Untouchable
Page 6
“We knew Wiesner was probably going to file a lawsuit against Michael at some point,” Mesereau countered, “so it just wasn’t appropriate to have him listening in.”
“Dieter had to go down to the lobby and sit there drinking coffee for the next ten hours,” King recalled. “It broke his heart.” Upstairs, Jackson was cool to Schaffel. “He said hello, but didn’t shake Marc’s hand,” King recalled. Schaffel grew especially glum when Jackson answered a question about his “discovery” that Marc had directed and produced gay porn films. “I was shown a videotape by the lawyer [Branca] and I was shocked,” Michael said. “He was in that whole circle, and I didn’t know.”
“I saw Marc was hurt,” King remembered, “and told him, ‘It’s war, baby.’”
Schaffel had imagined that when the two of them saw each other again, all the good memories would come flooding back and somehow everything would be put right. “We had so many great times together,” Schaffel explained. “Michael used to stay at my house in Calabasas all the time. Grace and the bodyguards would come with him, get him set up, then leave, and either Michael by himself or with the kids would stay there alone for days.” Michael used to love to stroll over to the Commons, a large mall lined with restaurants, theaters, and shops that was just down the hill from Schaffel’s home. He wore disguises, but not the kind that would call attention to himself. “No veil or surgical mask,” Schaffel said. “Just a baseball cap he wore with his hair tucked up into it, and sunglasses. Part of why it worked was that no one would expect to see Michael Jackson in a place like this. He would go into that movie theater right over there, all by himself, walk all around here, all by himself. He loved being able to do that.”
His favorite memory of having Michael at the house, Schaffel said, was the time he stepped out into the backyard and saw Michael with his head thrust into the shrubbery on the border of the property. “The neighbors below me were having a birthday party for one of their kids and Michael was snooping through the bushes,” Schaffel remembered. “All of a sudden I hear some kid scream, ‘Hey, Mommy, look, it’s Michael Jackson!’ And Michael backs away from the bushes like a little kid who’s in trouble. I hear the kid still telling his mom it’s Michael Jackson. So I look through, and the mom says, ‘Oh, no, that’s just our neighbor Marc.’ Michael laughed for an hour afterward.”
It was all business, though, around the table in the suite at the Dorchester. “I don’t think [Michael] even looked at Marc,” remembered King, who was asking all the questions. He tried to fight it, King said, but found himself being much more impressed by Michael Jackson as a witness than he had anticipated. “Michael is very poised, very charming, very aware of the camera,” King recalled. Jackson insisted that he be allowed a break every hour to change his shirt and “refresh.” “The guy spent the first three shirt changes knowing nothing,” King recalled. “But then I had all these phone messages he’d left, plus all these documents and letters he signed. I will say that Michael, to his credit, said right off the top that if Marc was owed money he should be paid. He said he just didn’t know if Marc was owed. And Marc believed him, still believed him. I didn’t. I had recognized by then that Michael is way smarter than he’s made to look in the media. No way he didn’t know. Still, he handled the questions really well, and was very witty throughout. I have reading glasses and when I took them off to look at him, he said, ‘Howard, I know when you take off the glasses you’re really serious.’ He’s very charming, and of course, he’s Michael Jackson. It affects you.”
Mesereau thought King was oblivious to the poignancy of the situation. “The thing that struck me in that deposition, as Marc Schaffel sat across from us, was the sadness in Michael’s eyes,” the attorney explained. “It really hit me then that Michael went through life knowing that anybody he developed a relationship with was eventually going to sue him. And yet he kept hoping it would turn out differently each time.”
During one of the breaks, King’s wife pulled him aside and said, “I think you don’t want women on that jury.” When her husband asked why, Lisa King answered, “The whole time, I felt the need to hug him and be his mother. He looks so sweet and vulnerable sitting there that you want to take care of him.”
For King himself, the moment of insight came during the last break of the day. While Michael was off changing his shirt and refreshing himself, the attorney happened to look down at the floor beneath the chair where Michael had been sitting. “And I saw that with his feet he had chewed up that carpet mightily,” the attorney recalled. “I mean he had literally dug a hole in it with his heels. And it sort of shocked me. Because all day he had looked as cool and calm and collected as you could imagine. That was absolutely how he appeared on camera. But, like us, the camera had only seen what was above the tabletop. Somehow, Michael had managed to channel this tremendous amount of tension he had in his body into his legs and feet, every last bit of it, so that from the waist up he looked perfectly serene.” He stared in wonder at that fist-sized ball of carpet nap beneath Jackson’s chair for several moments, King recalled, “and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is good.’”
2
He had been performing almost as long as he had been alive. Michael Joseph Jackson, born August 29, 1958, was still in diapers when he began to entertain his mother by shaking and shimmying to the rhythm of the washing machine at the family home in the sooty industrial city of Gary, Indiana. As a five-year-old, he brought down the house at a Garnett Elementary School pageant with an a cappella rendition of the Sound of Music tune “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” that made his kindergarten teacher weep. By age six, he was the lead singer of a group called “The Ripples and Waves Plus Michael,” which included his four older brothers. The Ripples and Waves had become the Jackson Brothers by the time they answered an advertisement in a local newspaper for musical groups to perform at a fashion show for a local modeling school. More than two hundred groups showed up at the audition, but six-year-old Michael Jackson stood out even in a crowd that size. “All of the brothers were talented, but Michael was magical,” recalled Evelyn LaHaie, the school’s owner, who chose the Jackson Brothers to perform as her modeling students walked the runway at the Big Top department store in Gary. On Michael’s seventh birthday in 1965, his song-and-dance routine during a performance of “Doin’ the Jerk” led the Jackson Brothers to a first place finish at Gary’s “Tiny Tots’ Back to School Jamboree.” A little more than six months later, what was now the Jackson 5 won the annual talent show at Gary’s Roosevelt High School behind a lead singer who was in the second grade. Even at that age, Michael Jackson was an astounding mimic who could produce eerily exact replications of Wilson Pickett’s shouts and James Brown’s yowls.
The Jackson 5’s first real gig was at a local club called Mr. Lucky’s, where they earned seven dollars for their performance. Not quite eight years old, Michael was fronting a band that now performed regularly at small black clubs, strip joints, and the occasional private party all over northwest Indiana and East Chicago. The group was still obscure enough to enter amateur contests and in early 1967, when Michael was eight, won the biggest talent show in the midwest at the Regal Theater in Chicago for three consecutive weeks. In August 1967, the Jackson 5 was awarded first prize at the biggest talent contest in the country, Apollo Theater’s “Amateur Night.” Within a year they were signed to a contract at Motown Records, and a year after that delivered a debut record that shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
The father that drove this success was a shrewd, vain, domineering brute who in the process of advancement so wounded the most sensitive of his six sons that the controlling force of Michael Jackson’s adult existence became a determination to be as little like Joseph Jackson as possible.
Up until the time he found a way to live off his sons’ talent, Joe had been a busted-out boxer and bluesman who supported his sprawling family by working the four-to-midnight shift as a crane operator amid the grime and grit and blast furnace heat of the Inland St
eel Mill. He earned just over $8,000 in his best year, barely enough to sustain the Jackson family home—a tiny, aluminum-sided cube without landscaping or a garage—in which eleven people shared a single bathroom. In the spring of 1964, when the Jacksons began performing publicly, Joe’s five older boys had the smaller of the home’s two bedrooms, where they slept in a triple bunk bed, with six-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Marlon squeezed together on the middle mattress, while nine-year-old Jermaine squirmed to make space on the upper bunk he shared with ten-year-old Tito, so that the oldest son, thirteen-year-old Jackie, could sleep alone on the bottom. The two oldest girls, Maureen (called Rebbie by her family), who was not quite fourteen, and eight-year-old La Toya made their beds on a convertible sofa in the living room, with two-year-old Randy asleep on a loveseat nearby. The youngest Jackson, Janet, would not be born until two years later, in 1966, and joined her sisters on the sofa as soon as she left her crib.
Thirty-five years old in 1964, and already the father of eight children, Joe Jackson was an inch and a half shy of six feet tall, with heavily muscled shoulders and a cheek mole; he was handsome in a heavy-lidded way, and more ambitious than anyone outside the immediate family realized. Determined to mold his sons into a musical act that would achieve the success he never did, Joe pushed them relentlessly. Michael’s memories of those early rehearsals all centered on the father/manager who brandished a belt and bellowed at them constantly, smacking his sons on their backsides or throwing them into walls if they made a mistake. Being locked in a closet was the punishment for repeated failure.
Joe’s own rhythm and blues band, the Falcons, had disbanded a couple of years earlier after failing to obtain more than a handful of bookings in local bars. The guitar Joe loved more than anything else he owned sat on the shelf of a clothes closet that little Michael considered “a sacred place,” mainly because he and the other children were strictly forbidden from entering it. Their mother Katherine would take the guitar down from time to time when Joe was out of the house to teach the children her favorite country and folk songs. Tito was seven when he began sneaking into his parents’ bedroom to borrow Joe’s guitar, playing it for the oldest brother, Jackie, who had just turned ten, and six-year-old Jermaine, who harmonized as Tito picked and strummed. The three of them were learning at least one new song a week until Tito broke a string on the guitar and was discovered by his father. The whipping he got for that “tore me up,” Tito remembered. It was a phrase all the Jackson boys used to describe the beatings their father gave them when he was in a fury. As he sat crying on his bed afterward, Tito insisted to his father between sobs, “I can play that thing.” Joe demanded that the boy prove it, and Tito did just that, with Jackie and Jermaine sliding in beside him to sing along. In that moment, Joe Jackson decided that the steel mill would not be the end of his road. He brought home a new red guitar for Tito the next day, then told all three boys they were going to “rehearse,” which they would swiftly learn was not at all the same as “playing.”
Five-year-old Marlon was soon added to the group, at his mother’s insistence, even though he possessed little if any musical talent (though he was a terrific dancer), but nearly two more years went by before Michael was let in and changed everything for everyone. None of them, especially Joe, wanted to acknowledge that it was the sublime talent of the band’s youngest member, and that talent alone, which would make the Jackson 5 a star attraction.
Michael figured it out, of course, and by the age of nine he was the only one of Joe’s children who dared to fight back against his father—“just swinging my fists,” as he remembered it. “That’s why I got it worse than all my brothers put together . . . my father would kill me, just tear me up.” The other boys would say that Michael deserved the beatings he got. He was defiant, they said, and brought a bad attitude to rehearsals, demanding to know why they had to do things this way instead of that one. Joe’s other sons followed their father’s lead—right into adulthood—but Michael never would, not even as a very young child. Once, when he was three and had just received a spanking, Michael pulled off one of his shoes and threw it at his father’s head. Joe responded by snatching the boy up by one leg and holding him upside down as he administered a whipping so severe that it became a family legend. During his first couple of years with the Jackson 5, Michael caught the back of Joe’s hand more times than he could count, and was regularly whipped with a strap or a switch. The older boys were increasingly baffled by their little brother. On the one hand, it was obvious that Michael took the abuse their father dished out far more personally than any of them did, and that he was much more deeply hurt by it. On the other hand, he refused to stop saying and doing the very things that he knew would result in another beating. It wasn’t a lack of fear, Michael would say: He was so afraid of his father for most of his childhood that he could taste vomit in his mouth whenever Joe came near him. Anger welled up beneath that fear, though, and fermented into hatred. Shamed by a sense of powerlessness, he found only one weapon he could use against his father—the threat that when it was time to take the stage he would refuse to sing. It worked once in a while, when Joe could see that Michael truly meant what he said, but more often the result was a beating worse than the one before it.
For all that, Michael never failed to admit as an adult that there had been two main ingredients in the success of the Jackson 5: his own ability and Joe’s will. By the time the Jacksons began performing professionally, Joe had choreographed their movements down to the smallest detail. “He told me how to work the stage and work the mike and make gestures and everything,” Michael recalled. The price of Joe’s attention to detail, though, was that, “If you didn’t do it the right way, he’d tear you up.”
Like his own father, an Arkansas schoolteacher named Samuel Jackson, Joe was a humorless taskmaster who discouraged—even disallowed—socializing with anyone outside the family. He wasn’t going to allow any “bad associations,” as he put it, to distract his sons from their primary mission of showbiz success. The Jacksons were among the few children in their neighborhood who looked forward to going to school, because lunchtimes and recesses were the only opportunities they ever got to play with other kids.
As it had been for Samuel, the distinction between discipline and cruelty was largely lost on Joe. On more than one hot summer night he popped through the boys’ bedroom window wearing a grotesque fright mask that left Michael and Marlon crying in bed long after he’d pulled the disguise off, chuckling at its effectiveness. His purpose, Joe would explain, was to make sure they didn’t put themselves at risk by leaving the damn window open. He was protecting his boys.
Joe never stopped working on his sons’ act and wouldn’t allow the boys to slack off either. During the week, he rehearsed his sons twice a day: in the morning before school and in the afternoon when they got home. Kids from the neighborhood who already despised the Jacksons for shunning them would stand outside throwing rocks and taunts at the house, telling them they thought they were special but really, “You ain’t nothin’!”
Once they began to get bookings at talent contests and in dive clubs, Joe would have the boys doing as many as five shows a night on weekends, all over the Gary and East Chicago area. There were lots of nights that ended when Joe would roust them out of bed at three in the morning to go to work. “I’d be sleeping and I’d hear my father—‘Get up! There’s a show!’ Michael would recall thirty-five years later. “We’d have to perform.” He would whine sleepily the whole drive there, but once he took the stage Michael always seemed fully awake. He loved performing that much, and loved it almost as much when people threw money at the stage afterward. He and his brothers would run around madly collecting coins from the floor and stuffing them into the pockets of the pants they had learned to wear with belts cinched tight to help support the weight of all that money. He spent most of his “earnings” on candy, Michael would remember. Joe kept the fees, which were becoming the family’s main source of income.
By the time Michael was eight, the Jacksons were good enough to play what was known as the “chitlin’ circuit,” a loose association of two- or three-thousand-seat theaters located in inner-city neighborhoods that stretched from Kansas City to D.C. As soon as school let out on Friday afternoon, the boys would “line up for inspection” next to the Volkswagen bus where their equipment was piled into the luggage rack on top, then depart for a weekend of work that often wouldn’t end until they rolled back into Gary early Monday morning, just in time to eat breakfast and head off to school. They were opening for acts that included the Temptations, the O’Jays, Jackie Wilson, and Bobby Taylor. Sam & Dave became big supporters. On the chitlin’ circuit, it was Michael who studied the other entertainers. Joe, like his older boys, loved to socialize backstage, but Michael hated that even as a boy. “It makes me shy,” he would explain. “I don’t know what to say.” Instead, he would stand at the back of the theater, watching the acts he most admired. James Brown was at the top of that list, a performer who left puddles of sweat on the stage and a state of ecstatic exhaustion in the crowd. Timid as he was offstage, Michael constantly probed the adult performers for tips or advice. He pestered the notoriously prickly Etta James in her private dressing room, persisting even when she told him to scat. I just want to learn from the best, Michael would say, and, like James, most of the chitlin’ circuit’s stars couldn’t resist the compliments of such a cute kid.