When Michael began to blush, Tatum asked one of Hefner's assistants for two swimsuits, then handed one to Michael.
Tatum's hair was soft, blond and flowed just below her shoulders. Her skin was baby pink and her figure quite ample for a girl who wouldn't turn fourteen until close to the end of the year. She was almost plump. ‘She's like a sacred doll,’ Michael observed of her to a friend. He said that while soaking in the water and watching for shooting stars, the two shared secrets with one another.
Years later, rumour would have it that they were nude together in the hot tub. ‘Oh, we weren't naked,’ Michael firmly pointed out to me in an interview. ‘We had on bathing suits. Why do people have to always find something dirty in everything?’
Tatum O'Neal had won an Oscar at the age of nine for her role as the chain-smoking, swearing companion to a Bible-belt swindler (played by her father) in the film Paper Moon. Her own childhood was difficult.
Born to actress Joanna Moore and Ryan O'Neal, Tatum saw her parents split up when she was three. For a while, she lived on a ramshackle ranch with a dying horse, some dead chickens, and a mother who was addicted to drugs. At seven, Tatum grew flowers in a wrecked car in the yard and cooked breakfast and lunch for herself and her younger brother, Griffin. Her father was permitted to visit on weekends.
‘When she was living with her mother, I could always tell what shape Tatum was in by the look of her hair,’ Ryan said. ‘I knew if it was healthy, she was at peace with herself. If things were bad, there were clumps missing from her hair. She'd sometimes take a scissors to herself.’
Joanna, anguished and on the verge of defeat by 1972, decided to seek help from her ex-husband, who had been giving her thirty thousand dollars a year in alimony. Ryan paid for her rehabilitation and she, in turn, surrendered eight-year-old Tatum to him. Tatum hated Joanna. When the little girl went to visit her in the hospital, Tatum became so disgusted with her mother that she spat in her face. When she told Michael about her life, he said he had never heard a story so tragic.
‘My mother is a saint,’ Michael said in 1977. ‘When I hear about Tatum's mother and what she went through with her, it makes me thank God for Katherine. People think I have had a hard life. But look at Tatum's. That's why I like her, because she's a survivor.’
Unlike Michael, whose goal it was to be an entertainer, Tatum became an actress by accident. Ryan helped her get her first solo mostly as a way to keep an eye on her while he worked on Paper Moon. When Tatum became a working actress, Ryan O'Neal took over her career much the same way Joseph Jackson had commandeered Michael's. ‘I chose International Velvet for her,’ Ryan said. ‘She didn't even read the script. I just said, “This is the one you're doing,” because I knew it was good.’
When Tatum complained about the way her father ruled her life, Michael empathized with her. ‘I know exactly what you're talking about,’ he told her.
However, Tatum did make some of her own decisions. She once told Michael the story of how she turned down the role of the young hooker in Taxi Driver, a part that eventually went to Jodie Foster. At the audition, Tatum said she wanted to play the part of the taxi driver; she was twelve. The producer ignored Tatum's suggestion and kept talking up the role of the hooker. Finally Tatum said, ‘Frankly, I think the part's too small. I did win an Academy Award, you know.’
‘I can't believe you said that. I don't think I would ever have the nerve,’ Michael told her when he heard that story. ‘I want to be like that. I want people to think of me as having a lot of nerve.’
In his autobiography Michael wrote that Tatum was his first love ‘after Diana’. Tatum has indicated, however, that her relationship with Michael was strictly platonic.
It's telling of the fantasy Michael has created around his childhood and teen years that the women he claims to have had romances with – including Diana Ross and Brooke Shields (‘We were romantically serious for a while,’ he wrote of Shields in his book) – have all denied ever having been intimate with him. After Michael talked about Tatum on his 2003 Martin Bashir interview, saying she came on to him, she issued a statement saying he had ‘a vivid imagination’. Says actress Sarah Jackson (no relation to Michael), who was a friend of Tatum's at this time, ‘Tatum told me that Michael was a nice guy, but so shy. “How can any girl have a relationship with him? When we're together, he hardly says two words. I know he's a virgin. Someone needs to have a talk with him about it. I wonder if he's afraid to have sex. He doesn't seem very interested.”’
‘Why do people think I'm gay?’
Michael Jackson's sexuality has been the subject of speculation since he was a teenager. Perhaps it was his high-pitched speaking voice; or maybe it was his bashfulness, or the fact that he tended to avoid eye contact and seemed so uncomfortable in his own skin that caused some to think that he was either concealing something about himself or had not yet come to terms with it.
Michael has been dealing with the tabloid press for many years and feels he is misunderstood because of unfair and dishonest media coverage of his life. However, it was when he was nineteen that he first became upset about a story that was not true. Like a lot of untruths, it was silly: supposedly, he was going to have a sex-change operation and marry a handsome actor named Clifton Davis, writer of ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’. The story spread quickly across the country; numerous music publications rushed to the presses with it.
Michael once told me that he was in the music department of a store in the South when he first heard about the rumour. He said, ‘This girl came up to me and said, “Please tell me it isn't true! Please tell me!” She was crying. I asked, “What? What isn't true?” She said, “Tell me you're not going to become a girl. Tell me.”’
‘Where in the world did you read that?’ Michael asked. ‘Jet magazine,’ she responded. ‘It was in Jet that you were going to have a sex change.’
‘I felt I didn't know who I was at that moment,’ Michael recalled. ‘I told her to tell all her friends that it was just a stupid rumour.’
‘Stupid’ as it was, it seemed to Michael that everywhere he went, he heard the story. At the time, nothing could be worse for him than the notion that there were people who thought he might be homosexual. Michael was raised in a family where homosexuality was sinful.
After the rumour had been circulating for months, Michael was at Caesars Palace to see Diana Ross perform when he ran into Clifton Davis. Clifton was backstage with performer, Leslie Uggams. ‘I was with Diana, holding her hand,’ Michael remembered. ‘Clifton was standing next to me, and he was holding Leslie's hand. As I was standing there posing for the photographers, I thought to myself, Oh no, this is a perfect setup for some magazine to doctor up a picture so that it looks like Clifton and I are holding hands. That's how paranoid I was getting about that story,’ Michael confessed.
After the photographers departed, Clifton went over to Michael and joked, ‘Hey, look at you. You're not a girl after all, are you?’ Michael didn't think Clifton's question was very funny. He would never get used to the stories that he leads a secret gay life, and is still upset when confronted with questions about his sexuality.
‘Just for the record, are you or are you not gay?’ I asked him during an interview in 1979.
‘No, I am not gay,’ Michael snapped. ‘I am not a homo. People make up stories about me being gay because they have nothing else to do. I'm not going to let it get to me,’ he continued. ‘I'm not going to have a nervous breakdown because people think I like having sex with men. I don't and that's that,’ he said, his sentences pouring out. ‘If I let this get to me, it will only show how cheap I am. I'm sure I must have a lot of fans who are gay, and I don't mind that,’ he continued, speaking faster. ‘That's their life and this is mine. You can print that,’ he said, thrusting his index finger at me. ‘What is it about me that makes people think I'm gay? Why do people think I'm gay?’
I didn't think I should answer his question. He was already upset.
‘Is it my voice?’ he continu
ed. ‘Is it because I have this soft voice? All of us in the family have soft voices. Or is it because I don't have a lot of girlfriends? I just don't understand it.’
The truth is that Michael would never have allowed himself to have homosexual relationships, even if he did have feelings for other men. He was too puritanical as a result of his religious background. The Jehovah's Witnesses firmly believe that world destruction is imminent and that only a few of God's servants will survive the horrible holocaust. One question had hung over Michael's head for his entire youth; would he win salvation or burn in hellfire? If he wanted to be saved – if he wanted to be with his mother through all eternity – he would have to live up to all of the church's rigid teachings, which sure meant he couldn't be gay. Indulgence is not part of the Jehovah's Witnesses' creed. Any congregant who does not adhere to the rules and dogma is shunned or ‘disfellowshipped’. By the time Michael was a teenager, he had been trained to live his life a certain way. He would not be able to break that conformity.
Also, if Michael had any homosexual leanings he would have been too fearful to act on them. He knew that with any relationship he ever had – be it with a man or a woman – he ran the risk of the other person reporting the details to a newspaper or magazine, one that would pay astronomical sums for the story, especially if it were a sensational one. Although some public figures who are homosexual have come out of the closet in recent years – not many, though – back in the 1970s it just didn't happen at all.
Still today, many entertainers hide their true sexual identities from their fans and peers because they fear rejection, and the loss of income. Ever practical where his work is concerned, Michael is aware that being gay would damage not only his career, but his relationships with his family, as well. How would Katherine and Joseph handle it if he were to announce that he is, as he put it so many years ago, ‘a homo’? ‘When I first heard the rumours that he was gay, I thought I'd go crazy,’ Katherine once said. ‘He's my son and I know the truth. He knows the truth too. We both talked about it and cried about it. Michael was very hurt by the rumours. He is not gay. It's against our religion.’ They cried about it; tears shed over the fact that people they didn't even know had whispered such things.
How would his brothers react if Michael said he was gay? Back in the seventies, they would have been upset because it might have projected a controversial image for the group. Today? Publicly, they might offer their support. However, privately, they would probably be thrown. Like their mother, they are not progressive-minded. Indeed, if Michael were a gay man today – and no one is saying he is – and suddenly made the decision to bolt from the closet after all of these years, the only Jackson who would probably be able to come to terms with it would be Janet, a woman who has been around enough and seen enough to know that there are gay people in all walks of life.
Besides dealing with upsetting questions about his sexuality, Michael had other problems in the late seventies. Of course, most people have a difficult time with certain stages of adolescence, but Michael was much more sensitive than most people his age about the common challenges of puberty, perhaps because he was the subject of such intense public scrutiny. For instance, his face had broken out severely with acne in the mid-seventies; he was so ashamed of the way he looked that it was extremely difficult for him to go out into public. ‘I seemed to have a pimple for every oil gland,’ he recalled. Onstage, his condition was difficult to notice because of carefully applied makeup and the benefit of lighting. However, offstage it was obvious that Michael had complexion problems. Reporters would comment to each other about his skin. Fans would be shocked by his appearance. Michael could barely stand the humiliation.
‘I became subconsciously scarred by this,’ he has confessed. ‘I got very shy and became embarrassed to meet people. The effect on me was so bad that it messed up my whole personality.’
Michael couldn't look at people when he talked to them. Rather, he would look down or away. He wouldn't even look at his mother when he spoke to her. ‘He didn't want to leave the house,’ Katherine would recall. ‘When he did, he kept his head down.’ He would never really recover from the psychological effects of the acne. ‘The changes that it wrought in him became permanent,’ Katherine said. ‘He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. He was quieter, more serious and more of a loner.’
Complicating matters was Michael's belief that, acne aside, he was not good-looking. His skin was too dark, he decided, and his nose too wide. Even though his family was aware of Michael's sensitivities, Joseph and the brothers did not afford him any special treatment. They were a rowdy, boisterous bunch offstage and teased each other, playfully. Either a brother took it well, or he didn't.
At nineteen, Michael was nothing if not a study in contrasts. He was a young man who could muster enough courage to meet with the president of Motown, yet was afraid of the kinds of propositions most teenagers found exciting, such as the opportunity to drive an automobile. Whereas many youngsters are eager to get behind the wheel of a car by the age of sixteen, Michael was still petrified of the notion three years later. ‘I just don't want to,’ he said, when pushed. ‘I just don't have the desire. Whenever you do something, you have to want to do it. And even though there are some things you just have to do, I don't have to drive. And I simply don't want to. There's nothing special about it for me.’ Michael would usually have a limousine take him wherever he wanted to go, though often one of his brothers would drive him.
Besides the fact that he was frightened of driving, Michael also didn't want to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take the driver's test. He was afraid he'd be recognized and then be humiliated because he still didn't have a licence at his age. The thought of this kind of embarrassment was stressful for him. At one point, when he thought he might at least try to drive, he tried to obtain special consideration so that he wouldn't have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles for the testing. However, the Encino division of the D.M.V. is accustomed to dealing with celebrities; officials there don't consider any of them special. It was all just too much to bear for Michael. He couldn't do it. ‘But suppose you're someplace and your chauffeur gets sick,’ Katherine argued with him. ‘You need to be able to drive.’ Michael would be twenty-three before he'd finally obtain his driver's licence, and only at Katherine's insistence.
Michael and Joseph Meet with CBS
Michael Jackson's teenage melancholy intensified when The Jacksons' second album for CBS, Goin' Places, released in the winter of 1977, was a major disappointment. Despite the fact that the first album for the new label had received mixed reviews and had only gone gold when everyone was hoping for platinum sales, CBS sent the group back to Philadelphia to work once again with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The title track of Goin' Places only went to number 52 on Billboard's top 100; the album peaked at 63 on the Top 200. In the UK, it peaked at number forty-five and only stayed on the charts for a week! However, despite such sporadic sales, The Jacksons at Epic were still faring better than Jermaine Jackson was at Motown. His Feel the Fire album, released at the same time, peaked at number 174 in America and did even worse in the UK and the rest of Europe. Most industry observers now believed that Motown was mysteriously intent on wasting Jermaine's career even if he was married to the boss's daughter.
On Goin' Places, Michael wrote a rhythm number called ‘Different Kind of Lady’, which became a successful club hit but was seldom played on the radio. It was not issued as a single. Another song penned by the group, ‘Do What You Wanna’, also went unreleased as a single. By this time, The Jacksons hadn't had a number-one record since ‘Mama's Pearl’ in 1971. Joseph was concerned. It was painfully clear that the new relationship with CBS wasn't working out as he had hoped it would for his sons.
Joseph decided to meet with Ron Alexenberg, the man who had originally signed The Jacksons to Epic, to try to convince him once and for all that the group should be able to write and produce its own material. Perhaps Joseph remembe
red the way Michael used his own initiative to meet with Berry Gordy when the chips were down, because he asked his son to accompany him.
Michael was astonished that his father would ask for his assistance and couldn't help but be suspicious of his motives. Still, he agreed to go along. Michael considered the group's future so important, he was willing to overcome – at least temporarily – his aversion to his father and cooperate with him on this matter. Just as Joseph put on his public facade as father, Michael would put on his public facade as son.
‘He was still the soft, tender Michael Jackson everyone thought he was, but something was definitely different about him by this time,’ said James Situp, the Jacksons' pianist and band director. ‘Everyone who dealt with him closely, family included, began to tread softly when dealing with Michael. The quiet power he was gaining was amazing to me. I'd never seen anyone have that much influence over people without having a stern attitude. I noticed that when he spoke, people were starting to listen. He was still outvoted on things, but now it was a bit more reluctantly. Joseph and the brothers were beginning to give him space. I began to notice that if they saw one iota of displeasure in his face, they began to get worried. For sure, things were changing as Michael was growing up.’
Still, it is not difficult to imagine that his brothers resented Michael's power. Even if it did benefit them, it didn't feel good to them that Michael was the one who always ended up meeting with their record company bosses.
During the meeting with Ron Alexenberg, Michael and Joseph explained that they were unhappy with the way the Jacksons' careers had thus far evolved at CBS, and that the time had come for the company to finally allow them control over an album. ‘If you can't do it,’ Michael said, ‘then we need to move on. Why waste more of your money on records that aren't going to sell? Let us work on our own record. Then, you'll have a hit. Otherwise, you won't.’
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