Another Billie Jean lived in the UK but the 5,000-mile journey has never deterred her. She actually took out a lawsuit against the family, saying she had married Michael in secret and they’d had a child. She even presented convincing-looking marriage and birth certificates as ‘evidence’ in a case that obviously went nowhere.
But the most astonishing incident happened later at Neverland when a Billie Jean accessed the grounds. When security found her, she was carrying a bona-fide California driving licence from the Department of Motor Vehicles with a photo and an address that said ‘Neverland Ranch’, Figueroa Valley and the zip-code – and the name Billie Jean. It was incredible the lengths these women went to.
I need to stress that the vast majority of Michael’s fans were not Billie Jeans; they were the most dedicated, loyal and loving fans an artist could wish for, and he knew this better than anyone. He shared a unique association with the people he called his ‘soldiers of love’. Once security had screened groups of fans outside Hayvenhurst, he’d come out to spend a few minutes chatting and signing autographs. He was forever trying to make himself accessible in an increasingly inaccessible reality.
As his brother, it wasn’t always easy to keep my patience. One day, I pulled into the driveway to find a man standing alone at the gate, blocking my way in. I asked him politely to move. He refused. I asked him what his problem was. Michael’s family, he said. That was his problem. ‘I’m here to rescue him,’ he added.
‘Michael doesn’t need rescuing. Now get out of my way,’ I said.
When he refused, I got out of the car and we started fighting just as the security guards arrived. ‘You know nothing about this family! Now leave us alone!’ I yelled.
Strangers claiming to know Michael as well as we did were something we would have to get used to. But at least that guy got the message and ran off.
If only it would always have proved that easy to keep divisiveness at bay.
MICHAEL MADE THE DECISION TO REDESIGN Hayvenhurst, gutting its interior, adding a second storey and landscaping the gardens. There had been talk of a move after 11 years in Encino, but he wanted to stick around because he liked it there, so he offered to pay for the remodelling. Everyone moved into a family-owned condo up the road as the house was rebuilt English-style, mock-Tudor. He wanted ‘to liven the place up a little’ and the new Hayvenhurst – planned in 1981, built in early 1983 – remains infused with my brother’s heart and spirit.
After passing by a stone fountain of kneeling horses, the grand entrance is a double-door leading to a lobby with a white marble floor. Library and in-house theatre to the left; living room and kitchen to the right. Ahead the staircase sweeps from right to left, curving up around a central chandelier. At the landing that overlooks the lobby, turn right down the emerald-green carpet to what were Janet and La Toya’s rooms. Turn left to Mother’s and Joseph’s suite in one corner and Michael’s in another. Michael’s quarters and the sisters’ bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house – a point worth noting for later reports that placed La Toya’s ‘bedroom adjacent to Michael’s’, suggesting she could easily witness all his comings and goings.
Inside his quarters, there was a brick fireplace, black marble bathroom and a Murphy bed that folded into the wall because Michael often liked to sleep on the floor; a hangover from our Gary days when we’d throw down a mattress or a duvet. There is just something about sleeping on the floor that we’ve always liked. I’m the same to this day. I prefer it, whereas Michael always said it was good for his back.
In his rooms, photos of Ava Gardner were pinned up because he ‘loved her grace and beauty’. In later years he had pictures of child star Shirley Temple and then, towards the end of his life, Alicia Keys. His ceiling leaps to a narrow mezzanine-level loft – reached by a white-painted, wooden spiral staircase – which is lined with bookshelves and leads to a door and a set of rooms tucked away in the roof, with a den and a ‘hair salon’ complete with a barber’s swivel chair, sink and mirror. It wasn’t the only private place in his quarters – he also ensured he had his own staircase to a back entrance out of the house.
His bedroom opened on to a brick patio with a vast, pergola-like canopy supported by pillars; he placed a giant hot-tub in one corner and a tiled barbecue area in the other. This was where he sat in the mornings, with views of the lawns 90 degrees to his left and the cobblestoned courtyard below, reached by his outside spiral staircase leading from the patio. In the middle of that yard stands a Victorian lamp-post with a street sign announcing ‘Happiness’. In a corner down to his left, there is a brick building with a mock shop frontage; one display window depicts a 1950s toy store full of porcelain dolls, wooden toy soldiers, teddy bears, a doll’s house and a mini rocking chair; the other a flower store, full of artificial arrangements in baskets. This is the façade of Michael’s studio. The fun on the outside belied the serious work that went on behind the scenes.
Inside, a painted mural fills one wall. It is a green forest scene, with a cartoon version of Michael perched in a tree reading a green book with a title The Secret of Life – required reading for Jehovah’s Witnesses. On the studio’s exterior wall is an encased image of a Disney-like castle on a hill, lying in the distance at the end of a path leading from a forest. In the foreground, Michael stands with a child leaning into him. ‘Of Children, Castles and Kings,’ the caption reads, embedded with pin-lights.
But the most striking change was in the gardens: there were flowers everywhere. Michael never used to like flowers ‘because they remind me of funerals’, but his trips to Disney had changed all that. Now he created blooming flowerbeds, arranged in the colours of the rainbow, five, six rows deep. It is in those gardens that you can’t help but notice a wrought-iron web of leaves framing a lantern. It hangs from one corner of the house with a wooden, hand-carved sign that reads, ‘Follow Your Dreams Wherever They May Lead.’
There was one surprise renovation we were not allowed to see until Michael was ready. The ‘attic’ – two narrow rooms above the garage – was out of bounds for weeks. ‘No one is allowed up there,’ he told Mother. ‘It’s a gift to you all – I want everybody to see it at the same time.’
He was up in that attic for nights on end, running up and down the short flight of stairs beside the garage, organising his secret project with his assistants and helpers.
Come the day of the grand unveiling, Michael asked every sibling to gather in the dining room with Mother and Joseph. The chef laid on an impressive buffet, so we guessed this was a big deal. There was a real touch of the ceremonial and then, clapping his hands to seize our attention, he appeared at the door. ‘Everyone, my surprise is ready. Follow me!’
In single file, we crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the attic. I was somewhere in the middle of the herd when I heard gasps up ahead. When I reached the top and looked around, I understood why.
Michael had turned the entire space into a memory room.
He had literally smothered the walls and ceilings in images, blown up into large prints, running into one another. Every inch of available surface – including the underside of the sloping garage roof and the inside of a closet – is to this day covered with his black-and-white and colour montage. I’m not talking photos neatly arranged in frames like a museum; I’m talking about walls plastered with images that provided a running commentary of our years as a family, our years as a group, and his years as a solo artist; his fondest memories merged together in one place to provide a secret archive of his and our journey.
I was speechless trying to absorb the scale of this monumental project. There were photos of our grandparents, the family, 2300 Jackson Street, our childhood, Jackson 5 days, magazine covers, TV publicity shots, concert stills and crowd shots. You name it, he’d posted it. Even Mother’s driver’s licence, our parents’ marriage certificate and his old school report. The second room, at the far end, would ultimately fill with memorabilia, awards, mementoes and glass cases of his sequine
d gloves. By the mid-eighties, one wall became his ‘celebrity wall’ – maybe 50 photos of him with famous people. To name but a few: Julie Andrews, Elton John, Jackie Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Sean Connery, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, James Brown and E.T., from when Michael narrated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial storybook LP. There was even a blown-up image of our tutor, Rose Fine.
But the walls did not say it all. On the skirting-boards, messages were written in perfect calligraphy, running around the room like one of those news-tickers at the bottom of a television screen: ‘Joseph Fulfilled His Dreams Through Us’; ‘Thank You, Jehovah, Joseph, Mother, Berry Gordy, Suzanne de Passe, Diana Ross’; ‘The Earth Has Music For Those Who Listen’. And in the attic’s bathroom, he posted only one telling item: a giant image of the 1981 Diana Ross album Why Do Fools Fall in Love – a title which I think points to his own reflections about his relationship with Diana. I found it significant that this was the only image that stood in isolation in all the rooms.
One of the two rooms was dedicated to the Jackson 5 years. He had enlarged one black-and-white publicity photo so that we stood five feet high at the top of the stairs – the first image you see. Above it, he had written his own caption: ‘JUST KIDS WITH A DREAM’. Beside it, on a wall-mounted plaque, Michael had inscribed a message, written in gold on black:
To take a picture
Is to capture a moment
To stop time
To preserve the way we were
They say a picture speaks a thousand words
So with these photographs
I will re-create some wonderful
Magical moments in our lives
Hopefully, this journey into the past
In picturesque form
will be a stimulant
To create a brighter, successful tomorrow
– Michael Jackson
This picture gallery was also his office and dancing room. Each Sunday, this was where he locked himself away for two-to three-hour sessions to rehearse a move. I love the thought of him dancing surrounded by memories. When anyone claims that Michael was always running from his past and the Jackson 5 days, I afford myself a wry smile and think about this memory room and the walls that speak to each of us and say: ‘Be proud. Never forget.’
SOME FACES ON THAT ‘CELEBRITY WALL’ Michael classed as dear friends: Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Sammy Davis Junior and the inimitable Elizabeth Taylor. He met them while socialising, which he increasingly did once the new Hayvenhurst was completed. He started holding dinner parties, sending out invitations and making an occasion of it, with the chef cooking the finest food and staff on hand to serve. Mother referred to them as his ‘star-studded dinners’ and still recalls the night when she stayed in her room until there was a knock on her door and it was Michael with Yul Brynner, who had just popped upstairs to say hello. When Yul saw Mother was wearing her sleeping cap, he told her not to be embarrassed.
I never attended one of those occasions, but Mother was almost always there. She said that Michael, who was around 26 at this time, tried to behave in a mature fashion with his notable, older guests. ‘He grows up to their age,’ was how she put it. Yet the first thing he did was show them his doll collection in the window at the studio and the ice-cream/frozen yoghurt machine he had installed. As much as he tried to be adult beyond his years, his inner child was impossible to contain.
One thing you’ll note about this eclectic group of people is that they were all actors in the movie business. He first met Katharine Hepburn when Jane Fonda invited him to the set of On Golden Pond in 1981. But whoever he was with, Michael was determined to extract their life wisdom, advice and knowledge, especially about the movie industry and fame; he was eager to tap into their experience as he stepped out as an artist in his own right.
With each friend – at their house or trailer – he took along a tape recorder and discreetly recorded their conversations. This might seem like a strange thing to do and I doubt the other parties knew about it, but it was understandable from his point of view: he captured their sound advice so that he could play it back, like one of his recorded pep-talks. I think he was so enraptured by being with them – especially Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor – that he wanted to ensure that he never missed a word they said. At night, back at Hayvenhurst, he played back those conversations, listened and took notes. Michael was a prolific note-taker and note-sender, and he went through cassette after cassette on that tape recorder of his. I suspect there are numerous attorneys, producers, record-label executives and managers who were close to Michael without realising that the record button was pressed to capture a moment or protect his interests.
Over the years, as his fame and success grew, the motivation to record conversations had less to do with capturing advice than what people said about others or harsh words said to him. The fact that Michael was the star and revered by fans was not always respected by some people who came and went. Once Michael was with me when someone he respected started blaring at him down the phone. He held it away from his ear. ‘This is how they speak to me. Can you believe it?’
I think many underestimated Michael. They considered him a musical genius yet they also detected his malleable tendency and his difficulty with confrontation. This, I think, was perceived as a weakness rather than kindness. I always liked to see strangers meet him for the first time and walk away impressed, preconceptions shattered. He had the capacity to be one of the silliest, most down-to-earth people you could know, but he was also one of the savviest, with an intellect and a creativity that made him one of the smartest thinkers-outside-the-box at any table.
I laugh now at his use of a tape recorder because it feels almost like he was snooping on his own private conversations, which reminds me of how inquisitive he was. Once, after Hazel and I had moved from Hidden Valley to a new house in the Brentwood area of LA, Michael was over and I was looking for, and failing to find, a flashlight.
‘It’s in the top drawer next to your bed,’ said Michael.
‘Oh, you’ve been rooting around again, huh?’ I said.
Going through people’s drawers had been a notorious habit of his since way back. He said you could always find out a little something about people by seeing what they kept there and how organised they were. He had started doing it when we’d visited our grandmother, Mama Martha, in East Chicago. He’d go into her drawers and rifle through her keepsakes. ‘Michael, stop being nosy! You’ve no right looking in folks’ drawers!’ she said, but he didn’t listen.
I was terrified he was going to do it at Sammy Davis Junior’s magnificent home on Summit Drive, Beverly Hills. ‘Michael, don’t go looking in his drawers. I’ll telling you!’ I said. But he just chuckled and kept me guessing.
Sammy was a great guy to hang out with. He, Michael and I shared a love of movies and Sammy turned down the blinds to the California sun, pressed a button and a projector screen slid down the wall. One of the most-watched movies when Michael was over was Shirley Temple’s The Little Colonel. I think Sammy liked it best, though, when we reminded him about his cowboy movies. Michael once challenged him to a draw and it was game-on with Sammy’s fake pistols – old props from Hollywood. They pushed aside the stage-sized coffee-table in the living room and stood back to back. Altovise, Sammy’s wife, and I were reduced to spectators. Sammy swaggered dramatically to one end of the room and Michael, all serious-faced, to the other.
Then someone shouted, ‘DRAW!’
‘BANG! BANG!’ declared Sammy, and in one stroke he seemed to have swivelled on his heels, drawn and ‘fired’, as Michael grappled with his holster.
Michael’s pivot as a dancer may have been impressive, but Sammy teased him: ‘I’m still the fastest draw in the West!’
A nice footnote to this story is that, some time around the turn of the new millennium, Michael was fortunate enough to meet Shirley Temple at her home i
n San Francisco. I think he naturally gravitated towards child stars – wanting to meet Sammy, Shirley, Elizabeth Taylor, Spanky McFarland and, later, Macaulay Culkin – because he felt there would be an instant empathy.
I can only imagine what he and Shirley must have shared, but the only insight I had into their conversation came during Michael’s 2001 address at Oxford University when he said: ‘I used to think that I was unique in feeling that I was without a childhood. I believed there was only a handful with whom I could share those feelings. When I recently met with Shirley Temple … we said nothing to each other at first, we simply cried together, for she could share a pain with me that only others like my close friends Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin know.’
WE HAD GROWN UP LOOKING AT clocks and feeling pressure, from a rehearsal timetable to curfews on tour, from album deadlines to show times in that venue or this city. Time had ruled us, or we had raced against it, but the brother who heard the ticking clock loudest was Michael. If he wasn’t doing something constructive – most of the time – he felt guilty. As much as he spoke about time being stolen from his childhood, he never eased up on himself. He thought video games a waste of time, and catching rest idle. He needed to stimulate his mind, not numb it. Even if that only meant reading a book. ‘I can’t just sit around,’ he explained. He always said there were not enough hours in the day to work on all the ideas and thoughts he had.
Michael became a man truly obsessed once he set his soul on creating Thriller, the album. This project totally consumed him when he locked himself away with Quincy Jones. He worked between Westlake Studio, Hollywood, and the Hayvenhurst studio (unaffected by the renovation), where he recorded the original ideas. Alone. That way, Michael could capture the feel of the album that was in his mind; the first creative thought that became the foundation to the end product. No matter how many musicians were brought in later, he’d refer back to his original idea for the sound and song as a guideline to keep everybody aligned with his thinking.