The most ordinary years in the life of Michael Jackson were his first half
dozen in the rough industrial town of Gary, Indiana. Then, like Tibetan
monks lighting on a young Dalai Lama, the future King was recognised by the
agents of pop music and groomed for a life apart.
Watching the ten-year-old Jackson reorganise the publicity shoot for the
Jackson 5’s first single, placing himself in front of his brothers and on
one knee, a record executive was sure that they had found one who belonged
at the top of the industry.
“How did he know that, how to take a publicity photo,” said Ben Brown, then a
high-ranking executive at Steeltown Records, albeit speaking with a great
deal of hindsight. “He was an old soul, as if he had been a superstar in
another life.”
Born on August 29, 1958, the seventh of nine children, his mother, Katherine,
was a shy woman from rural Alabama who walked with a limp because of her
polio.
His father, Joseph, was a crane operator for a steel firm who earned $65 a
week and aspired to work in the music industry. His own band never amounted
to much but when he heard his second son, Tito, playing his own discarded
guitar another avenue into that world opened before him.
“I envisioned these kids making audiences happy by sharing their talent,” he
said later. “Talent they’d maybe inherited from me.”
The Jackson children practised before and after school. The neighbours
complained: rocks were hurled through their windows and passers-by gave
abrupt assessments of their talents, shouting: “You ain’t nothing, you
Jacksons.”
At the age of 3 Michael began singing and at the age of 4 it became apparent
that he ought to be the lead. He was quick on his feet too: Tito recalls him
dodging blows whenever his father “took a swing at him”: the first signs of
the fleet-footedness that was a hallmark of his career came as he avoided
violence.
His father was a strict disciplinarian with some odd ideas of how to enforce
order. When his children left their bedroom window open at night, he would
apparently climb up and burst in screaming and wearing a mask to teach them
to keep it shut. It gave them nightmares.
Later Jackson would recall the thrashings his father considered necessary to
keep the young band in line, a cycle of violence that intensified as he,
alone among the brothers, began to stand up to him. The only threat that
worked on his father was the threat to stop singing.
His mother’s parents had divorced and she was determined to hold her own
family together even though she and her husband were now moving in radically
different directions.
She had become a devout Jehovah’s Witness, he was busy booking the brothers to
play strip clubs. Aged 9, Jackson was quite used to watching striptease. As
part of one of their early numbers, he was encouraged to leave the stage and
crawl beneath the tables, looking up ladies’ skirts, flashing lewd smiles.
“I may be young,” he said while introducing a song by Smokey Robinson, “but I
do know what the blues are all about.” Robinson himself would say that the
child had an “old soul”.
“I remember hearing that all the time when I was little,” Jackson told Oprah
Winfrey in an interview in 1993. “They used to call me a 45-year-old midget
wherever I went.”
Commentators have since noted the paradox at the heart of Jackson’s strange
life: a childhood spent being an adult, followed by an adulthood spent as a
child.
The Jackson 5 graduated from strip clubs and talent contests to the top of the
charts via a record deal with the Motown label in 1969. They were brought to
Los Angeles, and by November 1969 the single I Want You Back had topped the
charts. In the next seven years the brothers were worked for all they were
worth, releasing 13 albums and touring venues and television studios with
“Baby Michael” at the centre of the whirlwind.
“I would do my schooling, which was three hours with a tutor, and right after
that I would go to the recording studio and record, and I’d record for hours
and hours until it’s time to go to sleep,” he said later. “I was most
comfortable on stage but once I got off I was . . . very sad.”
Jackson appeared to be following the parabolic trajectory of the child star
who betrays his fans by growing up: adolescence brought pimples; fans who
saw him up close were shocked; his father told him he was ugly. He was
certain this was true: he felt his skin was too dark and his nose too wide.
He did not follow the example of his brothers and sleep with the band’s
groupies. His first love, he said, was Diana Ross, who at other times had
served as his surrogate mother in show business. He claimed the teen actress
Tantum O’Neal as his first real girlfriend. She held his hand at a party in
1977. “It was serious stuff,” he said. “She touched me.”
For her part, Ms O’Neal, like Diana Ross and, later, Brook Shields, insisted
that any relationship was strictly platonic.
The brothers had left Motown in 1976: in 1977, Jackson made a break for
freedom, following Ross to New York to appear alongside her in a film of The
Wizard of Oz, playing the scarecrow.
His first massively successful solo album, Off the Wall, was born out of his
friendship with the film’s musical director Quincy Jones. Off the Wall was
released in 1979. Jackson the songwriter was emerging from the chrysalis of
Jackson the child star: he wrote a hit single, Don’t Stop (’Til You Get
Enough) and then, after more work with his brothers, started on what would
become Thriller, the most successful album of all time.
Children all over the world gawped at the album cover and the $10 million
video of Jackson shaking and popping before a support act of zombies. A
global brand was established: the moonwalk, the single sequined glove, the
unlaced sneakers.
An incident in 1984 buffered the legend: performing before a crowd in Los
Angeles for a Pepsi commercial, a fireball exploded across the stage and set
his hair alight. He remained calm as it burnt — some concluded it was part
of the act until they saw him carried away on a stretcher.
Sales of Thriller jumped by 150,000 week on week. It was at the height of his
success that Jackson began to retreat from the world that was so fascinated
by him. He bought a ranch in California and called it Neverland. He built
his own amusement park, stocked it with a menagerie of animals, including a
chimpanzee called Bubbles, and spent afternoons alone riding his own Ferris
wheel.
The stories multiplied: it was said that he slept in an oxygen tent and was
determined to purchase the remains of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick. The
blaze of rumours was stoked further by the singer’s own changing appearance.
Some trace an addiction to plastic surgery back to the late 1970s. Susan
Blond, a publicist who worked for Jackson during those years, found herself
promoting a changing face. “By Thriller he had already gone overboard,” she
said.
Jackson denied that he had undergone any operations but for work on his nose
to help with his singing, and said the cause of his whitening skin was a
dermatological condition called vitiligo.
His global commercial success continued with the album Bad: the video was
directed by Martin Scorsese; the concerts incorporated lasers and the sight
of Jackson flying like his hero Peter Pan on a wire. Concurrent with this
sell-out tour, his autobiography was published. Jackson declared himself
“one of the loneliest people in the world”.
Critics felt he was losing his touch, however. The music that always hauled
him above the mire of stories about his sexuality, his appearance and his
close friendships with child actors, like a giant crane at a stage show, was
losing some of its power.
Rumours of child molestation hardened into accusations that threatened to land
the singer in court. The police raided his home in 1993 after an allegation
by the family of 11-year-old Jordy Chandler. He later arrived at an
out-of-court settlement with the family for around $20 million. Marriage, to
Lisa Marie Presley, was widely regarded as an attempt to restore his
reputation. The marriage failed, as did a second, to Debbie Rowe, his former
nurse.
The albums of the 1990s were poorly received and his ability to raise his own
children was questioned after he dangled the 11-month-old Prince Michael II
from the window of a German hotel in 2001. Astonishingly for a man who had
sold so many records, his finances were also said to be in a state of
perpetual crisis, brought on by unrestrained spending.
His next appearance on the world stage followed a controversial television
interview with the British journalist Martin Bashir, in which he admitted
sharing a bed with a boy.
Police subsequently issued a warrant for his arrest, and he surrendered in a
blaze of publicity, to stand trial on charges of molesting a 13-year-old
boy. Though he was acquitted after his defence team highlighted the
extraordinary past life of his accuser, the boy’s mother, it was a rather
partial victory. Two jurors said they thought him almost certainly guilty of
child molestation and remarked that they hoped that he would stop sleeping
with young boys.
His final years somewhat resembled his own peripatetic youth, and were equally
bizarre. Forced out of Neverland, which he mortgaged to the hilt, he was for
a time a guest of the son of the King of Bahrain, Sheikh Abdullah. He went
out in public dressed as a Muslim woman, wearing the veil.
Running from his own financial difficulties, he stumbled into new ones: the
sheikh believed Jackson had agreed to record a new album and to allow him to
contribute to the material, and to write an autobiography. for his part,
Jackson, interpreted the money and hospitality that the sheikh had afforded
him as gifts. The case, that was due to come before the High Court in London
and in which Jackson was due to appear as a witness, was settled, at the
last moment, by an amicable deal out of court.
For all his troubles, his poor health and the chaos of his life, his music
still seemed to offer a means of salvation. A new tour, announced in March,
sold out in days. He insisted he could still moonwalk.
All that the tour might have been, is now left, like most of the rest of his
barely believable life, as a subject for speculation.
“Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars,” he told one of his
biographers, J. Randy Taraborelli, in 1995. “Tell them I eat live chickens
and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say.”
