You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (35 page)

THERE WERE MANY DOWNSIDES TO MICHAEL’S
fame, but he recognised early on that it gave him a platform and the power to make a difference with his music, and messages of hope, love, basic humanity and Mother Earth. He recognised the unity in music and felt its galvanising force as the only universal medium that made everyone listen, speak the same language, and brought communion between every race, creed and culture. Michael was one of those rare artists whose music shook hands with the world and brought people together. He had the biggest heart and he truly wanted to help children, nurse, nurture and make them happy, especially the unloved, the less fortunate, the sick, the infirm and
the dying. This was not some trite, trendy mission statement on behalf of a pop star, it was a purpose that he lived and breathed, dedicating vast amounts of time to many causes and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to numerous charities.

Neverland’s privacy meant that no one witnessed the busloads of charity groups and terminally ill children who, month after month, visited Neverland as invited guests. Like the 200 deprived children from the St Vincent Institute for the Handicapped, or those kids from the Big Brother, Big Sister organisation. Michael never publicised these visits because he’d only have been accused of a publicity stunt. So let me remind everyone that in the millennium issue of
The Guinness Book of Records
, Michael was named as the pop star who gave to and supported the most charity organisations. It was the one record he never boasted about. Not that he needed a public pat on the back because the gratitude came via the thousands of letters from charity leaders and parents, who wrote to explain how a visit to or a weekend at Neverland had provided either a long-needed therapeutic day out for a sick son or daughter, or a dying child with happiness. The busloads of children and the army of grateful parents – who trusted what they saw and not what they read – are worth bearing in mind in the context of what came later.

I witnessed my brother’s sincere connection with kids when we visited hospitals in almost every city during the ‘Victory’ Tour. Throughout his career, he would build time into every schedule to visit children’s hospitals, cancer wards and orphanages around the world. In those privileged moments that I shared on such visits, I saw him using the craft God had given him to give something back. His interaction with a child was the most unquestionably pure thing to witness.

I guess you had to be there to see a dozen bald kids running around Neverland, temporarily forgetting their chemotherapy. But I saw what happened when he walked into a room at a hospital: a child’s sickness seemed to vanish for a moment as his or her face lit up and their eyes widened. I often saw parents and nurses crying
at this breakthrough. I used to compare Michael’s impact to the joy that Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse caused when they walk into a room.

No one in our family was surprised by any of this because his empathy with children had always been an intrinsic part of him and Mother remembers him watching television and crying over some terrible event on the news. Central to this hyper-sensitivity was his religious upbringing and, as he always reminded us, ‘Jesus said to be like children, to love children, to be as pure as children, and … see the world through eyes of wonderment.’ He always believed that we ‘should give our hearts and minds to the little people we call son and daughter because the time we spend with them is the Sabbath. It is Paradise.’ This thinking – this mind-set – is essential to understanding how my brother approached and viewed his relationship with children.

When fans listen to his song ‘Speechless’ from his
Invincible
album, they are listening to that kind of wonder because he wrote it seated high in the branches of that oak tree at Neverland, while watching a boy and girl at play. That was because both girls and boys visited the ranch: I stress that because of the loaded myth that only ‘young boys’ were guests and that was never the case.

He couldn’t bear to witness suffering in children. Mother always tells the story of how she and Michael were at home watching the news in 1984 when the cameras focused on the famine in Ethiopia. Michael saw images of skeletal starving children, with flies clustered around their mouths, and just wept. That was the spark for his ‘We Are The World’ collaboration with Lionel Richie and a lifelong dedication to charity.

The story that best sums up my brother’s humanitarianism was when he heard about a gunman opening fire in a school playground in Stockton, Northern California, killing five children and wounding another 39. It was February 1989 when such incidents were not as common as they seem today and his devastation was overwhelming. His instinctive response was to rush to Cleveland Elementary School, but then he checked himself. ‘Will my presence
help or hinder? I can’t sit here, but I don’t want to cause more problems.’ He was torn between the mayhem his fame could cause and his sincere wish to help.

In the end, after allowing three weeks to pass, he followed his instinct and flew up. As photographer Harrison Funk tells it, he wanted to make his visit as low-profile as possible and was sneaked into the school in a detective’s car. When he arrived, he walked into an assembly of children in a large classroom and gave a passionate talk about hope, comfort and God. Then he handed out toys and recordings of his song ‘Man In The Mirror’, which contains that lyric about making the world a better place. Afterwards, he visited a local church to spend time with parents of the victims. Remember, this was at a time when Michael was at the pinnacle of his career and yet – without having to and without prompting – he took time to reach out to a community recovering from a terrible tragedy. For me, the biggest cheer for that compassion came from eight-year-old Thahn Tran, who had lost his younger brother in the shooting. He spoke to a reporter of the strength my brother had given him: ‘I didn’t want to go back to school, but Michael made it all right again. If he goes there, it must be safe.’ Michael found this kind of response ‘more rewarding than anything I can get from a sold-out stadium or a No.1 hit’ because he knew he was doing good and not just entertaining. There are many similar stories about him the world over.

And this was the man whom the authorities would later want the world to believe had a perverted mind and was capable of harming children.

PRINCESS DIANA WAS A FELLOW HUMANITARIAN
Michael had always admired and they finally got the chance to meet backstage at Michael’s
Bad
concert at London’s Wembley stadium in 1988. In my mind, they were fame’s kindred spirits: both hugely misunderstood, both ridiculed for heartfelt missions, both hounded by the paparazzi, and both reduced to wearing disguises to gain a little privacy.

From what I understood, Michael and Diana spoke on the phone irregularly between 1991 and 1994, and I know that more calls were placed from Kensington Palace to Neverland than vice versa. And they apparently shared one other trait: the ability to spend literally hours on the phone. It seemed that Princess Diana didn’t care for time differences and when she wanted to speak, she called, and Michael – who had never been the best of sleepers – was often wide awake. Once they got going, they could talk for hours. When I asked him what she was like, he said she was ‘a wise, sweet, sweet woman’, and she had told him that Prince William and Prince Harry loved playing his music loudly in her apartment. Given my brother’s admiration for anything royal, I’m sure he liked hearing that!

In 1995, Diana gave a BBC Television interview to Martin Bashir and it was seen as a PR coup, helping the world better understand her. Michael made a note of it: if she trusted Bashir, that was good enough for him.

ALMOST THREE YEARS BEFORE DIANA’S TELEVISION
confessional, Michael gave his own broadcast interview to set the record straight via an up-and-coming host who, because of her unfamiliar face, had to introduce herself to the viewers: ‘Hello, I am Oprah Winfrey.’

Michael, who had since parted company with his manager Frank Dileo due to differences of opinion, wanted to speak out for the first time in 14 years because newspaper headlines were increasingly poisonous. ‘Wacko Jacko’ journalists were now making up headlines everywhere, but Oprah confirmed one lie when she searched Neverland high and low for a sleep-in oxygen chamber and admitted: ‘I could not find one anywhere …’

The bully mentality of the British tabloids – picking on his appearance, making fun of him – was particularly upsetting because it had the effect of denying Miachel’s humanity, making him a simple caricature to poke fun at. He decided on an at-home interview with Oprah that would go out live to remove any chance
of clever editing. That willingness to leave himself wide open before a global audience indicated how sincere he was: there were no prima donna rules, question approval or conditions. Just give it your best shot. What you see is what you get. Watched by one hundred million viewers.

For me, the ‘world exclusive interview with the most elusive superstar in the history of music’ turned out to be more of a career-changing triumph for Oprah than it was for Michael: it seemed to kick up more dust than it brought clarity. Although Michael never used the word ‘abuse’, this was the interview that would cast Joseph as abusive. It was also the occasion on which Michael publicly revealed that he suffered from vitiligo, which destroyed his dark skin pigmentation, answering speculation that he was bleaching his skin because ‘you don’t like being black’. I always felt that his honest answer was greeted with cynicism and led to more, not less, speculation about his skin. The truth is that Michael noticed a small white patch on his stomach around 1982, just as I had found a spot on one thigh. Where mine didn’t worsen, his spread. I had suspected something was going on as early as 1984 and ‘Victory’, because he started to cover up all the time.

It is
not
true that his vitiligo was the reason behind him wearing his sequined glove: that was an idea first suggested to him by Jackie. In fact, Michael only wore a glove or wore a white forearm cast to draw attention to his hand movements; his trousers stopped short to show the white socks that drew attention to his feet. He even wrapped his fingers with white tape so that when he performed, ‘the white follows the light’. Little details like this had artistic reasons in my brother’s mind and that was his genius.

But his daywear and show costumes on ‘Victory’ revealed as little skin as possible: round-neck vests, high-buttoned shirts, and sleeves that showed only a hint of wrist. I suspected something but really had no idea how serious his vitiligo was getting.

By 1990, the family was aware of Michael’s condition and how distressing it was for him. You only have to imagine waking day by day to find increasing patches of blotchy pale skin to understand
how traumatic that was for anyone, let alone someone so image-conscious. This was a time when he relied heavily on his ever-present makeup lady, Karen Faye, to cover the vitiligo that had spread to his face and neck. A spiritual soul with blonde hair and animated by a bubbly energy, Karen had first been assigned to Michael’s team some time around
Thriller
and she quickly evolved from a trusted professional to a true friend he affectionately nicknamed ‘Turkle’. Soon Karen’s wise words and comforting friendship proved as indispensible as her brushes and makeup.

I know from Karen that she had first noticed pale patches on Michaels’ skin when she was with him on the ‘Say, Say, Say’ video in 1983. Back then, it was a simple case of colouring them in to match his dark skin tone but it reached the point where his condition left him with tufty patches of his natural colour. This meant that his skin
without
pigment predominated so Karen had to camouflage the dark areas by matching them to the lightest skin. Trying to keep a darker tone over his body when it had lost the majority of its dark pigment was impossible, especially when he sweated.

These necessary cosmetics had everything to do with the
appearance
that he was lighter, and his heavier use of makeup was also, I suspect, the reason behind the cruel jibes that Michael was ‘a drag queen’. That saddened me because, for him, it was a necessary mask. When you understand how sensitive he was about his condition, you also understand how much he trusted Karen. It was invasive work but every professional choice she made was designed to give him freedom and confidence, and make him look like the star he was. And he equally relied on her keeping all her work confidential. Some members of his entourage, video directors and photographers, didn’t understand that Karen’s challenge was to keep Michael looking perfect and she couldn’t explain her actions because she was sworn to secrecy. So observers only saw an overly fussy makeup lady – one who sometimes inexplicably disappeared with her client. This was misconstrued: people decided she was competing as a woman for his attention. The truth was that she was working her butt off to keep him feeling
safe and secure, ensuring none of his vitiligo was visible to anyone crowding near him.

To make medical matters worse, Michael was also diagnosed with a mild form of the auto-immune disease lupus, which, when it flared, caused reddening blotches across his nose and cheeks. The vitiligo and the lupus together led doctors to advise him to stay out of the sun, which was why he started walking around with an umbrella on balmy California days. The saddest thing is that it took Michael’s death, via autopsy reports and doctors speaking out, to confirm everything he had said about his skin. He told the truth in 1993. It was finally believed in 2009.

Thankfully, Oprah brought other truths to the world, too – from her own mouth, back at the time of that blockbuster interview. For me, what she observed about Neverland
before
any of the nonsense started to poison the true picture is significant. Just before the interview ended, she noted the movie theatre’s two hospital beds for sick children and said: ‘What I realised when I saw this is that you have to be a person who really cares about children to build it into your architecture.’