You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (24 page)

‘YOU ARE CONFIDENT … YOU ARE
strong … You are beautiful … You are the greatest.’

In my mind, I am relistening to a tape and it is Michael’s unmistakable voice. He’s talking to himself. ‘You are confident … You are strong … You are beautiful … You are the greatest,’ he repeats. He is meditative and alone, speaking in a tone as soft as the lightest breath. I hear it today as clearly as I did back then; one of Michael’s morning meditations in the eighties, a mantra captured on a voice recorder so that he could play it back as a pep-talk to himself. He was like a sportsman in the dressing room before stepping into the public arena on a must-win day, eradicating any doubt or fear of failure. With Michael setting out to conquer the music world, he needed to be mentally strong. I don’t know if it was a technique handed down by Muhammad Ali, but ‘the greatest’ suggests to me that it was, as an extension of our training: think it, see it, believe it, make it happen.

I first heard this mantra in 1984, in the studio with Michael, when we recorded a song called ‘Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming’. We’d
been talking about negativity and he said something about controlling our thoughts, adding, ‘Listen to this.’ If he were still alive, he would probably cringe at my sharing this because it was a very private ritual. But if his legacy is about the empowerment of others with his music or wisdom, then I think this insight is appropriate because it shows that Michael Jackson – the King of Pop, the greatest entertainer – was human, too. It says that his self-esteem needed a kick up the butt just like anyone else’s.

Michael used positive self-talk when he needed to feel good or make something happen: ‘When you say it out loud, and you keep repeating it, the subconscious can make it come true,’ he always said. To him, speaking into a tape recorder – a device never far from his side to capture an arrangement or lyric that came into his head – was as natural as making a wish. He wrote about this in his autobiography, explaining how he made wishes while watching sunsets, casting out those hopes for the sun to take with it. As a boy, he always made a wish before diving into the pool. These wishes were focused on creating the best-selling record of all time. We all believed in positive visualisation, but Michael took it to a whole new level: messages on his mirror, mantras on his tape recorder, imagining his name in
The Guinness Book of Records
, and wishes cast into sunsets and swimming pools.

I have no doubt that he was telling himself that he was the greatest in the run-up to his ‘This Is It’ concert in London; a featherweight champion psyching himself up for a comeback. He was his greatest critic with each new album and tour; he didn’t view himself as the fans did. The adulation may have been Michael’s constant source of love, but it didn’t guarantee self-love in a public environment where the media labelled him ‘wacko’ and ‘weird’. Mental strength becomes the biggest challenge when the fans don’t expect you to fall but the world’s media are waiting for the moment you do.

Michael believed that if he put something out there – and said something was so – it would become reality, and everyone in the family knew that he was promising the kind of solo album that
would astound us all. But that creative process was strictly private. According to Mother, he locked himself away in his quarters and she only knew the song-writing was going well because, occasionally, she’d pass his door and hear a ‘Whoo!’ and excited clapping.

IF
OFF THE WALL
DIDN’T BRING
a clutch of awards, it swelled his ‘fan-dom’, and the days of Jackson-mania meant he was ready and equipped for it. That was probably a good thing because disturbing incidents started to happen. Once, Mother went into a back room behind the garage and got the fright of her life. There, in a sleeping-bag, lying next to a bunch of discarded food wrappers, was a young girl, looking equally startled. Ever the saint, Mother asked her what she was doing.

‘Waiting for Michael,’ she said innocently.

‘How on earth did you get in? How long have you been here?’

‘About two weeks. Will Michael see me?’

We knew how she had gained access but I’m not going to advertise the fact, even if we have blocked it off today. But that’s how big the property was: she had been able to go unnoticed for that long.

Yet that was a minor incident compared to the time Mother decided to take a nap in her bedroom. She was probably lying there for about half an hour when she felt a presence. She opened her eyes and, looking down on her, standing beside her bed, were two of the most innocent-looking fans. ‘We didn’t know what to do … we didn’t want to wake you,’ they said, ‘but we’ve come to see if we can ask for Michael’s autograph.’

Mother didn’t call the police because ‘I didn’t want them getting into trouble.’ But our position would be less forgiving when the ‘Billie Jeans’ of this world started to show up.

There have been many theories about the song’s inspiration, with suggestions that ‘Billie Jean’ was a specific woman. But, as Michael made clear in his autobiography, she is actually a composition of the most obsessive fans, as witnessed during our Jackson 5 days.

The song tells the story of a woman trying to trap a man with a false pregnancy and its true back-story lies in two incidents. First, one lady mailed me a pair of pink baby shoes to the Bel Air home I’d shared with Hazel. An attached note read: ‘These are for the baby we’ll be having. I am pregnant with your child.’ Then Jackie received a similar fantastical claim in a handwritten letter sent to his home. As the two most prolific boys with the ladies, we were wide open to such claims but they ignored the fact that we practised safe sex. Michael never slept with a fan so no such claim could be made against him.

In later years – after the song became a worldwide hit – the family described a certain kind of fan as a ‘Billie Jean’. It wasn’t intended to be a compliment – because that song is no love story – but a few people put their hands in the air to claim this notoriety over imagined relationships with Michael.

Billie Jeans were fans Michael was wary of. The interior walls of the guard-house we installed at Hayvenhurst were covered with photos and sketches of what each woman looked like. It resembled a sheriff’s office with ‘Wanted’ photos. The most notorious Billie Jean was a woman we knew as Yvonne, an African-American with three kids. She was always loitering around, convinced Michael loved her. One day, she waited at the front gate until Mother came out to see her. She had shaved the heads of her three children, saying they had lice and she needed Michael’s help because ‘These are your grandchildren. These are the children I had with Michael.’

Another Billie Jean lived in the UK but the 5,000-mile journey has never deterred her. She actually took out a lawsuit against the family, saying she had married Michael in secret and they’d had a child. She even presented convincing-looking marriage and birth certificates as ‘evidence’ in a case that obviously went nowhere.

But the most astonishing incident happened later at Neverland when a Billie Jean accessed the grounds. When security found her, she was carrying a bona-fide California driving licence from the
Department of Motor Vehicles with a photo and an address that said ‘Neverland Ranch’, Figueroa Valley and the zip-code – and the name Billie Jean. It was incredible the lengths these women went to.

I need to stress that the vast majority of Michael’s fans were not Billie Jeans; they were the most dedicated, loyal and loving fans an artist could wish for, and he knew this better than anyone. He shared a unique association with the people he called his ‘soldiers of love’. Once security had screened groups of fans outside Hayvenhurst, he’d come out to spend a few minutes chatting and signing autographs. He was forever trying to make himself accessible in an increasingly inaccessible reality.

As his brother, it wasn’t always easy to keep my patience. One day, I pulled into the driveway to find a man standing alone at the gate, blocking my way in. I asked him politely to move. He refused. I asked him what his problem was. Michael’s family, he said.
That
was his problem. ‘I’m here to rescue him,’ he added.

‘Michael doesn’t need rescuing. Now get out of my way,’ I said.

When he refused, I got out of the car and we started fighting just as the security guards arrived. ‘You know nothing about this family! Now leave us alone!’ I yelled.

Strangers claiming to know Michael as well as we did were something we would have to get used to. But at least that guy got the message and ran off.

If only it would always have proved that easy to keep divisiveness at bay.

MICHAEL MADE THE DECISION TO REDESIGN
Hayvenhurst, gutting its interior, adding a second storey and landscaping the gardens. There had been talk of a move after 11 years in Encino, but he wanted to stick around because he liked it there, so he offered to pay for the remodelling. Everyone moved into a family-owned condo up the road as the house was rebuilt English-style, mock-Tudor. He wanted ‘to liven the place up a little’ and the new Hayvenhurst – planned in 1981, built in early 1983 – remains infused with my brother’s heart and spirit.

After passing by a stone fountain of kneeling horses, the grand entrance is a double-door leading to a lobby with a white marble floor. Library and in-house theatre to the left; living room and kitchen to the right. Ahead the staircase sweeps from right to left, curving up around a central chandelier. At the landing that overlooks the lobby, turn right down the emerald-green carpet to what were Janet and La Toya’s rooms. Turn left to Mother’s and Joseph’s suite in one corner and Michael’s in another. Michael’s quarters and the sisters’ bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house – a point worth noting for later reports that placed La Toya’s ‘bedroom adjacent to Michael’s’, suggesting she could easily witness all his comings and goings.

Inside his quarters, there was a brick fireplace, black marble bathroom and a Murphy bed that folded into the wall because Michael often liked to sleep on the floor; a hangover from our Gary days when we’d throw down a mattress or a duvet. There is just
something
about sleeping on the floor that we’ve always liked. I’m the same to this day. I prefer it, whereas Michael always said it was good for his back.

In his rooms, photos of Ava Gardner were pinned up because he ‘loved her grace and beauty’. In later years he had pictures of child star Shirley Temple and then, towards the end of his life, Alicia Keys. His ceiling leaps to a narrow mezzanine-level loft – reached by a white-painted, wooden spiral staircase – which is lined with bookshelves and leads to a door and a set of rooms tucked away in the roof, with a den and a ‘hair salon’ complete with a barber’s swivel chair, sink and mirror. It wasn’t the only private place in his quarters – he also ensured he had his own staircase to a back entrance out of the house.

His bedroom opened on to a brick patio with a vast, pergola-like canopy supported by pillars; he placed a giant hot-tub in one corner and a tiled barbecue area in the other. This was where he sat in the mornings, with views of the lawns 90 degrees to his left and the cobblestoned courtyard below, reached by his outside spiral staircase leading from the patio. In the middle of that yard stands a
Victorian lamp-post with a street sign announcing ‘Happiness’. In a corner down to his left, there is a brick building with a mock shop frontage; one display window depicts a 1950s toy store full of porcelain dolls, wooden toy soldiers, teddy bears, a doll’s house and a mini rocking chair; the other a flower store, full of artificial arrangements in baskets. This is the façade of Michael’s studio. The fun on the outside belied the serious work that went on behind the scenes.

Inside, a painted mural fills one wall. It is a green forest scene, with a cartoon version of Michael perched in a tree reading a green book with a title
The Secret of Life
– required reading for Jehovah’s Witnesses. On the studio’s exterior wall is an encased image of a Disney-like castle on a hill, lying in the distance at the end of a path leading from a forest. In the foreground, Michael stands with a child leaning into him. ‘Of Children, Castles and Kings,’ the caption reads, embedded with pin-lights.

But the most striking change was in the gardens: there were flowers everywhere. Michael never used to like flowers ‘because they remind me of funerals’, but his trips to Disney had changed all that. Now he created blooming flowerbeds, arranged in the colours of the rainbow, five, six rows deep. It is in those gardens that you can’t help but notice a wrought-iron web of leaves framing a lantern. It hangs from one corner of the house with a wooden, hand-carved sign that reads, ‘Follow Your Dreams Wherever They May Lead.’

There was one surprise renovation we were not allowed to see until Michael was ready. The ‘attic’ – two narrow rooms above the garage – was out of bounds for weeks. ‘No one is allowed up there,’ he told Mother. ‘It’s a gift to you all – I want everybody to see it at the same time.’

He was up in that attic for nights on end, running up and down the short flight of stairs beside the garage, organising his secret project with his assistants and helpers.

Come the day of the grand unveiling, Michael asked every sibling to gather in the dining room with Mother and Joseph. The chef laid on an impressive buffet, so we guessed this was a big deal.
There was a real touch of the ceremonial and then, clapping his hands to seize our attention, he appeared at the door. ‘Everyone, my surprise is ready. Follow me!’

In single file, we crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the attic. I was somewhere in the middle of the herd when I heard gasps up ahead. When I reached the top and looked around, I understood why.

Michael had turned the entire space into a memory room.

He had literally smothered the walls
and ceilings
in images, blown up into large prints, running into one another. Every inch of available surface – including the underside of the sloping garage roof and the inside of a closet – is to this day covered with his black-and-white and colour montage. I’m not talking photos neatly arranged in frames like a museum; I’m talking about walls plastered with images that provided a running commentary of our years as a family, our years as a group, and his years as a solo artist; his fondest memories merged together in one place to provide a secret archive of his and our journey.