You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (25 page)

I was speechless trying to absorb the scale of this monumental project. There were photos of our grandparents, the family, 2300 Jackson Street, our childhood, Jackson 5 days, magazine covers, TV publicity shots, concert stills and crowd shots. You name it, he’d posted it. Even Mother’s driver’s licence, our parents’ marriage certificate and his old school report. The second room, at the far end, would ultimately fill with memorabilia, awards, mementoes and glass cases of his sequined gloves. By the mid-eighties, one wall became his ‘celebrity wall’ – maybe 50 photos of him with famous people. To name but a few: Julie Andrews, Elton John, Jackie Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Sean Connery, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, James Brown and E.T., from when Michael narrated
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial
storybook LP. There was even a blown-up image of our tutor, Rose Fine.

But the walls did not say it all. On the skirting-boards, messages were written in perfect calligraphy, running around the room like
one of those news-tickers at the bottom of a television screen: ‘Joseph Fulfilled His Dreams Through Us’; ‘Thank You, Jehovah, Joseph, Mother, Berry Gordy, Suzanne de Passe, Diana Ross’; ‘The Earth Has Music For Those Who Listen’. And in the attic’s bathroom, he posted only one telling item: a giant image of the 1981 Diana Ross album
Why Do Fools Fall in Love
– a title which I think points to his own reflections about his relationship with Diana. I found it significant that this was the only image that stood in isolation in all the rooms.

One of the two rooms was dedicated to the Jackson 5 years. He had enlarged one black-and-white publicity photo so that we stood five feet high at the top of the stairs – the first image you see. Above it, he had written his own caption: ‘JUST KIDS WITH A DREAM’. Beside it, on a wall-mounted plaque, Michael had inscribed a message, written in gold on black:

This picture gallery was also his office and dancing room. Each Sunday, this was where he locked himself away for two-to three-hour sessions to rehearse a move. I love the thought of him dancing surrounded by memories. When anyone claims that Michael was always running from his past and the Jackson 5 days, I afford
myself a wry smile and think about this memory room and the walls that speak to each of us and say: ‘Be proud. Never forget.’

SOME FACES ON THAT ‘CELEBRITY WALL’
Michael classed as dear friends: Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Sammy Davis Junior and the inimitable Elizabeth Taylor. He met them while socialising, which he increasingly did once the new Hayvenhurst was completed. He started holding dinner parties, sending out invitations and making an occasion of it, with the chef cooking the finest food and staff on hand to serve. Mother referred to them as his ‘star-studded dinners’ and still recalls the night when she stayed in her room until there was a knock on her door and it was Michael with Yul Brynner, who had just popped upstairs to say hello. When Yul saw Mother was wearing her sleeping cap, he told her not to be embarrassed.

I never attended one of those occasions, but Mother was almost always there. She said that Michael, who was around 26 at this time, tried to behave in a mature fashion with his notable, older guests. ‘He grows up to their age,’ was how she put it. Yet the first thing he did was show them his doll collection in the window at the studio and the ice-cream/frozen yoghurt machine he had installed. As much as he tried to be adult beyond his years, his inner child was impossible to contain.

One thing you’ll note about this eclectic group of people is that they were all actors in the movie business. He first met Katharine Hepburn when Jane Fonda invited him to the set of
On Golden Pond
in 1981. But whoever he was with, Michael was determined to extract their life wisdom, advice and knowledge, especially about the movie industry and fame; he was eager to tap into their experience as he stepped out as an artist in his own right.

With each friend – at their house or trailer – he took along a tape recorder and discreetly recorded their conversations. This might seem like a strange thing to do and I doubt the other parties knew about it, but it was understandable from his point of view: he
captured their sound advice so that he could play it back, like one of his recorded pep-talks. I think he was so enraptured by being with them – especially Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor – that he wanted to ensure that he never missed a word they said. At night, back at Hayvenhurst, he played back those conversations, listened and took notes. Michael was a prolific note-taker and note-sender, and he went through cassette after cassette on that tape recorder of his. I suspect there are numerous attorneys, producers, record-label executives and managers who were close to Michael without realising that the record button was pressed to capture a moment or protect his interests.

Over the years, as his fame and success grew, the motivation to record conversations had less to do with capturing advice than what people said about others or harsh words said to him. The fact that Michael was the star and revered by fans was not always respected by some people who came and went. Once Michael was with me when someone he respected started blaring at him down the phone. He held it away from his ear. ‘This is how they speak to me. Can you believe it?’

I think many underestimated Michael. They considered him a musical genius yet they also detected his malleable tendency and his difficulty with confrontation. This, I think, was perceived as a weakness rather than kindness. I always liked to see strangers meet him for the first time and walk away impressed, preconceptions shattered. He had the capacity to be one of the silliest, most down-to-earth people you could know, but he was also one of the savviest, with an intellect and a creativity that made him one of the smartest thinkers-outside-the-box at any table.

I laugh now at his use of a tape recorder because it feels almost like he was snooping on his own private conversations, which reminds me of how inquisitive he was. Once, after Hazel and I had moved from Hidden Valley to a new house in the Brentwood area of LA, Michael was over and I was looking for, and failing to find, a flashlight.

‘It’s in the top drawer next to your bed,’ said Michael.

‘Oh, you’ve been rooting around again, huh?’ I said.

Going through people’s drawers had been a notorious habit of his since way back. He said you could always find out a little something about people by seeing what they kept there and how organised they were. He had started doing it when we’d visited our grandmother, Mama Martha, in East Chicago. He’d go into her drawers and rifle through her keepsakes. ‘Michael, stop being nosy! You’ve no right looking in folks’ drawers!’ she said, but he didn’t listen.

I was terrified he was going to do it at Sammy Davis Junior’s magnificent home on Summit Drive, Beverly Hills. ‘Michael, don’t go looking in his drawers. I’ll telling you!’ I said. But he just chuckled and kept me guessing.

Sammy was a great guy to hang out with. He, Michael and I shared a love of movies and Sammy turned down the blinds to the California sun, pressed a button and a projector screen slid down the wall. One of the most-watched movies when Michael was over was Shirley Temple’s
The Little Colonel.
I think Sammy liked it best, though, when we reminded him about his cowboy movies. Michael once challenged him to a draw and it was game-on with Sammy’s fake pistols – old props from Hollywood. They pushed aside the stage-sized coffee-table in the living room and stood back to back. Altovise, Sammy’s wife, and I were reduced to spectators. Sammy swaggered dramatically to one end of the room and Michael, all serious-faced, to the other.

Then someone shouted, ‘DRAW!’

‘BANG! BANG!’ declared Sammy, and in one stroke he seemed to have swivelled on his heels, drawn and ‘fired’, as Michael grappled with his holster.

Michael’s pivot as a dancer may have been impressive, but Sammy teased him: ‘I’m still the fastest draw in the West!’

A nice footnote to this story is that, some time around the turn of the new millennium, Michael was fortunate enough to meet Shirley Temple at her home in San Francisco. I think he naturally gravitated towards child stars – wanting to meet Sammy, Shirley,
Elizabeth Taylor, Spanky McFarland and, later, Macaulay Culkin – because he felt there would be an instant empathy.

I can only imagine what he and Shirley must have shared, but the only insight I had into their conversation came during Michael’s 2001 address at Oxford University when he said: ‘I used to think that I was unique in feeling that I was without a childhood. I believed there was only a handful with whom I could share those feelings. When I recently met with Shirley Temple … we said nothing to each other at first, we simply cried together, for she could share a pain with me that only others like my close friends Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin know.’

WE HAD GROWN UP LOOKING AT
clocks and feeling pressure, from a rehearsal timetable to curfews on tour, from album deadlines to show times in that venue or this city. Time had ruled us, or we had raced against it, but the brother who heard the ticking clock loudest was Michael. If he wasn’t doing something constructive – most of the time – he felt guilty. As much as he spoke about time being stolen from his childhood, he never eased up on himself. He thought video games a waste of time, and catching rest idle. He needed to stimulate his mind, not numb it. Even if that only meant reading a book. ‘I can’t just sit around,’ he explained. He always said there were not enough hours in the day to work on all the ideas and thoughts he had.

Michael became a man truly obsessed once he set his soul on creating
Thriller
, the album. This project totally consumed him when he locked himself away with Quincy Jones. He worked between Westlake Studio, Hollywood, and the Hayvenhurst studio (unaffected by the renovation), where he recorded the original ideas. Alone. That way, Michael could capture the feel of the album that was in his mind; the first creative thought that became the foundation to the end product. No matter how many musicians were brought in later, he’d refer back to his original idea for the sound and song as a guideline to keep everybody aligned with his thinking.

We understood his artistic need for space so we hardly saw him for most of 1982 as he pushed himself beyond the point of fatigue to perfect
Thriller
. But when the ‘finished’ album was played to him, he was ‘devastated’. It didn’t
feel
right and the final mix was off. ‘It’s like taking a great movie and ruining it in the editing,’ he wrote in his autobiography.

The team who worked with him so intimately will have known his creative ideas better than anyone. In their minds, I am sure
Thriller
sounded ambitiously strong, regardless of Michael’s reservations. But Michael could have umpteen tracks laid down and throw them all away – and that was exactly what he did when everyone thought
Thriller
was ready. When he first heard it, he ‘cried like a baby’, in his words, and said, ‘That’s it! We’re not releasing it.’ The story he told is that he stormed out of the studio at Westlake, borrowed some bike from a member of his team and pedalled as fast as he could to get away from the madness he felt. He happened upon a schoolyard packed with kids playing, so he stopped. He said all their laughter and innocence ‘put everything into perspective, and I rode back, feeling inspired again’. He then set to work on
Thriller
(take two). About one month later, he had tapped the outer limits of his creative ability and imagination to bring back a classic for the world to enjoy.

Thriller
was released in November 1982 and started a blaze. It spent 37 weeks at No. 1 in the album charts, selling anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 copies a week. But it achieved much more than sales and records: it marked his musical coronation. Not just in America, but worldwide. Joseph had always hoped that one day we would create music for the masses’ and I like to think we broke down a lot of racial barriers in the Jackson 5 days. But
Thriller
obliterated all of them and was embraced by young, old, male, female, gay, straight, black, white. It achieved what music’s soul was all about: it transcended differences and united people.

IT HAD BEEN ALMOST 18 YEARS
since we had first set out as artists in Gary, and 25 since Mr Gordy had launched his label in Detroit. To mark that quarter-century milestone, NBC was taping the telecast
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever
.

Suzanne de Passe was one of its producers and she called to say that they wanted the Jackson 5 to perform at the reunion concert as part of the salute to Mr Gordy. It sounded amazing on paper. Just the thought of performing again with the brothers elated me. For six years, I’d had a recurring dream that I was on stage with them and I was counting a song off in my head, just about to sing … and then I’d wake. My unconscious had teased me with that promise for too long. Now, it was going to be a reality and I couldn’t wait.

I was certain Michael would feel the same, especially since his attic picture gallery celebrated this very era, and considering his love for Mr Gordy. But the reality of the music industry is that advisers have an artist’s ear and his camp’s brand focus was ‘Michael Jackson’ not the Jackson 5. It was about the future, not the past. And with everyone caught up in the momentum of
Thriller
, I guess no one wanted to concern him with a night in Memory Lane. As they saw it, Motown 25 would benefit Mr Gordy and the brothers, but what good could it do Michael? My brother also had his own reservations. But although it was reported that he didn’t want to perform with his brothers again, it was never about that. His early opposition was about not wanting to perform on TV. Still bruised from his CBS exposure on
The Jacksons
, he was surer than ever that television was a damaging medium to true stardom.