MJ (7 page)

“All Michael did every single day, for years, at school, at lunchtime, was just draw and draw and draw,” Merkow says.

Walton had a football rivalry with a high school in Beverly Hills. The team secretly sneaked nonstudent Jackie Jackson into uniform as the second-half quarterback, replacing Merkow. “Even our own principal knew!” Merkow says. Jackie was a ringer—the fastest player on the field by far—and Walton ended up winning the big game. Merkow recalls those days, especially for Michael and Marlon, as happy and fun-loving, but Jermaine was sort of the family’s angry enforcer. “If you did something Jermaine didn’t like, he’d just kick your ass,” Merkow says. “When we needed some muscle, he was the first one.”

The Jacksons eased into their rich celebrity life.
Katherine Jackson bought furniture and a wardrobe. Joseph bought a
new van. Jackie bought an orange Datsun 240Z (which he would total near Ventura Boulevard while fumbling for gum behind the wheel and slamming into a parked car). Tito moved out to live with his new girlfriend, Dee Dee, and bought his first car, a Trans Am. Friends of the Jacksons quickly found that if you were “in,” you had access to a benevolent kingdom of riches. At one point, Merkow and his wife went to Tito’s home to find he had just bought another car. Merkow wondered aloud what Tito
would do with his old, Gucci-trimmed Mercedes.
“I don’t know,” Tito said, “What do you think?” “Well, I’ll take it,” Merkow suggested. Tito tossed him the keys.

But, Merkow adds, “When you had a falling-out with the Jacksons, you’re done.”

“As they got bigger and bigger and more famous, this one had to have a big house and this one had to have a bigger house and this one had to have a big car
and this one had to have a bigger car and this one had to have a Rolls-Royce and this one had to have a Rolls-Royce. And this one’s wife had to have a diamond and this one’s wife had to have a bigger diamond,” recalls Susan Jackson, who married drummer Johnny.

“And,” adds her twin sister, Sherry Danchik, who often socialized at Hayvenhurst, “this one had to have two kids and this one had to have three kids.”

At Hayvenhurst, Jackie, Michael, and Marlon convened in one room to work on their dance routines. Jermaine, Tito, Rancifer, and Johnny Jackson rehearsed in another room. The Motown songs, especially hits like “I Want You Back” and “The Love You Save,” were built on complicated studio arrangements, but the Jackson 5 managed to strip them down so Tito, Jermaine, and Johnny could provide the rhythm and Ronnie could
“make it fat” with his organ sound.

As the singles took off, so did the boys. They appeared on the covers of teen-dream publications such as
Right On!
and the more journalistic
Soul
(subtitle: “America’s Most Soulful Newspaper”). Fans learned Jackie liked
Tom Jones and regarded Jermaine (not Michael, conspicuously) as the group’s best singer; Tito was a fan of Chicago Cub
Ernie Banks; Jermaine taught himself to play the bass “mostly by fooling around with it”; and mischievous Marlon bothered Michael on a regular basis because, according to Michael,
“sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop.” Michael, in one
interview, spoke revealingly of gathering around the family TV set whenever a
“good group” is performing. “See, it’s not copying. That’s not the point,” he said. “You’ve just got
to keep up with the different steps and sounds that everyone is coming up with. It’s all part of keeping your own act together. We know a lot of groups watch us. And we’re very happy they do.”

At the end of every Jackson
5 show, teen girls by the dozens rushed the stage, to the point where the brothers had to regularly drop their instruments and run as fast as they could to waiting cars before even finishing their sets. At the
Boston Garden, they had to sneak into a Pinto and hide under blankets to avoid fan detection.

It was even worse in Europe.
“When we got to the venue, the kids were climbing up on the fence. The fence was very, very high . . . and they were about to break the fence down!” said Jeannie Long, a member of the Sisters Love, a Jackson 5 opening act. “Then after we got to where we were going to be staying, we went to have something to eat. And the kids—the wall of the restaurant was all glass. And it scared me so badly, because it seemed like they were going to break the wall down.”
Jermaine lost tufts of hair, Michael lost a shoe, and the Jacksons at one point had to give an impromptu rooftop concert to calm a pursuing crowd. Once, Michael made the mistake of wearing a scarf. “They were pulling on both ends of the scarf—choking him,” Jermaine said, clearly scared. “He put his hand under the scarf so it wouldn’t tighten up on his neck.” It was like the Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night
, but with frightened children instead of bemused adults. Only
in Japan, where the fans preferred tossing dozens of roses onto the stage rather than chasing and hair grabbing, did the boys get any peace on the road.

The Jacksons’ security man, a former Los Angeles cop named Bill Bray, turned the Commodores, another opening act, into Jacksonmania guinea pigs. He set the older band in open limos along the street near the venues. When the Jackson 5 rushed offstage, the screaming girls encountered the Commodores instead of the Jacksons. This bought crucial time for the actual Jacksons to pile into their own limos and drive away.
“We got a few nicks and cuts and scratches,” recalls Walter “Clyde” Orange, the Commodores’ drummer. “But we loved it.”

The shows were rigid. All five Jacksons stood in a line—Tito with his guitar, on the left, followed by Marlon, Jackie, and Michael doing their high-step-and-hand-roll moves in the center, then Jermaine with his bass. With their bobbing haircuts, striking good looks, and psychedelic costumes, they had a collective charisma, which Michael amplified when he separated from the pack and strutted around the front of the stage, doing his slides, twirls, and lead vocals. They played all their Motown hits—“I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” and “Mama’s Pearl.” They overreached with Isaac Hayes’s “Walk On By,” which they turned into a psychedelic-rock workout featuring Tito, then segued into Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t Know Why I Love You.” Michael’s rehearsed patter, with his brothers playing straight men, was usually built around the shtick of “Isn’t it funny that I’m the lead singer
and
I’m really young?” “I met a girl in the sandbox,” Michael would say before “Who’s Lovin’ You.” “We toasted our love during milk break. We fell out during finger-painting.”

At the hotels, there were pillow fights and card games, and more grown-up diversions as well.
“It’s just like rock ’n’ roll—there’s groupies everywhere,” Rancifer recalls. The older Jacksons, particularly budding sex symbols Jackie and Jermaine, began to indulge, sometimes in front of tiny Michael, who would say the way his brothers treated women on the road turned him off from sexual activity for years. Bored, Michael pounded on doors of his grown-up entourage, including Motown’s Weldon McDougal III. “Man,” McDougal told Michael,
“why don’t you go and hang out with Jackie and them guys?” Michael said, “Hey, man, they got somebody in their room.” McDougal: “Well, how do you know?” Michael: “Because I was listening at the door for about an hour.”

When the brothers grew old enough, women threw hotel-room keys onto the stage, which the boys dodged. During one late-period Motown tour, a beautiful blond woman approached manager Samm Brown with a come-hither look. (
“She’s not here for
you
,” Brown had to keep telling
himself as he spoke with her.) She asked to be introduced to one of the Jackson boys. Brown interrupted the brother in question—he won’t name names—while he was dressing in his room. “Well, what does she look like?” this Jackson asked. “Stunning,” responded Brown. The brother instructed Brown to crack open the door so he could check her out, through a mirror on a side wall. Finally he motioned with his hands: “Come in!” Years later, Brown realized the woman had been a
Playboy
Playmate.

“Suffice it to say, it wasn’t Michael,” Brown recalls. “She was not there to see Michael.”

Joe Jackson’s presence as tour manager didn’t make anybody feel more comfortable. The Commodores, including front man Lionel Richie, used Traffic’s rock hit “Feelin’ Alright” as an onstage jam, until Joe, one day, inexplicably forbade the opening act from playing it. The Jackson 5 put the song in their own set the same night. Another time, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, tour roadies
“forgot” to bring the Commodores’ equipment, including their stage clothes, from the previous show in another city. Joe refused help, so the band improvised, borrowing equipment from nearby friends, forgoing boots and even pants and replacing “Feelin’ Alright” with Buddy Miles’s hot new blues anthem “Them Changes.” The impromptu fashion statement, as Orange recalls, led to rave newspaper reviews the next day. “Nobody really liked Joe Jackson,” Orange says.

*  *  *

“Stand still,” the studio men kept telling eleven-year-old Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson couldn’t stand still.

When he sang, he danced. When he danced, he jerked his head around. When his head moved forward, he sang too close to the microphone. When his head moved backward, he sang too far from the microphone. He was knocking the vocal sound off track.

Suzee Ikeda walked into the sound booth and gently pushed
Michael’s head and neck closer to the mike during the soft part, and pulled it away during the loud part. “It started out like that,” she says, “and it became a whole other thing.”

Ikeda, twenty-two, had arrived at Motown’s Los Angeles offices three years earlier, in 1967. As a girl, she had been an aspiring actress, but she became frustrated with the cattle-call auditions and geisha-girl roles the producers lined up for her. Instead, through her junior high school orchestra teacher, she wound up sitting in on professional recording sessions with Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, and others, sometimes singing a bit herself. She worked on a Supremes Christmas album and, over time, she impressed influential in-house songwriter Brian Holland, who signed her to a solo Motown contract.

Suzee’s talent turned out to be not in her singing ability but in her personality. In her shiny, Diana Ross–like voice, she would record a few singles for Motown, including the desperate “I Can’t Give Back the Love I Feel for You.” But when she wasn’t performing, she was working as a creative assistant at Motown’s studios in LA, watching producers, asking questions, learning the business. Eventually, Berry Gordy noticed her hanging around. “Look, I’ve got enough singers,” he said. “But I don’t have anybody like you, who knows how to do all this stuff.” Ikeda resisted at first—“If I do this, good-bye, singing career,” she told herself—but eventually she accepted Gordy’s full-time job offer.

Ikeda turned out to be a tender figure for Michael Jackson. She helped him in subtle ways. Musically, she discovered to her surprise, he didn’t need much. Most singers had to take a tape of new songs home to “live with it” for a few days, then return with the proper phrasing. Not Michael. Suzee would teach him a song in the studio, give him the tape, and the next day he was ready to go. “He had the fastest ear of anyone I’d ever known,” she recalls. “He’d sing a song one time and he knew it.”

Suzee and Michael developed a series of hand signals and written
notes. Standing next to him in the studio, she’d crook her finger a certain way, prompting him to begin a new vocal run. She’d type out lyrics in advance, triple-spaced. It was not her idea for Michael to stand on a milk crate, covered with a strip of carpet, so he could reach the microphone and stand evenly with Jackie and Jermaine, but she wound up overseeing this crucial piece of equipment. (The crate is still in her house.) She provided paper and Sharpie markers so Michael could doodle cartoons—reverential images of Berry Gordy Jr., Diana Ross, and Ikeda herself, although his rendition of her had such comically exaggerated Asian features that she had to say to Michael, “
Excuse
me?”

Suzee teased him on whether he could understand the grown-up emotions in his love songs—like “Never Can Say Goodbye,” with its references to anguish and doubt. Michael insisted he could. When Suzee quizzed him about what a word meant, he would say, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.” Invariably, most likely after consulting a family dictionary, he’d come back the next day with the correct answer.

Suzee taught Michael how to unplug his microphone so he could speak freely in the studio without the entire production staff hearing him from behind the glass. Through notes and whispers, he appealed to Suzee. “I don’t want to do it this way,” he wrote. “I don’t think that’s right.” Under her breath, she responded, “Do whatever you want.” She understood that Michael Jackson, at age eleven, knew instinctively how to sing a song better than veteran Motown producer Hal Davis did.

Davis could be infectiously enthusiastic. He had a way of saying, “That’s a hit!” that suggested whatever artist or songwriter in his presence was the most important person in the world. He could also be reclusive, inscrutable, vengeful. Suzee kept hundreds of Michael’s cartoons and doodles in a file cabinet in Davis’s office. One day, Berry Gordy informed Ikeda that she would be working in a new song-production group. When it started to look as though Ikeda would
have increased access to the all-powerful Gordy, Davis developed an attitude. He dumped the contents of Suzee’s cabinet, Michael Jackson doodles and all, into the trash.

*  *  *

With Davis essentially running Motown in Los Angeles, Gordy began to shift his attention away from music. He put his time, money, and creative energy into making Diana Ross a movie star, giving her the title role in his new Billie Holiday biopic.
“Berry wasn’t even listening to the records then, let’s be serious,” recalled Barney Ales, Gordy’s top lieutenant. “He was going in a new direction. He was all
Lady Sings the Blues
by then.”

Still, when it came to Gordy’s two biggest acts, Ross and the Jackson 5, he continued his controlling ways. Arthur Rankin, cartoon producer at ABC, met with Gordy at his Hollywood Hills home to go over designs and choreography for a new cartoon series they were discussing on Michael and his brothers. Rankin had ideas of his own. He wanted prominent illustrator Jack Davis to do the artwork.
“Bring him over here,” Gordy said. “We’ve got all the stuff we need right here.” When Rankin showed up, he was surprised to find Gordy with a room full of technicians standing by to roll tape. Gordy took an interest in design, appearance, and how the cartoon likenesses would move and sing. He was “very much in control of his kingdom,” Rankin recalls.