You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

  Then people were wondering whether Michael had used an anonymous sperm donor. Why anyone thought my brother was incapable of fathering his own children was beyond me, as was the idea he’d use a donor when it was his personal legacy that mattered to him. I think it’s fair to say that Debbie had a dominant gene (Prince had white-blond hair when he was born) but when I look into that kid’s eyes or catch his profile side-on, his similarity to Michael as a boy is obvious. But, to nail the myth once and for all, Michael has passed on his vitiligo to Prince. My brother’s paternity is irrefutable when Prince removes his shirt. What really matters, though, is that my niece and nephews know without a shadow of a doubt that Michael was their biological father and they were born out of love.

  WHEN I LOOK AT PHOTOS OF Michael from this period – post-marriage and pre-children – it is difficult to ignore the facial changes that he underwent through further plastic surgery. In fact, over the following decade, I would say that he reached the point of over-correction because he got so caught up in a negative self-image that he tried to find in the mirror what he had set in his mind: unattainable perfection.

  I don’t know the exact extent of the work he had done but there were several more surgeries to his nose. He was someone whose wealth allowed him to do something about his insecurities, but he hadn’t changed to us because we looked in his eyes and they were the same, and his heart was still the same: he was still Michael.

  Personally, I think his preoccupation with plastic surgery was some form of body dysmorphia, a condition often rooted in childhood or puberty, where the sufferer finds exaggerated flaws that do not exist. This is my opinion, not a diagnosis. Over the years, I wanted to shake him and say, ‘Michael, can you not see how damn handsome you are?’ But it was such a sensitive issue that I felt I could not, and he failed to realise that his self-esteem was not something a knife could correct.

  That is why I get angry with the doctors who enabled him to go too far. I always thought if you went to see a doctor and nothing was wrong, they had a duty to tell you so. The saddest thing was that Michael was never happy with his final look. Ultimately, I think he learned a painful lesson that the face is not a piece of music; it cannot be endlessly tinkered with and made perfect. The mirror lied to my brother more than anyone in his life, and it saddened me to know that he never saw how beautiful he was. As I wrote for the memorial programme in 2009, Michael, this world was never meant for someone as beautiful as you – and with that, I referred to not only how he looked, but how he thought and viewed the world.

  THE MOMENT THEY MARKED MICHAEL’S FOREHEAD – and especially his ‘third eye’ – with the mixture of sandalwood paste, turmeric, clay and ash, he felt something resonate: ‘I instantly felt like I had come home,’ he said.

  He had just landed on India’s soil and the country was, he said, his ‘spiritual home’; the one place he’d always wanted to visit since we started travelling the world as brothers. When they greeted him at the airport with dancers and the thumbed touch of tilak – the sacred blessing for good health and auspiciousness – it confirmed to him, as he had once said, that in another lifetime he was Indian. He’d always known there was a reason why he had an Indian chef and a friendship with Deepak Chopra, he joked. Native-American Indian by ancestry, Far East Indian in soul.

  When he was drawing up the schedule for the ‘HIStory’ World Tour, he booked one performance in India and arrived there two weeks before he took his vows with Debbie. The scale of his visit was illustrated when they closed Mumbai International Airport for his arrival: 10,000 people had turned out to welcome him. Three Russian cargo planes touched down with the stage. Then his own 747 jumbo followed, the words ‘The King of Entertainment’ emblazoned across the sides of its fuselage. On his return, Michael showed off his Indian outfits and the mini-Ganesh statue he’d been given.

  I heard about his time there, and the way he raved about it afterwards, from the promoter Viraf Sarkari who, with Andre Timmins, brought Michael to the Andheri Sports Complex and 25,000 fans. But it is the story of what happened outside the arena on day one that has stayed with me.

  As he drove away from the airport in a Toyota people-carrier, he was standing through the sun-roof, wearing one of his scarlet military jackets, with gold buttons and a white arm-band. His vehicle was somewhere in the middle of a 20-car cavalcade as Mumbai came to a standstill. The orders to the drivers beforehand were not to stop: they should sweep through to the hotel as quickly as possible.

  ‘Wait! Stop!’ said Michael, when he came to the first junction. He had seen a small group of urchins – street children, wearing nothing but rags for clothes, who probably had no idea who this visitor was. They had been playing by the roadside, only to stop and gawp at the spectacle passing them. Michael ducked down into the vehicle, then stepped into the street to greet them. He approached them with a smile and communicated in a universal language: he took one child by both hands and started dancing. Then, as all the officials and politicians watched from the cars, the other children started laughing and dancing, too. He was there for two or three minutes, whipping them into giddiness before he hugged each one, kissed them on the cheek and handed out candies before he jumped back into his vehicle. The cavalcade set off again, with Michael waving.

  At the very next junction just down the road, it happened again. ‘Stop! Stop!’

  He’d spotted more street children, and got out and danced and handed out more candies. He repeated the stop-start dance routine at every junction he came to on the way to the hotel. As Viraf remembers: ‘It was the most incredible sight of humanity I have ever seen.’

  Once those three days in Mumbai were over, and before he checked out of his suite at the Oberoi Hotel, Michael politely vandalised the entire room. He took his pen and signed the mirror, the bed-sheets, the room-service brochure, the pillows, the towels and every piece of furniture in there. Then, he left his instructions: ‘Sell all of this and give the proceeds to charity, please.’ It made a small fortune. Viraf remembers the message on the pillow that today someone, somewhere is treasuring: ‘India, all my life I have longed to see your face … I have to leave but I promise I shall return. Your kindness has overwhelmed me, your spiritual awareness has moved me, and your children have touched my heart. They are the face of God … I adore you, India.’

  SPIRITUALLY, WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CONNECTED as brothers, as family, even when there was physical distance. You don’t grow up as tight as we were and lose that sense of connection. There have been countless moments of serendipity to remind me of how interconnected we will always be, but the two most memorable came courtesy of Nelson Mandela and Charlie Chaplin.

  It was March 1999, I think, when I travelled to Johannesburg for a function to honour the most incredible man of our times. I was almost making a habit of booking meetings with Nelson Mandela: we had appeared on a South African talk show together and then I was invited to perform for him twice, first, at his eightieth birthday celebration in 1998, and then at the inauguration ceremony the following June, when he handed presidential power to Thabo Mbeki. I performed in front of 90,000 people and it was a momentous occasion, which I shared with comedian Chris Tucker, who was wearing an attention-grabbing red tie.

  Three months prior to that historic day I had walked into a big reception room at another presidential function buzzing with people from all over the world. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Jermaine? Your brother’s here.’

  ‘Which brother?’

  ‘Michael – he’s over there,’ he said, pointing to the black military jacket and mirrored sunglasses on the other side of the room.

  I walked over and decided to stand in a position that meant he came across me unexpectedly. ‘Erms! WHAT are you doing here?’ he shrieked, looking as surprised as hell.

  ‘What are YOU doing here?’ I said, laughing.

  ‘I’m here as a guest of Madeba,’ he said, using our host’s clan name.

  ‘Me too!’

  Mandela
had been a big fan of Michael’s since seeing him perform during his 1997 tour of South Africa, but I don’t think either of us could believe the odds of turning up at the same function 16 hours away from home without anyone mentioning it. We agreed to grab some time afterwards before I left for Swaziland and then we drifted into separate pockets of people to continue rubbing shoulders.

  Then it was time for the ceremony and we went to take our seats. I saw Michael cutting across the room, heading in the same direction as me. Our parallel paths came together at the same point: standing directly in front of the ‘throne’ where Mandela would be sitting. That was when we realised the organisers had seated us either side of him: Michael to his right, me to his left. We laughed again. Brothers in arms. Side by side with Mandela. It was a beautiful honour for both of us, flanking the most dignified crusader of our age. It was almost as special as walking in the footsteps of one of the best entertainers there has ever been.

  It was when I was walking around the basement of Charlie Chaplin’s home in Vevey, Switzerland that all I could think about were the umpteen sketches of his hero that Michael had drawn over the years. He might have borrowed from Fred Astaire and James Brown for his craft, but there was something about Chaplin’s silent mystique as an entertainer that had fascinated Michael. So, it was a privilege for me to be invited by Chaplin’s sons to the family home on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the Alps in the background. Eugene and Michael Chaplin were holding an annual film festival and I was to help judge certain independent films.

  When I arrived at the house in its postcard setting, I found it easy to understand why Chaplin had left America, besieged by the media because of his political views and love-life. He found solace and a sense of ‘normality’ in this retreat. Nothing much had changed between the days of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest fame and Michael’s.

  In my school days, when the teachers passed around the geography books, I always turned to the pages that showed Europe and found Switzerland. I would stare at the map, then find pictures and day-dream about being there. One day I told the teacher I would end up living in Switzerland and she humoured the delusion of the steelworker’s son. And now I stood in my day-dream, simultaneously entering Michael’s. Just as his fans would imagine walking around Neverland, he imagined retracing Chaplin’s footsteps.

  That thought stayed with me as I was shown the Chaplin family archive in the basement. It was more vault than museum, with tiny slits for windows near the ceilings. Everything was there: photos of Chaplin out of costume as a father, minus the moustache, looking distinguished in a suit with brushed-back wispy white hair. There were movie posters and old films spooled in silver tins. I was thousands of miles away from the madness of Los Angeles yet was now in the seat of Hollywood’s founding father, picking up his Oscars from the shelf – and suddenly realising that once the Academy had expected its award-winners to be weight-lifters. Those things were heavy!

  I remember returning to America and calling Michael to tell him about what I had seen. ‘You should have been there!’ I said. ‘You would have found out everything and –’

  ‘Jermaine,’ he interrupted, ‘I was just there a few weeks ago! – I didn’t know you knew the Chaplins!’

  That was when we swapped our stories and talked about the small world again.

  Mandela in South Africa. Chaplin’s ghost in Switzerland. It didn’t seem to matter where we roamed, we were always walking to the same beat. There were actually several occasions where he would show up and then be told I’d been there before, or vice versa; it never stopped amusing us. Wherever I went in the future after all these episodes, I always had my eye out for Michael, half-expecting him to come walking around the corner or tap me on the shoulder. In fact, I still do.

  FOLLOWING MICHAEL’S DEATH IN 2009, THIS kind of serendipity – these signs from God I take comfort in – didn’t stop. Strangely, it was in Mumbai that I felt a tap on the shoulder. I was in India doing a music video for a song I’d done, ‘Let’s Go To Mumbai City’, in memory of the victims of a series of terrorist attacks in November 2008, and we were filming at the railway terminus where 58 people had been shot dead. At the end of the day, I decided not to return to the hotel. Instead I started walking and found myself near this souk-like marketplace filled with tailor’s shops and shoe shops, and teeming with people. Wherever I looked there were shops filled with fabric and suits. I followed the street aimlessly until I saw an incredible outfit, which looked out of place in the window of an appliance store: it was one of those long shirwani jackets, fine-looking and embroidered. It drew me inside to where a line of people had formed at the counter. ‘Where is the store that has that outfit?’ I shouted.

  ‘Roopam … you are looking for Roopam store, sir. Three floors up,’ said a man.

  I took the elevator and found myself walking into a corridor that had women’s clothes to the right, and men’s to the left. I stepped into a room with fabric and suits hanging in rows on each wall, surrounding a tailor’s workbench in the middle. The owner – his name was Viran Shah – came out of a back office to greet his customer. ‘Oh … my … God!’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said, looking around to see if he was talking to someone else.

  ‘Ooooh … my … God!’ He scurried back into his office, did some noisy fishing around and came back out with a folder, which he laid on the wide desk. ‘Your brother Michael – he was here! He bought clothes from here!’

  There, in the folder, were photos of Mr Shah and my brother from 1996. Out of all the stores and streets in Mumbai, I had walked into the very one where my brother had been almost 14 years earlier. I had the best kind of tears in my eyes, as the tailor kept patting his cheeks, still disbelieving the coincidence. I wanted to tell him that there was no such thing as a coincidence, but instead I told him to get his tape measure. ‘I’ve obviously been guided here, so I would like to buy some of your suits, sir,’ I said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Unbreakable

  AS WE MOVED INTO THE NEW millennium, Michael’s fans looked forward to the next decade of his music. A new album, Invincible, was to be released, and a follow-up tour across America and overseas had been planned. First, though, on 10 September 2001 a televised concert would commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his solo career, from his first solo single ‘Got To Be There’ with Motown. A host of artists were booked to perform at New York’s Madison Square Garden. For us, it promised to be a truly special night because CBS executives had insisted on a Jackson brothers’ reunion as part of the deal: we would be on stage together for the first time in 17 years.

  It was hard to believe it had been so long, but it was even harder to accept that we had three decades behind us as performers. The show’s promoter was David Gest, a man probably best known to the world as Liza Minnelli’s ex-husband, but we had known him from our schooldays through one of our classmates at Walton School.

  As with everything that involved a brothers’ reunion, things didn’t go too smoothly at first, though. Four months before the show, I discovered that David was charging $2,500 for a top-tier ticket. I immediately saw profit margins wider than the stadium itself, loyal fans being out-priced and not a hint of Motown in the show. We hadn’t forgotten the bad press we’d received during ‘Victory’ when fans had criticised us for the promoter-set prices of 30 dollars, to be bought in multiples of four. I thought we’d learned a lesson. But David was adamant, saying his focus was to create a spectacular salute for Michael. That was everyone’s focus, but the important details – like the fans and Motown’s role in our lives – seemed, in my opinion, lost on him. Randy and I found his attitude impossible, so we issued a public statement condemning the ‘exorbitant’ ticket prices and suggesting that we wouldn’t perform. He issued a counter-statement, pointing out that Jackie, Tito and Marlon would be taking part even if we weren’t.

  I backed down because ‘Victory’ had taught us some sore lessons about politics so we signed the contracts, put it be
hind us and focused on what was important: creating a special night for Michael.

  Many came in artistic homage, including Slash, Britney Spears, Usher and Gloria Estefan, while Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando took the opportunity to say a few words.

  That night Madison Square Garden was one big musical party and the ‘reunion’ segment a virtual flashback to ‘Victory’. We appeared first as silhouettes, backs turned, Michael centre-stage, the crowd going crazy. We delivered an in-sync performance that hadn’t faded with time. Sean Coombs, a.k.a. Puffy, had been watching us earlier: ‘It’s amazing the way you guys just line up, fall in and are on point after all these years.’

  The dynamics hadn’t changed and when we got together, Jackie was always the eldest brother, fussing about detail, getting everyone organised. I think Michael was as amused as I was during rehearsals when Jackie started marshalling Tito who, because of recent surgery, missed the odd step. ‘Tito, you got to keep up, man!’

  ‘Hey!’ Tito shot back, ‘All you got to do is sing and dance. I gotta sing, dance and play the guitar, and guess what? I’ve been doing this for 30 years …’ Always brothers, never changing.

  Come show time, we never skipped a beat and we knew it felt and looked special. Mother and Joseph said it was just like old times, and Michael was appreciative, too: ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without you up there with me, thank you … thank you,’ he said, as we went backstage and gave quick hugs to Prince and Paris.