You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (29 page)

We’d already done five takes when Bob wanted Michael to wait a few seconds longer at the top of the stairs so that he could be captured in silhouette. So we did it again. Take six. I was on the bass, right of stage, facing the audience. ‘And … action!’ someone shouted. The audience stood and started screaming. Cue the familiar ‘Billie Jean’ beat. Then the popping sound of flash-bombs. I knew Michael was now skipping down the steps. I turned side-on and that was when all hell broke loose. I glimpsed flames in Michael’s hair, but he was oblivious. He kept dancing. Then he spun so fast that he doused the flames, resulting in a halo of smoke, but the damage was already done. Five people raced from the wings and bundled him to the floor. Everything happened so quickly that my brain didn’t compute at first what I had just seen. I was convinced my brother had been shot, because the panic
reminded me of the President Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, the way everyone pounced on him. I dropped my bass and raced over as Michael was getting to his feet. Dazed. Blowing out his cheeks. I saw him patting the top of his head; I saw a bald patch covering his crown, his hair scorched away. One of the flash bombs had rained sparks that had ignited the flammable hair-spray we all used. Later, when watching the footage back, it was clear that a flame was shooting out of his head as he skipped down the steps. Within five seconds, his entire hair was engulfed. Going up like a haystack.

Backstage, he was lying down, remarkably calm. I think the shock stopped him freaking out. I crouched down and rubbed his arm, and all the brothers huddled around. ‘He’s going to be okay … You’re going to be okay, Michael,’ I said, as much for me as for him. Thank God Mother wasn’t there. She didn’t need to see him like that. Thank God for Bill Bray, too, who carefully broke the news to her over the phone and managed to conceal our panic.

An ambulance rushed him to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood and we followed in one car, still wearing our colourful costumes. The whole family headed there, because that’s what happens when something bad happens to one of us: everybody drops everything and runs to that person in need. One for all, and all for one. Michael had suffered third-degree burns to his scalp – almost down to the skull – and no one needed telling how lucky he was to be alive. He was later transferred to the Brotman Memorial Hospital in Culver City, where he sat up in bed watching videos, his head swathed in bandages. He actually admitted that he’d got a secret thrill from the ambulance ride. He’d wanted to taste that kind of excitement since he was a kid, he said. Thank God for Michael’s spirit.

Michael never intended to sue Pepsi but, after seeing the plight of other burns victims, he developed a plan. Instead of talking damages, he talked charity and renamed the Brotman Burns Unit the ‘Michael Jackson Burns Unit’ – and got Pepsi to donate $1.5 million. In litigious America, it was humbling to see someone
bypass their own suffering to help those worse off. And, trust me, Michael was in pain. Although he’d make a full recovery and be okay to tour, come July, he had to undergo surgery to laser the scar tissue and stretch part of his scalp over the burned area. Michael also had some kind of implant and all of the treatment left him in excruciating pain. Not just for those first few weeks, but for many years afterwards. It was so bad that you’d see him pulling at his head in agony. All he could rely on to alleviate the pain was a prescription drug called Demerol. This was no regular anti-inflammatory. It was a morphine-strength painkiller that brought numbing relief. Imagine the worst pain of your life and wanting to do
anything
to end it – that was what my brother went through. In that state, I doubt he gave a second thought to Demerol’s side-effects, one of which was ‘can be habit-forming’.

THE NEXT BROTHER TO BE LAID
up in a hospital bed before the tour began was Jackie. He was at some movie drive-in when he was hit by a car. It busted his knee. He was in the hospital for days with a cast from thigh to ankle. Like Michael, his injury would heal but, sadly, not in time for him to tour. He was devastated because he knew how special the concerts were going to be. He’d still ride with us, provide input, and come on stage to make appearances, but he couldn’t perform. It was a blow for everyone as six performers became five, and I don’t think I was the only one wondering if the tour was cursed.

‘THEY’RE DIGGING UP DIRT TO DESTROY
the man,’ Joseph said, as a smear campaign began against Don King. Someone somewhere had put out word that he had a 1966 conviction for manslaughter. Don King had killed a man, and he was promoting a concert with Michael Jackson. This ‘revelation’ was lapped up by the press – and every enemy Don had on the tour. I felt for him because there was something coincidental and dirty about its timing, and it didn’t matter that he could speak from a four-year prison education about the futility of violence. His rehabilitation
and plea of self-defence weren’t going to get a fair hearing. It was now open season in the badmouthing of Don King.

Long story short, when Michael heard about it, he refused to tour for as long as Don remained in charge. ‘He’s a crook,’ he said, ‘and we don’t work with crooks.’

Joseph had to intervene to stop him quitting. ‘That is what the press does to folk,’ he said. ‘We’ve come too far for you to back out now. Don’s been working 24/7 to make this a success: don’t punish the man.’

Michael went away to think about it and word eventually came back that he’d continue with the tour, but that one revelation changed everything within his team and the other brothers’. Don received a legal letter forbidding him to conduct business or communicate with anyone on the brothers’ behalf.

Eventually, one month before the start of the tour, a fourth co-promoter was brought in to balance the picture and take more control. Chuck Sullivan, the owner of the New England Patriots, arrived: he had impressive pull with different stadiums around America. Effectively, his appointment reduced Don, Joseph and Mother to figurehead roles, but Don remained defiant. ‘If you want to take this tour away from me, you’ll have to pay me,’ he said. So they did. He received a diminished role and three per cent of profits.

EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED AND YET NOTHING
had changed. The moment we launched into full-on rehearsal, our onstage camaraderie returned like an old friend, with the timely reassurance that everything was going to work out just fine. The difference between brothers performing as One and legal teams looking for conflict was like night and day. We had never toured with the crew around us, yet everything about our strange environment felt familiar. The passage of time hadn’t affected the nucleus of our bond. Throw us into a new arena and throw anything at us, we could still bring it.

We set up the full stage at Zoetrope Studios – the Hollywood rehearsal space owned by movie director Francis Ford Coppola,
who had directed Michael’s Disney movie,
Captain Eo
. Those rehearsals were invigorating because the more we ran through the set, the more excited we became. Michael was like the rest of us: he coasted, running through the motions at 50 per cent. He always saved his 1,000 per cent for the stage.

But what he also did, as he would with every tour, was go home and practise his dancing alone. Each intricate move had to be perfect and he’d push his body until it could take no more. He would run through agreed steps during rehearsals, then work towards perfection at home, repeating a move over and over … and over. He told me that sometimes he was so tired he could barely lift his legs to climb the outside spiral staircase to his quarters.

At Neverland he had a dancing room, with wooden floors and mirrors all around. You could actually see the swirls ingrained in the floor from where he had been pivoting and spinning. His dance always left its own indelible mark.

AS WE ARRIVED IN KANSAS CITY
for the tour’s opening in the July, the digging for dirt turned away from Don King to Michael. Journalists were hunting for
anything
and one persistently false rumour wouldn’t go away: that our brother was homosexual. This claim first arose in the seventies when some magazine ran a scurrilous story suggesting he was competing with a woman for the love of a male songwriter. It was nonsense then, and remained so throughout Michael’s life but by the middle of 1984, he was tired of hearing the same old echo in reporters’ questions or reading the sly innuendo in print.

He knew how the media worked it. Ask if Michael’s an alien, he’ll deny it. Cue the headline: ‘MICHAEL DENIES HE’S AN ALIEN!’ Ask him if he’s gay, he’ll deny it. ‘MICHAEL DENIES HE’S GAY’. Then everyone would wonder why he was denying whatever it was.

Michael’s life would become mapped by headlines. That was why he chose to say nothing in the end and hoped his music would
transcend everything and speak for him. But back then, in Kansas, one reporter asked if he had any reaction to reports that he was gay. Michael batted it away, saying he was not a homosexual but wondered why people were so fixed on attaching labels. ‘We’re all humans. What’s the big deal?’ he asked.

It wasn’t emphatic enough. The press started to read between the lines of what he’d meant by ‘What’s the big deal?’, not understanding that Michael was trying to strike a balance between a denial and supporting the gay community. He couldn’t win.

To me, the whole debate about his sexual orientation was preposterous. I think people misinterpreted the fact he was a workaholic. People saw an unmarried man with a penchant for makeup, child-like things, with no facial hair, and an attachment to a chimpanzee, then filled in the blanks. Michael was also unafraid of displaying his creative feminine side and his voice tended to fit society’s stereotype of what a gay man sounds like. But none of us in the family have heavy voices and I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such ridicule. When I first started driving in LA, I was pulled over by a police car. When the male officer heard my voice, he laughed, turned to his female colleague and said, ‘Who’s going to search
her
?’

Michael always said, ‘My wife is my music and I’m married to my craft’ – and that was why he achieved greatness. But he was also a devout Jehovah’s Witness who lived his life in accordance with the Bible. Because of his religion, he was a lot more restrained than his brothers. Michael longed to know what a full and intimate relationship felt like. After
Thriller
, he seemed to be eternally waiting for that elusive lady to walk into his life, someone he could trust, and someone he knew was there to be with him and not ‘Michael Jackson’; to be in love with him and not in love with the idea of him.

My brother was a kid at heart and he wanted to find that in a woman, too. Michael’s heart wasn’t about intensity, passion and drama. It was about playfulness, water-pistol fights, comic books and movie nights. It was about sharing his humanitarian dreams,
visiting hospitals and looking at life through a child’s eyes. This was his field of diminishing returns when it came to looking for his ideal woman. Until that ‘match’ came along, he would struggle to let anyone in.

SOON ENOUGH, THE TERM ‘WACKO JACKO’
would be coined by the
Sun
newspaper in London. It was a nickname Michael found offensive and was the consequence of a public-relations strategy to plant weird and wonderful stories about him. Michael always insisted he knew nothing about this PR sleight-of-hand and I can believe that. His Motown training was the promotion of artist and music, nothing else.

The first story ran in the
National Enquirer
with a photo showing Michael seemingly asleep in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber under the headline ‘MICHAEL JACKSON’S SECRET PLAN TO LIVE TO 150’. It was a genuine photo. This chamber was used by burns patients at the Brotman Memorial Hospital and Michael couldn’t resist posing inside it during one of his visits. Not because it was part of his treatment but because it looked space-age and he wanted a quick, fun photo. He lay inside for a matter of seconds with his eyes closed and hands across his chest. It ran in the
Enquirer
, which printed quotes from ‘close friends’, who said he planned to buy one to sleep in to stop the ageing process. Extraordinarily, people believed it. I lost count over the years of how many times I was asked: ‘Is it true your brother sleeps in an oxygen tank?’ I wanted to say, ‘My brother doesn’t like sleeping in a bed, let alone a tank!’

The second story was so outlandish that it doesn’t deserve an explanation: Michael was intending to buy the Elephant Man’s bones, with supporting, on-the-record quotes from manager Frank Dileo. Again, people believed it. Or did they just
choose
to believe it because everyone needs to feel comforted that genius does not come without eccentricity? I never could figure it out. As his family, we read these reports and never gave them a second thought, but when Mother found out that Frank Dileo was behind the silliness,
she challenged him. ‘You shouldn’t be spreading stuff like this,’ she told him. ‘It makes my son look like an idiot.’

Frank apparently wasn’t worried. ‘It makes people wonder about him and this is what we want.’

Was this a misguided strategy to build
mystique?
I never did understand the team’s thinking. It treated Michael like some kind of wannabe who needed his profile raised when the
Thriller
album had already done all the talking. Such reports led to Michael being ridiculed and that seemed like a travesty when his only intention in life was to be treated as a serious artist. The people around him should have known better, because that kind of transaction with the press is always dangerous.

Michael wasn’t prepared for the seemingly daily assault that paraded him not just as ‘wacko’ but as a ‘weirdo’ and a ‘freak’. And his plastic surgery, together with innocent interactions with animals and children, would add to the twisted portrayal. Eventually he wrote an open letter to the press, expressing how hurt he was by the lies coming from people who didn’t even know him. He quoted an old Indian proverb: ‘Do not judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.’