Michael Jackson (25 page)

The Jacksons continued to tour without Jermaine. It was business as usual. They performed in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 1977.
During that engagement, Michael had to escape to the roof of a Woolco department store when ten thousand people caused a near
riot as they waited in line for hours hoping to jam into the store's record department, where Michael had promised to autograph
copies of
The Jacksons.

That same night, backstage before the show, John Seaver, who worked for the firm that promoted the Memphis engagement, later
recalled, ‘I showed a
Billboard
article to Michael that said Jermaine's Motown album was a big bomb. It made unfair comparisons to The Jacksons' album, saying
that that one was a smash. Michael didn't say anything at first. Then he commented, ‘Oh, he'll bounce back. I know it. Jermaine
won't let this get to him.’ He seemed genuinely sorry for his brother.

‘The article was passed along to the other brothers, who scanned it. Marlon said something about “too bad”. Tito said that
the album wasn't any good, but that Jermaine would probably come up with something stronger next time out. “No matter what,
he's our brother,” Tito said, “and I don't like seeing him do anything that's not a success. Just proves, I think, that Berry
doesn't know what he's doing.” They all agreed with Tito.’

Then Joseph came into the dressing room.

‘What are you boys reading?’

Jackie handed him the article. ‘Read this, about Jermaine,’ he said.

Joseph read the feature quickly. ‘Well, you know, I think it serves Jermaine right,’ he said as he smacked the magazine on
a table. He then walked away. The brothers looked at each other with raised eyebrows. There was silence. It must have been
difficult for them to recognize Joseph's pain, the betrayal he felt – not to mention the way he felt taken advantage of by the
Motown machinery. Of course, Joseph never revealed himself to his family in a way that might bring about any kind of understanding
for him. Therefore, he never got it. As he walked out the door, Michael gave him a cool, appraising glance. ‘Some father,’
he muttered.

By the time Michael Jackson turned nineteen in August 1977, he was one of the best-known entertainers of recent years, the
idol of many young women. While his brothers often availed themselves of the sexual opportunities presented to them on the
road, Michael never followed suit. Though much of Michael's music has had a sensual edge over the years, and his dancing has
often been suggestive, he was not sexually adventurous as a young man.

‘I think it's fun that girls think I'm sexy,’ Michael told me in 1977. ‘But I don't think that about myself. It's all just
fantasy, really. I like to make my fans happy so I might pose or dance in a way that makes them think I'm romantic. But really
I guess I'm not that way.’

Most people who were close to Michael when he was a teenager agree that he never had a serious romantic life at that time.
Michael did not trust anyone enough to allow them to penetrate the shell he had built around himself. Perhaps he felt he had
been betrayed too often by people he had loved or admired – his father, his brothers, maybe even Berry Gordy – to permit himself
to be vulnerable to a relationship. Still, Michael understood the value of public relations and show-business hype. Therefore,
he did parade a few ‘relationships’ for public consumption.

As recently as the Martin Bashir interview in 2003, Michael said that actress Tatum O'Neal, who was thirteen in the summer
of 1977, was his first girlfriend. Michael and Tatum first met two years before at a party hosted by Paul McCartney aboard
the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. They had no contact with each other again until the spring of 1977, when Michael
spotted Tatum with her father, Ryan O'Neal, at a club in Los Angeles. Michael was socializing with two publicists from Epic,
Susan Blond and Steve Manning when, as he recalled it, ‘all of a sudden I felt this soft hand reach over and grab mine. It
was Tatum.’ The fact that Tatum had deigned to hold Michael's hand was, for him, a colossal event. ‘It was serious stuff to
me.
She touched me,
’ he said.

The next day, Tatum invited Michael to a dinner party at
Playboy
publisher Hugh Hefner's rambling Holmby Hills estate. There they watched
Roots,
the highly rated Alex Haley television mini-series, on videotape. When Tatum became bored, she asked Michael to get into
the hot tub with her. ‘But I don't have a bathing suit,’ he said.

‘Who needs bathing suits?’ Tatum responded.

When Michael began to blush, Tatum asked one of Hefner's assistants for two swimsuits, then handed one to Michael.

Tatum's hair was soft, blond and flowed just below her shoulders. Her skin was baby pink and her figure quite ample for a
girl who wouldn't turn fourteen until close to the end of the year. She was almost plump. ‘She's like a sacred doll,’ Michael
observed of her to a friend. He said that while soaking in the water and watching for shooting stars, the two shared secrets
with one another.

Years later, rumour would have it that they were nude together in the hot tub. ‘Oh, we weren't naked,’ Michael firmly pointed
out to me in an interview. ‘We had on bathing suits. Why do people have to always find something dirty in everything?’

Tatum O'Neal had won an Oscar at the age of nine for her role as the chain-smoking, swearing companion to a Bible-belt swindler
(played by her father) in the film
Paper Moon.
Her own childhood was difficult.

Born to actress Joanna Moore and Ryan O'Neal, Tatum saw her parents split up when she was three. For a while, she lived on
a ramshackle ranch with a dying horse, some dead chickens, and a mother who was addicted to drugs. At seven, Tatum grew flowers
in a wrecked car in the yard and cooked breakfast and lunch for herself and her younger brother, Griffin. Her father was permitted
to visit on weekends.

‘When she was living with her mother, I could always tell what shape Tatum was in by the look of her hair,’ Ryan said. ‘I
knew if it was healthy, she was at peace with herself. If things were bad, there were clumps missing from her hair. She'd
sometimes take a scissors to herself.’

Joanna, anguished and on the verge of defeat by 1972, decided to seek help from her ex-husband, who had been giving her thirty
thousand dollars a year in alimony. Ryan paid for her rehabilitation and she, in turn, surrendered eight-year-old Tatum to
him. Tatum hated Joanna. When the little girl went to visit her in the hospital, Tatum became so disgusted with her mother
that she spat in her face. When she told Michael about her life, he said he had never heard a story so tragic.

‘My mother is a saint,’ Michael said in 1977. ‘When I hear about Tatum's mother and what she went through with her, it makes
me thank God for Katherine. People think I have had a hard life. But look at Tatum's. That's why I like her, because she's
a survivor.’

Unlike Michael, whose goal it was to be an entertainer, Tatum became an actress by accident. Ryan helped her get her first
solo mostly as a way to keep an eye on her while he worked on
Paper Moon.
When Tatum became a working actress, Ryan O'Neal took over her career much the same way Joseph Jackson had commandeered Michael's.
‘I chose
International Velvet
for her,’ Ryan said. ‘She didn't even read the script. I just said, “This is the one you're doing,” because I knew it was
good.’

When Tatum complained about the way her father ruled her life, Michael empathized with her. ‘I know exactly what you're talking
about,’ he told her.

However, Tatum did make some of her own decisions. She once told Michael the story of how she turned down the role of the
young hooker in
Taxi Driver,
a part that eventually went to Jodie Foster. At the audition, Tatum said she wanted to play the part of the taxi driver;
she was twelve. The producer ignored Tatum's suggestion and kept talking up the role of the hooker. Finally Tatum said, ‘Frankly,
I think the part's too small. I did win an Academy Award, you know.’

‘I can't believe you said that. I don't think I would ever have the nerve,’ Michael told her when he heard that story. ‘I
want to be like that. I want people to think of me as having a lot of nerve.’

In his autobiography Michael wrote that Tatum was his first love ‘after Diana’. Tatum has indicated, however, that her relationship
with Michael was strictly platonic.

It's telling of the fantasy Michael has created around his childhood and teen years that the women he claims to have had romances
with – including Diana Ross and Brooke Shields (‘We were romantically serious for a while,’ he wrote of Shields in his book) – have
all denied ever having been intimate with him. After Michael talked about Tatum on his 2003 Martin Bashir interview, saying
she came on to him, she issued a statement saying he had ‘a vivid imagination’. Says actress Sarah Jackson (no relation to
Michael), who was a friend of Tatum's at this time, ‘Tatum told me that Michael was a nice guy, but so shy. “How can any girl
have a relationship with him? When we're together, he hardly says two words. I know he's a virgin. Someone needs to have a
talk with him about it. I wonder if he's afraid to have sex. He doesn't seem very interested.”’

Michael Jackson's sexuality has been the subject of speculation since he was a teenager. Perhaps it was his high-pitched speaking
voice; or maybe it was his bashfulness, or the fact that he tended to avoid eye contact and seemed so uncomfortable in his
own skin that caused some to think that he was either concealing something about himself or had not yet come to terms with
it.

Michael has been dealing with the tabloid press for many years and feels he is misunderstood because of unfair and dishonest
media coverage of his life. However, it was when he was nineteen that he first became upset about a story that was not true.
Like a lot of untruths, it was silly: supposedly, he was going to have a sex-change operation and marry a handsome actor named
Clifton Davis, writer of ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’. The story spread quickly across the country; numerous music publications
rushed to the presses with it.

Michael once told me that he was in the music department of a store in the South when he first heard about the rumour. He
said, ‘This girl came up to me and said, “Please tell me it isn't true! Please tell me!” She was crying. I asked, “What? What
isn't true?” She said, “Tell me you're not going to become a girl.
Tell me.
”’

‘Where in the world did you read that?’ Michael asked. ‘
Jet
magazine,’ she responded. ‘It was in
Jet
that you were going to have a sex change.’

‘I felt I didn't know who I was at that moment,’ Michael recalled. ‘I told her to tell all her friends that it was just a
stupid rumour.’

‘Stupid’ as it was, it seemed to Michael that everywhere he went, he heard the story. At the time, nothing could be worse
for him than the notion that there were people who thought he might be homosexual. Michael was raised in a family where homosexuality
was sinful.

After the rumour had been circulating for months, Michael was at Caesars Palace to see Diana Ross perform when he ran into
Clifton Davis. Clifton was backstage with performer, Leslie Uggams. ‘I was with Diana, holding her hand,’ Michael remembered.
‘Clifton was standing next to me, and he was holding Leslie's hand. As I was standing there posing for the photographers,
I thought to myself, Oh no, this is a perfect setup for some magazine to doctor up a picture so that it looks like Clifton
and I are holding hands. That's how paranoid I was getting about that story,’ Michael confessed.

After the photographers departed, Clifton went over to Michael and joked, ‘Hey, look at you. You're not a girl after all,
are you?’ Michael didn't think Clifton's question was very funny. He would never get used to the stories that he leads a secret
gay life, and is still upset when confronted with questions about his sexuality.