Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (35 page)

The second snag was that . . . Oh, how should I break this to him in terms he could understand? Well, how about this: Tito, you may find this hard to believe, but nobody in the entire world gives a rat’s ass about the Jacksons – plural – any more. It’s over. In effect, since the release of Michael’s
Off the Wall
, it’s just John Lennon and His Four Ringos, and you, my ageing bro, have the biggest nose of them all. But of course Tito Jackson didn’t need to be told that. He and Jackson 5 plc knew it only too well; hence his clumsy attempt to chop his kid brother off at the knees before his arrival could reduce his once-acclaimed siblings to mere shadows. This barely concealed panic at Michael’s staggering talent and runaway success was to become the overriding theme of the meeting. But let us first get him into the room.

Michael Jackson arrived last, accompanied by his sister Janet. At that point, the world hadn’t heard of Janet Jackson and at first I thought she might be his PA. She showed him to a chair and then, taking the seat next to him, appeared to run through an elaborate itinerary in barely a whisper.

At this point in his life Jacko was still recognizably human. He was still clearly a black guy and not the eerie wraith we later learned to gawp at. However, he was plainly not about to crack open a beer and ask about the sports scores either. He wore the most enormous mirrored dark glasses and, once seated – and this really threw me – picked up a phone and held it to his ear.

‘Should I wait until he’s through?’ I said to Janet.

‘Oh no, he’s not talking to anybody,’ she replied with a smile, ‘it’s just something he feels comfortable with.’ And she giggled a little giggle. And Michael giggled a little giggle. And the brothers slumped back in their chairs, scowling. ‘Also,’ she went on, ‘any questions for Michael? Could you ask them to me and I’ll get your answer for you.’

This was too much. ‘What, he can’t just answer me himself?’ I shot back at her.

‘Oh, he will eventually, he just has to feel comfortable with everything first,’ she replied calmly.

‘But he’s only sitting four feet away,’ I pointed out and, regrettably, we lapsed into bickering. Meantime, Tito, Randy, Grumpy and Sneezy were all saying, ‘Hell. What’s wrong with us? We’re here too, you can ask us anything you like!’ At this point I suddenly realized we were all talking over and around Michael Jackson as though, well, as though he wasn’t really there at all.

An Epic USA press officer entered and asked if everything was OK. Janet told her with a light laugh that I had a problem adjusting to Michael’s ‘ways’. So I was asked to step outside and the PO gave me a little talk:

‘Danny, Michael is a very individual individual. It is important to understand that. It has taken us a long time to get him to where he is now. Now, he will speak to you, but you must let him judge that moment. Actually, I’m glad we have this time because I didn’t get a chance to tell you what he regards as off limits for this interview . . .’

Oh brother, this was getting better and better.
Individual individual
?
Where he is now
? What on earth did any of that mean? It is important to understand that, at this point in the early 1980s, although Jackson was already one of the biggest pop stars in the world, the words ‘Wacko’ and ‘Jacko’ had never been heard in tandem. Nobody knew he was crazy yet. At least, nobody much outside the people gathered in and around that room. I certainly didn’t. I had brought a notepad full of what I thought would be relevant questions on the state of black music and black culture in America today. Now I was starting to sense that I might as well have been addressing them to Bob Hope.

So, what was ‘off limits’?

‘OK now,’ she continued. ‘Firstly, no swear words. Secondly, Michael is a devout Jehovah’s Witness, so no talk about birthdays and Christmas.’ I ask you to picture my face at this point. ‘Lastly,’ she went on, ‘he will under no circumstances be drawn on what he thinks of the Osmonds. Are we cool with that?’

The
Osmonds
? The Osmonds hadn’t had a hit in ten years. This man had just finished
Thriller
. Good God, where was this kid’s mind at? And now, of course, suddenly all I wanted to ask about was the Osmonds. Anyway, back in I went.

Michael remained serene and glued to his phone and, if I wanted him to respond to anything, it seemed the only way was to ask him things like ‘Who’s your favourite actor, Michael?’ To which Janet would whisper, ‘He wants to know who your favourite actor is.’ Then Michael would mutter ‘Robert De Niro’ to Janet and then Janet would say ‘Robert De Niro’ to me.

Was I confused? Intimidated? Freaked out a little? No, I was loving it. I was an
NME
writer and I was getting plenty here.

I also noticed that when the brothers answered questions, they wouldn’t talk to me. They would talk, bellow even, at Michael. It was as if this was a rare get-together and they were using it as a surrogate therapy session. They had plenty they wanted to get off their chests before he disappeared into another level of fame altogether. For example, when I asked what it was like in the days before the Jackson 5 were famous, one of them, let’s say Marlon, said: ‘Oh, see, that’s something Michael wouldn’t remember. We were on the road three hundred and sixty-five days a year back then. We had no help, no crew. Tito, Jackie and me, we had to haul the drums, the microphones, everything ourselves. Set it all up, take it all down, move on to the next town. Seven shows a week, man. Michael – he’d be asleep in the bus, man. Just come on, sing and dance, then be too small to do the real dirty work.’

When I enquired about what sort of music they started out playing, I got: ‘I remember we had this one Joe Tex song, “Skinny Legs and All” – it was Michael’s job to run out in the crowd and lift up all the girls’ skirts during that. He don’t remember those days.’ The siblings all broke up at this. Michael didn’t and seemed uneasy. ‘Oh please, don’t say that. I’m so embarrassed by that now. I would never dream of . . .’ They wouldn’t let him off the hook. ‘Embarrassed? Damn it, Michael, that was your favourite part of the show!’ More laughing.

Addressing the subject of Michael’s success, I received the following heart-warming response: ‘Well, his sales are good for us because people who buy one of his records will probably look in the section behind and get one of ours too.’ All the time Michael looked as though he would rather be somewhere else. I really started to feel for him.

Small slips got pounced on. Here he is on the opening track he’d written for the latest, and as it turned out last, album with his brothers: ‘Well, I wrote that opening track in that way . . . because I thought it would make a good opening track.’ There was a pause and then Tito, with some justification, said: ‘Oh, great answer, Michael.’ More laughter and Michael became further detached from proceedings.

Later, when most of the others had left and there was only him and me, he became a different person. Well, more animated anyway, although, sadly, just as trite. The peacock on their new album sleeve represented ‘colours coming together’. He didn’t feel there was such a thing as black music and was happy for Blondie to have hits with rap songs because they knew how to ‘cross over’. He considered what he did neither rock nor soul, but simply show business. Benny Hill was a genius. The Sex Pistols were cool because Sid Vicious was a funny name. He asked where I went to have fun in London. Often his thoughts would peter out mid-sentence, as if he had caught the sound of his own voice and had no confidence in it. Incredibly, it seemed that Michael Jackson just wasn’t used to being listened to.

At the time I wrote that Jackson was like Chance the Gardener in
Being There
. That’s clearly wrong, because Chance was mistaken for a genius. Jackson
was
a genius and I was with him at about the time that gift began to truly overwhelm him. Seismic personal and professional changes were happening to him that would prove impossible to govern. Chief among these was surely that his family, the only connection he had to a wider world, was starting to lose any meaning for him and he was about to destroy everything they had slogged and sweated to build. He was condemning them to become the post-Donny Osmonds, and there was nothing he could do about it.

I remember watching the video to the song ‘Bad’ some time later, the one Martin Scorsese shot as a gangland fight in a subway station. In the film, Jackson was at his peak, a cutting-edge pop star playing the coolest member of a streetwise gang setting the pace and breaking the rules. Everybody wanted to be that Michael Jackson at that point – especially Michael Jackson. Instead, here was a confused and frightened boy who, though totally comfortable, assured even, headlining Madison Square Garden, had not the slightest idea how to walk to the corner shop and buy a loaf of bread. In the real world he was a sham, and the worst thing about that was not only did he know it, but he wasn’t allowed to forget it by those closest to him.

The last time I saw him was in Los Angeles, a few days later, when he acquiesced to a photo session. (The camera had really panicked him at the initial meeting.) He was far more relaxed and friendly now, and kept reminding me of different Benny Hill sketches, even asking me to do bits of Monty Python stuff ‘in a British accent’. He was fun. But then, he was away from everyone and wearing stage clothes and make-up.

As I bade him goodbye at the lift, I said, ‘Take care, Michael.’

He reacted as if he’d never heard the phrase before. ‘Yes. Take care. Yes, I will “take care”,’ he said, chuckling. ‘You take care too, Sid Vicious!’ he said.

Then he caught himself again, and stopped still. For a moment he didn’t know what to do. In that instant a PA said he was wanted on the phone. His voice became small again. ‘Do you know who it is?’ he asked. The assistant said she wasn’t sure. He looked uneasy and walked back down the corridor.

That was my last glimpse of what was left of the real Michael Jackson. Though he was not yet completely insane, I believe he still knew the difference between Jackson the unassailable megastar and the little Jackson kid. Soon he was going to make a choice and that was all going to change. Totally, irrevocably and so thoroughly that not even his own family would recognize him.

Head & Heart

C
rocs Nightclub in Rayleigh, Essex, was a grungy suburban sweatbox that attempted to justify its name by keeping a live, full-sized crocodile in a glass tank just inside the entrance. About a fortnight after filing the Jackson piece I found myself in Crocs for
Twentieth Century Box
, filming a show about the up-and-coming new electro-pop sound that Janet tipped, once again correctly, to sweep the future charts. To this end we were following a group of local hopefuls called Depeche Mode as they attempted to get some heat going under their fledgling stab at stardom. Alongside Depeche Mode – who would indeed attain global fame – the show also featured another band, Naked Lunch, whose fortunes were destined to hurtle in the opposite direction. On the day, of course, I declared that things would go entirely the other way around.

At one point in the evening, the director, a terrific documentary maker called Daniel Wiles, decided that a great opening shot to the film would be me delivering a speech straight to camera that, as the picture widened, would reveal that I was actually in the tank with the eponymous crocodile. Everybody agreed this would be a terrific attention grabber, and it was only I who had a small follow-up question about how the effect might best be achieved. To satisfy my caution – which I remember was seen as a terrific wet blanket – a member of the crew was dispatched to find the manager and ascertain if the crocodile really would attack someone who got in there with it. The manager said without question it would. By this time, however, the director was so sold on this image that he was smelling BAFTA awards and so the production crew had a meeting to come up with a way round it.

What happened – and I ask you to contrast this with today’s mania for Health and Safety at work – was that a runner was sent to a nearby fish-and-chip shop to rustle up any uncooked chicken pieces they could sell us. When the runner returned, she had done even better: in her carrier bag was an entire uncooked bird, and this was duly tied to the end of a long piece of string. Next, our electrician, Pat Brennan, stood on a chair and dangled the chicken into the tank. After a few minutes of swaying the bird back and forth, he succeeded in getting the giant reptile’s attention and the beast lumbered over. Soon the crocodile was settled very close by, its cold, mean eyes transfixed on Pat Brennan’s swinging chicken of temptation.

It was at this moment that the director tapped me on the shoulder and hissed, ‘Right, Dan, in you go.’

Well, nobody likes to take the fizz out of an idea that is so clearly exciting the gathered crowd and so, a little dry of mouth, in I went. At the far end of the tank was a boulder protruding out of the water. This, I had been told, was where I should settle down and go into my dialogue. The only way to get to this rock was to shuffle, back to the tank’s interior, around the little three-inch-wide ledge that ran around the inside of the glass just above the waterline while holding on to the very top of the tank with my fingers. This I did, amid much giggling and wisecracks, all the while knowing that, should the crocodile become distracted by my movements, it would turn and eat my arse off.

Happily, I can assure you now, once a hungry crocodile gets a swinging chicken on its mind very little else interests it. And so I delivered my jabbering intro to camera, in one, before making the perilous return journey along the inside of the tank. Back safely to a small round of applause – some were disappointed, of course – it was agreed that whatever else
Twentieth Century Box
got in the can over the upcoming weeks, here was the shot of the series. Somebody even suggested that it was a shame we hadn’t got any stills of the moment to send out as publicity. Somehow, this idea gathered support, particularly as we happened to have a stills camera in the van. I think you must be ahead of me now. Yes, back in I went, and this time sat on the rock grinning like a half-crazed lottery winner as the flashbulbs popped and the crew gave insane directions like, ‘Now turn toward the crocodile with your hands out!’ and ‘Now look as if you’re screaming!’