You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

by Jermaine Jackson

  By 1990, the family was aware of Michael’s condition and how distressing it was for him. You only have to imagine waking day by day to find increasing patches of blotchy pale skin to understand how traumatic that was for anyone, let alone someone so image-conscious. This was a time when he relied heavily on his ever-present makeup lady, Karen Faye, to cover the vitiligo that had spread to his face and neck. A spiritual soul with blonde hair and animated by a bubbly energy, Karen had first been assigned to Michael’s team some time around Thriller and she quickly evolved from a trusted professional to a true friend he affectionately nicknamed ‘Turkle’. Soon Karen’s wise words and comforting friendship proved as indispensible as her brushes and makeup.

  I know from Karen that she had first noticed pale patches on Michaels’ skin when she was with him on the ‘Say, Say, Say’ video in 1983. Back then, it was a simple case of colouring them in to match his dark skin tone but it reached the point where his condition left him with tufty patches of his natural colour. This meant that his skin without pigment predominated so Karen had to camouflage the dark areas by matching them to the lightest skin. Trying to keep a darker tone over his body when it had lost the majority of its dark pigment was impossible, especially when he sweated.

  These necessary cosmetics had everything to do with the appearance that he was lighter, and his heavier use of makeup was also, I suspect, the reason behind the cruel jibes that Michael was ‘a drag queen’. That saddened me because, for him, it was a necessary mask. When you understand how sensitive he was about his condition, you also understand how much he trusted Karen. It was invasive work but every professional choice she made was designed to give him freedom and confidence, and make him look like the star he was. And he equally relied on her keeping all her work confidential. Some members of his entourage, video directors and photographers, didn’t understand that Karen’s challenge was to keep Michael looking perfect and she couldn’t explain her actions because she was sworn to secrecy. So observers only saw an overly fussy makeup lady – one who sometimes inexplicably disappeared with her client. This was misconstrued: people decided she was competing as a woman for his attention. The truth was that she was working her butt off to keep him feeling safe and secure, ensuring none of his vitiligo was visible to anyone crowding near him.

  To make medical matters worse, Michael was also diagnosed with a mild form of the auto-immune disease lupus, which, when it flared, caused reddening blotches across his nose and cheeks. The vitiligo and the lupus together led doctors to advise him to stay out of the sun, which was why he started walking around with an umbrella on balmy California days. The saddest thing is that it took Michael’s death, via autopsy reports and doctors speaking out, to confirm everything he had said about his skin. He told the truth in 1993. It was finally believed in 2009.

  Thankfully, Oprah brought other truths to the world, too – from her own mouth, back at the time of that blockbuster interview. For me, what she observed about Neverland before any of the nonsense started to poison the true picture is significant. Just before the interview ended, she noted the movie theatre’s two hospital beds for sick children and said: ‘What I realised when I saw this is that you have to be a person who really cares about children to build it into your architecture.’

  And her overall experience of Neverland? ‘I loved being here because it made me feel like a child again,’ she said.

  AS MOST PEOPLE ARE AWARE, MY brother was as keen on preserving his privacy as he was his memories and it is widely assumed that, once away from Neverland, there was no escape from scrutiny. But he kept his small victories equally private and there was one other place on earth that the world never did find about.

  From the early nineties onwards, and when in L.A., Michael headed to Santa Monica Airport – but he didn’t go there to catch a plane: he went there to find refuge. As flight instructors took up student pilots in their Bonanzas, and different limos dropped off VIP clients at waiting Gulfstreams, one man in a baseball cap slipped between them and walked to an anonymous-looking hangar not far from the runway. Once Michael pulled down its giant shutter of a door, he was able to relax. This was his secret windowless bunker where no one could find him. And he didn’t come to this place to sing or dance, or rehearse: he went there to paint. It was an ‘art space’ found for him by Australian artist Brett Livingston-Strong – whom he’d commissioned to do some portraits. The two of them could disappear there for hours. Michael said this bolt-hole and ‘the therapy of art’ allowed him to ‘escape the craziness and take my mind off everything’.

  In 2011, the world finally found out about this secret refuge when Michael’s art work was first revealed. I don’t think anyone had, until then, appreciated what a superb artist he was, but he derived endless pleasure from experimenting with watercolours and pencil sketches. He even designed his own furniture – with the number ‘7’ detail. It is a priceless collection which Michael requested be kept at the hangar because of its anonymity and because most of that work was done under the tutelage of, or in collaboration with, Brett.

  I visited the hangar after Michael’s death. His art from across the years was still on display, unframed, surrounding the large worktops in the middle of the floor and the clutter of art materials in the corners. There must be upwards of 50 pieces. As I stood there and imagined him locking himself away, immersed in his work, all I could do was smile and think, Golly, you’ve come a long way from splashing paint on Diana Ross’s carpet.

  AS A FAMILY, WE KNEW MICHAEL reached out to befriend children and if you knew his heart like we did, the idea that we should have been concerned by this trait is ridiculous.

  I knew of two children Michael had invited into his life. Dave Rothenburg adopted the name ‘Dave Dave’ to sever all connection with his own father’s surname because, when he was six, his father had set ablaze his hotel room and the bed he was sleeping in, causing him 80-degree burns and leaving him scarred all over his face and body. As Dave Dave so eloquently said at my brother’s funeral: ‘Michael reached out to me, befriended me, and the first time we met, he hugged me – and he never stopped hugging me throughout my life as he continued to provide emotional support.’

  Then there was Ryan White, the boy from our home state of Indiana, who contracted AIDs from a blood transfusion and was first invited to Neverland in 1989. His mother Jeanne spent time at the estate before allowing her son to stay on his own for long weekends. Michael liked Ryan because he didn’t treat him like a pop star. Ryan liked Michael because he didn’t treat him like an AIDs victim. When Ryan got sick, my brother tended to him the way a true care-giver would. He was devastated when Ryan passed away in 1990. The song ‘Gone Too Soon’ was written in Ryan’s memory.

  But it wasn’t just sick children who stayed at Neverland. Michael liked being surrounded by his nieces and nephews; he kept gravitating towards child stars and that was how child actors Jimmy Safechuck, Emmanuel Lewis and Macaulay ‘Mac’ Culkin became friends; and then there was an Australian boy, Brett Barnes, and brothers Frank, Eddie and Angel Cascio, whom Michael bent over backwards to help financially in life. Michael just wanted to help any sick child and any child star struggling with the less happy sides of celebrity.

  He became particularly close to an Australian kid called Wade Robson. Michael went so far as to describe Wade, his sister Chantal and mother Joy as ‘my second family’ and he expressed this to them in writing. Over the years, there would be other surrogate families but I can only speak of his fondness for the Robsons. First, it was mother, daughter and son who visited and stayed at Neverland. Then, as Joy trusted what we all trusted, Wade was allowed to stay at the house on his own. This fact was always conveniently overlooked by the media: no child ever stayed at Neverland without their parents also being present, or without their parents first getting to know and trust my brother as the child’s guardian. Newspaper coverage always erased the parents, preferring to build the image of Michael having an isolated relationship with the bo
ys, as opposed to his all-embracing relationship with the families. Nobody ever mentioned that the families of Marlon Brando, Tommy Hilfiger, Chris Tucker, Kirk Douglas and the master of positive-thinking, Wayne Dyer, were also regular visitors but I guess it seemed more titillating to think of unchaperoned children as the only guests.

  The Robsons had met Michael in 1987 as his Bad Tour passed through Brisbane. Five-year-old Wade had won a contest to dance with him on stage – and he wowed the stadium. Michael was blown away and later said that watching Wade was ‘like looking in the mirror at myself all over again.’ All he wanted to do was harness this kid’s talent and make his dream come true, so to cut a long story short, he ended up moving the family to LA when Wade was seven. In that two-year gap, Michael had built a solid phone friendship with Joy, spending hours on long-distance calls. By the time they pitched up in California, they were not strangers. Michael then took Wade under his professional wing, putting him to work with his choreographers, Bruno ‘Poppin’ Taco’ Falcon and Michael ‘Boogaloo Shrimp’ Chambers, two guys whose invisible input was all over Michael’s routines, and especially the Moonwalk. Then, in an echo of our childhood in Gary, Michael sat with Wade for hours in front of the television watching dance videos, mentoring him and pointing out which moves to watch and what detail to note. The upshot was that Wade became a dance teacher aged 12 at Millennium Dance Complex, North Hollywood, where Michael held many of his by-invitation-only dance auditions. Four years later, he became choreographer to Britney Spears and then, later, to Justin Timberlake. A talent – spotted, harnessed and nurtured by Michael – passing down his teachings to Britney and Justin.

  Many parents saw Michael making a difference to their kids’ lives in so many positive ways, and not once did anyone see or sense anything untoward about leaving them in his company. There was a consensus in parental instinct. Every time. It wasn’t ‘allowing a young boy to sleep over at a house with a grown man’, it was entrusting a child to the responsible and tender care of Michael – the difference between an impersonal connotation and personal, cast-iron knowledge.

  In hindsight, there was always going to be a problem in an untrusting world that, by now, was becoming celebrity-obsessed. The more strangers you befriend with good faith, the more the odds shorten that, one day, someone will walk in, smell wealth and opportunity, and decide to take advantage. My brother’s trusting nature and, perhaps, naïvety wouldn’t discern that day coming.

  MICHAEL DESPERATELY WANTED TO BE A father and have children of his own, but he never stopped being consumed by work and the perfect woman hadn’t come along. But that didn’t stop him talking about wanting kids and he made no secret of his desire to have nine. That was the number he quoted, just as we had been nine.

  Both of us had mentioned having ‘lots and lots of children’ when we grew up. Maybe when you come from a large family, you want to repeat it. I don’t know. I just know that we love kids. Michael had an upstairs room at Neverland filled with a collection of porcelain dolls, dressed in velvet and lace dresses. I could never go in there because I didn’t want a million non-blinking doll faces in my dreams. As Mother said, ‘That’s one scary room with all those faces staring at you.’

  I think this room was more than just a collector’s prized possession. In my mind, it was a positive visualisation of what he wanted: a house full of children. His bedroom and games room were also busy with mannequins dressed in all sorts of fashions he admired and then there were his life-size superheroes like Superman, Darth Vader, Batman, R2-D2 and Roadrunner. I think at Neverland he missed being surrounded by people – having grown up in a full house – which was also why he invited relative strangers into his world, constantly building surrogate families for himself. I am also certain that he found echoes of his boyhood in the child friends who became his new ‘brothers’. Through them, he relived his own childhood after he had rebuilt his playground.

  People failed to understand that what Michael created for himself was a comfort blanket – it had no ulterior motive. Everything he surrounded himself with substituted something in his past. He wanted to be solitary yet struggled to sit with it and he was to struggle with it until the void was filled with a family of his own.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Body of Lies

  I REMEMBER 1993 MOSTLY FOR WHAT happened behind Michael’s back. It was the year when the dream lost control and everyone seemed powerless to stop it – or content to let it happen. From now on, there seemed to be schemers, plotters and planners everywhere, triggering a destructive chain of events that would affect my brother for the rest of his life. Outside his fan community, it was no longer about loving and appreciating Michael Jackson the entertainer; it seemed to be about the authorities and media ghoulishly anticipating his downfall.

  Not for a second did the family think that success could betray him in such a way. It wasn’t the kind of lesson we had been taught at Motown University and Michael wouldn’t understand the forces he was up against until he was staring the living nightmare in the face. We had spent our lives as the Jacksons trying to control our goals, strategy, image and music: we woke up one day to find all hell had broken loose. It’s at such moments you realise that, in life, you’re never in control. Only God is – and Michael’s unshakeable belief in Him would pull him through the biggest injustice I’ve ever seen.

  VENICE BEACH IS ONE OF THOSE laid-back towns I’ve always avoided because of its crowds. It’s a log-jammed tourist trap at weekends with its mime artists, psychics, performing dogs, rappers, musicians and dancers all taking their chance on the ocean-front boardwalk. One weekend, Wade Robson was one of those street performers, trying out his moves. He was about 10 and he, his sister and mother Joy were still regular guests at Neverland and had set up home in a condo in west LA. Michael had used Wade, with Macaulay Culkin, on his ‘Black and White’ video, but he was still an anonymous face in the crowd, especially in Venice Beach. There was no way anyone should have known who he was, let alone linked him with his mentor.

  Until, that is, some ‘freelance writer’ named Victor Gutierrez sidled up to his mother and explained that he was investigating Michael Jackson for ‘being a paedophile’. How did he know who she was? Joy took his business card and immediately phoned Michael’s office. It was early summer 1992 – a year before any formal allegation or police investigation – and a butterfly started to beat its wings near the beach.

  IF HE WERE STILL AROUND TODAY, Michael would tell you that he was wary about the people he engaged with. He only mentored, nursed or nurtured maybe 10 or 15 children over the years. And that, to him, was doing good deeds in the eyes of God. The more he reached out to help, the more he was practising what he’d been taught all his life. Michael was his mother’s son. We all are: each of us has been taught to see the good in everyone. Ever since Mother had invited fans to sit at her kitchen table while we were on tour as the Jackson 5, our artist-fan relationship has been finely balanced. Even at Hayvenhurst, we’d be seated at the dinner table when the bell would ring at the gate – ‘Hi, we’re visiting from Australia and we’re just here to see the family.’ Joseph would invite them to join us.

  We were probably the only family in Hollywood with an open-door policy and the irony was not lost on me: don’t let the outside world in when you’re working towards the dream, but let anyone in once the dream has been achieved. In our minds, we were still folk from Gary, with temporary citizenship of California. We never wanted to lose the common touch. As Mother always reminded us: ‘There would be no Jackson 5 and no Michael Jackson without the fans.’ With that in mind, maybe it’s easier to see why Michael wasn’t street-smart when it came to letting random people into his life.

  One day in May 1992, he was driving along Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and broke down. Fortunately, there was a Rent-A-Wreck nearby so he could hire a replacement car. The owner of the business was an elderly man named Dave Schwartz. He had a younger, attractive wife named June, and she had a son from
a previous marriage: 13-year-old Jordie Chandler. At first, everything seemed okay. It turned out that the kid was a huge fan of Michael’s – the boy was rushed to his step-father’s offices, with his sister Lily, before his idol left. Michael apparently spent no more than five minutes with them, but was told he wouldn’t have to pay for a car if he took Jordie’s telephone number. It would make the boy’s day if he called him sometime. Please. It would be a dream come true.

  The pressure on my brother was, apparently, polite but forceful, and he would have been sympathetic because at 13 he’d have done anything to meet Fred Astaire. So, he took the kid’s number, promised he’d call and was a man of his word.

  Somewhere along the line, he clearly felt comfortable enough to stay in contact. He called the mother and the boy over the next several months as he travelled. Before anyone knew it, they were part of his entourage and snatched press photos referred to them as ‘Jackson’s adopted family’. Such reports went over our heads, but one person was apparently really happy about it: the boy’s father, Dr Evan Chandler. He was a dentist who didn’t have custody of his son, and who harboured a dream to become a screen-writer. He’d already had one story idea picked up, which would evolve into the Mel Brooks’ movie Robin Hood: Men In Tights, but he wanted more. Only one thing stood between him and his Oscar: the money to fund that dream. But his son now appeared to be Michael Jackson’s new best friend and, as the dentist told his ex-wife – as we heard in court, many years later – the relationship was ‘a wonderful means for Jordie not having to worry for the rest of his life’.

  MICHAEL HAD INCREASINGLY SHUNNED contact with the outside world. Sadly, in consequence, he drifted away from the brothers again. We knew that he called Mother and asked about us, checking that we were okay, but I was unhappy that we had slipped back into lazy-communication mode.