‘Just long enough to f*** your Queen,’ he said.
I swear the world stopped spinning at that precise moment. It wasn’t only his temerity that shocked: it was the fact that a member of the Jackson 5 had uttered a swear word. It was akin to hearing a pastor swear on a Sunday. Well, that was it. All officialdom hell broke loose and the indignant Customs officer was sending Johnny back to America on the first plane. As the adults scrambled around the passport desk, we stared at Johnny and said things that mirrored his remark about the Queen. Somehow, the combined desperate diplomacy of Suzanne and Joseph managed to persuade the Customs guy to relent, but Johnny got a real rocket afterwards. ‘That stupidity nearly cost us the entire performance!’ said Suzanne.
We opened the Royal show with a 10-minute spot, including our new release ‘Rockin’ Robin’, sharing a bill that included Elton John, Liberace, Carol Channing and some names we didn’t know: Rod Hull and Emu (a comedian with a blue-feathered emu puppet), Arthur Askey, Danny La Rue and Ken Dodd with his ‘Diddymen’. Elton John wished us luck backstage. We had last known him as Major Lance’s keyboardist, but he’d since changed his name. But it was his flamboyant style that made the most noise that night: all outrageous shaded spectacles and colourful zany costumes, with big buttons and shiny pieces. In fact, when we saw a crew wheeling by his wardrobe and the even more substantial one of Liberace, ours felt minuscule and dull by comparison – and that was saying something.
After our three-part harmony dedicated to the Queen – our fan song ‘We Thank You For The Joy You Have Given Us’ – we were presented to Her Majesty backstage. Michael said for many years afterwards that it was ‘one of the greatest nights of my life’ – and it probably was until it was eclipsed when he met Princess Diana much further down the road. But shaking the gloved hand of the Queen wasn’t our only treat in 1972.
Earlier, while kicking our heels in the dressing room, Marlon noticed a small hole in the wall, reached by standing on a chair. We knew this was an exciting ‘find’ because his face was doing one of those screams without emitting noise. Clearly delirious, he waved us over, jabbing at this hole in the wall and keeping his hand over his mouth. One by one, we fought for our turn to place our eye to it … giving us direct sight into the neighbouring dressing room. There, sitting on the toilet, was a lady whose name shall remain nameless, but Michael was beside himself, pointing to his ass to confirm that, yes, we had all seen her naked butt. Man, she would have killed us had she known, but on a night performing in front of the Queen, this one woman had provided us with our biggest thrill of the tour without even realising it. Even performing at the Liverpool Empire the following week and breaking all attendance records in the Beatles’ home city couldn’t beat that for a bunch of Indiana boys.
WHEN WE PLAYED THE MID-SOUTH COLISEUM in Memphis, we were excited because it meant that we’d not only be reunited with Rebbie, but we’d get to meet her daughter, our new niece Stacee, then about 10 months old. As we flew in from another state, Rebbie drove from Kentucky to our hotel for the night and management arranged for a crib to be set up in a side room of one suite. No one was more excited than Michael when our eldest sister arrived and he was the perfect, doting uncle. He spent more time with Stacee, pulling faces to make her coo and laugh, than he did with anyone else. In fact, I don’t know who was entertaining whom as they crawled around on hands and knees. We left them alone, with Michael dangling a red, white and black transistor radio, shaped like a globe, over her crib. We must have been catching up with Rebbie in the adjoining room for about an hour when we wondered, ‘Is Michael still in there?’
Rebbie went to check. Seconds later, she popped her head around the door, waved us over, but put a finger to her lips. We all crept to the doorway and saw the funniest, cutest sight – Michael had climbed into the crib, cuddled up next to Stacee and fallen fast asleep. It was an angelic picture. Michael was 13 – a good two decades away from that horrible period in his life when some would suggest his pure love of children was sinister and perverted. And yet his empathy, gentleness and connection with children was always an intrinsic and innocent part of him.
The clues to his pure heart were not only evident in private, they were there to be seen in public, too. Of all the journalists who interviewed him over the years, his favourite was a lady called Lisa Robinson. She was the one reporter he trusted, knowing she wouldn’t twist what he said. After his death in 2009, she wrote up a compilation in Vanity Fair of her numerous taped interviews. In one segment, she republished a Q&A session she had done with Michael.
How many children would you like to have? 20. Adopted. All races.
What is your most prized possession? A child …
It dated from 1977. Michael was 17 years old.
AUSTRALIA FELT LIKE ANOTHER PLANET, AND with each new frontier we conquered, Rose Fine had us reading about different histories, cultures and peoples. Wherever we went, she scheduled the odd afternoon of sightseeing. To her, touring with the Jackson 5 was a grand version of a school field trip. Australia greeted us like royalty and rolled out the red carpet. At one place, there was a reception with a fancy buffet fit for a king. I can’t pinpoint the exact city, but the Aussie hospitality was so legendary that everywhere seemed the same. Anyway, we were by now so slick with the social pleasantries that any official event was part of the routine and we worked the room, smiling away the jet-lag.
As we mingled, Joseph wandered off and approached a crowd of about a 100 black teenagers, standing behind a fence. They were Aboriginals. Rose had told us how Sydney Opera House sits on Bennelong Point, a camp taken from the Aboriginal people by the British in pre-colonial days. We were starting to wonder what Joseph was doing when he marched over and said he wanted to invite this group inside. The organisers told him that wouldn’t be permitted ‘because they are Aboriginal.’ To someone who had striven for respect and equality as a black man, this was a red rag to a bull. Next thing we knew, he was back at the fence, taking a young Aboriginal girl by the hand and pulling her through a small gap. She looked scared and bewildered at first, but her friends started to follow and squeezed through, one by one. You could have heard a pin drop as the white guests watched our father trample over social etiquette and protocol.
‘Boys! Come on over and meet your new fans!’ said Joseph. The joy on the faces of the Aboriginal teenagers was something to behold and Joseph was laughing, making his point. No one asked them to leave and after an awkward transition, the night continued to be a success as whites and Aboriginals mixed at the Jackson 5 party.
Some days later, we received an invitation from the Aboriginal community to visit them at a remote reserve. ‘We wouldn’t advise going there, Mr Jackson,’ said some official. ‘We cannot guarantee your safety.’
Joseph ignored that advice, and Michael said it simply, ‘We can have Aboriginal fans, too, can’t we? They are no different.’
With a translator in tow, we ended up having a memorable time at the Aboriginal reserve, feeling like overdressed aliens among the bare-chested tribe. Yet we faced no wariness or judgement. What struck us was how spiritual the whole place felt. We watched people carve tree bark, and we learned the simple joys of the boomerang and how to play the didgeridoo – Tito still has one as a treasured souvenir.
It was in Senegal that we encountered our first African baobab tree – one of Mother Nature’s marvels, thousands of years old, with a trunk that can grow to anything between 15 and 40 metres in girth. The tree at the front of 2300 Jackson Street was a twig by comparison. ‘This is one of the strongest trees you will ever see,’ said Rose Fine, ‘and there was a time in the 1880s when the baobab’s hollow trunk was used as a prison.’ In Western Australia. For the Aboriginals.
Michael was perplexed. How could something so naturally beautiful – a creation of Mother Earth – be twisted and used to incarcerate people? Trees were family, not prisons. Light and dark. Good and evil. These were the contradictions of life that we had yet to understand.
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MICHAEL HAD SEEN MOST OF THE world before he turned 18, and it was an incredible experience to share as brothers, filling our passports on Motown’s dime and moving beyond Europe to Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Out of all our travels, the most insane episode happened in the Brazilian city of São Paolo. Just when we thought we had seen it all, when it came to mania, our South American tour surprised us.
We flew into São Paolo, and our equipment – instruments and wardrobe – followed us on the next flight. Come the evening of the concert, we discovered this hadn’t been such a great idea. The second flight was delayed or cancelled, and no one was sure if it would arrive in time for the show. The optimists in the camp kept saying things like ‘Maybe it will still show up – there’s plenty of time yet,’ but everyone could hear the concert hall filling up. Within an hour, it was full to capacity and we were empty-handed.
That was when someone thought it would be a good idea to go out there, ‘talk to your fans and explain the situation.’ With no fanfare, the house lights on full beam, we brothers – plus a promoter – walked onstage wearing the T-shirts and jeans we had flown in. The crowd went crazy. Jackie raised his hands for quiet and attempted an explanation. I’m not sure how our English was received by the Portuguese-speaking crowd, but they must have understood the basic facts – no wardrobe, no equipment, no concert – because the boos and heckles started. The mic passed to me. Maybe the ‘heart-throb’ could calm things. But the boos got louder. So we passed it to Michael. Maybe the cute front man could kill it. But nothing was working. Beneath the rising boos, we heard a chant growing in Portuguese which, we were later told, was the equivalent of ‘BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!’ We were lost, looking at each other, wondering what to do. A bottle bounced on to the stage. Then it was raining cans and coins. All the time, we stood there, putting our arms up, ducking and stepping back to dodge whatever was thrown, trying to get them to understand. But it was futile and growing increasingly hostile. Jackie ordered us offstage. As we turned away, it sounded like the whole of Brazil was booing us back to America.
‘We need to get out of here,’ said Bill Bray, backstage.
A handful of angry fans jumped on to the stage, and we ran for the bus outside. By now, a sizeable crowd had anticipated our exit, with more and more spilling out of the gates. We each made it on to the bus and the doors closed. ‘GO, DRIVER, GO!’
As he started to pull away, fans were hammering on the sides, venting their anger. Everything had turned ugly so we were glad to be getting out of there. On a seat two rows behind me, Michael looked as white as a ghost, curled up in his seat.
‘WAIT!’ screamed Marlon. ‘There’s ROSE!’
We looked out of the window and there, fighting her way through the crowd, with her clutch held aloft in both hands, was our tutor. In the rush to get out of there, we had left her behind, reading a magazine in the dressing room. Rose had one of those seventies hairstyles that flopped at the fringe and hung in one neat style, but she looked now as if she had been dragged backwards through a rosebush. As she banged on the door, the driver opened it, let her in and snapped it shut again, leaving our dishevelled tutor – all breathless and red-faced – standing at the front, in the aisle.
‘Well! I can’t believe there is not one gentleman in the whole bunch!’ she said, pronouncing every word precisely.
Thankfully, there was no time for a discussion about it. At that very moment, the driver put his foot down, jolting Rose into the front seat. Then – CRASH! – a brick shattered a side window. CRASH! Another. We all hit the deck. It was a terrifying experience to be under attack. I was crying. Michael was crying. Randy was crying. We couldn’t comfort each other because we were too busy lying low, covering our heads. As we pulled away, the bus kept receiving hits from God knew what, and the ambush seemed to go on for ever. By the time we reached the comparative safety of the hotel, it had three shattered windows and countless dents. Michael and I were quivering wrecks, pleading with Joseph that he mustn’t make us go back and perform there. Thankfully, he announced we were leaving on the first flight the next morning.
Come daylight, we were up and ready, and took a replacement bus to the airport. As Jack and Bill started organising the unload, we walked into the terminal to check in and realised our drama was not over: we were met by a group of soldiers, each holding machine guns across their chests, and some official was forcefully explaining that we were not allowed to leave until we had honoured our contractual commitment. There was a lot of serious talk we didn’t hear, but the symbolic muscle of the army was a deliberate reminder that we were going nowhere. The upshot of this madness was that we had no option but to return to our hotel and wait another 24 hours for our equipment to show up.
It felt kind of strange doing a show that we were made to do, and it put a real dampener on our spirits. It was probably the one concert we didn’t feel excited to perform, but we still got into show-mode and turned it on. And you know what the crazy thing was? The fans had a wild time: they screamed and sang, and fainted – and told us how much they loved us.
WE ACTED THE FOOL ALL THE time so when Motown’s collaboration with Rankin & Bass came good, we found it apt that we morphed into cartoon characters in ABC’s animated series, The Jackson 5. For Michael, the reality that our life had been turned into a cartoon had him more excited than he was over any album or concert. He was in front of that television each Saturday morning, at home or in hotels, like it was the only thing to watch in the world. Each episode featured our songs but they used actors for our voices, so we didn’t even have to work for it. That made Motown’s Fred Rice a magician in my book. For Michael, the cartoon was a C.S. Lewis fantasy turned real. In that Narnia-like space, the make-believe version of our lives came without the rough and tumble of Jackson-mania. In his eyes, we were now on a par with Mickey Mouse and, as a Disney nut, he loved that. As he grew older, he was torn about the cartoon’s success. On one hand, he loved ‘being’ a cartoon character that belonged in another world. On the other, those re-runs threatened to keep us forever perceived as the child group and Michael was by now itching to break out from the restrictions of bubblegum soul. If he didn’t necessarily want to grow up as a person, he wanted to develop as an artist.
CHAPTER NINE
Growing Pains
PUBERTY IS ALWAYS A POTENTIAL THIEF for a child star: it threatens to take away the image your dream is built on. Michael and I both struggled with acne; mine still stubborn and raging as an 18-year-old, his rabid and new at 14. A liking for fried food and soda in dressing rooms had caught up with us. Like me, Marlon – who also suffered – accepted the break-outs without too much angst, and I didn’t think Michael would be any different. I didn’t appreciate how much he worried about the threat his acne posed to his image because he never really spoke about it. We didn’t talk about that sort of thing. What ‘cool’ teenage boy does? We Jackson brothers were especially bound that way. We had been taught so much about pride, respect and performance that we had never learned the art of easy communication. We didn’t check in with one another unless it was album talk, tour madness, choreography ideas, basketball plans or girls. So Michael suffered quietly as his features changed and his skin flared up with pimples. Indeed he locked it deep inside, except for the odd worry he expressed to Mother.
As things turned out, his voice changed to his advantage: it kept its pitch and he learned how to use other voices, giving him an infinite range, with the ethereal timbre that was uniquely his. There were ridiculous rumours that he received hormone injections to keep that sweet high sound. Even when his voice coach Seth Riggs vouched for its natural range, people doubted it. But his voice was the least of his concerns. Michael’s acne was a confusion he wasn’t expecting. And then there was his nose. It widened noticeably and he hated it. In fact, he hated his skin and his nose so much that he found it hard to look at himself in the mirror. This wasn’t just typical teenage self-consciousness: it became a full-blown inferiority c
omplex. The more he looked at himself, the unhappier he felt. In fact, he was painfully brittle during conversations with anyone, always looking down to avoid eye contact.
His comfort zone, as always, was the stage or the ‘platform’ of press interviews when reporters spoke of how ‘energised’, ‘inquisitive’ and ‘ebullient’ he was. In performance mode, Michael’s teenage woes were well concealed behind makeup or the performer’s personality he projected. Offstage, our merciless teasing only made matters worse, but teasing is what brothers do, and we all had to go through it. When my acne first kicked in, they – including Michael – called me ‘Bumpy Face’ or ‘Map Face’ and Marlon was ‘Liver Lips’. I even received a second label, ‘Big Head’, because my head was, apparently, too big for my body. So when Michael was called ‘Big Nose’, it was just part of the common initiation into manhood – but he struggled with it. Not that we knew so until much later.
Michael always recalled Joseph using the tease, and that was what hurt him most – hearing it from an adult’s lips and from the man who had driven home the importance of image all our lives. ‘Hey, Big Nose, come over here,’ said Joseph. Michael said nothing and cringed each time.
I woke up one morning concerned by a discoloured area that had appeared on the inside of my left thigh, a white blemish – the size of a spot. It bothered me so I had it checked out. The doc said it was tiny area of vitiligo and was nothing to worry about unless it started to spread. And there were bigger issues to tackle – like the acne. Michael and I spent mornings busting those bumps together, standing side by side in front of the mirror, and we used the skin-bleaching cream Nadinola, because Michael soon learned that, for black kids, busting and picking leaves a mark darker than the natural skin colour. We viewed Nadinola as a magic potion: one tiny dab could fade a little area of discoloration, keeping our skin tone even.