As I write this, I am fully aware that this one fact – if taken out of context – is in danger of fanning the myth that Michael bleached his skin so that he would appeal to a wider audience: nonsensical when you think how vast our Jackson 5 fan base already was. Anyway, over-the-counter Nadinola is used for acne and skin discoloration. Its three per cent hydroquinone is nowhere near strong enough to transform anyone’s actual pigmentation. So I’ll be clear: Michael never bleached any part of his face or body, save for the dark spots on bad-skin days. In later life, other measures would be necessary to treat more serious skin conditions. Suggestions that he was trying to stop being a black man hurt him greatly, especially when his pigmentation was like La Toya’s – she was always that paler shade when younger. Michael was proud of his roots as a black man and proud to be a record-breaking black artist – but learning how headlines started was all part of growing up.
I don’t think any of us anticipated growing pains as a group. On paper, our hit records, cohesion, synergy and public demand made us the least likely group to split. But we hadn’t reckoned on the impact of becoming young men who would want to move out, have wives and raise children. Michael, especially, didn’t see the realities of adulthood coming.
MR GORDY ANNOUNCED SOLO PROJECTS FOR Michael and me, deciding to showcase our diversity from under the umbrella of the Jackson 5 as Motown capitalised on our separate fan bases. Within this opportunity, we never forgot that the group came first: the Jackson 5 was our security, the solo projects were our experimental adventures. We felt that any independent success could only strengthen the brand. Michael went first with ‘Got To Be There’, which charted at No. 4 in the Billboard Hot 100, followed up with ‘Rockin’ Robin’ at No. 2 and then his first solo No. 1 ‘Ben’, which sold 1.5 million copies. My LP Jermaine spawned the single ‘Daddy’s Home’ – a cover of the Shep & the Limelites hit – and it reached No. 3, selling around one million copies. We would both release other solo singles until 1975 but none of them worried the Top 10.
But in the wake of our charted successes, I suddenly faced a press that was curious to find rivalry. ‘What’s it like being your brother’s rival?’; ‘Jermaine, Michael went No. 1, do you wish you had, too?’ They were questions from an old script, as yellowed as a newspaper left in the window too long. Journalists forgot that we were brothers first, artists second. Michael cheered me like he had on the baseball field. I had his back like I’d had it in Gary, at school and onstage. Our upbringing was about pushing each other to raise the bar. That is healthy competition, and that was what we shared. Music didn’t usher in rivalry, but we saw how the outside perspective betrayed what we were as brothers. I’ve always said that when you’re looking into the goldfish bowl it’s impossible to know what the fish are thinking – yet people still try. During our transition into adults, the ‘rivalry’ and ‘jealousy’ between Michael and me would stick to our media portrayal. It was like everything else that left its mark in childhood – an emotion, a feeling, a scar, an experience: it never goes away.
As a group, we would release four more albums: Skywriter, Get It Together, Dancing Machine and Moving Violation. We moved away from bubble-gum soul into a sound that was more funk with a pop edge. But while our average worldwide album sales hovered around the two million mark, our chart success wasn’t through the roof any more. We were no longer permanent residents of the Top 10 and found ourselves struggling to make the Top 50 albums. Measured against our early successes, it was a decline that we struggled to understand. Somewhere between albums – say mid-1973 – I started to hear the first murmurings of worry that Motown’s team wasn’t bringing it any more. Michael – believing more and more in his creativity – spoke about how we needed more freedom to write our own material, and I could see Joseph paying attention. Their view was that we were hit-makers not releasing enough hits, and that Motown wasn’t promoting us as vigorously.
I couldn’t understand the complaint. Why are you getting so hung up on one or two records going nowhere when we’ve had so many hits? I thought. The juggernaut wasn’t stopping, the touring demand was still there, and the crowds were still screaming. It was hardly a crisis. Anyway, I had bigger things on my mind. After a succession of teenage conquests, I realised there was no one in the world quite like Hazel Gordy, so I proposed when she joined up with us on an East-Coast leg on tour, and she said yes.
Ever since we’d arrived in LA., the Jacksons and the Gordys had been one. Now we were cementing that bond. We were both ecstatic. Back then, I believed in the ‘forever’ and the happy ending; I believed that nothing good would ever end.
I KNEW IT WASN’T GOING TO be easy breaking my happy news to the family. That was why I left it for a few days, to think over my approach. I dreaded telling Joseph, because – ever since Tito had married Dee Dee the previous year – he thought he was losing us, and he didn’t handle it very well. His reaction was always going to be unpredictable. I worried about telling Michael because we were so close that I knew he’d feel the wrench of me moving out. Bottom line in our house: marriage wasn’t celebrated as the joy of two people coming together, it was initially viewed as a wedge driving apart a winning team of brothers.
I remember rehearsing the conversations in my head but all I could visualise was Joseph’s angry face and Michael’s sad eyes. Maybe that was why I chose to break the news first to Joseph from a phone booth when our tour passed through Boston, with Hazel by my side. (By now, Joseph didn’t accompany us all the time. He dropped off on occasion to rest up, trusting the Motown operation.)
When I phoned Encino, Mother answered. I told her the news. She was delighted. ‘Joseph always said that girl was crazy about you,’ she said. ‘Let me go get him. He’s out in the garden.’
Joseph was either blowing the leaves or cutting the grass, and I seemed to be waiting an age, pushing dimes into the coin slot. Mother came back to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Jermaine … he can’t come to the phone. He’s busy in the garden.’ The resignation in her voice told me everything, and it crushed me. Mr Gordy backed me. My own father didn’t – and that hurt.
That same night, I plucked up the courage to tell the rest of the brothers. ‘We already know,’ said Michael. ‘I love Hazel. I’m really happy for you.’ He was all smiles, and would refer to this new addition to the family as ‘Mrs G’.
What he didn’t say was that he saw his brothers’ marriages (Jackie would soon marry his girl, Enid) as events that left him behind. I learned all this from Mother later. ‘He’s not feeling good about it, Jermaine,’ she said. ‘He feels everything has changed and everyone is leaving him. Marlon and Randy will be next. He’s sad. He’s scared of being lonely.’
Michael never did say anything, then or later. Instead he hid his true feelings, not wishing to ruin my happiness or spoil the big day.
WITH MR GORDY AS THE BRIDE’S father, it was always going to be a ‘wedding of the century’, as Ebony magazine billed it. I didn’t have much say in its theme or decadence. It was like creating a new album: I’d just show up, do my thing and everything would fall into place. The guest list was a Who’s Who of the music industry and the grand theme a Winter Wonderland at the Beverly Hills Hotel with 175 white doves, artificial snow and Smokey Robinson singing ‘Starting Here & Now’ written especially for us. Hazel and I found ourselves on the cover of Soul and Life for an ‘inside the wedding exclusive’.
Come the big day on 15 December – one day after my nineteenth birthday – Mr Gordy handed over his beautiful daughter at the end of the aisle by pinching my upper arm and winking, as if to say, ‘She’s yours now, you take care of her.’
The day went like a dream, and I was so carried away that I didn’t see Michael, dressed in his groomsman suit, sitting alone at a table, all glum. I remained oblivious to the separation he felt. Anyway, Hazel and I had found a house in Bel Air so I was only going to be a 15-to-20 minute drive away, and we’d still be recording and touring together. If anything, the positive consequ
ence was that our marriage tied us to the heart of Motown. I couldn’t see the downside; I just presumed everyone was happy for me.
But some days later, Hazel told me that her father had received a letter from Tito. The gist of it was that he felt it unfair that Hazel and I had received such a lavish wedding when he and Dee Dee had had to settle for something more sedate. Or words to that effect. This complaint overlooked one fact: the wedding was provided by Mr Gordy in his capacity as a father of the bride, not as president of Motown. But that didn’t stop me being viewed as the brother receiving special treatment from the boss.
I didn’t believe for a second that Tito was behind that missive. Men don’t get jealous about the trappings of a wedding – wives do – but he had signed it and that made me wince. Not that I said anything. I brushed the letter’s contents under the same carpet where Michael kept his feelings about the splintering effects of marriage. We didn’t like confrontation. Big elephants have sat in our rooms all our lives and been ignored for the sake of avoiding conflict. Better to have peace (Mother’s way) than cause upset (Joseph’s way).
It seemed Hazel’s and my wedding caused ripples in the Gordy and Motown families, too. It would also transpire that Marvin Gaye – a genius riddled by his own insecurity, and Hazel’s uncle by his marriage to Mr Gordy’s sister, Anna – was concerned too. I later learned (as confirmed by his confidant and collaborator on ‘Sexual Healing’, David Ritz) that he worried about ‘the new singer walking into the family’, saying, ‘It’s all part of Berry’s plan to replace me.’ It was crazy talk from an incredible artist in a class of his own, but Marvin had irrationally convinced himself that I would now become the favourite son of the Motown family.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that my love for Hazel caused such ructions. Thankfully, I was too wrapped up in my own happiness to care.
IF THERE WAS ONE SIGHT OF himself that Michael did like in the mirror, it was when he was dancing. For our 1974 single ‘Dancing Machine’ – which went to No. 2 in the charts – he wanted to try something ‘different’ and perfect a dance he’d seen in street theatre: ‘The Robot’. He used every spare minute to practise in front of the mirror at Hayvenhurst or in the studio, and probably before he went to bed. When I saw his first attempt, it seemed scratchy and disjointed, but when he finally showed us the polished version, it was incredible. He glided like he had wheels on the balls of his feet and electric wires running through each joint. He became remote-controlled. ‘The Robot’ was his first real signature move long before the Moonwalk moment, but none of us knew how it would go down when he first performed it during ‘Dancing Machine’ on the Soul Train show. All I can say is, go YouTube it, because you’ll see how electric it was when Michael first threw his hat into the ring to announce that one of the most poetic dancers of our generation had arrived. Kids all over Los Angeles were busting ‘The Robot’, and the song put us back in the Top 10. That was the power of dance and television, we said. Noted for the future.
IN 1974, MICHAEL GOT HIS CHANCE to play Las Vegas and dance in the footsteps of Sammy Davis Junior – and we did it in true Vegas style with a full-on variety show. Showcased as ‘The Jacksons’, we introduced La Toya, Janet and Rebbie into the fold for a two-week run at the MGM Grand.
It was a rare treat being in the same city and at the same venue for 14 days straight and for once, we had a chance to unpack our suitcases. What also made it special was that it was solely a Jackson production, nothing to do with Motown. Organised and managed by Joseph, devised by the brothers, we brought a vaudeville feel to the show, with music, tap dancing, acting and comedy skits, with strings, brass and band in support. All nine brothers and sisters entertained a different crowd – sit-down tourists, not the screaming fan-base. We had packaged the mad energy from 2300 Jackson Street and found a stage to unleash it. It was especially nice having the first wanderer, Rebbie, sharing the show-time experience and there was something proud about walking onstage to a packed house every night as a family, not just five brothers. Those revue nights also benefited Michael because they gave him an ideal opportunity to work with his post-puberty voice and to experiment with his repertoire of talents and creative ideas.
It was his idea for Janet to incorporate her impression of Mae West during a part-skit, part-medley of songs performed with Randy, she playing a grown woman, he playing the man. During their rendition of ‘Love Is Strange’, there was a part where she ignored Randy calling out to her and he’d get mad, yell her name, and then the music would stop. In that pause, she turned and walked over to him, throwing her hips to a drum-beat with each strut. And then Janet, the cutest little thing, put a hand on a hip and purred, ‘Why don’t you come up and see me some time?’ She brought the house down at every single show.
The name Janet Jackson stayed on people’s lips and we recognised that our sister was a fine little actress. La Toya’s performer switch also turned on during her tap-dancing routines with Michael, Marlon and Rebbie as they danced up a storm to Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’. We’d end the show with a family tap-dance to a big-band number, bowing out to a standing ovation, all smiling, hands linked, united. If I could have taken just one snapshot of a moment in time, it would have been a freeze-frame of me looking down the line and capturing the joy we took from doing what we love: entertainment.
We must have gone down well with the Vegas crowd because we were invited back for a few more stints after that. And then everything slowly started to change.
I knew something was going down when I kept walking into the dressing room and the brothers stopped a hushed conversation and disappeared into their magazines. Michael shifted uncomfortably in the awkwardness that often filled the room. The atmosphere just felt … odd. At the time, I told myself it was nothing; it was just the brothers bemoaning Mr Gordy and they weren’t saying stuff in front of me because they didn’t want to compromise me.
ONE PHONE CALL SHATTERED THE FAMILY illusion of togetherness. A woman friend of Mother’s rang with the news that Joseph had a mistress. What made this betrayal even more hurtful was that the lady was someone Mother had once invited into the house and who had had her eye on Jackie. It seemed that any Jackson would do. Mother was everything a betrayed woman can be: devastated, livid, confused, and torturing herself with the when and where. She had waited in the wings all her life with nothing but ‘family’ on her mind, so taking that phone call was like being T-boned.
I was in Philadelphia with Hazel, but I know from the others how ugly things turned at Hayvenhurst. Janet and Rebbie pleaded with Mother to ‘leave him, divorce him’ and couldn’t stand the sight of ‘the dirty down dog’. Janet yelled and screamed in his face for the hurt he had caused – and Joseph took it. Michael wept with hurt and anger, also advising Mother – quietly – to kick out our father. Joseph had lost the respect he had spent a lifetime building in his children and his actions contradicted every family value of loyalty and decency that he had ever preached. In the heat of the moment, suitcases were packed and Mother needed a few days away, but in the end, she hung on to her old-fashioned and religious beliefs that forgiveness and time can rebuild. ‘I had no stomach to fight, no room for ugliness, and a faith in Jehovah,’ she said.
OUT OF ALL THE INVITATIONS WE had and the parties we attended, the most-laid back afternoon we ever spent was in 1975 with Bob Marley and his Wailers at his musical haven: 56 Hope Road, Kingston, Jamaica. It was the year that saw the release of ‘No Woman No Cry’ – his breakthrough, internationally and in America. We were in town to share the stage at a packed-out concert at the invitation of Jamaica’s then opposition leader, the Labour Party’s Edward Seaga. We even took along our wives and Mother. As Mother reminded us, it’s not every day you get the chance to hang with Bob Marley – and she loved some hip-swaying reggae.
We drove through a rainbow-coloured gateway and pulled up outside a colonial property with a tiled roof, set in a lush landscape of mango trees, drooping palms and the greenest vegetation. Kids
seemed to be everywhere, riding bicycles. We ‘walked inside’ to find a dirt floor; no floorboards or carpet, just soil. It summed up the vibe of our earthy afternoon.
‘It’s cool to have you guys here … Stick around as long as you like,’ said Bob, all sweet-mannered Rastafarian chill, matted dreads, flared jeans and armless vest. So we kicked back that balmy afternoon, and talked about the power of trees, Mother Earth and James Brown. We were too polite to ask about the unidentifiable scent in the air. It smelt like rat‘s stink, we said. He was too respectful to our innocence so he didn’t explain that it was the aroma of recently-smoked ganja.
It was challenging enough experimenting with the drink he had lined up for us: a plastic bottle filled with nasty-looking dirty water. ‘We supposed to drink this?’ said Michael, and the Wailers laughed.
It’s hard to refuse a kind offering from your host so we held it like a specimen bottle in a science class, examining the floating bits in the brown water. Lucky for the rest of us that Michael was the one holding the bottle so all eyes were on him. ‘It’s herbs and spices,’ someone reassured us.
‘It’s a miracle cleansing cure for all ailments. It’s good for you,’ another added.
Michael tipped the bottle, dipped a finger inside, licked it hesitantly … and pulled the ugliest face. That told us all we needed to know: it was no better than Joseph’s castor oil. We skilfully managed to persuade our host that we’d take away this miracle liquid ‘to drink later’.
We had so much fun with the Jamaican people who were then experiencing a turbulent, and often violent, political climate. Bob was a forerunner in being a musician and humanitarian, with his lyrical messages of love, peace and harmony. About three years later, he staged a concert in Kingston called ‘One Love, One Peace’. There, he famously brokered the moment between warring factions when Michael Manley, the Prime Minister and People’s National Party leader, shook hands on stage with Labour’s Edward Seaga. That fragile peace wouldn’t last, but Michael saw what music – not politics – had achieved. ‘That is what I want to do,’ he said. ‘Make music that makes a difference.’