Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  In New York, he had discovered the joy of being in disguise. Concealing his identity (and perhaps more important, covering his acne) with the full makeup that transformed him into the Scarecrow while he was working on The Wiz had allowed Michael an opportunity to hide and hold his head up high at the same time. He reveled in the discovery of how freeing it could be to meet people when you were wearing a mask. Members of the crew would say later that they had to literally drag him off the set each evening. When he went out at night as Michael Jackson, he now at least had a ready explanation for his bad skin—all that makeup he had to wear. And he was going out a lot that autumn in New York.

  Michael became a regular at Studio 54 just as the disco club was reaching the crest of its popularity. Watching the floor show there was the closest he had ever come to forgetting he was a Jehovah’s Witness. People were shoveling cocaine up their noses at Studio 54, spilling more on their shoes than could be found in some small American cities, then following the coke with chasers of amyl nitrate. Upstairs, the “Rubber Room” was the stage for a disorganized orgy, with people having sex of every conceivable variety under no more cover than a darkened corner, and lots more having sex on the catwalks overhead. Michael came in many nights with Liza Minnelli, who had befriended him at the club and took him regularly to the so-called VIP room in the basement, a dingy little space bordered by chain-link fences where celebrities sat in white plastic lawn chairs laughing about what the people who couldn’t get in imagined it must be like down there. On the main floor, Michael was often seen at the same table with Andy Warhol, who like him was much more interested in watching sex than having it, and who didn’t expect him to make conversation. Truman Capote, another companion, described Michael and his sister La Toya as “oases of innocence” amid the debauch of Studio 54. The two didn’t drink, didn’t use drugs, and certainly didn’t have sex. Michael would watch people acting out sexually, Capote recalled, but did it the same way that he watched James Brown dance, like he was studying what he saw in order to put it to use at some later time.

  Michael’s greatest breakthrough in New York had come when he secured a promise from the executives at Epic Records that he would have creative control of his next solo album. He wanted to start work on it as soon as he returned to Los Angeles. But the brothers all insisted he had to wait until they had finished the next group album, Destiny, and outvoted him four-to-one. They proceeded with apprehension, though, deferring to Michael’s opinion in ways they never had before. Even Joe was walking softly, fearful of alienating the one group member they all knew was indispensable.

  Michael had come back from New York skinnier than anyone had ever seen him, speaking in a peculiar breathy falsetto that made people lean in close to hear him. At the same time, he exuded a new authority and seemed reluctant to share his thoughts with anyone in the family. He was itchy and irritable around the house, snapping at even his mother for the first time any of them could remember. Joe responded to Michael’s moodiness by demanding that CBS and Epic give his boys the same sort of control of the Jacksons’ new album that had been promised to Michael as a solo act. He knew how much was riding on Destiny. Joe was concerned enough about the Jacksons’ future, in fact, to hire a couple of white comanagers, Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann, to ensure not only that CBS kept its promise about letting his sons write their own material but also that the company would push for crossover promotion, giving just as much attention to securing a white audience for the boys as it did to satisfying the Jacksons’ black fans.

  The result was the best album the brothers Jackson had so far released, either at Epic or at Motown. Throughout the music industry, it was agreed that there wasn’t a weak song on Destiny and that Michael Jackson had delivered a tremendous performance on the album. The range of his voice, combined with his ability to adapt to varying styles and tempos, was what most amazed people. Ever since passing through puberty Michael had been dealing with questions about whether he had a voice that would work for him as an adult. Ben Fong-Torres observed how skillfully Michael was coping with his vocal slippage “by switching registers in the middle of phrases and by changing the keys,” but there was still a feeling that his best performances as a singer might have been delivered before he turned fourteen. On Destiny, though, Michael had transitioned with seeming effortlessness from the lush ballad “Push Me Away” to the snap and crackle of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” handling each masterfully. The latter song, written by Michael with his younger brother Randy, was a huge hit, hailed from the first as one of the handful of truly great disco numbers ever released. There was perhaps more to Michael Jackson, several reviewers observed, than anyone had previously realized.

  Michael, though, was more embarrassed by Destiny than proud of it. He was especially upset by a jacket photo in which his brothers, egged on by Joe, had posed behind the studio control board as if they were writers and producers of the album. Mike Atkinson and Bobby Colomby had actually produced the album, but only Michael among the five brothers voted to give the pair credit. Atkinson and Colomby (the latter more responsible for persuading Walter Yetnikoff to give the Jacksons another chance than anyone at CBS) had to obtain affidavits from the engineers and musicians who worked on Destiny in order to win their executive producer credits.

  The disappointing release of The Wiz in the midst of the Destiny tour was little more than a footnote in the swirl of discontent that surrounded Michael in early 1979. The depth and intensity of his wish to become a movie star was something Michael would not share with his brothers or with Joe. He agonized in private over the one plum part he was offered after the release of The Wiz, that of the transvestite dancer in the film version of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. Michael turned down the role, concerned he would be seen by the public as “that way.” It was an old wound. Jet magazine reported as fact the gossip that he was considering a sex change operation so that he could marry actor Clifton Davis (who had written the Jackson 5 song “Never Can Say Goodbye”). When J. Randy Taraborrelli, the Soul magazine reporter who would become the chief chronicler of Michael’s youth, had felt compelled to ask him if he was homosexual, it upset him further. “I am not homo,” Michael snapped in reply. “Not at all.” As a devout Jehovah’s Witness, he was required to see homosexuality as an abomination. “What is it about me that makes people think I’m gay?” Michael demanded. “Is it my voice? 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?”

  Michael worried also that his movie star ambitions would be hindered by his appearance, a subject that made him even more uncomfortable than questions about his sexuality. He was still fighting severe acne outbreaks and increasingly bothered that he had the darkest skin among his siblings, who teased their brother during Taraborrelli’s visit to the Hayvenhurst estate a week before Michael’s twentieth birthday by calling him “Big Nose” and “Liver Lips.” He was most deeply injured, though, by one his father’s typically cruel remarks. “I was going through an awkward puberty when your features start to change, and he went, ‘Ugh, you have a big nose. You didn’t get it from me,’” Michael recalled in a conversation with Rabbi Boteach. “He didn’t realize how much that hurt me. It hurt me so bad, I wanted to die.”

  By the time Michael returned home to Los Angeles from the Destiny tour in the spring of 1979, the tension created by a constant effort to counter deep insecurities with towering ambitions was fueling an obsessive focus on the solo album he had deferred for nearly a year now. His brothers wanted to work on the album with him, but Michael refused, even when Katherine attempted to convince him that he owed them. The balance of power had shifted for good. This new record was nothing to worry about, Joe assured his other sons. Michael’s first two solo albums, made when he was still a prepubescent boy soprano, had charted well enough, but the two made after his voice changed were miserable failures, and this new one would most likely be the same.

  Micha
el was receiving a good deal more support from Quincy Jones, the musical director from The Wiz, whom he had chosen to produce his new album. He had asked if he could produce Michael’s next solo album, Jones would recall, while they were preparing to begin principal photography on The Wiz. “At rehearsals with the cast, during the part where the scarecrow is pulling proverbs from his stuffing, Michael kept saying ‘So-Crates’ instead of ‘Socrates,’” Jones recalled. “After about the third time, I pulled him aside and told him the correct pronunciation. He looked at me with these big wide eyes and said, ‘Really?’ and it was at that moment that I said, ‘Michael, I’d like to produce your album.’ It was that wonderment that I saw in his eyes that locked me in. I knew that we could go into completely unexplored territory, a place that as a jazz musician gave me goose bumps.”

  The young man’s oddities and uncertainties were on full display when they began work on the new album in Los Angeles nearly one year later, but Jones could see that they were more than matched by his effort and ambition. Michael was coming into the studio better prepared than any artist he had ever worked with before, Jones said. “Driven” and “determined” were the two adjectives the album’s producer would most often use to describe his young star. On top of that, Michael was more willing to accept criticism than any other performer he had seen, Jones said, even when distraught over the announcement that only three of his own compositions had been selected for the album’s final cut. Throughout the production, “I saw his sensitivity and his focus,” Jones recalled. “There was such an innocence, but he didn’t miss a thing.”

  Anyone associated with the record who would later claim they knew it was going to be a big hit was “a flat-out liar,” Jones would say thirty years later. “We had no idea Off the Wall was going to be as successful as it was, but we were thrilled. Michael had moved from the realm of bubble-gum pop and planted his flag square in the heart of the musical pulse of the ’80s.”

  The three songs from Off the Wall that Michael had written would turn out to be among the albums most successful numbers. Michael’s falsetto funkfest “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” in fact, was the biggest hit of an album stocked with them, becoming his first recording to reach #1 on the pop charts in more than seven years. The pulsating “Rock With You” (written by Rod Temperton) also hit #1, while two other cuts from the album, “Off the Wall” (also by Temperton) and “She’s Out of My Life” (written by Tom Bahler), reached the top ten, making Michael the first solo artist in pop history to put four singles off the same album into the top ten. Reviewers were almost unanimous in praising the record, agreeing that there wasn’t a weak number on it. The buying public agreed: Off the Wall would sell nearly five million copies domestically, and another two million in the foreign market.

  Jackson had his publicist send a letter to Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor and publisher, suggesting that Michael should be on the magazine’s cover in light of Off the Wall’s success. Wenner wrote back, “We would very much like to do a major piece on Michael Jackson but feel it is not a cover story.” Furious, Michael said it was because editors believed that putting a black person on the cover resulted in fewer sales at the newsstand and vowed to prove them wrong. When Off the Wall won only a single Grammy, for best R & B album, Jackson sobbed around the house for weeks, then repeated his vow to deliver another solo album as soon as he could, to “show them.”

  Michael turned twenty-one shortly after the release of Off the Wall and celebrated his legal adulthood by announcing that he intended to hire his own attorney to examine his business affairs and explain to him where all the money was going. Joe was incensed and confronted his son but Michael refused to budge, and the two stopped speaking to one another. Katherine tried to intervene, urging her son to believe that his father was working in his best interest, but Michael held firm.

  His search for new representation was a short one. Michael had been deeply impressed by the very first attorney he interviewed, a thirty-one-year-old corporate tax specialist named John Branca, who was at that time best known for being the nephew of Ralph Branca, the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who had given up the playoff-deciding “Shot Heard ’round the World” to the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson in 1951. Branca offered to organize Michael’s finances and promised to renegotiate his contract with CBS. The attorney proceeded to do just that and was soon reporting back to Michael that from this day forward he would receive the highest royalty rate in the business as a solo artist, 37 percent, the same as Bob Dylan. Not only that, Branca added, but CBS had agreed to let Michael leave the Jacksons any time he wanted, without affecting his brothers’ relationship with the company.

  Branca would say later that he had motivated himself during his negotiations with CBS by recalling something Michael told him right at the start of their first meeting: “I intend to be the biggest star in show business, and the richest.”

  “Thriller Time” was how Michael Jackson would refer to the two-year period of his life that followed the release of his seminal album, as if recalling an alternate dimension of temporal reality. Thriller Time changed everything, certainly, and just as certainly, changed nothing at all. In those twenty-four months, and in the twenty-four years that followed them, Michael Jackson would demonstrate as completely as any person ever has that the central truism of the celebrity experience is that getting what you want will never make up for not having what you need.

  All Michael knew for sure in early 1980 was that the success of Off the Wall had not satisfied him. His next record, he assured everyone around him, would sell twice that many copies. He would have to wait to prove that, though, because his family had already made sure that the next Michael Jackson record would belong to them.

  Released in July 1980, the Jacksons’ Triumph was, all things considered, a major success for the group. Critics called it the strongest album the brothers had ever put out, and the public was only slightly less enthusiastic. Three songs (all either written or cowritten by Michael) from Triumph charted in the top twenty and the album itself was certified platinum within six months of its release. Michael sang lead on nearly every number, but even during those recording sessions had scarcely concealed his frustration at being forced to delay work on a new solo album. His brothers, on the other hand, could barely contain their excitement about the impending Triumph tour, scheduled to visit thirty-nine cities beginning in July 1981, in spite of Michael’s reluctance to accompany them.

  He certainly didn’t need the money; Off the Wall had made him wealthier than the rest of his family put together. For the first time in his life, he was acquiring assets, among them the house his parents lived in. Joe surrendered his interest in the Hayvenhurst estate to Michael in February 1981. In his determination to prove to the world (and to Berry Gordy in particular) that he could stand on his own as a businessman, Joe had dug himself a hole so deep that in the end there was nothing to do but cry out for help. It had started in 1974 when he formed his own record company, Ivory Tower International Records, planning to build the business around a female quartet from Ohio that called itself M.D.L.T. Willis. The group and the label went nowhere. Joe would sign, manage, and produce several other singing groups during the next seven years, and they all fizzled as well. By the beginning of 1981, he was hugely overleveraged and so desperate for cash that he offered Michael half of the Hayvenhurst estate for $500,000. It wasn’t long after that before Joe sold Michael half of the half of the property that the parents had tried to keep for themselves, leaving Katherine with just a 25 percent interest in the estate and Joe with the understanding that he was now his son’s tenant.

  Joe still had his share of the management fees from Triumph coming in and would receive about 5 percent of the net profits from the Triumph tour—if Michael agreed to participate. As usual, Joe counted on Katherine to make that happen. Despite having filed her second divorce action against Joe just a few months earlier, Katherine did what her husband and her other sons begged her to do and
persuaded Michael that he owed the family a piece of his enormous success. Half of whatever Joe got out of the deal, after all, was hers.

  It was understood from the beginning that Michael would be the stand-alone star of the show on the Triumph tour. The grandest productions and the biggest applause at each stop came whenever he performed one of his solos from Off the Wall. The last number of every show would be “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” which ended with Michael disappearing into a giant smoke screen created by Doug Henning, the magician who was accompanying the Jacksons on the tour. Neither the audience nor his brothers would see him after that. Michael not only refused to socialize with anyone connected to the tour but issued strict instructions that no one was to use swear words, make sexual references, or tell dirty jokes while in his presence. Still upset that he had ended the Destiny tour with a bad case of laryngitis, Michael declined to speak except when he had to, sipped a brew of lemon and honey constantly, and insisted that air conditioners be turned off whenever he was in a room—even if it was ninety-five degrees outside. All he wanted, Michael made clear, was for this tour to be over. “I will never do this again,” he told Soul magazine’s Taraborrelli. “Ever.”

  Robert Hilburn interviewed Michael in the back of a tour bus after the show in St. Louis and found the star to be quite different in person from “the charismatic, strutting figure” he had seen onstage. The Michael Jackson he met face-to-face was “anxious,” the Los Angeles Times writer recalled, “frequently bowing his head as he whispered answers.” At one point Hilburn asked Michael why he didn’t live on his own like his brothers. Unbeknownst to the writer, Michael had bought a condominium near the Hayvenhurst compound back in February 1981, but rarely slept there. “I think I’d die on my own,” Michael told Hilburn. “Even at home I’m lonely. I sit in my room and sometimes cry. It is so hard to make friends and there are some things you can’t talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home.”