You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (26 page)

The rest of us felt he was making a mistake. Mother was the first to ask him to rethink his position. ‘Motown did give you and the brothers your start,’ she reminded him, ‘and you’d be performing on the same stage as all the acts you idolised as a boy.’

He said he’d think about it, but that hesitancy didn’t sit well with me. I rang him at home. When I heard his voice, I immediately sensed he was exhausted with the subject but I felt strongly that he was approaching this from a negative viewpoint or listening to bad
advice, and brothers have the right to challenge another brother’s thinking. ‘You know, being back together will be spectacular,’ I said. ‘All our fans will be there and that magic will make good TV, not bad TV.’ I reminded him of when he’d done ‘The Robot’ dance on
Soul Train
and the power of that performance. How it had got half of LA’s kids up and dancing; How empowered
he
was by it.

‘That was different,’ he said. ‘That was then. I don’t want to do no more TV. I want to be doing music videos and live performances. I don’t
want
to do what the Osmonds are doing.’ He was calm but resolute. I could do nothing but respect his artistic reasons, and I was resigned to the fact we’d be doing Motown 25 without him. Privately, I was crushed.

The next thing I knew, Mother was on the phone saying Mr Gordy had turned up. I wouldn’t have put any money on a positive outcome, because if Mother couldn’t persuade Michael, then no one could. But my father-in-law had always said that the defection to CBS Records ‘was not only amicable but wrapped in love’, as far as the brothers were concerned and he visited Michael to convey how important it was for him to be there on the night.

‘Think about it,’ he told Michael, ‘up there again with Jermaine … together again … back onstage. It will be magic!’ Mr Gordy had never forgotten that phone call Michael had made before the Westbury Music Fair, saying he needed me. ‘But it’s not just Jermaine who needs you now,’ he added. ‘It’s me and the Motown family.’ He reminded him that Smokey would be back with the Miracles, and Diana Ross would reunite with the Supremes. No one could imagine the night without Michael reuniting with the Jackson 5.

Michael saw wisdom. ‘Okay, I’ll do it,’ he said. But on one condition: he’d do a Jackson 5 medley but then he wanted a solo spot to showcase ‘Billie Jean’ – a CBS Records song on a night dedicated to Motown. You have to admire that kind of nerve and maybe that was why Mr Gordy agreed to the compromise. Either way, everyone was in agreement and we all wanted to make this thing feel special.

We got busy and rehearsed our group choreography at both Hayvenhurst and Jackie’s house but none of us knew what Michael had up his sleeve for his solo spot. At some point, he had decided he’d use the television platform to try out a move he’d borrowed from street-dancers, one he had been finessing for the past two years. It was a move called ‘The Moonwalk’.

The one thing Michael fussed over for this grand performance was his wardrobe. He had the white sequined glove, the Sammy Davis-style half-mast black pants, white socks, the silver sparkly shirt, and he asked his management to order a black fedora, ‘something that a secret agent would wear’. But the jacket? However hard he looked, he couldn’t find it. He opened the doors of his quarters, looked down the hallway and saw that Mother’s bedroom door was open. As a lover of anything shiny, he had once seen her wear a black sequined jacket and he went to her closet to fish it out. He put it on and walked downstairs to find its owner in the kitchen. ‘This would be a good jacket for me to do a show in!’ he said. ‘And it fits good!’ He loved it because when he moved it sparkled. ‘Imagine it under the lights,’ he said. That was how Mother’s jacket found its place in history. With a dance borrowed from the streets of LA and a jacket from Mother’s closet, Michael was show-ready.

One question fans always ask me about the Moonwalk moment is: ‘What was Michael like before and after the performance?’ In people’s minds, this defining moment of his career has adopted a significance they assume was present in its build-up: that Michael was locked in some kind of trance-like focus, ready to unleash his wonder on the world. The truth was a little less remarkable. He treated the telecast at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium like a piece of cake. It was a big deal for Mr Gordy and Motown, but it was just another performance for Michael. When we asked him what he was planning for his spot, he simply said, ‘I’m going to do something that might work.’ And then we didn’t see him. He just … disappeared. He must have been gone half an hour.

‘Where you been?’ I asked, when he came back to the dressing room. He started chuckling and that mischievous grin spread
across his face. ‘Been up in Diana’s rooms … She’s got some serious suitcases going on!’ he said.

Wait. I’ve just seen Diana Ross – and you weren’t with her.

He looked at me. I looked at him, and we died laughing.

‘You’ve been rooting through Diana’s stuff!’ So that was one part of the question answered. What was Michael like before the show? He was nosing about his mentor’s dressing room, wondering what she had in there.

He was also all over the production team during rehearsals, wanting to know every detail of the telecast. Every performer has to run through ‘camera blocking’ to allow the director to frame his shots, but Michael wanted to know what those shots were, how many cameras he had and at what angles. All this before the editing process! It was part of his methodical approach – and control.

He explained it best in an interview with
Ebony
magazine in 2007 and what he said applied to every live performance and music video he ever did. He said: ‘I don’t care what kind of performance you are giving – if you don’t capture it properly, the people will never see it. You’re filming WHAT you want people to see, WHEN you want them to see it, HOW you want them to see it, what JUXTAPOSITION you want them to see. You’re creating the totality of the whole feeling of what’s being presented … ’cause I know what I want to see. I know what I want to go to the audience. I know what I want to come back.’

For me, the perfect moment came when we walked onstage as the original Jackson 5, and the magic and chemistry returned naturally. All that had altered was that we weren’t kids any more and, golly, we had fun that night. I was overcome with this sensation of ‘WE’RE BACK!’ even if it was for only one night. I didn’t care, because this was the moment that, in the back of my mind, I’d known would happen again. I embraced it with a kind of home-coming jubilation. Poetically, when it was my part to sing on ‘I’ll Be There’, during the medley, my mic went out. Michael, alert to every beat, sensed it, saw my lips move with no sound and scooted over to share his mic, putting his arm around me as I sang. There is a
wonderful picture of this moment, with both of us smiling. I think many people thought it was staged as we both leaned into his mic, but it was a technical glitch we got away with and that image is one I treasure from a momentous night.

At the end of our medley, Randy walked on and had his moment to recognise his input with the Jacksons, and then we bowed and everyone in the auditorium stood. That ovation meant everything, and we hugged each other before walking off, leaving Michael alone in the spotlight.

Now it was his turn, on his own. ‘I have to say,’ he told the audience, ‘those were the good old days. I love those songs. Those were magic moments with all my brothers, including Jermaine, but … er … those were good songs … I like those songs a lot, but especially … I like …’

The crowd started to scream and someone shouted, ‘“BILLIE JEAN!”’

‘… the new songs!’ Cue his virtuoso routine, which sent the place crazy with those kicks, toe-stands and spins of his. It was all improvisation, going with the beat. And then, at the bridge of the song, came the rehearsed moment: his first five-second burst of the Moonwalk, followed by another five seconds at the end. Ten seconds that would be talked about forever – and 10 seconds I missed when live.

I was in the wings with a restricted view, standing with the Four Tops and the Temptations, when I heard the audience go nuts and I said, ‘He got ’em … Mike’s got ’em!’ The other brothers watched it on small monitors and I knew from their reaction that the seventh child had just pulled off something special.

Michael came offstage to a standing ovation but was probably the only doubtful-looking person in the house. ‘How was it? Did it work?’ he asked.

Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson told him they were blown away, and then comedian Richard Pryor idled up. ‘
What
was that?
That
was incredible – the greatest performance I’ve ever seen!’ We lost Michael in a crowd of praise and superlatives as
everyone gathered around him. Mother and Joseph were in the audience somewhere, with our father screaming, ‘He stole the show! The boy stole the show!’

That ‘Billie Jean’ performance was the best performance Michael had ever been talked into. It was also the best I ever saw him do. It poured rocket fuel on the
Thriller
album and sales went even crazier, peaking at a million a week. More importantly, within all the phenomenal success and wealth it generated, Michael finally sealed his name in
The Guinness Book of Records
.
Thriller
became the biggest-selling record of all time, ultimately shifting more than 100 million copies worldwide, and it earned him his desired clutch of Grammys – winning a record number of eight. The kid who used to sing for a plate of cookies had now surpassed even our father’s greatest expectations by setting two records, neither of which has been matched or surpassed since.

Unbeknown to Michael, one of his idols was among the millions of viewers watching his Moonwalk from an armchair at home. My brother had no idea how his performance had touched this particular person until the phone rang the next day at Hayvenhurst. And even then, he struggled to believe it when he found Fred Astaire on the other end of the line. ‘I watched it and I taped it, and I watched it again this morning,’ said Fred, ‘You’re a helluva mover. Man, you really put them on their asses last night!’

That one call meant more to Michael than any number of Grammys. Fred Astaire admiring him was
the ultimate
as far as he was concerned, and life had finally fulfilled Joseph’s CBS signing-on promise in an unexpected way. It might not have been a dinner, it was more important than that: it was praise from his hero, and that carried more meaning.

What’s extra-nice about this story is that Michael got to meet this legend some weeks later and Fred Astaire held out the palm of one hand and imitated the Moonwalk with two fingers before Michael gave him a demonstration. Fred apparently told my brother that he was ‘the best dancer he had ever seen’, but it was the warning he issued that sticks in my mind: he told Michael that
his ‘Billie Jean’ performance would bring social pressure for him to dance at the drop of a hat. ‘Remember, you’re not a performing monkey – you’re an artist. You dance for no one but yourself,’ he apparently said. Michael, as ever, made a mental note.

As for Mother’s jacket, she never did get it back. Michael needed it for his now-famous routine. Some years later, he presented it to Sammy Davis Junior. In return, Sammy gave him a treasured wristwatch, which Michael gave as a keepsake to Mother. Seemed like a fair swap to me.

AROUND THE TIME MICHAEL WROTE
‘Earth Song’ in the mid-nineties, I sat down and wrote an outline for a children’s story with him in mind. I called it
The Pied Piper of Hood River
and it was set around the beautiful fields and rivers of Oregon. In this fable, a young musician lives in the wilderness, protects the forest from evil forces and talks with animals. It was partly inspired by Michael: I’d always seen him as something of a Dr Doolittle because he had an uncanny way of communicating with animals. He was not a horse-or dog-whisperer, more an all-round animal-whisperer. ‘Give them love, you get love back,’ he said.

It didn’t matter how wild or exotic, animals seemed to trust him. I once said that if you threw him into a cage of lions, you’d come back an hour later to find him sitting against a wall with two lazing in his lap. Several visits to LA Zoo confirmed his desire to be surrounded by animals and he collected his own menagerie at Hayvenhurst, starting with another snake – Muscles the boa constrictor – three cockatoos and a stunning collection of koi carp in the pond at the far end of the garden. The two of us also kept horses at the ranch of actor Richard Whitmore.

One day, Michael decided he wanted a llama. He asked me to take him to nearby Agora and we ended up at this lot packed with hay and horse trailers. From the car, we eyed four llamas out back. I parked between two trailers, unintentionally shielding my Mercedes from view. It was the only parking spot available. When we walked into the office – two kids dressed casual but smart in T-shirt and jeans – this guy, bent across a counter doing some paperwork, didn’t even look up when he said, ‘We’re not hiring.’

‘We ain’t looking for no job,’ said Michael, wearing his shades. ‘We’re here to buy a llama.’

The man looked up. Not a flicker of recognition on his face. It took me about two seconds to know that his musical taste ventured nowhere near the
Thriller
album. ‘We don’t have any llamas,’ he said. The look on his face said it all: you can’t afford it.

‘You have four of them out back,’ I said, trying to keep calm.

‘You know how much they cost?’

Michael smiled. ‘We know how much they cost.’

Then came an incredible bombardment of questions, fired by the man’s prejudices and assumptions. ‘Can you afford a llama? What do you boys do to afford a llama? Where will you keep it? Have you thought about this?’

Ever patient, Michael explained that we had a house with grounds and were serious customers. ‘I know how to look after all kinds of animals,’ he added.

The man begrudgingly asked to see some ID. Michael handed over a bank card. I handed over my driving licence. And then night became day.

‘You’re those Jackson boys?’ said the man, his face lighting up. He began to back-pedal about how he had to be careful and he couldn’t sell to just anyone; you understand how it is. But we didn’t understand: we saw right through him.

‘So you’re happy to accept me because you now know who I am?’ Michael asked. The biggest misconception people had about my brother was that his legendary shyness made him timid, but he was a man of principle, especially where his roots as a proud black
man were concerned and he wasn’t afraid to speak up on this when riled. Michael took back his ID and came right out with it: ‘You are an ass, and we don’t want to spend our money in here any more.’ Then we walked out to the Mercedes the man had failed to spot when we arrived.

On the drive home, Michael was exasperated. ‘Can you believe that? What is this area about? What are they teaching their kids?’

We had always been told by our parents that no one is born with a prejudice. It is something that is taught, ignorance passed down from generation to generation. The more Michael brooded, the more fired up he became. He told me to drive to Tito’s.

That afternoon, Tito’s acoustic guitar and our free-styling lyrics captured an angry inspiration for a song we called ‘What’s Your Life?’. That was how Michael liked to work. When a true experience inspired a song, he liked to get it down on his tape recorder or in the nearest studio. We recorded that song within an hour at Tito’s studio, also in Encino. It went like this:

Those lyrics sum up the conversation we shared in the car.

Michael eventually bought two llamas from elsewhere. He called them Louis and Lola. Those llamas stood as high as us, and were the most serene and beautiful pets you could imagine. He also bought two deer called Prince and Princess, two peacocks, Winter and Spring, and a giraffe called Jabbar, after the tallest basketball player we knew: LA Lakers star Kareem Abdul-Jabbaar.

And then, there was Bubbles. The lovable chimp was first introduced by a handler called Bob Dunn, who’d raised him for the first six or so months of his life, training him to be domesticated, before his arrival at Hayvenhurst. But Bubbles was more than some novelty pet – he was a constant companion and Michael doted on him. The media would poke fun at this, but millions of dog and cat owners the world over find companionship in their pets, talking to them, treating them as substitute kids. Michael’s relationship with Bubbles was no different, yet it was deemed ‘weird’.

THE FIRST-TIME WE MET WAS AT
Hayvenhurst. I’d heard from Mother about the new addition to the family so I went over to check him out. When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard Michael’s voice: ‘BUBBLES! No, Bubbles!’

On the way to his quarters, I saw his doors were open. Contrary to what’s believed, his rooms were not ‘a no-go zone’. The rules were probably no different from many other families: if the door was closed, there was an expectation of privacy. If open, we knocked and walked right on in. We simply respected each other’s boundaries. ‘I’d heard you had a chimpanzee in the house,’ I said, announcing my arrival.

Michael’s Murphy bed was down and Bubbles, wearing a diaper, was having a crazy five minutes, leaping and bounding over the bed, then swinging from the spiral staircase that led to the mezzanine balcony. He was throwing stuff around the room. It was like watching a hyperactive kid run riot.

‘No, Bubbles. Stop bouncing around!’ Michael said – and Bubbles stopped. It was fascinating watching them
interact: when Michael spoke like that, Bubbles tilted his head and listened.

My brother’s authoritative voice, being all parental, amused me. It was like he had become a father overnight. Chimpanzees are six times stronger than man, so in theory, Bubbles could have yanked Michael’s arm right out of its socket, but he was so tame that he responded like a child and did exactly as he was told. It took only one or two ‘NOs!’ before he realised the command was serious and he then calmed down, skulked over to Michael and jumped into his arms to be petted.

He had his own wooden crib beneath the spiral staircase but he only slept there when his ass got real tired. Most times, Bubbles slept in the bed, under the duvet, and Michael slept on the floor in a sleeping-bag. I think it’s fair to say that he was the best-kept ape in the whole of California, if not America. Bubbles wore Poison by Christian Dior because Michael always wanted him to smell and look good. When Mother smells that scent on someone today, she’ll whisper, ‘Smells like that old monkey!’ He even had his own wardrobe, full of the latest designs for a two-or three-year-old boy. One time, in later years, when my son Jeremy was a toddler, I grabbed some clothes from the washroom and dressed him. When Mother saw him, she said, ‘You’re wearing Bubbles’ clothes!’ I hated to admit that Bubbles had the better wardrobe.

When Bubbles became hyper, he’d be jumping all over, grabbing candy and tossing it, causing a real mess. You always knew when he was becoming a handful because Mother would shout, ‘MICHAEL! Get that monkey out of here!’

The trouble with Bubbles was that he knew his way around the house, and he’d walk into the kitchen, open the fridge door and help himself. And if he wanted you to go somewhere, he’d take your hand and lead you there. Most of the time, he stuck close to Michael. He was so playful and everyone loved him. Michael always liked hooking up his video camera to the television and filming Bubbles with the family, laughing at the images on his ‘live cam’ screen.

I think the funniest thing was when the two of them played hide and seek. Michael would hide and Bubbles would cackle out loud when he found him. The chimp clearly enjoyed this game because he’d terrorise Janet’s poor dog in his own ape-style version of the game. Bubbles would walk up to Puffy, bop him on the head, then sprint off and hide. The dog would sniff him out and start barking. Seconds later, when Puffy returned to the kitchen, Bubbles would scamper back, bop him on the head and run off again.

Michael and his ape were inseparable in the house, in the studio, on tour, and sometimes at functions. Michael didn’t care what anyone said. I don’t think Bubbles was too fazed, either. Mother says that whenever Michael went to his dancing room on a Sunday, Bubbles went with him. I heard that once when Michael was doing one of his spins Bubbles, unprompted, sat down, closed his eyes and spun on his ass as the music played. Bubbles ultimately went to Neverland, but when the children came along, it was felt there was a potential for aggressive jealousy, a risk no one could take. He had grown into a 170-pound beast, so he was returned to Bob Dunn’s ranch in Symlar, California, where Michael visited him from time to time. I know the separation was hard for my brother, but at least he had true fatherhood to look forward to. I suspect that Bubbles was none too happy either at being wrenched from his owner’s side after almost a decade together.

Today, as of 2011, Bubbles is still alive and being cared for at the Center for Great Apes in Florida, where they are happy to report that he’s definitely turned into his father’s son: ‘Bubbles can be sensitive and dramatic. If he has any kind of cut or scratch on his body … no matter how small … he will show it many times during the day to his caregivers and ask for sympathy. Though he is able to throw sand with amazing accuracy, he is extremely gentle with the youngsters …’

After Michael’s death, La Toya went to visit Bubbles. She found him sitting in a corner ‘looking sad’. But the moment she walked in, he recognised her, jumped up and came bounding over. God bless that damn monkey.

IN ANY LARGE FAMILY, THERE’S ALWAYS
one dark horse that busts out of nowhere and makes everyone sit up and take note. And I’m not talking about Michael, I’m talking about Janet.

We brothers had nailed our dreams to the mast early on. There were no surprises there. But no one saw the singer-songwriter blossoming in Janet. If anything, we had our youngest sister’s career path mapped out as an actress. So had she. After CBS’s
Good Times
, she landed television roles in
Fame
(as Cleo Hewitt) and in ABC’s
Diff’rent Strokes
(as Willis’s girlfriend, Charlene). Janet’s acting ability was as crystal clear then as it remains today. But, as she tells it in her 2011 memoir,
True You
, she wandered into the recording studio at Hayvenhurst one day, armed with lyrics ‘about my teenage-girl notions of loneliness and love’, wrote a melody, worked the mixing board and single-handedly laid down a track she called ‘Fantasy’. That was when she was nine. Just like Michael with his Quaker Oats bongos, she had been watching us all the time, especially when Michael and Randy took her along to rehearsals of the Jacksons. We’d watched our idols from a distance in Gary, but Janet had vicariously lived and breathed music with us, and the more Joseph heard her sing, the more he recognised a new talent to harness.

Long story short, my sister was 16 when she landed her first record deal with A&M Records, where our old schoolfriend John McClain had become senior vice-president of the A&R department. Having grown up around us, he was already like a protective big brother to Janet, so he naturally made her one of his top priorities at the label – and she soared on merit.

Unlike us, Janet felt she was pushed into her singing career. She went along with it because Joseph was insistent and she didn’t wish to defy him. But when you think of her enduring career, and how many No. 1s she’s amassed over the years, that was no bad instinct of my father’s. Again.

My abiding memory of Janet in childhood is of this impeccable flower who could do no wrong in any of our eyes. She seemed attached to Mother’s lap and couldn’t wait for Joseph to fall asleep
so she could climb into bed next to Mother, on the other side. And then, before Joseph woke, she’d get up and slip back into her own bed. La Toya was actually the first sister to break into the music industry, releasing her first album
La Toya Jackson
in 1980, again with our father’s encouragement. Michael contributed to one of her songs, ‘Night Time Lover’.

I remember going to school with my middle sister and being ignored by her in our Jackson 5 days. She was determined to find friends because of who she was, not because of her access to us. For years, she acted like she didn’t know any of the brothers. I first realised this when I saw her walking in the opposite direction in the school hallway. ‘Hi, La Toya!’ I’d say, but she kept her head in the air. We only became her brothers again once we’d crossed the threshold of Hayvenhurst – the one place in the world where all brothers and sisters could be themselves.

WHEN YOU FIRST THINK OF SONGS,
like ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Thriller’, you ‘see’ the music before you hear it because the visual of Michael’s music videos is seared into culture’s memory. That is the power and impact he always set out to achieve. Ever since ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by the Buggles became the first video aired on MTV on 1 August 1981, Michael had wanted to stand out within this new medium. He felt the industry approach was lazy, going through the motions of executing just another promotional tool. ‘They need to be more entertaining!’ he said. ‘They need a beginning, a middle and an end – a story!’ Echoes of Mr Gordy.