Michael Jackson, Inc. Read online

  At around the same age Jackson started performing, I played the title role in Lorenzo’s Oil alongside Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte. I began to notice a change in the way people perceived me not long after my sixth birthday, when I found myself signing autographs for a pair of girls one year my senior. Stranger still, after months playing a very sick child, donning a bald cap every morning and sometimes wearing an earpiece designed to make me slur my speech, I began to wonder if I might be ill myself.

  Eventually, I decided on “early retirement” and shifted my focus to more meaningful pursuits like winning a middle school intramural basketball championship. My parents were more than willing to let me leave show business, a luxury that Michael Jackson never had. That’s not to say he wouldn’t have chosen to be an entertainer; Jackson brought unparalleled electricity to his performances, something that could only have been generated by an inner drive as prodigious as his outsized talent.

  “Onstage for me was home,” Jackson told Oprah Winfrey in 1993. “I was most comfortable, and still am most comfortable, onstage. But once I got off stage, I was very sad . . . I used to always cry from loneliness.”21

  The struggles of his childhood bred in him a combination of perfectionism and insecurity—one that fed his desire to constantly break new ground in the fields of music, dance, and film—but also resulted in negative consequences both for his personal happiness and the success of his business empire.

  In the coming pages, I retrace the steps of Jackson’s journey from impoverished child to international superstar, notebook in hand as I travel to his birthplace of Gary, Indiana; the Apollo Theater in New York; his adopted hometown of Los Angeles and the rolling hills of Neverland; even the lush midlands of Ireland and the blazing neon lights of Las Vegas.

  Along the way, I draw on interviews with more than a hundred people who witnessed Jackson’s rise as a musician—and as a business—including members of his immediate and extended family, industry executives who helped him build his empire, and various entertainers and Hollywood veterans who came to know and work with him over the years. My reporting relies on firsthand interviews with many of the key players in Jackson’s life, and I have avoided the use of press clippings and secondary sources as much as possible. In the instances where I’ve used these, they’re mostly limited to color (album reviews, honorifics, times, and dates).

  This is a book about Michael Jackson’s business and everything that went into it. That includes the bundle of contradictions that could be used to describe him: a supremely confident visionary occasionally crippled by insecurity, a warm and generous human being capable of stonewalling colleagues to get his way, an ambitious long-term planner who sometimes left his side of multimillion-dollar agreements unfinished, a showbiz revolutionary who eventually lost control of his personal finances.

  His highs were as high as anyone’s, if not higher, and even his lows offer valuable lessons. The story of how Jackson transformed himself from a poor kid in a hardscrabble steel town into the world’s most successful superstar—and a business unto himself—makes him a remarkable case study for generations of entertainers to come, both on the stage and in the boardroom.

  “He had a kid’s heart, but a mind of a genius,” says Berry Gordy. “He was so loving and soft-spoken, and a thinker. . . . He wanted to do everything, and he was capable. You can only do so much in a lifetime.”22

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  STEELTOWN DREAMING

  Jackson Street isn’t the sort of place where houses have groundskeepers. The few inhabited homes on the rutted strip of asphalt in Gary, Indiana, sport overgrown yards and heavily fortified doors; the empty ones are marked by boarded or broken windows and crumbling roofs.

  That’s not the case at 2300 Jackson Street, Michael Jackson’s childhood home—a squat box that looks more like an oversize Monopoly piece than a structure capable of housing a family of eleven. In the twilight of a summer Sunday, a middle-aged man in baggy black jeans and a sleeveless denim vest patrols the tidy front yard, gently brooming stray leaves into a bag on the walkway to the front door.

  The house is surrounded by a wrought iron fence, its bars decked with roses, candles, and teddy bears left by years of visits by mourners from around the world. In one corner of the yard, a gleaming black monument towers over the greenery, looking like a monolith dreamed up by Stanley Kubrick, save for the inscription:

  KING OF POP

  MICHAEL J. JACKSON

  AUGUST 29, 1958

  JUNE 25, 2009

  HOME TOWN OF MICHAEL JACKSON – GARY, IN.

  “Never can say good bye”1

  The groundskeeper looks up from his sweeping and ambles over to the gate. He extends his hand, introducing himself as Greg Campbell.

  “That’s one hump, not two,” he says, letting out a deep guffaw. “You know, camels have humps.”2

  When I ask Campbell how he came to be sweeping up in front of this particular house, he informs me that he grew up just four blocks away. He went to grade school nearby with Jermaine and La Toya Jackson, and spent many afternoons in front of 2300 Jackson Street singing with the brothers.

  “We all started on the corner singing Temptations songs,” he says, and suddenly erupts into one of them—“I’ve got sun-shiiiiiiine!”— his pure tone ringing through the empty street. “It’s a lot of history.”

  He looks back at the house.

  “This is the beginning right here. Everybody got whupped, everybody played instruments.”

  As it turns out, Campbell isn’t the only childhood acquaintance of Michael Jackson on the premises. Another man bounds out of the gated door of the house, thick braids coiled neatly into a ponytail behind him. He rushes up to greet me, identifying himself as Keith Jackson—Michael’s first cousin—and asks if I’d like to buy a T-shirt for twenty dollars. I decline.

  Keith was only a toddler when the young King of Pop actually lived at the house, but he swears he remembers everything that happened in 1965 as though it occurred last Tuesday.

  “For me, it was the music, man; just to sit there and watch them rehearse,” he recalls. “We had the privilege of being there inside the house while other kids was just trying to peek through the window. So that was a moment in time that I really enjoyed, just watching them when they first started. Right here. I mean, I was like two or three years old, but I still remember.”3

  Nearly half a century later, though, Keith Jackson offers something else about his cousin—something having little to do with his well-documented musical prowess.

  “Mike was very smart, man,” he says. “Outside of being an entertainer, he was definitely a great businessman as well.”

  * * *

  Michael Jackson’s father doesn’t do phone interviews, or at least that’s what I was told when I first tried to contact him. If I wanted to talk to Joe Jackson, I would have to come to Las Vegas—alone—and meet him at the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a sprawling faux-Cajun complex on the wrong side of Interstate 15.

  When I arrived in the lobby, it wasn’t hard to spot the Jackson family patriarch. He was clad all in black—alligator loafers, slacks, dress shirt—with a lone red feather in his fedora. Bulky rings clung to his fingers like gilded barnacles. He removed his black-and-gold Prada sunglasses to reveal a pair of squinty eyes set toward the outer edges of his face, giving him the look of a nefarious disco piranha. Then he motioned me to a couch and we sat down. I asked if I could record our conversation; he nodded, but then reached for my device.

  “Let me put this right here like this,” he said in a high, hushed voice, looking across the lobby at a middle-aged stranger. “I don’t want her to be hearing what I’m saying.”4

  Joe Jackson has long been a suspicious man, but he hasn’t always lived gaudily. He and his wife Katherine bought their house at 2300 Jackson Street for $9,000 in 1949, with the help of loans from her parents. The couple’s first child, Maureen (nicknamed Rebbie), arrived the next year. She was followed by
Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, and Marlon (whose twin, Brandon, died shortly after birth), with barely nine months between each. And then, on August 29, 1958, came Michael Jackson.

  “He was very hyperactive, couldn’t be still,” recalls Joe. “Those things made me think that he would be good in performing.”

  The Jacksons would add two more children, Randy and Janet, and as their home’s purchase price suggests, accommodations were far from luxurious: the minuscule abode measures 24 by 36 feet.5

  “When you look at the house and see how small it is, it’s like, ‘Where did you guys sleep?’ ” says Gary’s mayor, Karen Freeman-Wilson, who grew up in the city at the same time as the Jacksons. “There was a daybed in one of the rooms, along with maybe a dresser or some other piece of furniture, and it was crowded.”6

  Still, a toddler’s imagination can make even the tiniest house seem spacious. “I had remembered it as being large,” Jackson wrote of his childhood dwelling. “When you’re that young, the whole world seems so huge that a little room can seem four times its size.”7

  Michael’s mother worked part-time at Sears but mostly stayed home with the children, while his father earned $30 per day as a crane operator at nearby Inland Steel.8 Whenever the mill cut back on Joe’s shifts, he’d work in the fields harvesting crops. He never told his children when he’d lost work; their only clue was an uptick in potato-based meals.9

  Michael Jackson’s musical talents can be traced in part to his parents. His mother grew up singing spirituals in church, while Joe played guitar in a Gary band called the Falcons as an adult.10 The Jackson boys absorbed their parents’ hobby, singing while washing the dishes every evening.11 Joe figured music could help keep his kids off the dangerous streets of Gary; if they were inside watching the Falcons, they couldn’t be outside getting involved with gangs.

  Joe’s guitar was not to be played by anyone else, and he made this especially clear to his children. That, of course, only made them more eager to try. When Joe worked late shifts at the mill, the oldest brothers—Jackie, Tito, and Jermaine—would sneak into his closet and take turns strumming while a young Michael watched. They’d play the scales they were learning in music class at school, branching out to the soulful tunes they heard on the radio. Katherine eventually found them out, but in an effort to encourage her sons’ musical development, she said she wouldn’t tell Joe as long as they were cautious.

  One day, Tito did the unthinkable while performing a song by the Four Tops with his brothers: he broke a string on the guitar. With their father due home any minute, the boys panicked—there wasn’t time to replace it. Joe was an avid practitioner of corporal punishment, and they knew this was just the sort of transgression that would result in a sound beating. Unable to come up with a plan, they placed the guitar back in Joe’s closet and hoped for leniency.

  They got their wish, though not quite in the form they’d been expecting. When Joe noticed the broken string, he stormed into the boys’ room holding his guitar and demanded to know who was responsible. Tito confessed, but just as Joe grabbed him to begin administering his punishment, the youngster protested.

  “I can play!”

  “Play, then!” Joe thundered. “Let me see what you can do.”

  Tito composed himself and started playing “The Jerk” by the Larks, with Jackie and Jermaine singing harmony while fighting back tears. When they’d finished, Joe left the room without saying a word—or lifting a finger. Two days later he returned from work with a red guitar for Tito and instructions for the other brothers to get ready to start rehearsing. And so the Jackson 5 was born.12

  Though Jermaine started out as the group’s lead singer, the family already knew there was something remarkable about Michael. Even as a toddler, he moved and sang with the grace and fluidity of a veteran entertainer. “Michael was so talented,” recalls his father. “I don’t think he even knew his own talents . . . he didn’t know because everything he tried came out perfect.”13

  Shortly after the boys started practicing as a band, they were playing for their grandmother when a curious thing happened: five-year-old Michael, who’d been playing the bongos and studying his older brothers, jumped in and started singing Jermaine’s part. His brothers complained, and Joe stopped the song. But Michael’s grandmother had heard something. She asked him to sing again, anything he wanted, and he launched into a rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Jermaine still remembers “the wide-eyed look on Joseph’s face.”14

  Michael clinched his status as the group’s frontman shortly thereafter with a school performance of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” The famous tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music was his first solo in front of a big crowd, but that wasn’t apparent to those in the gymnasium watching him. “When I finished that song, the reaction in the auditorium overwhelmed me,” he wrote. “My teachers were crying and I just couldn’t believe it. I had made them all happy. It was such a great feeling.”15

  Jackson’s business career had a less auspicious beginning. The singer’s childhood compatriots remember his ill-fated attempt to become a candy distributor—and his failure to grasp the concept of profit. “There was a store down the street somewhere up there,” says Campbell. “He’d go get them little malt balls for a nickel, and sell ’em for a nickel.”16

  Indeed, Michael’s earliest years offer few clues that, within two decades, he’d become the visionary behind a billion-dollar empire. But there were hints he might one day be the sort of entertainer who’d donate millions to charity.

  “Mike was always the giving type of guy,” says Keith Jackson. “I remember when he used to get his allowance from my uncle and my aunty Katherine, that he would actually go buy a bunch of candy and would give it to other kids. He’d just give it away, man.”17

  As a youngster, Jackson was so fixated on giving that he’d sometimes take. He developed a habit of swiping pieces from his mother’s modest jewelry collection and presenting them to teachers as gifts. Eventually she found out what was going on and quietly put a stop to it.18 But the incident foreshadowed a trait that would later prove destructive to Jackson. Says his father: “He could never say no.”19

  * * *

  These days, there’s not much about Mister Lucky’s Lounge that looks lucky. It sits abandoned on the corner of Grant Street and West Eleventh Avenue in Gary, Indiana, windows covered with plywood, mismatched bricks slowly disintegrating at the edges.

  The only recent additions to the building are two incongruously fresh-looking canvas signs. Each proclaims the onetime nightspot’s name in black and green letters atop a four-leaf clover. “Welcome Michael Jackson Fans!” the sign reads. “Mr. Lucky’s Lounge: the Jackson 5’s first performance venue!”

  The second sign is dominated by an illustration of what appears to be a brick. “Everybody Needs a Little Luck,” it suggests gently, before erupting into an all-out exhortation: “BUY YOUR LUCKY BRICK at www.MISTERLUCKYSLOUNGE.com.”20 21

  In addition to becoming the first venue to host a proper Jackson 5 concert, Mister Lucky’s was also the first place Michael Jackson earned money as a musician. He and his brothers took home a combined $11 for that initial paid performance in 1964. As usual, six-year-old Michael used his share to buy candy, which he then gave away to other neighborhood children.22

  Building off the boys’ success at Mister Lucky’s, Joe booked the Jackson 5 at nearby venues, entered them in talent shows in neighboring towns, and ran a schedule of practices and performances that seemed as rigorous and time-consuming as that of a Broadway production. “Rehearsing with them, that’s what led to them being so talented,” says Joe. “I rehearsed them a lot. They’ll tell you.”23

  Of course, there were no understudies. Michael remembers performing all night after spending days sick in bed. “As players, Jermaine, Tito, and the rest of us were under tremendous pressure,” Jackson wrote in his autobiography. “Our manager was the kind who reminded us that James Brown would fine his Famous Flames if they
missed a cue or bent a note during a performance. As lead singer, I felt I—more than the others—couldn’t afford an ‘off night.’ ”24

  When Michael was eight years old, he and his brothers faced their biggest test yet: a citywide talent show at Gary’s Roosevelt High. They rose to the occasion, delivering a sparkling rendition of “My Girl” by the Temptations, one of the top acts signed to Motown Records. The performance ignited a dream of Joe’s that would soon become an obsession. “I realized that it would be good to [get a] deal with Motown,” he recalls. “Most of the talent shows they won, they was singing Motown songs.”25

  It wasn’t long before Joe left the Falcons, opting instead to focus on managing the Jackson 5. He and Katherine had saved $300 to build an additional room onto their house; much to his wife’s chagrin, Joe used the bulk of it to buy musical equipment. Then he traded his Buick sedan for a Volkswagen van that could accommodate the boys and their gear.26

  The Jacksons would get their new room soon enough. By 1966, Michael and his brothers were performing five sets a night, six nights a week, in Gary or anywhere Joe could find a gig. Often that led to concerts at strip joints. Michael’s mother, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—a Christian sect that forbids the celebration of holidays and birthdays—insisted she didn’t learn this until reading his autobiography (a claim that strains credulity). For Michael, the gigs meant learning, and earning, in ways unfamiliar to most middle-schoolers.

  “I’d go out into the audience, crawl under the tables, and pull up the ladies’ skirts to look under,” he wrote. “People would throw money as I scurried by, and when I began to dance, I’d scoop up all the dollars and coins that had hit the floor earlier and push them into the pockets of my jacket.”27

  Though Michael has said he mostly enjoyed the performances, the rigor of the Jackson 5’s touring schedule left the boys exhausted. When they weren’t on the road, they practiced at home and took lessons with Shirley Cartman, a music teacher at their school who also ran her own studio.28