You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (23 page)

The main thing was that Michael’s surgery made him feel better about himself and, between now and his solo career, he would have surgeries that gave him a slimmer nose and a chiselled chin. Personally, I couldn’t see what all the media fuss was about.

OUR SPLIT AS THE JACKSON 5
was a catalyst for change, and I think the Jacksons era was a transition phase for Michael, between him holding on to the security of the group and deciding to let go. Looking back, his immense talent was only ever biding its time, waiting for its perfect moment. When CBS Records placed the brothers with writer-producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, they honed and polished the knowledge Michael had amassed at Motown. Michael said he learned more and more about a song’s anatomy.

The Gamble-Huff combo had orchestrated what was known as the Philly International Sound. This soul-funk – heavy on the strings and big on the beats – was, in their words, ‘the leaf that blew over from Detroit and landed in Philly’. If you know Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’, Billy Paul’s ‘Me & Mrs Jones’ or MacFadden and Whitehead’s ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’, you’ve listened to their calibre.

So my brothers headed east to make music in Philadelphia, not far from Motown’s roots. In this more collaborative environment, Michael and the brothers flourished as songwriters and producers, and they released some great pop music. Their first two albums didn’t take off, continuing the struggle we had experienced together. The change in fortunes came with their third album,
Destiny
, which moved away from the Philly sound and was a group collaboration, written by the brothers themselves. It went double-platinum, vindicating their long-time wish for creative autonomy. The album yielded hit singles: ‘Enjoy Yourself’ which went to No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100, ‘Show You The Way To Go’, their first UK No. 1 and ‘Shake Your Body’, which went to No. 7 in the US and sold over two million copies. ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ – a cover of a song first released by an Englishman called, ironically, Mick Jackson – also charted, and found its Top 10 audience in the UK.

There was also
‘The Jacksons’
TV special with Janet, La Toya and Rebbie on CBS, but Michael privately cringed over its scripted comedy and canned laughter. It was vaudeville all over again, but
instead of being restricted to a quiet corner of Vegas, it was broadcast across America.

Michael worried that over-exposure would jeopardise his musical career. We had always said that too much TV could burn out an artist like a light-bulb left on too long, and this bad experience would turn him off from exposure on television shows.

As for me, life without the brothers was a reality check. Motown put everything into the production of my album,
My Name Is Jermaine
, but it didn’t get behind its promotion as much as it could have. It had other priorities, like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross. So much for everyone’s suspicions about me becoming ‘the favourite son’.

This reality would hit home hardest in 1982 when the track ‘Let Me Tickle Your Fancy’ with Devo hit No. 17 in the US and carried Billboard’s red dot symbol, signifying it was ‘a bullet’ set to climb. But Motown didn’t harness the momentum. The song lost the bullet and started falling. I remember wandering around London at the time, feeling despondent and marooned. My most notable chart success at Motown was with ‘Let’s Get Serious’, which reached No. 9 in the Billboard Hot 100 and No.1 in the US R&B charts in 1980 before earning a Grammy nomination for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. People said that a nomination must be nice, but all I heard was Joseph’s voice reminding me that it’s the winning that counts.

However hard I tried over the years, it was never the same without my brothers. I didn’t regret sticking to my principles; I just regretted the new reality. In truth, neither I nor the Jacksons could recapture the magic and heights of the Jackson 5. In that respect, we chased our own shadows for much of the late seventies and early eighties. I continued recording, but also decided to channel my energies into becoming a producer, guided by Mr Gordy. ‘Find ’em, sign ’em, mind ’em and re-sign ’em,’ he always said. I had my own office and a roving brief to find and produce new talent. With Hazel, we brought in Stephanie Mills, Switch and DeBarge. If I didn’t exactly flourish in the charts, I advanced behind the scenes.

MICHAEL COMPARED HIS CAREER TO THE
American presidential plane, Air Force One, a 747 like no other, looking to take off and cruise in its own exclusive flying corridor. In his mind, the plane was his ‘empire’. It needed to be aerodynamic. He needed to know each and every passenger he was carrying, and every working part. He was ‘the pilot, flying solo’. This was an analogy he sketched out on paper as a master plan as early as 1978. He was entertaining the idea of going 100 per cent solo long before he did.

But if the ultimate decision to stand alone was tough for me, it was excruciating for him. He was a people-pleaser who hated the idea of confrontation or causing upset. In the studio, his creative instinct pushed forward a gentle but assertive insistence, but in his personal life, he preferred to stick his head in the sand and hope an issue would work itself out. In his heart, he knew that he carried the Jacksons, which weighed on him heavily.

In my opinion, two key factors brought his solo career to a head. First, the brothers left home one by one. Marlon married his girl Carol, and Randy moved out to find independence, aged 17. Michael – so used to the comfort of brothers around him – was left at Hayvenhurst with Mother, Joseph, Janet and La Toya. Rebbie observed the situation from afar, saying he ‘resented the brothers moving out of the house.’ She says, ‘He didn’t see how he could build effectively on the strong musical foundation they had established if the brothers didn’t remain 100 per cent focused.’

Michael was married to his work, and it puzzled him that we could allow women to come between us and our music. The echoes of Joseph’s conditioning were not lost on me. But Michael’s passion and companion was music: he simply had no room in his life for a woman. In the brotherly void, he grew accustomed to being on his own. The more time he spent alone, the more going solo seemed less alien. But the propelling force was Diana Ross. She was in his ear, saying he needed to chase what he wanted, advising him how to use
his
name, not the family name, making him believe in her example of leaving the Supremes. One of the hottest acts around – and a mentor he adored – was telling Michael that if he wanted
to be the best, he had to jump … and fly. At least, that was how the message was relayed back to me.

It was life-changing advice, issued in New York on the set of Universal’s movie adaptation of the musical
The Wiz
. Diana played Dorothy, and Michael played the Scarecrow. It was Mr Gordy who handed him this début screen role after Motown acquired the movie rights, proving the lack of acrimony following the split, but my father-in-law was initially unsure how Michael would react to his approach.

I was at the ranch when the phone rang and he sounded me out. ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said. ‘Michael loves
The Wizard of Oz
! It’s right up his alley! He’s got to play that role!’

It was between him and the Broadway star Ben Vereen (who, ironically, would play the Wizard in the musical
Wicked
in 2005), but Michael landed the part after impressing Universal.

Ultimately, the movie bombed but Michael won plaudits and the highest praise came from the director, Sidney Lumet, who said, ‘Michael is the most talented young person to come along since James Dean – a brilliant actor, a phenomenal dancer, one of the rarest talents I’ve ever worked with. That’s no hype.’ The whole experience lit another desire within Michael: to get more involved in movies. It also brought him exceptionally close to Diana.

His devotion to our goddess of Motown developed from a teenage crush into a young man’s infatuation. I think it’s fair to say that, in his mind, Diana was the first woman he fell in love with. I always wondered if she felt for him the way he felt for her, or if she saw him as the little boy she’d first met. Michael felt she no longer viewed him as a boy, but as a man and a respected artist. They had the kind of true friendship that rarely exists in Hollywood and I think that was what he prized most. As for how intimate they truly became, this is where his music – nearly always semi-autobiographical – should speak for itself. Go listen to the wistful lyrics of ‘Remember The Time’, released in 1992. That song was, as Michael told me, written with Diana Ross in mind; the one great love that, as far as he was concerned, escaped him.

MICHAEL NEVER MENTIONED FEELING
lonely at Hayvenhurst without the brothers. He concealed it well, even though he lived under the same roof as my parents and sisters. I don’t think any of us knew it was ‘one of the most difficult periods of [his] life’ or how ‘isolated’ he felt until we read his autobiography.

Of course, he built a special bond with Janet and she became his virtual shadow. Those two were so alike it was sometimes uncanny. Janet, although a tomboy, was the female version of Michael in many ways: sensitive, gentle, inquisitive, socially brittle but heartily strong, and full of kindness. But she wasn’t always around because her acting abilities had landed her a role in the CBS sit-com
Good Times
, playing Penny, which put her on set most days nine-to-five. Michael always had La Toya and they were also close.

He adored his sisters. Without them, he would have been utterly lost. But I think there is something about being brothers that only a brother can know. And I suspect the same detachment that hit me hit him. Maybe it was the shared realisation that we had no
real
friends outside the industry. We never had. Not in Gary. Not in Los Angeles. Our pace of life, the many schedules and our countless dreams had got in the way of forming true bonds. ‘Friendship’ was a word we heard but never really understood.

So, when he got bored, Michael told Mother he was going for a walk down the street and I guess she assumed he was getting out to clear his head. Ventura Boulevard is the longest east-to-west thoroughfare that links the San Fernando Valley with Hollywood and he had only to turn left out of the gates and walk less than one block to reach the crossroads next to the local supermarket. Michael didn’t wander down there to clear his head: he went to find friends – ‘to meet people who didn’t know who I was … I wanted to meet
anybody
in the neighbourhood.’

It was years later when we briefly spoke about this. ‘Why didn’t you call me? Or the other brothers?’

‘You had Hazel. I didn’t want to disturb you.’ That was Michael: afraid of coming across as a nuisance or upsetting someone else’s plans. Or maybe it was because we had never needed to organise
our togetherness before, so the idea of arranging to meet up, unscheduled, was alien among the brothers. Whatever the reason, it was not the first time Michael had been in distress and failed to reach out to his family. He’d rather suffer quietly, walk away and seek his answers in a stranger. It was as if he wished to enter into a bond where the slate was clean. Not that such a hope would be realistic. As he told me, traffic only stopped in Ventura Boulevard when motorists spotted ‘Michael Jackson!’ hovering on the street. They wound down their windows and asked for his autograph; they took his photo. I can only imagine his sadness when his expectations ran up against that reality.

Michael soon realised that his true self was invisible; all people saw was the image of ‘Michael Jackson’. This is what fame does: it eclipses the real you, and someone like my brother had no chance of being ‘seen’ for who he really was as a private person. From that day on, his friends would have to come from an eclectic group of A-list Hollywood names.

THERE WAS SERENDIPITY IN MICHAEL DOING
The Wiz
because its musical score maestro was Quincy Jones, who became the producer on Michael’s first solo album,
Off the Wall
, in 1979. Michael had heard of Quincy before
The Wiz
because Quincy had a high-profile concert group called Wattsline and also ran an LA workshop for unknown artists. When he first agreed to work with my brother, he said: ‘If he can make people cry singing about a rat, then he’s something special!’

Initially, this album was viewed as another solo project under the group umbrella, just as before, and Michael would ultimately take his material on the
Jacksons’ Triumph Tour
, their fourth album. I don’t honestly know if he reckoned, based on the performance of his previous albums, it would be a success but the Quincy factor changed everything. He and Michael proved a great team, hand in glove. Quincy helped extract and shape Michael’s ideas; the mechanic to his creativity. Together, they carved out Michael’s signature sound and
Off the Wall
ultimately sold around eight
million copies in the US, achieving two No. 1s in the Billboard Hot 100: ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’, the latter winning a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Male).

But Michael didn’t celebrate that first Grammy; he wept. He watched the ceremony at home and felt crushed that he didn’t win Record of the Year. For an album that had been embraced by the industry, critics and fans, one Golden Gramophone didn’t match his hopes or expectations. He felt snubbed, not honoured; he felt that his great work had been largely overlooked but it didn’t defeat him. It made him hungrier and he adopted the ‘I’ll show ’em’ attitude. He decided to ‘reach beyond’ and set his sights on domination, a clutch of Grammys, and creating ‘the biggest-selling record of all time.’ This was the ambition he would write on his bathroom mirror at Hayvenhurst: ‘THRILLER! 100s MILLIONS OF SALES … SELL-OUT STADIUMS’. It was a desire driven by his conditioning never to be second best and motivated by the same yearning with which he had vowed to have his name in
The Guinness Book of Records
. Michael also knew what it would take to get him there. Focus. Dedication. Determination. Perseverance. He wrote those words everywhere. Aged 21, he decided to take charge of his life.