You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

by Jermaine Jackson

  Long story short, when Michael heard about it, he refused to tour for as long as Don remained in charge. ‘He’s a crook,’ he said, ‘and we don’t work with crooks.’

  Joseph had to intervene to stop him quitting. ‘That is what the press does to folk,’ he said. ‘We’ve come too far for you to back out now. Don’s been working 24/7 to make this a success: don’t punish the man.’

  Michael went away to think about it and word eventually came back that he’d continue with the tour, but that one revelation changed everything within his team and the other brothers’. Don received a legal letter forbidding him to conduct business or communicate with anyone on the brothers’ behalf.

  Eventually, one month before the start of the tour, a fourth co-promoter was brought in to balance the picture and take more control. Chuck Sullivan, the owner of the New England Patriots, arrived: he had impressive pull with different stadiums around America. Effectively, his appointment reduced Don, Joseph and Mother to figurehead roles, but Don remained defiant. ‘If you want to take this tour away from me, you’ll have to pay me,’ he said. So they did. He received a diminished role and three per cent of profits.

  EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED AND YET NOTHING had changed. The moment we launched into full-on rehearsal, our onstage camaraderie returned like an old friend, with the timely reassurance that everything was going to work out just fine. The difference between brothers performing as One and legal teams looking for conflict was like night and day. We had never toured with the crew around us, yet everything about our strange environment felt familiar. The passage of time hadn’t affected the nucleus of our bond. Throw us into a new arena and throw anything at us, we could still bring it.

  We set up the full stage at Zoetrope Studios – the Hollywood rehearsal space owned by movie director Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed Michael’s Disney movie, Captain Eo. Those rehearsals were invigorating because the more we ran through the set, the more excited we became. Michael was like the rest of us: he coasted, running through the motions at 50 per cent. He always saved his 1,000 per cent for the stage.

  But what he also did, as he would with every tour, was go home and practise his dancing alone. Each intricate move had to be perfect and he’d push his body until it could take no more. He would run through agreed steps during rehearsals, then work towards perfection at home, repeating a move over and over … and over. He told me that sometimes he was so tired he could barely lift his legs to climb the outside spiral staircase to his quarters.

  At Neverland he had a dancing room, with wooden floors and mirrors all around. You could actually see the swirls ingrained in the floor from where he had been pivoting and spinning. His dance always left its own indelible mark.

  AS WE ARRIVED IN KANSAS CITY for the tour’s opening in the July, the digging for dirt turned away from Don King to Michael. Journalists were hunting for anything and one persistently false rumour wouldn’t go away: that our brother was homosexual. This claim first arose in the seventies when some magazine ran a scurrilous story suggesting he was competing with a woman for the love of a male songwriter. It was nonsense then, and remained so throughout Michael’s life but by the middle of 1984, he was tired of hearing the same old echo in reporters’ questions or reading the sly innuendo in print.

  He knew how the media worked it. Ask if Michael’s an alien, he’ll deny it. Cue the headline: ‘MICHAEL DENIES HE’S AN ALIEN!’ Ask him if he’s gay, he’ll deny it. ‘MICHAEL DENIES HE’S GAY’. Then everyone would wonder why he was denying whatever it was.

  Michael’s life would become mapped by headlines. That was why he chose to say nothing in the end and hoped his music would transcend everything and speak for him. But back then, in Kansas, one reporter asked if he had any reaction to reports that he was gay. Michael batted it away, saying he was not a homosexual but wondered why people were so fixed on attaching labels. ‘We’re all humans. What’s the big deal?’ he asked.

  It wasn’t emphatic enough. The press started to read between the lines of what he’d meant by ‘What’s the big deal?’, not understanding that Michael was trying to strike a balance between a denial and supporting the gay community. He couldn’t win.

  To me, the whole debate about his sexual orientation was preposterous. I think people misinterpreted the fact he was a workaholic. People saw an unmarried man with a penchant for makeup, child-like things, with no facial hair, and an attachment to a chimpanzee, then filled in the blanks. Michael was also unafraid of displaying his creative feminine side and his voice tended to fit society’s stereotype of what a gay man sounds like. But none of us in the family have heavy voices and I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such ridicule. When I first started driving in LA, I was pulled over by a police car. When the male officer heard my voice, he laughed, turned to his female colleague and said, ‘Who’s going to search her?’

  Michael always said, ‘My wife is my music and I’m married to my craft’ – and that was why he achieved greatness. But he was also a devout Jehovah’s Witness who lived his life in accordance with the Bible. Because of his religion, he was a lot more restrained than his brothers. Michael longed to know what a full and intimate relationship felt like. After Thriller, he seemed to be eternally waiting for that elusive lady to walk into his life, someone he could trust, and someone he knew was there to be with him and not ‘Michael Jackson’; to be in love with him and not in love with the idea of him.

  My brother was a kid at heart and he wanted to find that in a woman, too. Michael’s heart wasn’t about intensity, passion and drama. It was about playfulness, water-pistol fights, comic books and movie nights. It was about sharing his humanitarian dreams, visiting hospitals and looking at life through a child’s eyes. This was his field of diminishing returns when it came to looking for his ideal woman. Until that ‘match’ came along, he would struggle to let anyone in.

  SOON ENOUGH, THE TERM ‘WACKO JACKO’ would be coined by the Sun newspaper in London. It was a nickname Michael found offensive and was the consequence of a public-relations strategy to plant weird and wonderful stories about him. Michael always insisted he knew nothing about this PR sleight-of-hand and I can believe that. His Motown training was the promotion of artist and music, nothing else.

  The first story ran in the National Enquirer with a photo showing Michael seemingly asleep in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber under the headline ‘MICHAEL JACKSON’S SECRET PLAN TO LIVE TO 150’. It was a genuine photo. This chamber was used by burns patients at the Brotman Memorial Hospital and Michael couldn’t resist posing inside it during one of his visits. Not because it was part of his treatment but because it looked space-age and he wanted a quick, fun photo. He lay inside for a matter of seconds with his eyes closed and hands across his chest. It ran in the Enquirer, which printed quotes from ‘close friends’, who said he planned to buy one to sleep in to stop the ageing process. Extraordinarily, people believed it. I lost count over the years of how many times I was asked: ‘Is it true your brother sleeps in an oxygen tank?’ I wanted to say, ‘My brother doesn’t like sleeping in a bed, let alone a tank!’

  The second story was so outlandish that it doesn’t deserve an explanation: Michael was intending to buy the Elephant Man’s bones, with supporting, on-the-record quotes from manager Frank Dileo. Again, people believed it. Or did they just choose to believe it because everyone needs to feel comforted that genius does not come without eccentricity? I never could figure it out. As his family, we read these reports and never gave them a second thought, but when Mother found out that Frank Dileo was behind the silliness, she challenged him. ‘You shouldn’t be spreading stuff like this,’ she told him. ‘It makes my son look like an idiot.’

  Frank apparently wasn’t worried. ‘It makes people wonder about him and this is what we want.’

  Was this a misguided strategy to build mystique? I never did understand the team’s thinking. It treated Michael like some kind of wannabe who needed his profile raised when the Thril
ler album had already done all the talking. Such reports led to Michael being ridiculed and that seemed like a travesty when his only intention in life was to be treated as a serious artist. The people around him should have known better, because that kind of transaction with the press is always dangerous.

  Michael wasn’t prepared for the seemingly daily assault that paraded him not just as ‘wacko’ but as a ‘weirdo’ and a ‘freak’. And his plastic surgery, together with innocent interactions with animals and children, would add to the twisted portrayal. Eventually he wrote an open letter to the press, expressing how hurt he was by the lies coming from people who didn’t even know him. He quoted an old Indian proverb: ‘Do not judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.’

  But his best response would come in 1996, via the eloquence of one of his short-film videos for his single ‘Ghosts’ – a video co-scripted by novelist Stephen King, which broke the record for the longest-running music video ever made at 39 minutes 31 seconds. In it, he played himself as the owner of a haunted house behind Neverland-style gates in ‘Normal Valley’. He also wore a fat suit to play his arch nemesis: a white, middle-aged mayor, with grey hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, who was vowing to drive him out of town.

  The dialogue in the video’s opening sequence mirrors how Michael felt he was viewed and treated. It carried a serious message while poking fun at people’s judgements of him. YouTube it and you’ll see Michael, in character, acting out what people said about him as he speaks the lines of the middle-aged man who’d led a group of concerned parents, with children in tow, to his house. For ‘Normal Valley’, read Santa Ynez, California – and Media Land. ‘We want you outta this town. We’re a nice normal town. Normal people. Normal kids. We don’t need freaks like you telling ghost stories … You’re weird … you’re strange, and I do not like you … The fun’s over … go back to the circus you freak … Don’t force us to get rough with you, because we will if we have to …’ Then watch Michael’s reaction as he plays himself, expressing both his calm and his pent-up anger before using his magic to silence every adult who projected their warped thinking on to him.

  For me, that opening sequence is Michael venting his feelings through music. I remember his disguise vividly because, during a break in filming, he dropped by Hayvenhurst still in character, still wearing the fat suit, looking like a middle-aged white man with his grey wig and latex face. When he walked in, I instantly knew it was him because he winked at me but, beyond that, he was unrecognisable. Our cousin Tony Whitehead, who was carrying a book under his arm, was with me and he thought this ‘stranger’ was just another visitor. Michael decided to have some fun: he always liked a good laugh with Tony, who joined his tour crew as a carpenter and familiar face from 1988 onwards. So, Michael walked up to him, in character, as a white man, and said, ‘Hey, why do you have a book? Niggers don’t read!’

  Tony, thick-set and big-necked, not someone you’d choose to confront, couldn’t believe what he’d heard. ‘What did you just say?’ he said, standing over Michael, ready to clock him.

  ‘Tony! TONY!’ he screamed. ‘It’s ME! IT’S ME!’

  Our cousin stared into my brother’s eyes, trying to find the person he knew. ‘IT’S ME – MICHAEL!’ And that was when Tony stood down and we all fell about laughing.

  IN THAT FINAL MONTH BEFORE THE tour opening, attorneys seemed to argue and vote about every tiny detail, from how many tour dates (40 or 45) to the tour’s routing schedule; from this idea to that fee, from ‘we want this’ to ‘we want that’, from this cost to that ticket price. It was draining. Watching them feed different advice into different brothers’ heads was painful, and I could see it sucking the energy out of Michael. Tour-weary before the tour had even begun. But I’ll say this about him: as much as it drove him mad, he never once shirked a meeting or ducked out of a conference call.

  At one meeting, where another tiresome debate was going on, everyone was chipping in their two cents’ worth when I saw Michael mentally retreat and block out the noise. He leaned back in his chair and began scribbling; he was drawing Charlie Chaplin. Suddenly he looked like a kid killing time while the grown-ups argued around him – and it seemed the smartest escape. We were all brothers thinking the same thing by the end: we just wanted to escape the politics and get out onstage. Become what we knew best. Be all that we loved. As Michael said in his autobiography: ‘The tour was like: we’re a mountain. We’ve come to share our music with you. We have something we want to tell you.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Reunion Party

  THE ULTIMATE REWARD COMES ALWAYS AND only via the stage. Politics fade out and pale into insignificance the moment you hear the muffled roar of a capacity crowd from beneath a stadium. For any performance artist, it’s this moment that provides the purpose of living: the sweet taste of victory that we relive and chase ever afterwards. As kids, I don’t know how much of the Jackson 5 years, when we were packing out stadiums, we’d truly savoured but second time around, we were determined to soak up and capture every second and sensation. Tito said it at the outset: ‘It’s going to be the tour we never want to end.’

  The omens had started to look good when we were kerb-side at Kansas City airport, ahead of our first concert. This happy-looking guy was helping load our bags into one of the vans when he said: ‘Remember me?’

  I stared at him. ‘Wesley?’

  It was the catcher I’d collided with that day playing for Katz Kittens in Gary. What a small world we lived in. We compared the scars we still carried above our eyes. ‘That collision ended our baseball career,’ I said. ‘Not sure Jackie’s forgiven you!’

  ‘You guys don’t seem to have done too badly.’ He winked. Everything about 1984 would be tinged with that kind of nostalgia. Memories would be everywhere. Even below the stage: we’d ensured there was a disco club there for crew and friends, and called it Mr Lucky’s.

  Come opening night, we had massive support from everyone we knew in the industry and Michael boasted about one particular telegram he’d received from Marlon Brando. The line I remember ran, ‘MICHAEL – DON’T MAKE AN ASS OF YOURSELF AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T FALL IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT – MARLON’.

  Backstage, as 45,000 people packed into Arrowhead Stadium, we formed a huddle just like we used to, stacked our hands in the middle and then heard that growing sound: ‘JACKSONS! JACKSONS! JACKSONS!’

  The stage was monster – something like four storeys high, 150 feet wide and weighing 350 tons. But the crowd saw nothing up there at first, except a stone boulder with a protruding sword and two giant images of an oak tree at either side of the stage. There was no set. No instruments. No band. Michael wanted everything hidden at first, and then a city would rise out of nowhere, triggered by Randy, dressed as a knight, pulling the sword from the stone to slay alien-like Cretons. Then the sword glowed and sparkled, the stadium went dark and Randy dashed to join us below as we took our positions and lined up as five, standing on a flight of steps. Facing out, it was me on bass far left, Randy, Michael in the middle, Marlon, and Tito on guitar, all wearing our Aviators and standing slightly stooped to keep our heads below stage level.

  ‘Arise, world, and behold the protection of the kingdom!’ declared a booming voice over the speakers.

  We heard the screams of old; we sensed a familiar euphoria.

  ‘You all ready?’ said Michael, leaning forward.

  ‘Let’s tear this place UP!’ shouted Marlon, echoed by Randy.

  Giant floodlights beamed outwards, bathing the entire stadium in light as we started to rise, five silhouettes, statuesque. Only my eyes moved behind the shades – I couldn’t help but suck up the exhilaration at seeing a sea of people, hands in the air, with banners and signs that read: ‘We (heart) You Michael!’ or ‘J5’ or ‘Jacksons = Victory’. We were standing there for the longest time. Let ’em wait, said Michael. Build the anticipation. Send ’em crazy. On this, his first stepping out since Thriller, he knew he held t
he threads to 45,000 people’s emotions.

  We took slow, deliberate footsteps down the stairway in sync and each step lit up as we did so. At the bottom we waited, then raised our hands in sync to remove our sunglasses as the lights swivelled and turned on us. Then Michael gave his cue – a jab of his sequin-gloved hand. Cue the beat into ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Something’. In a 15-song set, we performed a Jackson 5 medley, Michael sent them wild with hits like ‘Human Nature’ and ‘Billie Jean’, and we performed our duet ‘Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming’ at the end of my solo set, which included ‘Let’s Get Serious’, before Michael gave ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Beat It’.

  For the first time in years, I was in musical heaven. If Motown 25 had been the reigniting of old magic, this was its explosion. And as much as the press would throw more crap at Michael, he had only to step out on stage to know where the love was. ‘MICHAEL! MICHAEL! MICHAEL!’ they chanted. I watched him watching them – a crowd aged from five to 70. Saluting them, blowing kisses, disbelieving it. Wearing the biggest smile on his face.

  Anyone who says – as many have – that ‘Victory’ was a miserable experience for him doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about. There was always a world of difference between the business and the show for Michael, and it was this kind of love that expunged the frustration that had preceded the tour. It was a buzz that would sustain us across five months, 47 American and eight Canadian cities. You ask any of the brothers today what the best time of their lives was, and I’m pretty sure they’ll each say, ‘Victory.’ Half the time, we just wanted to shut ourselves away as brothers because when it was just the six of us – with no one whispering divisive advice in our ears – we were in sync.