He caused such a commotion that a teacher arrived to find out what all the noise was about. As I explained my way out of being with a girl in the dark room, I heard Michael running down the hallway, laughing.
THERE WERE SO MANY GIRLS COMING at me back then, and my teenage self found the attention impossible to resist, but sneaking a girl by Bill Bray’s door, and knowing when Joseph was not around, was a skill in itself. Because it was also ‘forbidden’, it felt like a home run every time I managed to get a girl beyond checkpoints and beyond the threshold of the bedroom door. I had never been so grateful for exterior fire exits and back stairways. The awkward problem, of course, was sharing a room with Michael. What made this worse was that if he knew I was pursuing a certain girl, he’d deliberately attach himself to my hip. But once – one golden once – Michael was nowhere to be seen and I managed to sneak away from some hotel gathering to hook up with the prettiest of girls.
Back home, I had been seeing a lot of Hazel Gordy, but while we liked each other – and sent endless love letters – puppy love had not advanced into anything serious, leaving me free to build my experience on the road. We older brothers had a way of describing how far we got with a girl: from ‘first base’ (the kiss) to ‘second base’ (touching/clothes off) to ‘third base’ (the sex) and, in my hotel room that night, I was an LA Dodger running wild; eyes closed, on top of this girl, kissing and touching with a freedom I didn’t think possible. ‘That feels really good …’ she said. I was getting serious, she was groaning. Third base was in sight. I had one hand stroking her face, and the other on the mattress beside her head.
‘I love how you stroke my thighs,’ she continued, ‘… you’re real gentle …’ I’m not stroking your thighs. ‘… it feels good,’ she whispered. I peeked open my eyes and manoeuvred my head to take a sly look down the bed, and that’s when I saw it – Michael’s arm, reaching up and over from underneath the bed, his hand circling her thigh.
‘MICHAEL!’ I jumped up, the poor girl was mortified and Michael, chuckling, was already scrambling for the door. I could have killed him, not only because he was hiding there the whole time, but because he heard me whispering all these sensual, sweet nothings that he would tease me with for weeks after. I refused to speak to him that night. When we turned out the lights and he wished me goodnight, I said nothing. He waited a few minutes in the dark and then brokered the peace. ‘She got some real creamy thighs!’ he said. And we both burst out laughing.
GIRLFRIENDS WERE TECHNICALLY BANNED, SO JACKIE’S and my illicit conquests were kept on the down-low. First, Motown wasn’t keen on promoting us as anything other than boys-without-girlfriends-and-looking-for-love. We understood that our appeal was contained in the hope that we could one day become our fans’ boyfriends. Second, outside the bubble of Motown PR, Joseph’s equally image-conscious rules didn’t allow girlfriends, and this came across loud and clear. Girlfriends are bad for you. Girls will distract you. Girls will wreck record sales. You will lose fans. They will stop screaming for you – and so forth. We older brothers rolled our eyes. It was an extension of ‘never let the outside in’.
But I’m not sure Michael fully understood. If anything, it confused him. For the longest time, he was expected to play the public role of available boyfriend, but was then told girls were career poison and would stop him becoming the best. If he ever doubted the seriousness of this unwritten rule, he saw its truth rammed home one day when Joseph caught Tito with Dee Dee, his childhood sweetheart and future wife.
Tito was at the school gates waiting to be picked up when our father pulled up with Jack and saw him kissing Dee Dee. It opened a big can of whoop-ass. When Tito got in the van, Joseph really gave it to him. Tito protested, screaming how much he loved this girl, but Joseph kept hitting him, yelling that his selfish actions were going to split up the group. I know it upset Michael because when we stayed up late on the road, talking about girls, he spoke all hush. He asked me about how to treat a girl, wondering when was the right time to make the first move on a date. ‘I always want to be a gentleman,’ he said, 14 going on 42.
Not that Michael was completely green. At certain venues or functions, Jackie and I used him as our wing-man when Joseph wasn’t looking. Our father never suspected the young ones of hitting on older girls, so Michael’s adorability became our secret weapon. ‘You see that cute one over there,’ we’d say, ‘go over and ask for her number.’
When an approach didn’t concern him personally, he was devoid of shyness. He’d walk right on over and start talking. We’d see the girls coo and, nine times out of ten, he returned with a piece of paper, mission nonchalantly accomplished. ‘Here’s her number. She’s real nice!’ he’d say.
But we had different tastes back then. Where I was looking for easy girls, he idealised a young lady. Where I dreamed of getting them back to my room, he dreamed of taking them for ice-cream and watching cartoons. He was fussy; I was not. In fact, when it came to girls – and women in later life – he studied them in the same way he studied great artists. He looked out for every delicate detail: mannerisms, hair, smile and the way she walked. And his ideal chick ‘needs to be honest and kind.’ He always said that. As a boy, he wondered aloud if ‘honesty’ was too much to ask. ‘Will they want us for who we are, or want us because we’re the Jackson 5?’
I always gave realistic advice: ‘Michael, take these girls for what they are – great admirers of what we do, but they don’t really know us.’
‘But they love us … and they’d do anything for us!’
Big brothers shouldn’t have to dash little brothers’ hopes, and it was hard for me then to explain the distinction between the fans I brought back to the room and the true love he romanced about. ‘You don’t need to worry about any of this stuff yet,’ was my cop-out.
Michael just kept on nurturing his growing crush on Diana Ross – his idea of the perfect woman. ‘A girl has to be as dignified and beautiful as Diana,’ he said, and it was a view he would carry into adulthood. One day, at the house, he started teasing a teenage La Toya and Janet, and told them: ‘you aren’t pretty until you start looking like Diana!’
OUR EDUCATION TRAVELLED WITH US ON tour in the form of a private tutor, Rose Fine, who would also teach Janet. On first impression, you would have thought she was the strictest, most unforgiving principal, all stiff-backed, prim, proper and enunciating her words with clipped perfection, yet she was the warmest, most loving of ladies and we adored her. Rose was our educational shadow wherever we went, and it was always a strange sight seeing her endure the insanity of Jackson-mania, trotting behind us, trying to keep up.
One of her missions was to ensure we didn’t forget our Ps and Qs as she continually attempted to improve our eloquence. ‘You sing beautifully and you can learn to speak beautifully, too,’ she said. She was determined that five boys in the spotlight should speak ‘proper English’. Every time one of us said something like ‘We ain’t gonna do that!’ she corrected us. ‘You are speaking incorrectly. What you say is “We are not going to do it.” Repeat after me. We – are – not – going – to – do – it.’
‘But that’s not how we talk, Rose!’ Michael said. ‘We gotta be us.’
‘No, Michael – you say, “We have got to be ourselves.”’
Bless her, she kept fighting Mission Impossible.
In our hotel room at night, Michael and I talked about how ‘nobody black and hip is prim and proper’.
‘Rose don’t understand cooool,’ Michael laughed.
As much as we played with Rose, and probably exaggerated our dialect in front of her, we used to say she was the most powerful person around, even beyond Mr Gordy. Power invested by the Board of Education. If one of us so much as yawned onstage, or looked like he needed rest, or if media interviews ate into our four hours of daily education, she could shut us down faster than a fire marshal. It was a discretion she never used but it meant that she earned instant respect from everyone, especially Motown.
br /> We respected her role in our lives and her positive influence on Michael cannot be overestimated. Whenever we dropped her off at home in Studio City, she invited us in and her husband Sid took the opportunity to play a song. It was usually old-fashioned 1940s fare – something from the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers – but we clapped along politely. But it was when we first laid eyes on her library that Michael started to become the voracious reader that he was. Rose handled each book like a precious artefact, and she was always on at us to read, read, read – and Michael heeded this advice. Few people know that my brother was a bookish nerd, always swotting up on some random subject to better his vocabulary, knowledge or understanding of life. ‘I love reading. There is a wonderful world to be discovered in books,’ he said. Michael’s early reading material concerned Fred Astaire or Elvis, or child stars Shirley Temple or Sammy Davis Junior. In later years, his reading extended from Steven Spielberg to Alfred Hitchcock, President Reagan to President Roosevelt, Malcolm X to Dr Martin Luther King, and Mussolini to Hitler. I doubt many people would have given him credit for the general knowledge he amassed. Except Rose. She always taught us that we can learn from the best by following history’s lessons; that it has left the footprints for us to follow. That is why Michael’s autobiography, Moonwalk, starts with a quote from Thomas Edison:
When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past – that’s what all the books in the library are for. I see what has been accomplished at great labour and expense in the past. I gather the data of many thousands of experiments as a starting point and then I make thousands more. The three essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-it-iveness; third, common sense.
That quote still stands as the truest reflection of Michael’s approach to his own mastery, and they were the words he actually posted in gold letters to the cloth, coffee-brown walls of his sound studio at Hayvenhurst. Rose Fine opened the doors to his mind. ‘I wouldn’t be the same person if it wasn’t for her,’ he later acknowledged. Without her, I doubt his final grades would have been so good, either.
By the end of 1972 the Walton School had closed, so Michael spent ninth grade at Montclair School in Van Nuys where, that June, he received a school report he was so proud of that it became the only one he pinned up at the house. In History, English Grammar, Math and Study Methods, he received A grades. In French, he received a B minus and in English 9, he earned a B plus with the comment from the teacher: ‘Greater effort I have never seen.’ Teachers also marked ‘work habits’ and ‘co-operation’ and gave him E-marks pretty much across the board. An ‘E’ = ‘does assigned work, responds to instruction well’. All this is not bad for a pupil who, biographers claimed, ‘was a terrible student’ and ‘didn’t have a clue what was going on’.
Michael created one of his most telling pieces of school work during an art class at Walton. He had regularly asked Rose about the Vietnam War. Newspaper photos of wounded and screaming children always distressed him. His interpretation of what he saw became the subject of a drawing. I had forgotten it existed until it showed up on-line from the school’s yearbook. He drew a soldier standing in the foreground of a battle, beneath skies filled with fighter planes; he was unguarded, arms outstretched, machine-gun surrendered. The caption read, ‘STOP THE WAR’. With the charity he pioneered, Heal the World, and then his smash hit ‘Earth Song’ – its video and stage performance had him blocking the path of a military tank with his arms outstretched – you see the humanitarian spirit that had long existed within the sensitive boy.
Michael ended his school years at Cal Prep, where, in art classes he sketched version after version of Charlie Chaplin. One of his classmates was a girl called Lori Shapiro: she quietly observed my brother immersed in his drawings, then scrunching them up and throwing them away. ‘Michael,’ she said one day, ‘that drawing of Charlie Chaplin? Before you ball it up, can I have it?’
‘Sure,’ he said, signing his name in black felt tip and handing it over.
But Michael knew that a favour deserves its return. He hated algebra and he knew Lori was ‘the brains’. So, sitting near her desk, he swapped math books with her when the teacher wasn’t looking and she worked out his x + y = z. I reckon Lori was the chief reason he got an A grade in math!
Come graduation year, Cal Prep published its own roll of honour, where its pupils nominated the winners in a ‘Who’s Who’ roll call. Michael emerged with his first clutch of awards: ‘Best Dressed’, ‘Shyest’, ‘Most Creative’, ‘Most Artistic’ and ‘Most Likely to Succeed’. So, who won ‘Biggest Smile’? That honour went to Marlon.
MICHAEL TALKED A LOT ABOUT GOD with Rose. He was the only brother still attending the local Kingdom Hall and doing field service with Mother, La Toya and Janet, tour dates permitting. But different faiths and others’ relationship with God fascinated him, and Rose was Jewish. Michael learned – and loved – that the Jewish Sabbath was all about family, and that everything came to a halt on that day ‘so that humanity may make the ordinary extraordinary and the natural miraculous,’ as he wrote in 2000, in an essay on a website called ‘beliefnet’. Michael was intrigued that there was one guaranteed day each week to celebrate life and each other. But it also became much more than that to him. As he wrote: ‘In my world, the Sabbath was the day I was able to step away from my unique life and glimpse the everyday.’
Increasingly, Michael stayed true to the only sanctuary he knew, the Kingdom Hall, and the only inner balance he could find by ‘staying in happy fellowship with the Lord,’ as he put it.
THE COMMODORES, A SIX-MAN GROUP FROM Alabama, joined the Motown family in 1972 and came with us on the road as an opening act. Back then, Lionel Richie was mainly the saxophonist and Clyde Orange was lead vocals, and we enjoyed the best of times with them. Our camaraderie was special – must have been the southern thing. One time, at the Hollywood Bowl, they actually received more screams than we did … because their wardrobe didn’t show up and they had to play in their undershorts! Their legs stole the show.
By now, Joseph had decided Randy was worthy of a run-out with the group, playing the bongos. He was more of a suck-it-and-see-how-it-works addition than a permanent fixture – for now – but he would grow into a capable performer and an incredible songwriter. If only he had played tennis and not the bongos: offstage, the Commodores kicked our butts on the courts. They called out our competitiveness and it was no contest – we later discovered they had each had tennis scholarships. I swear Lionel Richie was Arthur Ashe in disguise. He was that good.
In the hotels, we spent time in their rooms, jamming and writing songs. They brought out the keyboards and worked on ideas, which fascinated us: we were a group who had material written for us. I can still see Michael lying back on the bed, having his hair braided by Lionel’s girlfriend (and future wife) Brenda, as we watched Lionel inspire the songwriting process. The Commodores were still six years away from releasing their smash, ‘Three Times A Lady’, but seeing how they built a song, from city to city, was inspiring.
At this time, Michael already had ideas of his own fermenting. ‘I feel there are so many songs in my head,’ he used to say. In fact, prior to the tour with the Commodores, he had started finding his creative voice at Motown, deciding to speak up for himself. That artistic watershed moment came with the recording of a song called ‘Lookin’ Through The Windows’. Michael had suggested his own take on a certain delivery, but when the idea faced resistance from the Corporation, he got upset and phoned Mr Gordy direct. Five minutes later, he returned with the boss’s approval. That day, he began to develop the confidence to trust in his own creative instincts. Everyone sat back and allowed him free rein. He pretty much improvised, feeling his way through the song, but they must have liked it because his interpretation was kept on the final cut. So, when Michael, at 13, witnessed the Commodores’ songwriting autonomy, it strengthened his creative resolve.
In later life, he looked back on our constant touring and said it denied us the chance to form lasting friendships with anyone. Schedules and living out of suitcases meant we couldn’t nurture true friendships on the road. Yet those touring days with the Commodores created a bond between him and Lionel Richie that lasted throughout his life. It was the genesis of their collaboration on the USA for Africa charity, ‘We Are The World’ – it won Grammys in 1986 for Song of the Year and Record of the Year – and showcased Michael’s true humanitarian heart on a global scale.
‘WHAT DID THE CAPTAIN JUST SAY?’ I asked, as we flew over the Atlantic, bound for our first European tour of France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain and our first destination: London.
‘He said there are 10,000 fans waiting at Heathrow airport,’ said Joseph.
On our arrival in London we all wondered how big this thing was getting. We seemed to be locked into something that was forever mutating: from the Chitlin’ Circuit to Motown, from Motown to Hollywood, from a record deal to four back-to-back No. 1s, and from conquering America to selling records on different continents. We had to pinch ourselves to believe that our records had reached as far as the flight was taking us.
London represented the ultimate disbelief: we were there to appear at the Royal Variety Show at the London Palladium in a performance for Queen Elizabeth II. This huge honour was appreciated by everyone but drummer Johnny, it seemed. He’d always had a sharp wit, but that could sometimes come across as cockiness and, we soon learned, no one should try to be funny with a British Customs officer. As we showed our passports, Suzanne de Passe politely explained that we were arriving to do a Royal Command Performance ‘as guests of the Queen.’ One by one, we were asked how long we intended to stay in the country. We all stepped up, answered politely and expected Johnny to do the same. ‘And how long are you intending to stay in the country, young man?’ asked the stern-looking Customs man. The moment I saw Johnny smirk, I knew we were in trouble.