The fan and press attention outside the gates was relentless and he became more and more anxious each time his car pulled into the driveway. Fans surrounded him on both sides and from his seat, all he could see were bodies. He started to freak out any time he saw someone approaching the window with their hands in their pockets. ‘What happens if one of these days someone has a gun in their pocket when I think they’re reaching for a pen?’ he asked.
Michael knew all about John Lennon’s death at the hands of a disturbed fan, David Chapman.
It reached a point where he became paranoid about a similar outcome. It was impossible for him to feel calm as he arrived or left home, and this was the prime reason why he sought solitude elsewhere, hunting for a secluded property within acres of land away from the city. He knew exactly what he had in mind, and he knew exactly the right place.
THE END
THE NEVERLAND YEARS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Once Said …
BETWEEN OUR LAST TOUR ENDING IN December 1984 and 1992, the family saw Michael sporadically, say three or four times a year in those eight years. When those occasions came around, at Hayvenhurst or Neverland, I found myself snatching time with him before he’d disappear again for the longest periods without a phone call. It actually felt like eight years without contact because the contact was so fleeting. His move to the solitude of the Santa Ynez Valley only made matters worse: we grew used to this foreigner called Distance moving between us and making itself at home. I don’t really know how that came about. Maybe I had first invited it when I’d stayed at Motown and broken the team pact. Maybe we had each become too preoccupied with trying to reach beyond our reach. But regardless of decisions taken as artists, had you said to me during the Jackson 5 years – and even during ‘Victory’ – that career and stardom would turn us into distant brothers, I would never have believed you. ‘We had each other before success and our love will outlast it,’ I would have said. ‘The synergy and team spirit that formed our backbone were built not in Hollywood but forged in the steel furnaces of Gary.’
I understood where Michael was at this time of his life. He was consumed with the Bad World Tour for most of 1987 and into 1989, and returned home to move into Neverland. We also knew that dropping off the radar was his creative habit. But before we knew it, the gap had widened and we had drifted towards an uncomfortable reality. Michael didn’t carry a cell-phone so it wasn’t as if we could call him. Communications technology was never his forte and the system dictated now that we call his offices at Neverland or in LA and leave a message. And another. And then another. They all went unreturned and I didn’t know what to think. Are our messages even being passed on? Is he ignoring them? Are we being blocked from talking with our own brother? If our messages aren’t being passed on, does he think we’re being distant?
Publications like People magazine ran reports about the Jackson siblings being ‘at odds – and out of touch’. It was only half-true: we were never at odds.
Of course we heard the snipes of strangers who claimed to understand our brother, suggesting he had chosen a place like Neverland because it ‘guaranteed space between Michael and his pesky family’. There was talk that ‘the brothers only want Michael for his fame to make a name for themselves’. Even though we had already made a name for ourselves: the Jacksons.
And then came the best claim: ‘Michael doesn’t need his brothers – he’s a success on his own.’ Hear that again: Michael doesn’t need his brothers. As if his success was all that mattered to him and us. That is the biggest misunderstanding about our family: few grasp that our love for each other was always the most important thing, regardless of perceptions built by headlines. ‘Family’ was all we knew, our platform to success, and it came before everything else.
It was only when this splintering happened that we realised that, away from the stage and outside of entertainment, there was no actual coming together because we didn’t celebrate holidays or birthdays due to the rule of Jehovah. We never sat down together at the dinner table or spent Sundays visiting one another. That was why, around 1988, I inaugurated ‘Family Day’: it would be a chance for us all to get together at Hayvenhurst, catch up, have a barbecue, watch a movie, or see our kids dress up and put on a show on the stage in the movie theatre. A couple of times Michael made these occasions, but not every time. What I liked about these days was the fact there was no business talk – we had ‘Family Meetings’ for that. ‘Family Day is a chance for us to be family again,’ said Mother. Meanwhile, Joseph observed that he felt like he was fighting to keep us all together.
It was because of our parents that we recorded the song ‘2300 Jackson Street’ in 1989, featuring Michael. He also wanted to film Mother and Joseph talking about the family and themselves – how they met, their first date – and he started the ‘interviews’, but they were never finished. He kept the material in his own archive, under lock and key, with his deeply personal diaries. Michael recorded everything on paper: his first song lyrics, his memories, feelings and notes about the different people he met and what they meant to him. It is a memory collection that should remain as he intended: private and sacrosanct. (He also saved trinkets, keepsakes, family videos and memories from his past, like Rebbie’s first pair of baby shoes, his nieces’ and nephews’ first pacifiers – dummies – or first dolls.) During ‘Victory’, it was his idea that we all join Mother on a trip down Memory Lane to visit her roots in Alabama and he wanted to capture us on camera as we visited distant relatives. This meticulous collection of everything ‘family’ made his distance seem at odds with who he was and what mattered to him in life. I guess every family has a distant member – I just never imagined that ours would be Michael, or that he’d become so absent from our daily lives. We went from ‘always together’ to the point at which we couldn’t get to him at all.
We knew Michael thrived in seclusion – I think artists need to retreat from life to some extent if they are to observe, sing and write about it. We understood that need in Michael – and I never forgot that he gave his first public performance, singing ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ on the school stage on his own. But he would learn that there is a fine line between creative solitude and personal loneliness. He found himself caught between what he chose and what his fame imposed on him; he would discover that solitude was not always his friend, and that the life of a genius can be the loneliest in the world. But there is one guarantee about family: you know where its members are, and that the day will come when you’ll be there for one another, come what may.
I needed solitude for very different reasons.
My marriage to Hazel had ended in 1987, mainly because I wasn’t, in the end, strong enough to resist temptation. I let her down and shattered something special. I met a woman named Margaret Maldonado and we ended up moving into Hayvenhurst after Michael moved out. But I needed to get away and find balance, so in 1989, I headed to the Middle East – a concert by Rebbie was my excuse. She remained the incredible dancer of old and her voice had blossomed, too. Michael had written her début album’s title track, ‘Centipede’, in 1985 and she had lined up shows in Dubai, Oman and Bahrain, which offered me my chance to show support and see her live for the first time. I didn’t know exactly what I was searching for on this trip because I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing. I just packed my bags and followed my instincts.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DRIVE THROUGH the Arabian desert to clear the mind. I had the windows up in the Range Rover and the air-conditioning turned high during the four-hour journey between Bahrain and Riyadh. It was the most serene, scenic – and dusty – drive of my life. A ribbon of road unfurled across powder sand, with giant dunes on either side. I saw camels running loose, children stopping to pray, and we passed tented communities of Bedouins as Middle Eastern music played on the radio. Everything about the place was hypnotic. Ali Qamber, a friend from Washington DC who’d met me backstage during ‘Victory’, was driving. He was my guide and transla
tor; he would help to change my life and become my closest friend.
As we drove, he pointed out a palm tree in the desert. ‘Remind you of Hollywood?’ he said.
This is nothing like Hollywood, I thought, but I smiled and nodded.
He talked about the Bedouins. Nomads. Big, strong families. Can weather anything. Family, family, family – that was what those people were about. I smiled and nodded again.
I had teamed up with him at one of Rebbie’s shows in Bahrain. The following day he had taken me to a reception at his house to meet his family. Despite the fuss that having ‘a Jackson’ in the house caused, the kids were well-mannered and respectful. Even in their excitement, they waited for each other to finish a sentence before another spoke. In this Muslim household, every negative perception I’d heard in America about the faith fell away. Everything that Muhammad Ali had said came flooding back. I remembered the day when he’d taken me into Mother’s office at Hayvenhurst, closed the doors and pulled up a chair opposite mine. ‘Listen up. I’ve got something important to say. Look at me. Believe what I am about to tell you.’ He started thumbing through the pages of the Bible, jabbing his finger at what he believed to be contradictions. Right under Mother’s roof. Taking the fight to Jehovah’s door. His guidance had led me to meetings of the Nation of Islam, when Minister Farakhan spoke to something inside me that wasn’t quite ready to listen.
Now, in the bosom of the Qamber family, I felt something so profoundly that I can only describe it as a calling. I told Ali then and there that I wanted to drive to Riyadh, fly to Jeddah, then drive to Mecca.
In my eager conversion to Islam, I found myself walking a well-worn track inside the holiest of outdoor arenas, the Al-Masjid al-Haram, in Mecca; seven circuits of the Ka’ba – this big, black-clothed square block. It is the sacred centrepiece around which Muslims walk in silent prayer. As I prayed – for my family, for the brothers to be watched over – I started to feel as if I was gliding, not walking. From nowhere, I felt that rush of being onstage and hearing a crowd’s roar. I felt euphoric without anything tangible before me.
‘You’re used to “seeing is believing”,’ Ali Qamber would say later. ‘Now you see that feeling is believing.’
I became aware of the dozens and dozens of people around me, walking the same circle, in the same direction, united in worship. Connected. It’s the same with Ramadan. No matter where people are in the world, they fast from sunrise to sundown, together. I observed more synchronicity and harmony, and everything resonated with me. I saw how, at the Call to Prayer, everyone prayed side by side in neat rows. They washed themselves before prayer because hygiene is imperative. They never placed the Qur’an on the floor at their feet because that’s disrespectful. Order, cleanliness and respect. Just as I was raised.
I returned to California reinvigorated. I moved out of Hayvenhurst and into a duplex in Beverly Hills with Margaret and our two children, Jeremy and Jourdyn. I was also keen to record my next album with Arista. The nineties would represent a fresh start. I vowed to live my life according to God’s will and become a better human being.
However, I would discover that seven laps around the Ka’ba is no guarantee for achieving that goal because life continues to test you – and sometimes you fail. Sometimes becoming ‘better’ is about making the worst decisions and learning from them.
I HEARD VIA THE TELEVISION NEWS that Michael had been taken to hospital with ‘chest pains’. It was June 1990, and he must have been staying at his new condo in Century City because he was in the emergency room at St John’s Hospital, Santa Monica. I remember thinking, I need to be there or he’ll have no one with him – the rest of the family must have been out of town.
It was easy to locate the hospital because of the television satellite trucks parked outside and the news helicopters hovering above. Michael was forever besieged now.
When I got to his room, he was resting in bed, wearing a hospital gown, propped up by a stack of pillows. He told me he hadn’t got ‘chest pains’ but severe headaches – a throbbing pain that I assumed was related to the old burn injury on his scalp. He was receiving his painkiller – Demerol – intravenously, but he was complaining more about a burning sensation in his arm. I called in a nurse, who adjusted the needle. I noticed two books on his bedside table: one about marriage and divorce, the other about taxes. For a man not contemplating marriage and who had his own accountant, it might seem odd but it was typical of Michael, who always wanted to be learning something new, however random.
I made a joke about his light reading material. ‘Maybe that’s why you have the headaches,’ I said – which raised a smile. If he wanted to tackle something new, I suggested, he should start on my ton of books about Islam. This hospital visit was my first real chance to share my experience in Mecca, and he was as intrigued as I’d known he would be. We spoke about spiritual matters generally, which was nothing new between us because we had often imagined standing outside our bodies to observe ourselves so that we could improve as performers and people. ‘Imagine what another person sees,’ Michael used to say, ‘and that will make us better in every way.’
‘That is what Islam is all about,’ I said, ‘to make us better humans.’
He asked me to bring him all the books I had, once I had finished with them. ‘But there’s something else I really need now,’ he said, all serious.
‘I’ll get the nurse. What do you need?’
Michael smiled. ‘Chocolate cake … They have this great chocolate cake here … Do you want to split a piece?’
Over the cake, we caught up on everything and then I told him my big news: I was moving to Atlanta to start work on a new album in the studio of two of the hottest producers around, L.A. Reid and Babyface, who had founded LaFace Records in a venture with Clive Davis and Arista. Nowadays, people in America will recognise L.A. Reid as a judge on the US version of The X Factor, but back then he and Babyface were starting to carve out their names as the biggest hit-makers in the industry. ‘These guys are going to be my Quincy Jones,’ I told Michael – an indication of how excited I was about the opportunity.
He wished me luck. ‘Just make sure you do your own melodies,’ he said, throwing in some late advice.
By the time we had finished talking, day was turning to dusk and he was feeling tired. He said I should go home. I said I wanted to stay to make sure he was okay. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said.
‘But I want to. Don’t worry about me, just go to sleep.’
On that first night, I didn’t want him to be alone in a hospital room. I drew the curtains and turned out the lights. There was a big armchair in the corner. It seemed comfortable enough. As Michael closed his eyes, that was where I curled up and fell asleep till daybreak.
MY MOVE WAS A BIG DEAL. I took everything but the kitchen sink and enrolled the kids in a new school as Margaret and I set up home in Buckhead, Atlanta, in a nice colonial-style property in West Paces Ferry Road. I signed a year-long lease and spent the initial weeks ensuring the family was happy and settled into the community. We even took in a baseball game or two and adopted the Braves as our team.
Meanwhile, I placed calls with L.A. Reid and Babyface’s people to chase the album start date, but was told there had been a delay. Never one to sit around doing nothing, I made the most of the lull and started talking business with Stan Margulies, the producer of the TV mini-series Roots and The Thorn Birds (and later The American Dream, our family’s life story up to 1992). Stan told me that he had 17 hours’ footage from research he’d done on Tutankhamun and wanted Michael to play the pharaoh in a movie. He asked if it was something my brother would be interested in. ‘He’d jump at the chance,’ I told him. ‘Just give me a few days, let me put it to him and I’ll come back to you.’
I left a message for Michael with his office. I waited up in Atlanta until 3am for his call back. Nothing happened. I did this – leaving a message and waiting up – for the following few days, but there was still no respons
e. I couldn’t understand why there was silence when the Michael I knew didn’t like wasting time when such an opportunity arose. But this was becoming the norm.
Before I knew it, three months had passed in Atlanta and nothing had happened on any front. Ninety days of nothing going on is a long time when you’re raring to go, revving on the spot. It was the slowest, most wasteful, most frustrating of times. Eventually someone at the record label called to give me the heads-up. They told me I wasn’t going to be happy about it, but they thought there was something I should know: L.A. Reid and Babyface were working in California with another artist. I was furious. No wonder they didn’t have the guts to pick up the phone and tell me themselves, I thought. ‘Who’s this other artist?’ I asked.
‘That’s the bit you’re not going to like,’ I was told.
‘Why? Who the **** is it?’
‘It’s your brother, Michael.’
I put the phone down and Margaret asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t tell her, because I couldn’t find the words. I was too busy fighting the forces of gravity as my head spun with questions. Michael had shared my excitement about my project: why would he retain the very same producers? Why, when I was committed to LaFace Records, wouldn’t they have the courtesy to tell me? Why would everyone go behind my back, leaving me hanging in Atlanta? Over the coming weeks, those questions festered unanswered. I heard nothing from the producers or my brother. Instead I embraced the teachings of the Qur’an, as I tried to become a better human being. I hung on to one particular hadith – a piece of wisdom from the Prophet Muhammad – and recited it in my head over and over: ‘The strong is not the one who overcomes the people by his strength, but the strong is the one who controls himself while in anger.’ As with all wisdom, though, it’s not about reciting it, it’s about living it.