You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (40 page)

THE MOMENT THEY MARKED MICHAEL’S FOREHEAD
– and especially his ‘third eye’ – with the mixture of sandalwood paste, turmeric, clay and ash, he felt something resonate: ‘I instantly felt like I had come home,’ he said.

He had just landed on India’s soil and the country was, he said, his ‘spiritual home’; the one place he’d always wanted to visit since we started travelling the world as brothers. When they greeted him at the airport with dancers and the thumbed touch of
tilak
– the sacred blessing for good health and auspiciousness – it confirmed to him, as he had once said, that in another lifetime he was Indian. He’d always known there was a reason why he had an Indian chef and a friendship with Deepak Chopra, he joked. Native-American Indian by ancestry, Far East Indian in soul.

When he was drawing up the schedule for the ‘HIStory’ World Tour, he booked one performance in India and arrived there two weeks before he took his vows with Debbie. The scale of his visit was illustrated when they
closed
Mumbai International Airport for his
arrival: 10,000 people had turned out to welcome him. Three Russian cargo planes touched down with the stage. Then his own 747 jumbo followed, the words ‘The King of Entertainment’ emblazoned across the sides of its fuselage. On his return, Michael showed off his Indian outfits and the mini-Ganesh statue he’d been given.

I heard about his time there, and the way he raved about it afterwards, from the promoter Viraf Sarkari who, with Andre Timmins, brought Michael to the Andheri Sports Complex and 25,000 fans. But it is the story of what happened outside the arena on day one that has stayed with me.

As he drove away from the airport in a Toyota people-carrier, he was standing through the sun-roof, wearing one of his scarlet military jackets, with gold buttons and a white arm-band. His vehicle was somewhere in the middle of a 20-car cavalcade as Mumbai came to a standstill. The orders to the drivers beforehand were not to stop: they should sweep through to the hotel as quickly as possible.

‘Wait! Stop!’ said Michael, when he came to the first junction. He had seen a small group of urchins – street children, wearing nothing but rags for clothes, who probably had no idea who this visitor was. They had been playing by the roadside, only to stop and gawp at the spectacle passing them. Michael ducked down into the vehicle, then stepped into the street to greet them. He approached them with a smile and communicated in a universal language: he took one child by both hands and started dancing. Then, as all the officials and politicians watched from the cars, the other children started laughing and dancing, too. He was there for two or three minutes, whipping them into giddiness before he hugged each one, kissed them on the cheek and handed out candies before he jumped back into his vehicle. The cavalcade set off again, with Michael waving.

At the very next junction just down the road, it happened again. ‘Stop!
Stop!
’

He’d spotted more street children, and got out and danced and handed out more candies. He repeated the stop-start dance routine
at every junction he came to on the way to the hotel. As Viraf remembers: ‘It was the most incredible sight of humanity I have ever seen.’

Once those three days in Mumbai were over, and before he checked out of his suite at the Oberoi Hotel, Michael politely vandalised the entire room. He took his pen and signed the mirror, the bed-sheets, the room-service brochure, the pillows, the towels and every piece of furniture in there. Then, he left his instructions: ‘Sell all of this and give the proceeds to charity, please.’ It made a small fortune. Viraf remembers the message on the pillow that today someone, somewhere is treasuring: ‘India, all my life I have longed to see your face … I have to leave but I promise I shall return. Your kindness has overwhelmed me, your spiritual awareness has moved me, and your children have touched my heart. They are the face of God … I adore you, India.’

SPIRITUALLY, WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CONNECTED
as brothers, as family, even when there was physical distance. You don’t grow up as tight as we were and lose that sense of connection. There have been countless moments of serendipity to remind me of how interconnected we will always be, but the two most memorable came courtesy of Nelson Mandela and Charlie Chaplin.

It was March 1999, I think, when I travelled to Johannesburg for a function to honour the most incredible man of our times. I was almost making a habit of booking meetings with Nelson Mandela: we had appeared on a South African talk show together and then I was invited to perform for him twice, first, at his eightieth birthday celebration in 1998, and then at the inauguration ceremony the following June, when he handed presidential power to Thabo Mbeki. I performed in front of 90,000 people and it was a momentous occasion, which I shared with comedian Chris Tucker, who was wearing an attention-grabbing red tie.

Three months prior to that historic day I had walked into a big reception room at another presidential function buzzing with
people from all over the world. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Jermaine? Your brother’s here.’

‘Which brother?’

‘Michael – he’s over there,’ he said, pointing to the black military jacket and mirrored sunglasses on the other side of the room.

I walked over and decided to stand in a position that meant he came across me unexpectedly. ‘Erms! WHAT are you doing here?’ he shrieked, looking as surprised as hell.

‘What are YOU doing here?’ I said, laughing.

‘I’m here as a guest of Madeba,’ he said, using our host’s clan name.

‘Me too!’

Mandela had been a big fan of Michael’s since seeing him perform during his 1997 tour of South Africa, but I don’t think either of us could believe the odds of turning up at the same function 16 hours away from home without anyone mentioning it. We agreed to grab some time afterwards before I left for Swaziland and then we drifted into separate pockets of people to continue rubbing shoulders.

Then it was time for the ceremony and we went to take our seats. I saw Michael cutting across the room, heading in the same direction as me. Our parallel paths came together at the same point: standing directly in front of the ‘throne’ where Mandela would be sitting. That was when we realised the organisers had seated us either side of him: Michael to his right, me to his left. We laughed again. Brothers in arms. Side by side with Mandela. It was a beautiful honour for both of us, flanking the most dignified crusader of our age. It was almost as special as walking in the footsteps of one of the best entertainers there has ever been.

It was when I was walking around the basement of Charlie Chaplin’s home in Vevey, Switzerland that all I could think about were the umpteen sketches of his hero that Michael had drawn over the years. He might have borrowed from Fred Astaire and James Brown for his craft, but there was something about Chaplin’s silent mystique as an entertainer that had fascinated Michael. So, it
was a privilege for me to be invited by Chaplin’s sons to the family home on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the Alps in the background. Eugene and Michael Chaplin were holding an annual film festival and I was to help judge certain independent films.

When I arrived at the house in its postcard setting, I found it easy to understand why Chaplin had left America, besieged by the media because of his political views and love-life. He found solace and a sense of ‘normality’ in this retreat. Nothing much had changed between the days of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest fame and Michael’s.

In my school days, when the teachers passed around the geography books, I always turned to the pages that showed Europe and found Switzerland. I would stare at the map, then find pictures and day-dream about being there. One day I told the teacher I would end up living in Switzerland and she humoured the delusion of the steelworker’s son. And now I stood in my day-dream, simultaneously entering Michael’s. Just as his fans would imagine walking around Neverland, he imagined retracing Chaplin’s footsteps.

That thought stayed with me as I was shown the Chaplin family archive in the basement. It was more vault than museum, with tiny slits for windows near the ceilings. Everything was there: photos of Chaplin out of costume as a father, minus the moustache, looking distinguished in a suit with brushed-back wispy white hair. There were movie posters and old films spooled in silver tins. I was thousands of miles away from the madness of Los Angeles yet was now in the seat of Hollywood’s founding father, picking up his Oscars from the shelf – and suddenly realising that once the Academy had expected its award-winners to be weight-lifters. Those things were
heavy
!

I remember returning to America and calling Michael to tell him about what I had seen. ‘You should have been there!’ I said. ‘You would have found out everything and –’

‘Jermaine,’ he interrupted, ‘I was just there a few weeks ago! – I didn’t know you knew the Chaplins!’

That was when we swapped our stories and talked about the small world again.

Mandela in South Africa. Chaplin’s ghost in Switzerland. It didn’t seem to matter where we roamed, we were always walking to the same beat. There were actually several occasions where he would show up and then be told I’d been there before, or vice versa; it never stopped amusing us. Wherever I went in the future after all these episodes, I always had my eye out for Michael, half-expecting him to come walking around the corner or tap me on the shoulder. In fact, I still do.

FOLLOWING MICHAEL’S DEATH IN 2009, THIS
kind of serendipity – these signs from God I take comfort in – didn’t stop. Strangely, it was in Mumbai that I felt a tap on the shoulder. I was in India doing a music video for a song I’d done, ‘Let’s Go To Mumbai City’, in memory of the victims of a series of terrorist attacks in November 2008, and we were filming at the railway terminus where 58 people had been shot dead. At the end of the day, I decided not to return to the hotel. Instead I started walking and found myself near this souk-like marketplace filled with tailor’s shops and shoe shops, and teeming with people. Wherever I looked there were shops filled with fabric and suits. I followed the street aimlessly until I saw an incredible outfit, which looked out of place in the window of an appliance store: it was one of those long shirwani jackets, fine-looking and embroidered. It drew me inside to where a line of people had formed at the counter. ‘Where is the store that has that outfit?’ I shouted.

‘Roopam … you are looking for Roopam store, sir. Three floors up,’ said a man.

I took the elevator and found myself walking into a corridor that had women’s clothes to the right, and men’s to the left. I stepped into a room with fabric and suits hanging in rows on each wall, surrounding a tailor’s workbench in the middle. The owner – his name was Viran Shah – came out of a back office to greet his customer. ‘Oh … my … God!’ he said.

‘What?’ I said, looking around to see if he was talking to someone else.

‘Ooooh … my … God!’ He scurried back into his office, did some noisy fishing around and came back out with a folder, which he laid on the wide desk. ‘Your brother Michael – he was here! He bought clothes from here!’

There, in the folder, were photos of Mr Shah and my brother from 1996. Out of all the stores and streets in Mumbai, I had walked into the very one where my brother had been almost 14 years earlier. I had the best kind of tears in my eyes, as the tailor kept patting his cheeks, still disbelieving the coincidence. I wanted to tell him that there was no such thing as a coincidence, but instead I told him to get his tape measure. ‘I’ve obviously been guided here, so I would like to buy some of your suits, sir,’ I said.

AS WE MOVED INTO THE NEW
millennium, Michael’s fans looked forward to the next decade of his music. A new album,
Invincible
, was to be released, and a follow-up tour across America and overseas had been planned. First, though, on 10 September 2001 a televised concert would commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his solo career, from his first solo single ‘Got To Be There’ with Motown. A host of artists were booked to perform at New York’s Madison Square Garden. For us, it promised to be a truly special night because CBS executives had insisted on a Jackson brothers’ reunion as part of the deal: we would be on stage together for the first time in 17 years.

It was hard to believe it had been so long, but it was even harder to accept that we had three decades behind us as performers. The show’s promoter was David Gest, a man probably best known to the world as Liza Minnelli’s ex-husband, but we had known him from our schooldays through one of our classmates at Walton School.

As with everything that involved a brothers’ reunion, things didn’t go too smoothly at first, though. Four months before the
show, I discovered that David was charging $2,500 for a top-tier ticket. I immediately saw profit margins wider than the stadium itself, loyal fans being out-priced and not a hint of Motown in the show. We hadn’t forgotten the bad press we’d received during ‘Victory’ when fans had criticised us for the promoter-set prices of 30 dollars, to be bought in multiples of four. I thought we’d learned a lesson. But David was adamant, saying his focus was to create a spectacular salute for Michael. That was everyone’s focus, but the important details – like the fans and Motown’s role in our lives – seemed, in my opinion, lost on him. Randy and I found his attitude impossible, so we issued a public statement condemning the ‘exorbitant’ ticket prices and suggesting that we wouldn’t perform. He issued a counter-statement, pointing out that Jackie, Tito and Marlon would be taking part even if we weren’t.

I backed down because ‘Victory’ had taught us some sore lessons about politics so we signed the contracts, put it behind us and focused on what was important: creating a special night for Michael.

Many came in artistic homage, including Slash, Britney Spears, Usher and Gloria Estefan, while Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando took the opportunity to say a few words.

That night Madison Square Garden was one big musical party and the ‘reunion’ segment a virtual flashback to ‘Victory’. We appeared first as silhouettes, backs turned, Michael centre-stage, the crowd going crazy. We delivered an in-sync performance that hadn’t faded with time. Sean Coombs, a.k.a. Puffy, had been watching us earlier: ‘It’s amazing the way you guys just line up, fall in and are on point after all these years.’

The dynamics hadn’t changed and when we got together, Jackie was always the eldest brother, fussing about detail, getting everyone organised. I think Michael was as amused as I was during rehearsals when Jackie started marshalling Tito who, because of recent surgery, missed the odd step. ‘Tito, you got to keep up, man!’

‘Hey!’ Tito shot back, ‘All you got to do is sing and dance. I gotta sing, dance and play the guitar, and guess what? I’ve been doing this for 30 years …’ Always brothers, never changing.

Come show time, we never skipped a beat and we knew it felt and looked special. Mother and Joseph said it was just like old times, and Michael was appreciative, too: ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without you up there with me, thank you … thank you,’ he said, as we went backstage and gave quick hugs to Prince and Paris.

Other than that we didn’t see much of Michael. He was the star of the show, producer, director, lights consultant and father, making sure everything was right and everyone was happy. He had a different dressing room from us and stayed in a different hotel – his usual haunt, the Helmsley Palace.

Back at the Plaza Hotel where the rest of us were staying, I told myself we needed to keep doing this, maybe every two, three or five years. Every time I was back in that performance zone with the brothers, the click of pieces fitting together was loud and proud. It was that buzz and those possibilities that kept me awake that night.

As my family slept, I stood at the hotel window looking out into the city that couldn’t sleep either. Madison Square Garden had felt so alive, New York City felt so alive, I felt so alive … There seemed so much euphoria in the air that night.

THE NEXT MORNING I WAS LYING
on my hotel bed when one of the brothers rang and told me to turn on the television. Like everyone else, I watched the events of 9/11 play out their horrible sequence. Being in Manhattan, cocooned in one of the city’s hotel rooms and feeling that flying bombs were everywhere, it didn’t feel so much like a terrorist attack, more an alien invasion. There was a sense of not knowing what was out there, how many there were in number, and when they’d strike next. And these were ‘beings’ that attacked us, not Muslims. True Muslims don’t abuse Islam like that, and they certainly don’t take down towers containing fellow Muslims. It was surreal watching the city being attacked
and I never again want to feel such helplessness for myself, my family and the country. Also, we knew that Marlon was in the air. He’d left early that morning to head home to Atlanta. Later, we found out that his plane had been turned around and landed safely. Thankfully, none of us had had a clue that Michael was due at a meeting that morning at the top of one of the Twin Towers. We only discovered this when Mother phoned his hotel to check he was okay. She, Rebbie and a few others had left him there around 3am. ‘Mother, I’m okay, thanks to you,’ he told her. ‘You all kept me up talking so late that I overslept and missed my appointment.’

We agreed to get ourselves back to California. But how? No flights were taking off, and although Janet was in LA and had booked two tour buses, she was told that they wouldn’t be allowed on to Manhattan., We were feeling marooned when Randy had a brainwave. He decided we should ‘hijack’ a bus. Seconds later, we were standing in the middle of the street and flagging down the first one that came along. It just so happened that the driver was also the owner of the bus company. We told him we needed two buses for the Jacksons. ‘Where you headed?’ he asked.

‘California,’ we said.

‘How much you paying?’

I can’t remember the cash amount, but he and a second driver were hurridly loading our luggage before we changed our minds. Michael was making his own getaway plans, so with everyone else aboard, we crawled towards George Washington Bridge. I remember looking back at the island as we pulled away and seeing all that evil smoke hanging in the air. It was an impossible reality to comprehend, but all I needed to understand was that everyone was safe as we headed home, leg by leg, state by state.

MICHAEL WAS DESPERATE TO DO SOMETHING
for those who had suffered on 9/11 and he dug out an old song from his unreleased archive, ‘What More Can I Give?’, first written after the LA riots of 1992, as inspired by Rodney King, the black guy whose
police beating triggered the unrest. For years, this song was called ‘Heal L.A.’ It was one of those songs with a universal message, which is why Michael resurrected it in the hope of raising millions of dollars for the victims’ families and survivors in New York. This was a mission that brought together the likes of Céline Dion, Gloria Estefan, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey and Usher. They, too, felt that the song’s message was powerful and timely, and Michael wanted to share it with the world. But Sony didn’t agree and the song wasn’t released: it received airplay, but it didn’t do what it should have. Creatively speaking, it was a crazy decision. Crazy to everyone but Michael, because he felt that tactical decisions were now being taken to hamper him commercially.

Slowly but surely, as his working relationship with Sony’s new head Tommy Mottola unravelled, he started to open up about what was going on inside the empire where he was a partner. It would turn out the politics that snared his 9/11 song were just the start.

Meanwhile, a family meeting was called at Hayvenhurst. An issue of family politics first needed to be dealt with.

EVER SINCE THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL,
there had been whispered concerns about Michael’s welfare. Some in the family had intuitively picked up on certain things in New York and suspected he was struggling with his prescription-drug dependency again. I hadn’t noticed anything that worried me, but looking back, I saw how he’d kept his distance – a different hotel, different dressing room, spending little time with us, post-show or -rehearsal. Initially I had put that down to Michael being Michael, wanting his space. Then someone explained to me that Michael hadn’t wanted to be near us, and had made certain people around him promise not to tell his brothers or sisters how he was; from nanny to members of his entourage to management to guards. Suddenly, everything fell into place. I have learned that when someone is aware of their struggle, yet cannot get on top of it, the last people they need close to them are those who see through the
social mask. Family is not an employed ‘yes-man’, or an adoring fan-base.

When those kind of realisations started to dawn, the family decided to act on its suspicions and Michael’s siblings descended on Neverland in early 2002. I was out of town but Mother, Jackie, Tito, Randy, Janet, Rebbie and La Toya all headed north, with a doctor, ready to carry out an intervention. When they arrived, unexpected, the guards wouldn’t let them in so one of the brothers scaled the wall, jumped over and pressed the button to open the gates for the cars.

As they reached the main house, they found nothing untoward. Michael was apparently heading for the pool with Prince and Paris, walking hand in hand – Nanny Grace took them away so everyone could talk with their father.

The confrontation was emotional. Tito suspected something wasn’t right and pleaded with Michael for the truth – if anything was wrong, he stressed, Michael must reach out: the family was always there for him. Michael was reassuring and relaxed. He said everyone had got it wrong. He was fine; there was nothing wrong with him, he insisted. Even the doctor had to agree. So
there was actually no intervention
and everyone departed happier, if not 100 per cent reassured.

We know that Michael would admit, in later lawsuits, that his judgement could have been impaired by the painkillers he’d been taking, so there was no doubt some concealment was going on, but it’s hard to get to the truth when someone hides behind distance and those serving them.

We would also find out that the chief reason why Michael had once again fallen foul of a reliance on pain medication was because of an incident in 1999 that had left him in more pain than ever before. He was doing a half-hour set during some charity show in Munich, Germany, and was standing on a bridge that rose up on hydraulics as he performed ‘Earth Song’, taking him higher and higher above the stage as the song reached its crescendo. The bridge was supposed to lower slowly, returning him to the stage.
Instead, the mechanics failed and the bridge just fell from its four-storey height with Michael gripping the rails, but still singing. In that instant, an engineeer hit the emergency stop button and that one action probably saved my brother’s life – it didn’t stop the fall, but it slowed the collapse to what one band member described as ‘fast slow motion’. Michael landed hard, hitting the concrete floor at parachute-landing speed.

Everyone backstage and in the band feared the worst, thinking he was sure to have broken a few bones in such a crashing fall. Meanwhile, the audience cheered, thinking this was all part of the show. Amazingly, Michael got to his feet, clambered back on stage and finished the song. Those in the wings knew he was struggling but he refused to come off. In fact, after ‘Earth Song’, he performed ‘You Are Not Alone’. Adrenalin was, it seemed, carrying him through. But as soon as he got offstage, he passed out and was rushed to hospital. When one of the band members later asked him why the hell he didn’t just come offstage, Michael told him: ‘Joseph always taught us that no matter what, the show must go on’ – a mind-set that would also become telling in June 2009.

Miraculously, Michael had not broken any bones but he had seriously put his back out and this would cause him constant pain and suffering for the rest of his life, which was why Demerol brought him relief. I’m not sure my family knew of this backstory when it descended on Neverland, but what has frustrated me is that news of their non-intervention only broke after Michael’s death but was reported as ‘an intervention’. There is a big difference between an intended intervention and one that actually happens. More importantly, an event in 2002 – and the circumstances behind it – can have nothing to do with a sudden death in 2009, and I am confident this truth will be proved by justice and time.

MICHAEL’S RELATIONSHIP WITH SONY HAD TURNED
sour after he realised a few things about the contract he had signed, and it turned a harmonious relationship with Walter Yetnikoff into an acrimonious divorce from Tommy Mottola.

First, after reading the small print, he found out that Sony retained the rights to his masters until 2009/2010 when he’d understood they reverted to him in 2000. Second, he discovered that the attorney who’d advised him had also advised Sony, leaving him to wonder if his interests had ever been best represented. He felt there was a clear conflict of interest that freed him to negotiate an early exit from the label, on one condition: he’d deliver one more album (
Invincible
), a greatest-hits compilation (later titled
Michael Jackson Number Ones
) and a box set. Michael resented these terms but he had to deliver if he was to be free, taking with him his 50 per cent stake in Sony-ATV Music Publishing – a move Sony hadn’t seen coming when it had merged interests back in the nineties.

Sony’s new reality was that Michael was now the artist/partner in the uniquely powerful position of leaving the label as a free agent yet retaining influence in all matters Sony-ATV, rights, licences and profits. Michael’s confidence in his strategy showed when he took to the stage of a London club to bemoan the fact that companies take advantage of artists. He told fans pretty much what he had told the family: ‘I have generated several billion dollars for Sony … several billion … and they really thought that my mind is always on music and dancing, and it usually is, but they never thought that this performer would … out-think them. I’m leaving Sony a free agent, owning HALF of Sony … and they are very angry at me,’ he said, then added a gentle taunt to those listening in Hollywood: ‘I just did good business, you know.’