Michael Jackson (22 page)

Michael was amazed by the contract CBS had offered the family. He had no idea that the group was worth so much and that this
was the kind of contract other superstar acts were accustomed to in the record business. He had to admire his father's tenacity.
After all, had it not been for Joseph, The Jackson 5 might have slid into obscurity at Motown. ‘I had to admit it,’ Michael
later noted, ‘this was one incredible record deal. My father did an amazing job for us.’

Still, Michael was torn between the notion of loyalty to Berry and that of good business sense. He decided to discuss the
matter with Diana Ross. Her reaction was predictable. She said that she had no influence over Berry where business matters
were concerned – and she wasn't lying, she didn't – but that Michael should listen to him because, as always, he knew what was
best for all of his artists. ‘I just believed that the boys should stay at Motown,’ she recalled in a 1981 interview. ‘I was
loyal to Berry at that time, and I felt that they should be as well. I told Michael that loyalty is the most important thing,
not money.’

In six years Diana Ross would change her mind about being loyal to Berry Gordy and Motown. When she was having her own disagreements
with him and decided to check on her value at other companies, RCA offered her $20 million, much more than what Berry could
offer her. She turned to Smokey Robinson for advice. Smokey gave her the same advice she had given Michael about loyalty to
Berry. However, she felt she had no choice. It didn't make sense to turn down that much money: she signed with RCA.

The CBS contracts were drawn up in a couple of days. Each of the four brothers eagerly signed them.

The problem then became how to break the news to Jermaine, and convince him to sign the deal. Jermaine's father-in-law, Berry
Gordy, was now considered to be the enemy, but Joseph realized that Berry had a powerful influence over his son. Berry had
recently promised Jermaine an exciting and lucrative future at Motown; he suspected that the group would try to leave and
he wanted to assure Jermaine of his future at the company. He had trusted him enough to give him his only daughter in marriage.
It would be Joseph's challenge to convince his son that his wishes should prevail over Berry's. He waited three days before
summoning Jermaine, trying to determine a strategy. He soon realized there was no easy way to coax Jermaine away from Berry.
It shouldn't be that difficult a decision for Jermaine, anyway, he decided. After all,
he
was Jermaine's father, not Berry. He was certain that Jermaine would make the ‘right’ decision. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Jermaine's
not stupid. I hope.’

‘Come to the house tonight,’ he told Jermaine on the telephone. ‘Come alone. Don't bring that wife of yours.’

‘That's when I knew something was wrong,’ Jermaine recalled, years later. ‘Hazel is a very strong person and asks a lot of
questions. I'm sure my father thought he could get me to do anything if Hazel wasn't there. I was afraid to go, afraid of
what I'd find.’

When Jermaine arrived at the Encino estate, Joseph escorted him into the bedroom and closed the door. The contracts were spread
out on a bureau, signatures on four of them. A fifth contract was unsigned. Joseph picked up Jermaine's contract and handed
it to him. ‘Sign it,’ he ordered. He didn't attempt to reason with him, or even explain anything to him… he just told him
to ‘sign it’. How Joseph could be so obtuse remains a mystery. He may have been able to get Jermaine's signature if only he
had used a modicum of common sense in his approach. Of course, Jermaine refused.

‘I said, sign it.’

‘No, Joseph,’ Jermaine said. ‘I'm not signing.’

‘You sign this damned contract, Jermaine.’

‘I ain't signin'’

‘Think about the money,’ Joseph shouted at him. ‘Real money. You think Motown's gonna come close to this deal? Look at this
money.’ He flipped through the pages, trying to find the clause that outlined terms.

‘I don't care,’ Jermaine said. ‘It's not about money for me.’

‘You don't care? You're crazy. That's what you are,’ Joseph said, angrily. By now he was shaking his fist at his son. ‘You
sign this goddamn contract, Jermaine, or you'll be sorry. CBS says The Jackson 5 will be the next Beatles, and you know that's
what we've been working for.’

‘Hell no. I don't want to be no Beatle,’ Jermaine said. ‘I'm not signing it, Joseph. Forget it.’

With that, as Jermaine recalled it to me in an interview years later, he ran from the bedroom and out of the house. He told
me that he knew he had to tell Berry what had happened – and that the Jacksons were actually leaving Motown – and the news couldn't
wait until he got home. He pulled over to a pay telephone and called his father-in-law.

‘The brothers, they signed with CBS, Berry,’ he blurted out as soon as Berry picked up. ‘I can't believe it. But they did
it. They left Motown.’

Jermaine recalled that there was silence on the other end of the connection. Finally, in a soft and calm voice, Berry spoke.
‘Are you absolutely sure, Jermaine?’

‘They already signed the contracts,’ Jermaine answered, his tone frantic. ‘I saw them with my own eyes.’

‘Well, what about you? Did you sign?’ Berry asked.

‘The brothers are leaving because there are problems at Motown,’ Jermaine said, ‘but I want to stay, Berry. I want to help
work out the problems.’

Jermaine later recalled, ‘I told him I didn't sign and that I wasn't going to. He told me to come by his house, which I did.
We talked it out. That night, he became like a second father to me, a sensible father. “You're on your way to the top,” he
told me. “You could be running Motown one day.” That's what I wanted. I wanted to be the president of Motown. I knew I could
do it. I knew I had it in me, even if Joseph never believed I did. Berry gave me the confidence to know that I could go places
if I stayed with him and with Motown. I believed him. I didn't believe anything my father had to say about anything. I believed
in Berry Gordy, not in Joseph Jackson.’

Despite the fact that there was such turmoil in the family, the group still had work to do on the road. When Jermaine came
back to the house a few days later to rehearse for the show, he and Katherine had a loud discussion about his decision not
to sign the CBS contract. Katherine was angry with him, and she let him know it. Jermaine reminded her that Berry Gordy had
been the one ‘who put steaks on our table and teeth in our mouths’. Katherine couldn't believe her ears. ‘We were
already
eating steaks in Gary,’ she told her son heatedly. ‘And as for the teeth he put in Jackie's and Tito's mouths, he's recouped
that money hundreds of times over, you can be sure of that.’ (However, it doesn't seem likely that the Jacksons
were
‘eating steaks in Gary’.)

The next stop for the group was the Westbury Music Fair on New York's Long Island. On the way, Michael attempted to act as
referee between Jermaine and Jackie, who argued loudly about the question of Motown versus CBS. In the end, the brothers,
with the exception of Michael, had completely turned on Jermaine. ‘They couldn't understand how they could go one way and
I the other,’ Jermaine remembered. ‘It was tense. It was bad.’

Michael adopted a more even-handed position than his brothers. ‘I thought he would see things our way, eventually,’ he later
recalled. ‘I never had a doubt things would work out.’

In some ways, the familial pressure manifested itself in predictable ways. Hazel, who almost always travelled with the group,
had become protective of her husband, not allowing him out of her sight. One of the group's road managers recalled, ‘After
we checked into the hotel in Long Island, we were all down in the lobby having fun, the other brothers and their friends.
I went up to Hazel and Jermaine's suite to see where Jermaine was, but Hazel said that Jermaine couldn't “come out and play”.
I thought that odd, and pushed her on it. She got upset, “I said, he needs his rest. Now, please go. Leave him alone.” Jermaine
didn't have a performance until the next evening, with the group. Why did he suddenly need more rest than the others? Hazel
continued, “I said he can't come out, so he can't come out. And that's final.” It seemed that her whole thing at that time
was to separate Jermaine from his family.’

Jermaine has said that, prior to the group's leaving for New York, Berry Gordy sat down with him and Hazel ‘and told us that
the first loyalty of a husband and wife must be to
themselves,
not to
anyone
else, not to anything else in the world.’ According to Jermaine, Berry said, ‘Whether it's me and Motown or the Jackson family
and CBS,
everything
comes second to yourselves as man and wife, because you are the two people who are going to have to live with each other
and with whatever decisions you make.’

Berry's diplomacy aside, he most certainly recognized the truth: Jermaine would not be able to leave Motown, not if he wanted
to stay married to the boss's daughter.

After The Jackson 5's first performance at the Westbury Music Fair, the telephone rang in the dressing room. It was Berry
calling for Jermaine.

As his family watched Jermaine's face for a hint as to what the conversation was about, Jermaine clutched the telephone tightly.
He didn't say much, other than goodbye. He exhaled deeply, and he hung up.

‘Okay, I guess I gotta go,’ Jermaine announced.

‘Now? We go on in thirty minutes!’

‘How're we gonna work around you?’ Jackie gasped, incredulously.

‘I can't believe you're doing this to us,’ Tito added.

Everybody was talking at once, Joseph's voice being loudest of the din. ‘Are you crazy?’ he stormed. ‘
We're
your family. Not the Gordys. What's wrong with you, Jermaine? You ain't going
nowhere,
boy.’

Berry had demanded that twenty-year-old Jermaine make the most important decision in his life, and make it right then, right
there: Motown or CBS? The Jacksons or the Gordys. His birth family or his family by marriage?

Whether Jermaine acted on impulse or understood the ramifications of what he was about to do, he rushed out of the dressing
quarters with tears in his eyes. ‘I'm outta' here,’ he said. He took a car to his hotel room, where he packed his suitcase
in about five minutes. ‘What's goin' on? What's goin' on?’ Hazel wanted to know. Jermaine could not speak through his racking
sobs. ‘We're leaving,’ was all he could say. A black Motown stretch limousine waited to whisk the couple to the airport, and
then back to Los Angeles.

‘We were surprised, really in shock, absolutely stunned,’ Marlon later remembered. ‘It was like a dream, Jermaine getting
that call and then walking out on us like that. We were about an hour from show time. The place was already packed. We had
a show to do. We couldn't dwell on any of it. Michael was crying, and I said, “Not now, Mike. We have fans out there. We have
to buck up.” Wiping his eyes, he said, “I can do it, Marlon. But, later, we gotta deal with this. We gotta get Jermaine back.”’

That night, The Jackson 5 exploded on to the stage of the Westbury Music Fair with such elation, no one in the audience would
ever have guessed the backstage drama that had just unfolded. Michael's first responsibility was to his audience. He was just
sixteen, but he knew what he had to do. During ‘Dancing Machine’, he whip-lashed the mike stand into a wobble, did a motorized
shuffle across the stage as if he were a robot, and then executed a split at the precise moment the stand crashed down upon
his shoulder. He then looked at the instrument with a disdain that implied mortal insult. The crowd roared its approval.

This journalist – a teenager at the time – was present for this show, a Jacksons' performance still recalled with vivid clarity.
Though Jermaine was missed – Michael announced that he had the flu – it was still a dizzying performance.

During an ironic tribute to the Motown Sound, Michael prowled the stage like a fierce, balletic wolf – ‘I Want You Back’, ‘ABC’,
‘The Love You Save’, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’, all the Motown hits and more were performed with graceful and often demanding
choreography. Whatever it took to please his fans, that's what Michael did, transforming, as always, personal frustrations
into sheer energy. While accepting his audience's approval, he seemed purged of all anxiety. Once again, he was with the only
people he knew he could completely trust: his fans.

The plaintive riff from The Jackson 5 hit ‘I'll Be There’ rang even more bittersweet as Michael performed it during this evening's
show. Without any rehearsal, Marlon stepped in and took Jermaine's ironic lines. ‘I'll be your strength,’ he sang, ‘I'll keep
holding on.’ Marlon had always been underrated as a singer, never having had a chance to truly shine in his brothers' shadow.
Tonight, he held his own, and against great odds. Still, Jermaine belonged on that stage, in his rightful place next to Michael.
It just wasn't right.

By the time the youngsters were finished, members of the audience were bouncing out of their seats; there were three encores.
But afterwards, backstage, there was no music, no partying, no laughing as usual after a stellar performance. Everyone returned
to his own dark mood. ‘Why does the show have to end?’ Michael asked his brother Jackie. He seemed disheartened. Though he
tried and tried to hide his feelings, they always seemed to show. ‘I wish it could just go on for ever.’