Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The press release issued on Michael’s behalf after Bray’s death was brief: “I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear and longtime friend, Mr. Bill Bray. As I traveled the world, Mr. Bray was there by my side. Bill Bray will forever have a special place in my heart.” He hadn’t been able to face seeing Bill old and shriveled and dying, Michael admitted to those who were with him, then cried alone in his room.

  Michael was still recovering from the news of Bray’s death when two days later he learned that his former manager, Dieter Wiesner, had just filed a $64 million lawsuit against him in Los Angeles. Wiesner had spent nearly a decade at Jackson’s side, beginning with the HIStory tour in 1995, when he traveled with Michael to 120 shows around the world. Much of the bond they formed during that time, and after, resulted from Wiesner’s sympathy for Michael’s wish to escape the music business. “He said on the HIStory tour that he would never do this again, that touring was over for him, forever,” Wiesner recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be doing the moonwalk on stage when I’m fifty.’”

  4

  On March 6, 2001, Michael Jackson traveled by car from London with his friends Uri Geller and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to add his name to the list of illustrious and celebrated figures (including several U.S. presidents, the Dalai Lama, author Salman Rushdie, and actor Johnny Depp) who have addressed the Oxford Union Society. He opened his remarks with an observation that he had been making in one form or another for going on twenty years: “All of us are the products of our childhoods, but I am the product of a lack of a childhood.”

  It was the central fallacy of his adult life. He had had a childhood, just not the one he wished for. This dissonance between what he imagined and what he had was the primary source of both his creativity and his unhappiness. It made him rich and famous and lonely all his life. He owed his mother Katherine for it every bit as much as he owed his father Joe, but of all the truths Michael avoided, that was at the top of the list.

  Katherine Jackson was born Kattie B. Scruse in Alabama, to a family that on her father’s side had been listed as “mulatto” in an early twentieth-century census. Stricken at eighteen months with polio, she either wore braces or walked with crutches until she was sixteen, and suffered merciless teasing by her classmates in East Chicago, where her family had moved when she was four. She grew up as a child apart, painfully shy and quiet except when she got the chance to sing or make music. She and her sister Hattie were each members of their high school’s orchestra, band, and choir. Kate, as her family called her, played both clarinet and piano, and possessed a sweet and rich soprano voice that more than one person told her should be heard on records. She and Hattie adored a Chicago radio program called Suppertime Frolic that played nothing but country and western music. The two sisters adored especially the songs of Hank Williams, and it was an early dream of Kate’s to become the first black female country star.

  By the time the braces came off and the crutches fell away, Kattie B. Scruse had grown into a lovely young woman who dreamed of a career in show business, either as an actress or a singer, but never found the self-confidence to strive for such a life. Instead, at nineteen, she was terribly smitten by the dashing local ladies’ man, recently divorced twenty-year-old Joseph Jackson. They married only a few months after meeting. She had legally changed her name to Katherine Esther Scruse not long before the wedding, but never quite got over the feeling that a poor crippled girl like “Kattie B. Screws” (as the other kids had called her) was lucky to land a man so many other women admired. The whispers of Joe’s infidelity started early but Kate ignored them for as long as it was possible.

  She seemed far more accepting of their lot in life than Joe did, making many of the children’s clothes herself or shopping for them at the Salvation Army store. She worked at Sears part-time as a saleswoman to supplement Joe’s earnings at the mill. Religion was the anchor of her life. She was raised Baptist and became a Lutheran but abandoned both churches when she discovered that the ministers of her local congregations were conducting extramarital affairs. Right around the time that Michael made his famous kindergarten performance at Garnett Elementary, Kate was converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses by a pair of proselytizers who were going door-to-door through the neighborhood. She was determined to get the entire family involved, forcing them all to dress up each Sunday morning and walk with her to the local Kingdom Hall. Joe lasted only a few weeks, and her older sons fell away soon after that. Only Michael and her two older daughters, Rebbie (who was an ardent Witness) and La Toya, fully embraced the principles of Kate’s faith. The others, though, all accepted the tenets that separated the Witnesses from American society. There were no birthday celebrations in the Jackson home, and no celebrations of the “pagan” holidays Christmas and Easter, either. Even Jackie and Tito refused to engage in the idolatrous practices of saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, but none of the Jackson boys made a display of their defiance.

  Though indifferent to the religious practices of the Witnesses, Joe appreciated the discipline and structure that his wife’s faith imposed on their children. Witnesses were taught to think of themselves as sheep, and of those who surrounded them as goats. When the battle of Armageddon was fought (any day now), the goats would be slaughtered and only the sheep would survive, resurrected to a life on earth as subjects of the Kingdom of God, ruled over by Jesus Christ. Joe had no interest at all in the spiritual dimensions of his wife’s faith, but it pleased him immensely to have his children indoctrinated into the belief that they must remain separate from the “goats” of their depressed and declining community.

  Rebbie, La Toya, and Michael would accompany Katherine when she went door-to-door through the neighborhood each week to witness her faith and distribute copies of the Watchtower magazine. Perplexed by his father’s refusal to attend services at the Kingdom Hall, Michael was more deeply bonded to his mother than ever by their shared beliefs, and became in some regards her special favorite by being the only one of the boys who would join her in regular Bible study. Katherine had always given him the love and affection he craved, though she was also quite willing to smack any of her children across the face if they talked back to her, or in some way offended God. The only real trouble between Katherine and Michael had arisen out of his habit of filching pieces of jewelry from her dresser drawer to give as presents to his favorite teachers at Garnett. His mother had him whipped for that, and yet covered up for some of his other transgressions, especially when she knew that Joe was in the mood to administer a truly terrible beating.

  A strange, even insidious ambiguity developed out of Katherine’s enthusiasm for Joe’s push to make his boys into a successful singing group. Early on, she would sew the boys’ costumes and drive them to their local engagements when Joe was unavailable. Later, she seemed to relish their success every bit as much as her husband did. They all could see that she loved the money and the attention, and yet she was constantly reminding them that wealth and fame weren’t what mattered—that only preaching and proselytizing were important in the eyes of God. An implicit and troubling hypocrisy became an undercurrent of Katherine’s character; what she said and what she did seemed to grow further and further apart.

  This was nowhere more evident than in the blind eye she turned to Joe’s infidelities and in the exposure to the more sordid aspects of sexuality she permitted her six-year-old son after he became the Jackson Brothers’ lead singer. Many of the clubs the Jacksons played in the early days were strip joints. Michael’s memories of those dates were a large part of why he was so uninterested in clubbing when he got older: “Fights breaking out, people throwing up, yelling, screaming, the police sirens.” He stood in the wings watching women undress before a rowdy mob of drunken men any number of times as he waited to go onstage and sing for the same crowd. Forty years later, he could still vividly recall “the lady who took off all her clothes.” Rose Marie was her name, remembered Michael, who watched
her at the age of seven with a stricken fascination as the young woman twirled the tassels attached to her nipples, lashing with them at the men who groped her from the front of the stage, then stepped out of her panties and threw them into the audience, where “the men would grab them and sniff them.” Returning home in the predawn light with a father who had enjoyed Rose Marie’s show as much as any man in the audience, to a mother who preached that such licentiousness was satanically inspired and would result in exclusion from the Kingdom of God, Michael defended his soul with a prudish romanticism that in years to come would not merely inhibit his sexuality, but simultaneously crush and distort it.

  Michael saw less and less of his mother when the Jackson 5 hit the chitlin’ circuit and began to travel throughout the Midwest and Northeast with their father. Those absences became prolonged after the signing with Motown, and Michael went weeks and months without seeing his mother—“the only person who made me feel loved”—at the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve. An early experience of severe turbulence made him terrified of flying and his father had to carry him onto the airplane kicking and screaming when their concert schedule forced the Jackson 5 to take off in a storm. Joseph “would never hold me or touch me,” Michael remembered, “and the stewardesses would have to come and hold my hand and caress me.” He cried all day before their first trip to South America, Michael remembered. “I did not want to go and I said, ‘I just want to be like everyone else. I just want to be normal.’ And my father found me, and made me get in the car and go, because we had to do a date.”

  He had long been denied the right to make friends outside the family, and now, constantly on the move, he began to experience all new relationships as fleeting. “You meet people on the road, somebody on your floor, could be a family,” he recalled, “and you know you have to have as much fun as you can in a short time, because you are not going to see them again.”

  Michael was shocked and appalled by the attitudes of the groupies who swarmed around the Jackson 5 when they became a big act. They bore no resemblance at all to what his mother had told him about the fairer sex. He was every bit as shocked, and even more appalled, by how his father and his brothers took advantage of young women who would do anything for a little attention from a famous family. From the first, Joe made no effort to hide the way he reveled in all that available young flesh, saying good night to his sons in their hotel rooms with both arms full of girls half his age, at once showing off his boys to the girls and the girls to his boys, then cackling as he headed off down the hall to enjoy the sweet fruits of success. Michael and Marlon, the two youngest members of the Jackson 5, were especially wounded by the constant betrayal of their mother, and in some way felt betrayed themselves by her unwillingness to hear about it. The older Jackson brothers, though, learned well from their father, and in almost no time Joe was accepting sloppy seconds from his strapping, handsome oldest son, Jackie, while Jermaine stood third in line. The hurt and shame and impotent angst were all still audible in Michael’s voice twenty-five years later when he described what it was like for him as a prepubescent, pretending to sleep in his hotel room bed while his brothers thrust away at groupies who lay on their backs or bellies right next to him. On more than one occasion he tried to convince the girls who gathered at the backstage door that they should go no farther, warning that they would be used and discarded. When they went ahead anyway, he was confused and frightened at first and then, over time, disheartened.

  Between tours, Joe and his sons returned home to a two-acre estate on the north face of the Santa Monica Mountains, with a private driveway off Hayvenhurst Drive just below Mulholland in the affluent enclave of Encino. It had become the new Jackson family home in the spring of 1971, a five-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion that was supposed to be Katherine’s dream house. Her sons’ friends called it “The Big House,” more because it felt like a prison than because of its size. Janet Jackson’s first husband, James DeBarge, gave the Hayvenhurst mansion its most resonant nickname: “The House of Fears.” Their new home was as far removed from the house the Jackson boys had grown up in as their former neighbors in Gary could have imagined. There was an Olympic-size swimming pool, basketball and badminton courts, an archery range, a guest house, a playhouse, and servants’ quarters, all contained within a gated compound that overflowed with citrus trees and flowering shrubs. The driveway was filled with luxury automobiles and the walls of the family room were lined with gold and platinum records.

  Joe’s already nasty personality darkened during those years. He bitterly resented that Berry Gordy now seemed to have more control over his sons’ careers than he, the father who had molded them into a professional act, and he went to maniacal lengths to remind the entire family that he and he alone was the boss around the house. A five-minute limit was imposed on phone calls and Joe enforced the rule with a leather strap that he used on even his teenage sons. He had refused for years to be addressed as “Dad” by his children, demanding that they call him “Joseph.” Some imagined that it was his way of instilling a professional attitude in his brood, but Michael saw through that to the truth: “He felt that he was this young stud. He was too cool to be Dad. He was Joseph.” The boys were regularly reminded that Joe thought of himself as their manager first, and as their father only when all else failed. Michael would remember the chill that went through them all when Joseph told them, “If you guys ever stop singing, I will drop you like a hot potato.” Inside the Hayvenhurst compound, what Joe called “discipline” became more ritualized and sadistic. He would make you strip naked first, Michael remembered, then slather you with baby oil before bringing out the cut-off cord from a steam iron that he was using now instead of a leather strap, and crack it across the back of your thighs, so that when the tip struck it felt like an electric shock. “It would just be like dying,” Michael remembered, “and you had whips all over your face, your back, everywhere . . . and I would just give up, like there was nothing I could do. And I hated him for it, hated him. We all did.”

  Their Bible-reading mother did little to stop it. “She was always the one in the background . . . I hear it now,” Michael recalled. “‘Joe, no, you’re going to kill them. No! No, Joe, it’s too much!’ And he would be breaking the furniture. It was terrible.” They would all beg Kate to divorce him, but, “she used to say, ‘Leave me alone.’” Katherine’s defenders would describe Mrs. Jackson as an abused woman who had been constantly bullied, threatened, and intimidated by her husband, and whose religion taught her that breaking up a marriage—any marriage—was a transgression against God.

  Terror would run through the Hayvenhurst house the moment they heard Joe’s car in the driveway, Michael said: “He always drove a big Mercedes, and he drives real slow. ‘Joseph’s home! Joseph’s home! Quick!’ Everybody runs to their room, doors slam.” More than a few times, he either fainted or retched when forced to be in his father’s presence. “When he comes in the room, and this aura comes and my stomach starts hurting, I know I am in trouble.” Michael and his little sister Janet used to play a game of closing their eyes and picturing Joseph dead in his coffin, Michael remembered, and when he would ask if she felt sorry, Janet’s answer was always the same: No.

  It was worse when they were on tour. The scene Michael dreaded most was the one Joe created after a performance, when he would send his sons into the room where a buffet dinner was set up, then bring in perhaps a dozen girls that he had selected from the group at the stage door. “The room would be just lined with girls giggling, just loving us, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ and shaking,” Michael remembered. “And if I was talking and something happened and he didn’t like it, he’d get this look in his eye like—he’d get this look in his eye that would just scare you to death. He slapped me so hard in the face, as hard as he could, and then he’d thrust me out into the big room, where they are, tears running down my face, and what are you supposed to do, you know?”

  The more Motown elevated Michael above the others, the angrier J
oe seemed to become. There was nothing he could do, though, to prevent Gordy and his executives from launching the solo career that they saw in Michael’s future. Michael’s first solo single, “Got to Be There,” was a sweetly innocent love song that was released in October 1971 and by Christmas had hit #1 on the Cash Box chart. The song became the title track of an album that was released in January 1972 and sent two more singles into the top ten. One of them, Michael’s chirpy cover of “Rockin’ Robin,” actually sold better than “Got to Be There,” rising to #2 on the Billboard pop chart.

  The first Michael Jackson solo track to become a Billboard #1 was, in essence, a love song to a rat. Released only a few months after the Got to Be There album, “Ben” was the theme song for the movie sequel to the popular horror film Willard, about a meek social misfit whose strange affinity for rats leads ultimately to his being devoured by them. The leader of the rats, Ben, returned in the sequel, adopted by a character with whom Michael would identify: a lonely boy without friends who finally finds a companion in the superintelligent rodent. Michael, who kept pet rats himself, delivered a haunting, sentimental theme song for Ben that was both weirdly moving and astoundingly successful, not only reaching #1 on the Billboard chart, but nominated for an Academy Award as well. Michael sneaked into theaters on at least a dozen occasions to watch the film from the back of the audience, waiting until he could hear his song during a credit roll that included his own screen-size name.