’ I joked.

  ‘It’s nothing, we’re just friends,’ he said, playing down its importance. But it was obvious from Tatum’s visits to Hayvenhurst that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. She was clearly smitten and he was giddy around her, but Michael was always guarded about when and where he saw her. I don’t remember one visit to Malibu when he left my house to see her, or they met on the beach. Which seemed odd, but Michael’s sense of privacy and discretion, even among his siblings, was notable.

  I am aware that Tatum has publicly distanced herself from being Michael’s childhood sweetheart, but I don’t think my brother ever suggested that they shared a blazing, passionate love affair. It was nothing but puppy love. But what matters is that, in my brother’s heart and mind, Tatum was his first girlfriend.

  ON AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY 1977, MICHAEL was with me at the Malibu house to enjoy Hazel’s barbecue. As she prepared the sunset feast, he decided to go splash about in the ocean. I watched him from the balcony – he had the beach to himself – sprinting down the slope in his shorts and jumping into the breaking waves. Hazel asked me to help her with something in the kitchen. I ignored her. I was too busy watching Michael as the sun started to drop. Something told me to keep my eyes on him, out there in the fading light, in the surf by himself, about five houses down.

  I saw the waves and then his bobbing head … the waves … his bobbing head. He looked like a seal. Fireworks started shooting into the sky from somewhere around Malibu Pier but I kept my eyes on Michael.

  Wait. Where is he?

  The sunset sky flared with flashes of white, and started popping.

  I can’t see him. I can’t see him.

  And then I was running, barefooted, down the steps, towards the o
cean, screaming his name. I caught him staggering on rubber legs in knee-deep water. He was gasping for air, shallow, rapid breathing. I got him out of the water and onto the sand.

  I helped him up the steps from the beach and got him, dripping wet, into the passenger seat of the Mercedes before breaking the land-speed record on the Pacific Coast Highway, bound for the Malibu Emergency Hospital. I wove in and out of the traffic, foot to the floor. Beside me, Michael said nothing, pinned to the seat, grey-faced.

  At the hospital, it turned out that he had pleurisy. After a few hours, he was discharged and I drove him back to my place.

  ‘That was the most frightening journey ever,’ said Michael, as we headed home.

  ‘Yeah, you had me worried, too,’ I said.

  ‘No, Erms!’ he said. ‘Your driving! It was scarier than being in the water!’

  I TURNED UP AT HAYVENHURST ONE day to find Muhammad Ali in the kitchen, the proudest black man in America sitting with Michael and Mother. The brothers had met him backstage at an all-stars event in his honour in 1975, and so began a happy association with the family, especially Michael. Ali was the sweetest, friendliest of men, like one of those playful uncles you can’t wait to visit. Every time he saw us, the first thing he did was skip and bounce around the living room, ducking and diving. Then, he made one of those faces he used to put up against Joe Frazier: all good-looking, eyes big, biting the lip, slight nod. He looked us straight in the eye and jabbed at the space either side of our ears. Before he knew it, one of us was shadow-boxing with him. His aura was shy but magnetic, his presence strong but kind. There was not a hint of ‘celebrity’. The Ali you saw jousting and joking on television was the Ali who visited our house.

  He spoke so fast and enthusiastically that his passion was contagious. The poetic lines he gave to the media he threw into natural conversation. He spoke in soundbites. His speech had such rhythm that, if you’d put music to it, he could have been America’s first rapper. He said life was a mind-game. No one steps into the ring without a strategy, he said, and we each have an equal shot at greatness. Black or white. Rich or poor. ‘Tell yourselves every day that you’re the best, you’re the greatest, no one can beat you. Tell yourselves that you are going to be out of this world,’ he said. ‘Be the greatest. Become it. Believe it.’ This was Ali putting steel girders behind everything our parents had taught us.

  Michael loved Ali because of his shared passion for magic. We were outside in the garden once – the photographer Howard Bingham was there – and Ali made us stand back as he stood side on at an angle. Then he was hovering on an inch of air. Floating like a butterfly.

  ‘Do it again! Do it again!’ Michael yelled, not taking his eyes off the footwork. Ali did it again. ‘How you do that, man?’

  ‘Lots of concentration, lots of magic!’ he said.

  Soon enough, Ali would pass down the art of levitation when my brother visited his beautiful house in Hancock Park. Michael returned from his first visit raving about the blown-up photos of Ali’s bouts, and the belts framed on the walls. Michael went there to learn magic and practise different tricks. Their magic entertained them both for hours, but I know my brother also learned much more about Ali’s philosophies on life, religion, his love of music – Jackie Wilson and Little Richard – and what it took to be a showman.

  In later life, I would visit his house for a different reason: his third wife, Veronica Porsche, and I started taking acting lessons at the Milton Katselas School of Acting in Beverly Hills, twice a week. It was all part of my long-term wish to be a movie director, and hers to act. She always arrived immaculately dressed for the wonderful monologues she would deliver. And what surprised me most was that she brought her own props. Not in a bag, but a truck. If ever I doubted her zeal to succeed, it ended when a truck pulled up outside the playhouse and a guy started unloading couches, chairs, tables and lamps. It was quite something to see the greatest showman’s wife throwing everything she had at this opportunity.

  Meanwhile, Ali’s admiration of Malcolm X intrigued Michael. In fact, it intrigued all of us, especially our school friend John McClain and me, because we were the most militant at that time. Motown had asked us never to speak in public about how Malcolm X went up against prejudice – questions about ‘black power’ were off limits – but we privately saluted his fight for black justice. I’ll never forget a rare television interview Ali did with the brothers in 1977 when he spoke about his recent visit to the White House. ‘The pictures I saw on the wall left me with one impression: it’s the White House. It is the white White House,’ he said, before he corrected himself and added, ‘Oh, I saw a black cook!’ One day, Ali added, they might allow a black man to be something more than a servant there.

  Ali was a committed and campaigning Muslim, and he introduced the topic of the Nation of Islam into our lives. In the same way that Michael had been interested in Rose Fine’s Jewish faith, he was also keen to explore Ali’s beliefs, which led him to read about Malcolm X, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and the Nation of Islam (NOI). He shared his mentor’s admiration of the NOI’s spirit of harmony, love and peace.

  Michael looked up to Ali as a personal and professional role model, but I doubt he ever appreciated how much the admiration was mutual. In the year after my brother’s death, Ali paid tribute to him. He was asked where he got his strength from to fight Parkinson’s syndrome and he said: ‘When people ask me, I tell them that I look at the man Michael Jackson looks at when he looks at the man in the mirror.’

  I think back to five-year-old Michael shadow-boxing with Marlon in our living room in Gary as Ali floored Sonny Liston and wish I could travel back in time to tell the young Michael that one day he’d be shadow-boxing with Ali in person, learning magic, self-belief and courage – and inspiring him with his music. ‘Destiny,’ I would say. ‘This is your destiny – and it’s only the start.’

  ‘WHAT IN THE HELL HAPPENED TO you?’ I said to Michael, when I walked through the doors of Hayvenhurst one afternoon and saw his nose and cheeks covered with bandages. It looked like he’d gone 10 rounds with Ali: Michael seemed sheepish and the look Mother shot me suggested my question was insensitive.

  He had slipped and fallen near the bar in the living room, I was told. Broken his nose. Everything was fine. I don’t doubt that he had fallen but the consequent rhinoplasty led to the start of several phases of plastic surgery over the years, which the world seemed to obsess about it. Just as my brother kept his acne trauma to himself, he kept his surgery private, too. It was none of my business, yet people still expect his siblings to point out every stitch and scar with a time, date and place. Maybe some families are that intimate about each other’s medical knowledge, but not ours. But even when I found out that he’d had a nose job, it didn’t surprise me. It’s hard to be surprised by something that is commonplace in Hollywood. The town merely mirrored our upbringing: image is everything. Besides, I understood Michael’s need for surgery because the size of his nose had made him miserable for so long. What I never understood were those wild suggestions that he had plastic surgery because he wanted ‘to do anything not to look like Joseph’. I shared a mirror with Michael for many years and his face adorned countless magazine covers. How anyone can think he resembled our father is lost on me.

  The main thing was that Michael’s surgery made him feel better about himself and, between now and his solo career, he would have surgeries that gave him a slimmer nose and a chiselled chin. Personally, I couldn’t see what all the media fuss was about.

  OUR SPLIT AS THE JACKSON 5 was a catalyst for change, and I think the Jacksons era was a transition phase for Michael, between him holding on to the security of the group and deciding to let go. Looking back, his immense talent was only ever biding its time, waiting for its perfect moment. When CBS Records placed the brothers with writer-producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, they honed and polished the knowledge Michael had amassed at Motown. Michael said he learne
d more and more about a song’s anatomy.

  The Gamble-Huff combo had orchestrated what was known as the Philly International Sound. This soul-funk – heavy on the strings and big on the beats – was, in their words, ‘the leaf that blew over from Detroit and landed in Philly’. If you know Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’, Billy Paul’s ‘Me & Mrs Jones’ or MacFadden and Whitehead’s ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’, you’ve listened to their calibre.

  So my brothers headed east to make music in Philadelphia, not far from Motown’s roots. In this more collaborative environment, Michael and the brothers flourished as songwriters and producers, and they released some great pop music. Their first two albums didn’t take off, continuing the struggle we had experienced together. The change in fortunes came with their third album, Destiny, which moved away from the Philly sound and was a group collaboration, written by the brothers themselves. It went double-platinum, vindicating their long-time wish for creative autonomy. The album yielded hit singles: ‘Enjoy Yourself’ which went to No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100, ‘Show You The Way To Go’, their first UK No. 1 and ‘Shake Your Body’, which went to No. 7 in the US and sold over two million copies. ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ – a cover of a song first released by an Englishman called, ironically, Mick Jackson – also charted, and found its Top 10 audience in the UK.