Michael Jackson (52 page)

After the first of three shows in Kansas City, the truth was painfully clear: Michael should never have agreed to do the tour,
but for more reasons than the problems with ticket prices and promotion. He was a front man for an act he no longer felt a
part of, and the brothers weren't comfortable in their roles as his supporting players, either. Or as one critic put it, ‘Marlon,
Jermaine, Randy and Tito seemed mostly ill-at-ease extras at their own celebration.’

Jermaine's odd comments to reporter Simon Kinnersley at this time brought to light the dissension and fraternal jealousy running
rampant within the group. He said, ‘Even though Michael is very talented, a lot of his success has been due to timing and
a little bit of luck. It could have been him, or it could just as easily have been me. But now I'm doing a lot of things.
I'm the hottest brother. It'll be the same when my brothers do their thing.’

To Michael's audience, though, none of the controversy they kept hearing and reading about mattered when
he,
the undisputed star, appeared on stage. All that mattered was his talent, his passion for his work, his charisma, his voice – and
the way he could execute one of those impossible, backward glides across the stage. The audience roared its appreciation for
him with every song. Not only had he outgrown any family pageantry, one sensed that he was constrained by a fear of upstaging
his brothers.

Also, there was a feeling – imaginary or not – that Michael couldn't wait for the show to end. At the same time, the brothers,
who entertained with great hunger and eagerness, looked as if they knew that their performance represented the chance of a
lifetime for them… and maybe their last chance. However, never for a moment did they appear to share any common values or
goals of showmanship with their star performer. And never did it appear that Michael wanted anything more to do with them
than necessary. By trying to prove his loyalty to his family, he had distanced himself even further from them. Moreover, maybe
he had lost a little of his soul in the process. Certainly he must have felt as if he'd lost
something
when James Brown – one of his idols – refused his invitation to perform onstage with him at Madison Square Garden in New York.

James, always a big fan of Michael's, felt that the steep ticket prices would preclude the attendance of many of the group's
black fans. That decision had to hurt Michael, and make him think about whether the tour was worth it to him.

The agony of
Victory
would continue through 9 December 1984 – same show and dialogue each and every performance. Michael is not a spontaneous performer.
In concert, he has a set routine, and he rarely veers from it. Bruce Springsteen went to see the show in Philadelphia and
afterwards he and Michael had a conversation backstage.

‘Do you talk to people during your concerts?’ Michael asked him. ‘I heard that you do.’

‘Yeah. I tell stories,’ Bruce said. ‘People like that, I've learned. They like to hear your voice do something besides singing.
They go wild when you just talk.’

Michael shuddered. ‘Oh, I could never do that. To me, it feels like people are learning something about you they shouldn't
know.’

The closer the time came for the tour to be over, the more anxious Michael was to see it end. ‘The way we planned it, this
was going to be the greatest tour of all time,’ Joseph Jackson would say in retrospect. ‘But outsiders interfered. Soon the
brothers were at each other's throats.’

Without a doubt, the most annoying thing about the Jacksons' behaviour over the years has been their frustrating inability
to take responsibility for their own actions. Over the years, all of them have pointed fingers to external sources for their
internal problems. Either it's managers, promoters, the public or, their favourite foe, ‘the media’, that is held responsible
for their problems – never themselves. Of course, the truth is that they almost always create their own internal dysfunction.

Touring can be a stressful, lonely business for an entertainer, even under the best of circumstances. However, to feel isolated
from the people with whom you are performing, let alone if they happen to be your family members, is devastating – especially
to someone as sensitive as Michael. The family had already begun to fall apart; the Victory tour seemed to be hastening its
complete destruction. At one point in the tour, Michael was so upset with his brothers, he suffered from exhaustion and dehydration
and had to be put under a doctor's care.

As a result of such pressure, Michael became increasingly difficult. Some of his demands were unreasonable. At one point,
he threatened not to perform unless a certain publicist working on the tour was fired. The publicist had apparently allowed
something to be printed that Michael did not appreciate. The brothers ignored the threat. Then, at the last possible minute,
right before the show was to start, Frank Dileo announced that Michael would not appear unless the publicist was dismissed
on the spot. Of course,
then
the publicist was fired.

In the beginning of the tour, it was agreed that only the performing members of the family would travel in the Jacksons' van.
However, when Michael started showing up with Emmanuel Lewis, nothing could have been more annoying to the brothers. Before
the tour was even half over, the brothers began travelling in separate vans and limousines – Jackie (who joined the tour midway
on crutches, but did not perform), Marlon, Randy and Tito in one vehicle, Jermaine in another by himself, and Michael in still
another, alone. When they had to travel by air, the brothers used a commercial airline; Michael travelled by private jet.
(A couple of times, Pia Zadora's multimillionaire husband, Meshulam Riklis, who was friendly with the Jacksons, took mercy
on the brothers and allowed them to use his private aircraft.) In New York, when the group had to fly by helicopter to Giants
Stadium, they agreed that no outsiders would be in the helicopter. Michael then showed up with Julian Lennon, John's son.
The brothers glared at both of them during the brief flight.

At one point, the Jacksons received an offer from a producer who wanted to pay them millions of dollars to film the show and
release it to the home-video market when the tour was over. They took a vote. Everyone was for the idea, except for Michael.
He threatened that he would not perform if they struck such a deal. Furthermore, no one was to videotape the show. Without
any recourse, the brothers bitterly turned down the deal, and all of that money.

Then, three nights later, the group was onstage with cameras all about them. Michael, himself, had arranged for the show to
be videotaped. ‘I'll give you copies, don't worry,’ he promised his brothers when they confronted him after the performance,
but they never saw a copy. (When Michael tried to get them to agree to let him release the video to the marketplace, they
blocked him from doing it.)

The brothers stayed on separate floors of hotels in each city; they refused to talk to each other on their way to the stadiums.
Every time there was a meeting about anything, there would also be side meetings among the different factions in the group,
including the pair of lawyers who represented Michael, the one who worked for Jermaine, and the two who spoke for the rest
of the brothers. ‘It was devastating,’ said long-time family friend Joyce McCrae. ‘It amounted to the worst experiences Michael
had ever had with his brothers. His success had affected every member of the family. Some were jealous, there was denial,
the whole gamut of human emotions.’

During the final week of the tour, Joseph and Don King began making plans to take the Victory tour to Europe. When Michael
heard about the possibility of European dates, he couldn't believe his ears. He sent a succinct message to Joseph and Don
through Frank Dileo: ‘I will absolutely not be going to Europe with the Victory tour. Good luck to you. Michael.’

On 9 December 1984, after the last song of the evening, Michael hollered out from the Los Angeles stage, ‘This is our last
and final show. It's been a long twenty years, and we love you all.’ The brothers looked at Michael with surprised expressions,
as if his declaration was news to them. ‘What a little prick,’ one of the brothers said of Michael afterward. ‘How dare he?
The little creep.’

‘There's no way Michael Jackson should be as big as he is and treat his family the way he does,’ Don King fumed after the
final show, when it was clear to him that he would not be taking the show abroad. ‘He feels that his father did him wrong?
His father may have done some wrong, but he also had to do a whole lot right.’

He went on, ‘What Michael's got to realize is that Michael's a nigger. It doesn't matter how great he can sing and dance.
I don't care that he can prance. He's one of the megastars of the world, but he's still going to be a nigger megastar. He
must accept that. Not only must he understand that, he's got to accept it and demonstrate that he wants to be a nigger. Why?
To show that a nigger can do it.’

If it was possible for Michael to blow sky high when he read those comments, he would have done it. ‘Sue his ass,’ he told
John Branca. ‘That guy has been pushing my last nerve since Day One.’ John knew better than to drag the Don King experience
into a new year with fresh litigation. He calmed Michael down, as he always managed to do, and convinced him to let it go.

As if to rid himself of the bad taste in his mouth left by the Victory tour, Michael donated all of his proceeds from it – nearly
five million dollars – to the T. J. Martell Foundation for Cancer Research, the United Negro College Fund and the Ronald McDonald
Camp for Good Times.

When Michael wrote of the Victory tour in his autobiography,
Moonwalk,
he didn't mention Don King, Joseph and Katherine Jackson, Chuck Sullivan, or any of the other principal players behind the
scenes. Of his brothers, he took the high ground, as he always does, ‘It was a nice feeling, playing with my brothers again,’
he wrote, graciously. ‘We were all together again… I enjoyed the tour.’ Whether or not he wanted to admit it publicly, the
real victory for Michael Jackson was that he and his brothers were finally finished as a performing group.

Their future as a family didn't look very promising either.

While Michael Jackson and his brothers were preoccupied with the Victory tour, trouble was brewing at home too. Much to everyone's
dismay, Janet (who turned eighteen on 16 May 1984), had become involved with a young singer named James DeBarge. James is
from a large singing family from Grand Rapids, Michigan (the same DeBarge that had been the Jackson's stable-mates at Motown),
and he and Janet seemed to have common ground, at least superficially, since both were from show-business families. Joseph
and Katherine disapproved of the relationship, saying that James was combative and unpredictable. Plus, in their view, Janet
was young and inexperienced. James would later insist, though, that he and Janet were first intimate when she was just fifteen,
and, he added somewhat indelicately, ‘that was some real lovemaking.’

When the Jackson parents finally figured out that James was abusing drugs, it was the end of their daughter's little romance,
as far as they were concerned. However, Janet told them that she was in love with him and determined to marry him, despite – or
perhaps even because of – their disapproval. She was aware that he had a drug problem, she said, but she thought she could handle
it, and maybe even be of assistance. ‘You always think you can change people,’ she said in retrospect. ‘And I knew that he
so badly wanted to change. He was trying, but he wasn't trying hard enough.’

They eloped on 7 September 1984, in Grand Rapids, DeBarge's hometown. Their wedding night was a disaster, as James recalled
it: ‘I spoiled it completely. Janet had been shaking in her shoes at the wedding ceremony, and I thought the least I could
do was to give her a night to remember. I booked the top suite of the Amway Plaza Hotel, which cost me a small fortune. But
then I went out and got rotten drunk with some friends. I finally got back to the hotel at three a.m. and Janet was waiting
for me, crying.’

The next day, Janet telephoned LaToya to tell her the news of her marriage. LaToya was then charged with breaking the startling
news to Joseph and Katherine who, predictably, did not take it well. She also telephoned each brother, except Michael. They
were all upset and angry, Jermaine in particular. ‘I know that he would have killed her if he could've gotten his hands on
Janet,’ LaToya would remember.

The question, then, was how to tell Michael. Actually, no member of the family wanted to be the one to do it. It was as if
they felt they would somehow be forever tainted in his eyes by being the person most remembered for having passed on such
awful news. Michael had always felt protective of Janet; he used to say that she was his best friend in the family, ‘like
a twin’. The news was sure to be upsetting, and the Victory tour was difficult enough for him without having to deal with
such domestic turmoil. So, no one wanted to be ‘the one’. Finally, Quincy Jones's daughter, a friend of the family's, called
Michael to tell him; she didn't have anything to lose. As expected, he was filled with anxiety by the news. ‘It killed me
to see her go off and get married,’ Michael would say later. ‘I didn't know how to handle it.’