Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Yet in the weeks before the video’s release, Michael was demanding that it be destroyed. The elders at the Encino Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had gotten wind of the “Thriller” video’s concept and summoned Michael to a meeting at which they expressed concern about “the state of Brother Jackson’s soul.” He at first resisted their attempts to force him to change the video, but when the elders threatened him with a “defellowship” that would have resulted in expulsion from the church, Michael wilted. His membership among the Witnesses was, he believed, the most stabilizing force in his life, both the strongest link he had to an experience of ordinary life that he craved and the fundament of his relationship with his mother. Even at the height of Thriller’s success, what he looked forward to most each week were the “pioneering” expeditions he made with the Witnesses. Michael loved everything about it, including the disguises he wore when visiting the shopping malls and suburban neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley. His favorite getup combined a fake mustache and beard, a pair of glasses with clear lenses and thick black rims, and a wide-brimmed hat that he pulled low on his forehead, all worn with a pullover sweater and a neatly knotted necktie. The adults on whose front doors he knocked almost never recognized him when he offered a copy of Watchtower, Michael said, and neither did the grown-ups he approached at the malls. Kids, though, often spotted him right away. “Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin,” he recalled, “I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn’t reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides.” Michael also continued to forswear alcohol, tobacco, and profanity, as a devout Witness was expected to do, and accompanied Katherine to the Kingdom Hall four times each week when he was in Los Angeles. “Church was a treat in its own right,” he would explain. “It was a chance for me to be ‘normal.’ The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else.”

  That became a problem, though, after he admitted the “occultism” of the “Thriller” video. He was already on shaky ground with some of the church elders, who were not only critical of the “worshipful attitude” shown by his legions of fans, but concerned as well about the increasingly provocative queries he was making during the question and answer sessions at the end of services. Michael had been particularly obstinate on the subject of the Genesis story, saying repeatedly that he didn’t understand why Adam and Eve should have been tested with forbidden fruit. If God was God, Michael reasoned, then He must have known the choice that Adam and Eve would make. And if God knew their choice, then why would He be angry at them for choosing it? It didn’t make sense. Furthermore, he wondered if Cain and Abel were the products of incest. “And they were two boys,” he noted, “so how did they have children, anyway?” He was unsettled as well by what he had begun to recognize as a sort of, well, contradiction in his mother’s adherence to their religion. Like her, Michael continued to reject Christmas and Easter as pagan holidays, even though he always found himself aching to participate in the festivities when they rolled around. He had also accepted for his entire life that he should enjoy no birthday celebrations. So it troubled him that each May 4, Katherine would accept birthday gifts, as long as they were presented in brown paper bags rather than wrapping paper. But she was so good otherwise, “a saint, really,” as he would often say, that this seemed a minor transgression. And he did not want to lose the connection the two of them had formed around their faith, or his place among the one group of people he knew who treated him like a regular human being.

  The morning after his meeting with the church elders in Encino, Michael phoned John Branca and demanded that the tapes of the “Thriller” video, now held at a local processing plant, be shredded and discarded. The befuddled attorney pointed out that Jackson had already spent half a million dollars of other people’s money on the video but Michael refused to be dissuaded. By the time Michael phoned his office the next day, Branca had the tapes sitting on his desk and an idea that he hoped might preserve them. He’d been reading a book about Bela Lugosi, the most famous of the movie Draculas, Branca said, and was surprised to discover that Lugosi was a devout Roman Catholic who believed that playing a vampire in the movies had no effect on his personal faith. With that set up, Branca suggested a disclaimer at the beginning of the video explaining that nothing in it reflected Michael’s religious beliefs. Grateful to be offered a way out of this corner he was in, Michael quickly agreed. John Landis, though, refused—at least until Branca convinced him that without the disclaimer the video would never be released. It was Landis himself who eventually wrote the sentence that was inserted at the video’s beginning: “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way expresses a belief in the occult.—Michael Jackson.”

  The disclaimer only added to the swirl of rumor, innuendo, and mystique that surrounded Michael at the beginning of 1984. “If 1983 wasn’t the year of Michael Jackson,” Dick Clark had observed during his annual New Year’s Eve television special, “then it wasn’t anyone’s.” He was being given a level of public permission to live in his own world that had never before been extended to anyone, celebrity or not. The dissonances of his personality actually contributed to the fascination with him. People marveled at the sexual energy that this twenty-five-year-old virgin generated onstage, especially when he danced. “Aided by the burn and flash of silvery bodysuits, he seems to change molecular structure at will,” a short article in Rolling Stone observed, “all robot angles one second, and rippling curves the next. So sure is the body that his eyes are often closed, his face turned upward toward some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps, and squeals.” Michael would later describe it this way: “I am like caught up in a trance with it all. I am like feeling it, but I don’t hear it. I’m playing everything off feeling . . . It just empties you out. You are above it all. That’s why I love it, because you are going to a place of nothing nobody can do. It’s gone, the point of no return. It’s so wonderful. You have taken off.” His need for the experience had become an addiction he had to feed even when he wasn’t touring. Each Sunday he would not only fast in accordance with the requirements of his religion, Michael explained to Rolling Stone, but also would lock himself up alone in his room to dance to the point of physical collapse, until he was laid out on his back, bathed in sweat, laughing and sobbing uncontrollably, utterly spent, and finally free. Free of what, the magazine’s reporter had asked. Free of myself, Michael answered: “I love to forget who I am.”

  That was becoming more and more difficult. On February 7, 1984, Michael was the guest of honor at the Guinness Book of World Records induction ceremony staged at New York City’s Museum of Natural History, where Thriller, with twenty-seven million copies sold already, would be certified as the biggest selling album of all time. Wearing one of the quasi-military jackets, replete with sequins and epaulets, that had become the staple of his wardrobe, Michael arrived with actress Brooke Shields on his arm. It was their first date—and her idea. The centerpiece of the party was an eight-foot world globe studded with lights that spelled out, “Michael Jackson—The Greatest Artist in the World.” Walter Yetnikoff read a telegram sent by President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. The First Couple had saluted Michael by writing: “Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us.”

  Three weeks later, on February 28, the Grammy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles was the Michael Jackson show from start to finish. Brooke Shields was again Michael’s date, but this time had to share him with Emmanuel Lewis, the twelve-year-old, three-foot, four-inch-tall star of the hit TV show Webster, who spent most of the evening perched on Michael’s lap, while Shields sat next to them wearing a dazed expression. The crowd was giddy to the point of delirium with the weird charm of it all, as Michael was summoned to the stage again and again, accepting a record-tying eight of the gilded gramophone statuet
tes in all. Each time Michael’s name was mentioned, or even when his image appeared on the studio monitors beside the stage, the fans in the balcony erupted into a cascade of applause that was more frenzied and sustained than anything those in the orchestra seats had ever witnessed at an awards ceremony. The biggest stars on the planet were like extras in his home movie. For the first time in his life, Michael seemed beyond caring what anyone thought about him. Backstage, the press eagerly asked him what was his favorite song and Michael promptly answered, “‘My Favorite Things’ by Julie Andrews.” The reporters began to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but then in the next instant realized he was serious, and stood with frozen grins as he literally skipped off down the hallway, singing the song at the top of his lungs. The after-party was held that year at the downtown restaurant Rex il Ristorante, where Michael and Brooke looked down from their balcony table on a crowd of commoners who included Bob Dylan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Murphy.

  Michael was the main attraction even at that April’s Academy Awards ceremony. When he showed up with Liza Minnelli at the most exclusive annual affair in Hollywood—legendary agent Swifty Lazar’s party at Spago—“The stars were reduced to mush,” as a USA Today columnist who was there put it, “as if the evening hadn’t been about the movies, but about Jackson instead.” The world-famous celebrities in attendance literally stepped on one another’s feet trying to get close to him.

  Even after the Grammys and the Oscars, even when he had been worshiped by fans who seemed to regard him as a sort of walking, breathing deity, he still had to go home alone at the end of the evening and wonder why he was so unhappy. “I was so lonely I would cry in my room upstairs,” he would remember of that time. “I would think, ‘That’s it, I’m getting out of here.’ And I would walk down the street. I remember really saying to people, ‘Will you be my friend?’ They were like, ‘Michael Jackson!’ I would go, ‘Oh, God! Are they going to be my friend because of Michael Jackson? Or because of me.’”

  “Michael Jackson” was now somebody else, the character he played in public. “I hate to admit it, but I feel strange around everyday people,” he told Gerri Hirshey. Alone, in private, he was nameless, a little boy lost. The only relief from the overwhelming sense of isolation he felt at that time, Michael would remember, came when he made his way down to Encino Park and sat in a swing among the kids on the playground. They didn’t know who he was and, more important, they didn’t care.

  Those walks to the park were ended by the crazed fans who literally camped in the bushes outside the gates of the Hayvenhurst estate. The expressions on some of their faces terrified him. “Oh, no, I can’t go out there,” he told one journalist who asked if they could conduct their interview at a nearby restaurant. “They’ll get me for sure. They’re around the corner, and they want to get their hands on me.” More and more often he was surrounded by bodyguards when he ventured forth from the Hayvenhurst house, burly men who were instructed to let no one who was not a child get near him.

  He tried to explain himself, as best he could, to the occasional interviewer who seemed sincerely interested. “I am a very sensitive person,” he told Robert Hilburn at the Los Angeles Times. “A person with very vulnerable feelings. My best friends in the whole world are children and animals. They’re the ones who tell the truth and love you openly and without reservation.” And he was more and more wary of adults. He explained his increased reclusion to Rolling Stone’s Hirshey by describing himself as “just like a hemophiliac who can’t afford to be scratched in any way.” When Hirshey asked about being on tour, Michael let her know precisely how unlike other pop stars he was: “Girls in the lobby, coming up the stairways. You hear the guards getting them out of elevators. But you stay in your room and write a song. And when you get tired of that, you talk to yourself. Then let it all out onstage. That’s what it’s like.” He disliked parties and hated clubs. “I did that when I was a baby,” he would explain. “Now I want to be a part of the world and life I didn’t have. Take me to Disneyland, take me to where the magic is.” He made trip after trip to Walt Disney’s original park in Anaheim, where the security staff would usher him through the secret passageways that connected rides, so he could avoid the people in lines. Pirates of the Caribbean was his favorite attraction at Disneyland. He would cruise through those dark grottoes again and again, in disguise, praying that no one would shout, “There’s Michael Jackson!” and wishing at the same time he could join the laughing children in the boat next to him. He was yearning desperately, Michael told one interviewer, for something he could identify only as “playtime and a feeling of freedom.”

  Emmanuel Lewis continued to be his closest companion. When he wasn’t giving him piggyback rides, Michael enjoyed carrying the twelve-year-old dwarf in his arms like a toddler. Visitors to the Hayvenhurst estate stood stunned, forcing polite smiles as they watched Jackson and the boy playing cowboys and Indians on the front lawn like a pair of five-year-olds. Those who knew him couldn’t help but be touched by the fact that there was at least one thing in his life that seemed to make him happy.

  Michael’s determination to retreat into a second childhood was never more evident than when he visited the White House in May 1984 as the guest of President and First Lady Reagan. Promised that he would be meeting just Ron and Nancy and a few children of staff members, Michael was dismayed when he stepped into the Diplomatic Reception Room and found it filled with excited adults. He immediately fled down a hallway to a bathroom just off the White House library, locked the door, and refused to come out until a White House aide ordered his assistant to round up some kids and make most of the grown-ups leave. “It’s all so peculiar, really,” Nancy Reagan would remark. “A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand, and sunglasses all the time.”

  He still didn’t know a single adult he could call a friend and it was becoming more difficult for him to connect to his family. The joint management contract with their father and Weisner and DeMann that Michael shared with his brothers had expired back in March 1983 and he had been formally without representation ever since. The brothers were waiting to see what he would do next, and Joseph was hanging in there, hoping to hold on to some percentage of the family superstar’s future. Joe tried to distance himself from Weisner and DeMann, but in the process only deepened the contempt Michael felt for his father. “There was a time when I felt I needed white help in dealing with the corporate structure at CBS,” Joe explained to an interviewer. “And I thought Weisner and DeMann would be able to help. But they never gave me the respect you expect from a business partner.” Weisner and DeMann responded with a statement that they had “no problem with Michael or the Jacksons”—other than Joe. “True, we don’t have a good relationship with him,” DeMann conceded, “but I don’t think he enjoys a good relationship with anyone whose skin is not black.” Michael weighed in with the most public expression of scorn for his father he had ever permitted himself, telling Rolling Stone, “To hear him talk like that turns my stomach . . . Racism is not my motto.”

  Any doubt about Joe’s future was erased in June when he received a letter written by John Branca that informed him that he, Joe, no longer represented Michael Jackson and should refrain from suggesting that he did in any further business contacts. The brothers, nearly as upset as Michael that Joe had responded to Katherine’s most recent divorce filing by deliberately concealing assets, followed suit with letters from their own attorneys telling their father that he was no longer their manager. It was the first time anyone in the family saw Joe cry.

  Michael had already spoken to Frank Dileo, the promotions director at Epic Records, about leaving the label to work as his manager. The squat-bodied, staccato-speaking Dileo had been credited by many for orchestrating the release of singles from Thriller in a sequence that resulted in songs appearing among the Billboard top ten at the same time, creating much of the synergy that lifted the album to its stratospheric success. Frank was
a Technicolor character whose hardscrabble hustler persona provided an odd sort of balance to Michael’s image of ethereal weirdness. Dileo cast himself as a roly-poly phoenix raised from the ashes of multiple disasters, including the death of his uninsured father when he was a teenager, a misdemeanor conviction for working as a bookie for college basketball games, and a house fire that cost his family everything they owned. Sporting a skinny ponytail and a fat cigar, the big-bellied, loud-voiced Dileo was affable but not easily intimidated, especially by the likes of Joe Jackson.

  Joe still had some steel in his spine, though, and was as canny and calculating as ever. He knew from past experience that playing the boys against one another was a winning strategy, five against Michael. What a great idea it would be, he suggested to Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy, to capitalize on the tremendous success of Thriller by including Michael in a “reunion tour” that would celebrate Jermaine’s return to the group. Michael still hadn’t made plans for a Thriller tour, Joe pointed out, and could fold his solo performances into the Jacksons’ stage show, turn it into something really huge financially for them all.

  Jermaine was in the moment the idea was put to him, but Michael resisted more tenaciously than before. He was tired of touring, he said, tired of all the attention, tired of travel and hotel rooms—tired of his family, period. What he didn’t say was that there was nothing he could gain by continuing to associate professionally with his brothers. Much as they needed him, he didn’t need them at all. The brothers first tried using guilt to sway him. Marlon was going through a nasty divorce, was in real financial difficulty, and couldn’t even make his mortgage payments. Maybe he should sell that house and buy a smaller one, Michael suggested. The brothers then called a meeting at which they showed up with a life-size poster of Michael and told him they were going to put it onstage in his place. Michael still wouldn’t relent. It was time to play their ace in the hole.