MJ (13 page)

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very singer James Ingram knew, including himself, stood carefully in front of the studio microphone, trying not to move too much and clutter the recording with extraneous noise. The first thing Ingram noticed about Michael Jackson, watching him sing
“P.Y.T.” at Westlake Studios in LA, was Michael didn’t care about any of that. Somebody may have had to hold little MJ’s head ten years earlier at Motown, but as a liberated, grown-up pop star, Jackson approached the mike as if twenty thousand people were watching him: he slid his feet, bobbed his shoulders, flailed his arms, snapped his fingers, tee-heed, woo-hooed, gulped, and hiccupped. After Michael finished transforming Ingram’s song “P.Y.T.” from a little love ballad into a booming, sure-hit, funk-rock anthem, he turned and asked: “Am I singing it right?” Sitting in the dark, Ingram’s eyes widened. “Man,” he said, “you
killing
it.”

*  *  *

The “universities of Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones,” as James Ingram refers to them, were two different institutes of higher learning. One was an assembly line, where laborers ran every bit of work by the boss for corrections and modifications. The other was warm and accepting, with
hugs for everybody, an organized hippie gathering.
“The Motown musicians came from this jazz heritage. It was competitive,” recalls Anthony Marinelli, one of the
Thriller
synthesizer players. “With Quincy, it was like coming into this loving family.” At eleven, trained into submission by his father, Michael Jackson needed Motown’s structure, routine, and instruction. At twenty-four, an artist and songwriter, he needed flexibility, patience, and encouragement. He needed somebody who knew when to let him run off a twenty-minute groove and when to gently reel him in. That was Quincy Jones.

Quincy encouraged Michael to be more self-sufficient for
Thriller
than he had been for
Off the Wall.
Michael was leaning that way already. He had been writing steadily since
Destiny
, and while he had no training (or interest) in transcribing musical notes onto a page, he devised his own method. As he’d told Quincy Jones over the phone years earlier, he heard music in his head and used his mouth to make
“sounds of how I want the bass or the strings or the drums or each part to go.” Michael described his inspirational process throughout his career as a kind of magic, “like standing under a tree and letting a leaf fall and trying to catch it—it’s that beautiful.” He used a recorder to capture sounds as they occurred to him (
“. . . and the piano be going ‘da da da da,’ and I’ll figure out the rest of it later”) and to psych himself up. Before writing and producing Diana Ross’s 1982 single “Muscles,” he taped a message to himself: “I want the biggest drum sounds we can get! Fool around with different sounds! Experiment! Bring to the studio things that influence me—like a child, or pictures of children. Tell all my musicians what I’m looking for—the best—and don’t settle for less.”

On one level, Michael’s songwriting evolution was part of Quincy’s plan. But some who worked with both men suggest they began to drift apart during the
Thriller
sessions. “Before
Thriller
, Quincy would do everything. Michael was the artist—he’d do his thing and do an amazing job and just go home,” recalls a source who contributed to the album. “For
Thriller
, Michael would do a demo, Quincy would redo it. He wouldn’t use
Michael’s guitar player—he used who he wanted to use. And Michael would have the balls to say, ‘I don’t like that. I want to bring my guy in.’ And they would. That’s when Michael started coming into his own as an artist, and he’d speak up. He started getting more hands-on.”

Michael was able to record his own songs at his sixteen-track home studio, but it wasn’t particularly state-of-the-art.
“It was kind of an orphaned, packaged studio,” says Brent Averill, the engineer Michael hired to rebuild it in fall 1979, the week
Off the Wall
came out. Averill spent the next several years showing Michael how to engineer during one-on-one sessions at Hayvenhurst. Back then, Michael’s family had no regular housecleaning, no gardeners, and no employees, other than Nelson Hayes, Michael’s assistant, and Bill Bray, the Jacksons’ longtime security man. Michael gave Averill a key to the front gate and the studio, and the engineer gave Michael the tools to record professional-sounding demos on his own. The most unusual feature of the studio was Michael’s parrot, who squawked at inopportune times—it can be heard in the background of one of the early “Billie Jean” demos. One time, working with La Toya on one of her songs, Averill made the mistake of laughing at the parrot’s antics in the background; Michael’s sensitive sister thought he was laughing at her and refused to work with him after that.

At his private studio, Michael wrote and recorded demos for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” “We recorded in a hurry,” Averill says. “Sloppy, throw it down, don’t fix it, just get it on tape while the ideas are coming.” MJ began to invite musicians to his home studio, including rhythm guitarist David Williams, keyboardist Bill Wolfer, and bassist Nate Watts. With their help, he updated and strengthened “Billie Jean.”

Michael summoned veteran backup singer Oren Waters, who’d laid down vocals for numerous Jackson 5 songs at Motown, as well as Oren’s sisters Maxine and Julia. During the “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” demo recording at Hayvenhurst, Waters began to see more complexity from Jackson than he expected.
“We had known Michael from when
he was a little kid,” he says. “The lyrics ‘You’re a vegetable, you’re just a buffet, people eat off of you’—I’m going, ‘I see the beginning of a little bit of torment.’ ”

Waters had no idea what else was happening in Michael’s life, and how much Michael and his family were struggling to keep it private. On October 16, 1980, Gina Sprague, a pretty nineteen-year-old secretary and publicist at Joe Jackson Productions, was sitting at her desk when Katherine, Randy, and Janet Jackson showed up at her office on Sunset Boulevard. Katherine, the matriarchal Jehovah’s Witness, was not known for her violent outbursts, and neither were Randy, eighteen, nor Janet, fourteen. But the three Jacksons allegedly assaulted her.
“Bitch, you better leave my husband alone!” Katherine shouted. Katherine Jackson had happened to pick up the phone at Hayvenhurst and heard her husband on the line, talking to Gina,
“graphically describing relations,” as she would confide to one of Joe Jackson’s other employees, Joyce McRae. Sprague denied the affair, but Joe was a known womanizer. That same fall, he was preparing to announce to his family the outcome of an earlier affair, with Cheryl Terrell, which led to the birth of his daughter, Joh’Vonnie Jackson, in 1974.

After the alleged assault, Sprague landed in Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center with cuts and bruises. Joseph visited the next day and tried to give her an envelope full of money. She refused. Two and a half years later, Sprague sued Joe, Randy, Katherine, and Janet for
$21 million. They settled privately. Katherine Jackson filed for divorce from Joe—again—on August 19, 1982.

During this period, even visiting journalists noticed a shift in Michael’s mood. Leonard Pitts Jr., a
Soul
reporter who would write a book about the Jackson family, recalled interviewing Michael at Hayvenhurst for his twenty-first birthday:
“He didn’t seem very happy. Truth is, he seemed tired. Not from fatigue or exertion. It was an existential tired, as if he felt worn down by the simple act of being. I remember Jackson did not walk about the place so much as haunt it, slumping
from room to room as [if] a great weight rested upon his sparrow shoulders.” When Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
asked during the same period why MJ still lived with his parents, unlike his brothers, he said,
“Oh, no, I think I’d die on my own. I’d be so lonely. Even at home, I’m lonely. I sit in my room and sometimes cry. It is so hard to make friends, and there are some things you can’t talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home.” Earlier, he had told the
Times
of his emptiness outside of performing: “It may sound crazy but I’m a stage addict,” he said. “When I’m not onstage for a long time I have fits and I get crazy. I start crying and I act . . . I guess you might say weird and freaked out. I’ve been doing this for so long,” he said. “I sometimes feel like I should be seventy by now.”

To deal with these feelings, Michael burrowed deeper into his art. He wrote one of his bleakest songs, “Heartbreak Hotel,” dealing with a favorite subject: fear of the public. He sings of faces “staring, glaring, tearing through me,” then observes: “Someone said, ‘Welcome to your room’ / then they smiled with eyes that looked as if they knew me / this is scaring me.” When he and his brothers recorded the song for the
Triumph
album, they packed its climaxes with all manner of noisy effects (including a La Toya scream) as Michael collapses into frightened panting. Michael was beginning to come out in public—as a depressive.

In 1979, Michael also had his
first nose job, or so he said, after he fell onstage trying to execute a complex dance step during the
Destiny
tour. Bassist Mike Mckinney and guitarist Bud Rizzo have
no memory of any onstage accident, during a show or rehearsal, or any midtour trip to a doctor’s office, but then again, MJ didn’t exactly announce it to the universe. Jermaine walked into Hayvenhurst one day to find Michael with bandages on his nose and cheeks.
“
What
in the hell happened to
you
?” he asked. Michael wouldn’t say. Katherine shot Jermaine a look suggesting his question was “insensitive.” He was “told” later that Michael had slipped and fallen near the living-room bar and
required rhinoplasty. Later, Michael was referred to a well-known plastic surgeon, Steven Hoefflin, who suggested a second nose job, then performed it himself.

Necessity or not, Michael hadn’t been feeling confident about his face.
“Offstage, our merciless teasing only made matters worse, but teasing is what brothers do, and we all had to go through it,” Jermaine said. “When my acne first kicked in, they—including Michael—called me ‘Bumpy Face’ or ‘Map Face’ and Marlon was ‘Liver Lips.’ . . . So when Michael was called ‘Big Nose,’ it was just part of the common initiation into manhood—but he struggled with it.” Especially painful, for Michael, was
Joseph’s adoption of the nickname. “Michael said nothing, and cringed each time,” Jermaine recalls. When Jermaine became a vegetarian, avoiding greasy food, his skin cleared up. Michael decided to do the same. As he did this while growing out of puberty, his cheeks sank in and he became unnaturally skinny. Friends and writers have theorized Michael was anorexic, although the singer never confirmed this.
“Michael was doing plastic surgery to wipe family off his face,” suggests Joyce McRae
^I
, who worked at Joseph Jackson’s production company. “Michael was at one point extremely miserable. He had really bad skin problems. He had a really, really horrible self-image.”

Michael consistently explained his facial reconstruction as just something people in show business did. But even in these early days of Michael Jackson procedures, perplexed friends and family were seeing broader motives. An old colleague from Motown, singer Jimmy Ruffin, was one of many who believe Michael was beginning to shift away from his African-American identity as he began to approach a broader (meaning white) world of pop culture.
“Michael felt under pressure where his image was concerned because of who he is. He was a black guy, he was an inner-city guy,” he said. “How could he be the darling of
white society? He had to change.” Others interpreted Michael’s facial moves artistically. He was writing his own songs, making his own music, and resculpting his face. As the world was moving toward
“hybridization,” wrote critic Jean Baudrillard, with fewer racial and gender definitions, so was Michael: “In short, he has been reconstructed with the greatest attention to detail.” As a kid, Michael Jackson had known only boundaries, from his controlling father to his segregated neighborhood, but as a singer, songwriter, and star, he could begin to construct an increasingly limitless world for himself, at least for the time being.

Michael was experimenting in more worrisome ways, too. In 1979, he was staying at the Drug and Arrow Hotel in Leeds, England, for a promotional tour with his brothers, when a thirteen-year-old boy named Terry George showed up at his door to request an interview. Michael was sharing a room with Randy and answered the door himself.
“Oh, hi!” Michael said to Terry. The British teen requested an interview. “Yeah!” responded Michael, who rarely gave interviews. “Come in.” (It was still the seventies, and rock ’n’ roll security hadn’t fully been developed yet.) They chatted for an hour, and Michael asked to exchange phone numbers. This led to months of international phone calls, sometimes late at night for Terry in the UK. Michael’s parents weren’t paying attention, and Terry’s dad would boast to his friends, “I was just speaking to Michael Jackson on the telephone.” During one of these phone conversations, Michael asked Terry whether he masturbated. Terry had no idea what he was talking about. “Do you ever use cream?” Michael asked. Terry thought he was talking about sweets. “No,” Terry said. “I’m doing it now,” Michael told him. Terry, by then fourteen, chose to laugh it off: “It was a bit of an awkward conversation, really,” he says today. He kept this highly sensitive information about Michael Jackson to himself, at least for the time being.

Michael turned twenty-one in August 1979. He could feel himself separating from his family, musically and creatively, and just as he needed his own manager, he needed a lawyer of his own, someone to
represent his interests and not Joseph’s. It had actually been Jermaine who made the first move in this direction, back in 1975, the year he turned twenty-one and removed himself from the family group to stay behind at Motown. Jermaine called a prestigious Century City law firm and told an attorney there that his brothers had made a ton of money over a decade and didn’t know where it was. The attorney referred Jermaine to an accountant who had once been an IRS agent.
Michael Mesnick conducted an internal audit of the family’s expenses. He found nothing unusual. He was straightforward. Even Joe appreciated that. He hired Mesnick to stay on as the Jacksons’ accountant.