From: http://www.msnbc.com/news/872643.asp?0cv=CB20&cp1=1
Michael Jackson Unmasked
Jan. 17 — He’s spent a lifetime in the public eye, making and selling his music. But lately, Michael Jackson has turned to the media for a different reason: to battle allegations of bizarre, even dangerous, behavior. With someone as mercurial as Michael Jackson, it’s hard to know where the truth lies. Clearly, the glow of his celebrity and the depth of his pockets attract opportunists. For months now, “Dateline” has been investigating the life of Michael Jackson. In this story, you’ll hear from people who know the story behind his plastic surgery, and those highly-publicized 1993 allegations of child sex abuse — the stories you haven’t heard and the Michael Jackson you don’t know. Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz has this “Dateline” exclusive.
EVERYTHING MICHAEL JACKSON does and just about anything he says becomes instantly controversial.
You may have seen Michael Jackson look into a TV camera and try to give the record of his life a new spin. You think he’s had too many plastic surgeries? He admits to only two. You think he’s deliberately whitened his skin? He says it’s a skin condition. You think there’s something wrong about sharing his bed with boys young enough to be his children? He doesn’t — and he says, there’s nothing sexual about his love for kids.
Is he telling the truth about any of that? “Dateline” spoke to a doctor who witnessed many of Jackson’s visits to his plastic surgeon, to a friend who’s worried about the toll surgery has taken on the singer, and for the first time, a police detective who personally investigated the allegations of sexual molestation — and who is speaking out, on the record, for the first time, with details of the investigation that threatened a show business legend.
Once, he ruled the world of music. And he didn’t just rule it, he transformed it. He was the Sinatra of his day, singing and dancing, while composing hit after hit.
But he was also the Elvis of his time, doing things with his body that defied the laws of motion. Blending Sinatra’s cool and Elvis’ heat, Michael Jackson was a showman so talented, so fluent in the language of entertainment, it seemed there was no audience he could not dazzle.
Today, it’s hard to believe the adorable boy who won our hearts has turned himself into someone who looks so different. A surgery designed to resolve a medical problem may now have become a dangerous obsession. It turned a national icon into a national punch line.
“NBC’s ‘Dateline’ is going to do an entire show on Michael Jackson’s face,” Jay Leno said in a recent monologue. “And Michael Jackson is furious, he is so upset, he’s so mad about this, in fact today he was so mad he ordered his plastic surgeon to put an angry look on his face.”
So what happened to Michael Jackson?
Almost a decade ago, at the height of his success, Jackson unveiled his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But just days ago, a much smaller gathering of his beloved fans met at that same spot.
This time, they were holding a candlelight vigil to show their support because, they said, they were afraid, in light of recent events, that their beloved singer might take his own life.
It has been a tough few weeks for Jackson, especially when you consider that just about everything that’s happened to him, has been his own doing.
To understand how far Michael Jackson has fallen, you need to understand how high he flew. For more than 30 years, his has been a steady rise to the top of the music world, stopping only long enough to pick up a pile of awards, a mountain of cash, and a swarm of fans.
He was a child star who had everything except a childhood, a kid from Indiana who made it bigger in Hollywood than anyone could have imagined, a sensation from almost the first time he sang into a microphone.
Brothers Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, and Marlon vibed 70’s funk in those day-glo colors, but the frontman of the Jackson Five was the family’s seventh child. And although it was Michael the public came to see, the fuel behind this stage family was someone audiences never saw, a frustrated musician named Joseph Jackson, a father who spotted the glint of talent in his children and pushed them hard to polish it.
“He was the driving force behind getting us together, and I guess getting us to rehearse, and my mother showed us the love and I guess she gave us our voices really,” said Michael’s older brother, Jermaine, speaking last year to a British documentary crew. “My father was very, very strict. He was just one of those dads who wanted things to be right.”
“It did feel, in many respects, I think, that the kids felt that he was managing them and not really parenting them,” says J. Randy Taraborrelli, who wrote a biography of Michael Jackson. It is definitely unauthorized, but Taraborrelli has interviewed Jackson a dozen times.
Taraborrelli: “Things began to change for the Jacksons when Joseph decided that these kids were going to begin to toe the line and have to rehearse and be disciplined.”
Mankiewicz: “And rehearsing didn’t mean once a week.”
Taraborrelli: “No, they were rehearsing all the time, every day.”
Michael Jackson has said his father was more than just tough, that he beat young Michael. His father denies that and says whatever he did, it was with the aim of getting his family out of Gary, Ind., out of the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house where Joe and Catherine Jackson raised their nine children.
“It was a close-knit family,” says Taraborrelli. “All they had, really, was each other.”
Michael was five when the group played their first paying gig at Mr. Lucky’s Lounge, where the pay was about $7.
But Joe Jackson’s dreams were bigger than that. And so the Jackson Five went to school during the day, then worked into the night, wherever they could. The closest thing they had to a hit was a song called “Big Boy.”
The family got three cents for every record sold, and promoting it was anything but glamorous. By his sixth birthday, Michael Jackson had performed to “Big Boy” in front of the audience at a number of strip clubs.
The Jacksons spent their boyhood and their adolescence in front of a microphone. And according to musician Bobby Taylor, who wrote and produced some of their early hits, that hurt one Jackson more than the others.
“The other boys got their childhood,” says Taylor. “Michael didn’t. He was never able to be that little kid.”
That would have an effect on Michael for years to come.
“I remember once we were out in Indiana where he was born,” says his former publicist, Lee Solters. “And we were in a limousine. And he was looking out on the fields. And he said, ‘You know, I was born here. I never had a childhood.’”
But when you’re a star about to burn more brightly than the rest...
“Sometimes there are things in life that you have to sacrifice to accomplish certain things at certain levels,” says Jermaine Jackson. “I guess the fact that he didn’t have a childhood is why he’s so great at what he does.”
Joe Jackson thought his sons were ready. So he turned to Bobby Taylor, who was impressed with little Michael.
“And he was singing like James Brown,” says Taylor. “And I’m saying, ‘This kid,’ I said, ‘How old is that little sucker out there?’”
He helped the group make a videotape audition, and sent it to Motown Records head Berry Gordy.
“I called Berry Gordy and I said, ‘Listen, man, we’ve got somebody better than The Beatles.’ I said, ‘This kid is gonna knock your socks off,’” says Taylor.
Gordy was looking for new acts. However, child acts could be hard to book and even harder to control. But Gordy stopped worrying about that after he saw the Jackson Five in their videotaped audition.
“Soon as he saw Michael Jackson with that voice, he realized that it was worth the investment,” says Taraborrelli.
With the stroke of a pen, Michael Jackson was headed for the big time. At the age of 10, the little boy from Gary, along with his brothers, had just signed a contract with one of the biggest record labels in the business.
A childhood left behind
The Jackson Five begins Michael’s launch to stardom
Michael Jackson was a musical prodigy. By the age of 10, he was already overshadowing his older brothers in the Jackson Five and had the full attention of Motown. But it hadn’t been easy. It took endless rehearsing and late nights playing any gig the group could get, even at strip clubs. Now Michael Jackson’s career was about to take off, leaving any chance at a childhood far behind.
THE JACKSON FIVE had arrived in more than one way. They had a Motown makeover and made their first national TV appearance on an episode of The Hollywood Palace TV show. Michael was 11.
But in the 1960’s in America, you didn’t really arrive until you did the Ed Sullivan Show — which they did on Dec. 14, 1969.
“And these boys found out they were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, they rose to the occasion,” says Taraborrelli. “It was such an amazing performance, an amazing unit of talent. And there was no way that they weren’t going to be huge. There was just no way.”
That first single “I Want You Back” shot to the top of the charts. Jackson mania had been launched.
They began appearing regularly on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere. There were product endorsements, a Saturday morning cartoon, their own TV variety show, and Michael was the center of attention.
At 14, on The Dating Game, three lucky girls competed for him.
Had Michael Jackson found success or had it found him? Either way, what passed for his childhood was over. From obscurity to Hollywood to the Jackson Five, not only had the stardom Joe Jackson had envisioned for his sons become reality, but as huge a phenomenon as Michael Jackson was, he was about to become even bigger.
“I remember Michael back then saying, ‘I just wanna record my own music. I just wanna try to write songs. I just wanna think that maybe I can produce. You know? I think I have it in me but I’m not really sure.’ He wasn’t so bold as to think he was going to be the greatest artist of all time,” says Taraborrelli. “He just wanted to have a chance, he just wanted a shot.”
He would get his shot, but with stardom would come the first signs of trouble, signs that Michael Jackson didn’t really like being Michael Jackson, and the public’s first glimpse of the odd, self-destructive behavior that would one day become as synonymous to this singer’s image as his music.
The star, the face, the fire
Michael Jackson makes some changes, accident on set
It was with the song “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough,” and the 1979 release of Jackson’s first solo album “Off The Wall,” that his fans first began to notice that, like his career, Michael Jackson’s face was undergoing some subtle changes. His biographer Randy Taraborrelli says Jackson had plastic surgery on his nose for the first time, for a good reason.
“HE HAD THE first nose job as a result of falling on stage and breaking his nose when he was about 19,” says Taraborrelli. “And so it wasn’t for, you know, a vanity purpose. It was a medical procedure.”
Mankiewicz: “But he decided he liked it.”
Taraborrelli: “Guess he liked it, yeah.”
Whether you’re male or female, cosmetic surgery is practically a rite of passage in show business. But at the time he started having plastic surgery, Jackson was no rookie looking for a big break, which makes his decision a little harder to understand.
Taraborrelli: “You know, this is a person that we grew up with.”
Mankiewicz: “And he wasn’t a bad looking guy.”
Taraborrelli: “No, he was a cute kid.”
Mankiewicz: “But he didn’t perceive it that way?”
Taraborrelli: “There’s just something about this theory that I think might be true. And that is that Michael had such an acrimonious relationship with his father, Joseph. All of the kids in the family grew up to kind of resemble Joseph. And in the beginning, some of the plastic surgery was to sort of erase his father’s image from the man in the mirror... And I think that when Michael looked at the man in the mirror and saw Joseph sort of emerging, that on some level he just wanted to eradicate that.”
But there are other theories as well, some that suggest Jackson’s surgeries are driven more by vanity than by anything else. He hated his adolescent acne, and musician and family friend Bobby Taylor recalls how young Michael’s nose was often the center of family attention.
“Michael, he hated his nose,” says Taylor. “We would play basketball and we would team up and say, ‘Michael, man, you can’t play. Your nose is too big. It’s gonna get in the way.’”
But did those childhood jokes set the stage for a lifetime of surgery? Does Jackson suffer from a little-known anxiety-related disorder?
“Just an offhand comment, somebody being mean, saying, you know, you got a big nose, that person can internalize that comment and believe that about themselves,” says Karen Pickett, a therapist who specializes in treating patients with body dysmorphic disorder. It’s sometimes called the ugliness syndrome, in which otherwise healthy, attractive people go through repeated cosmetic procedures with the aim of trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
“And because it’s so painful for them to hear that comment, then they will do anything to change what they believe to be this flaw, this big nose,” says Pickett.
Professionally at least, Jackson had few flaws to worry about. His next album would make music history.
“Thriller” was released the first of December, 1982. Nearly every song, nearly every video was a hit. And it was no accident. Michael Jackson saw it coming.
“Michael would put it in his mind that he wanted that album to be the greatest album of all time,” says brother Jermaine. “He would write it on a mirror that he wanted the greatest-selling album. It was on a mirror in this home right here. He wanted to be the biggest entertainer of all time and have the best-selling album of all time.”
With “Thriller,” he was, and he did.
What made Michael Jackson the standout star? His voice? His dancing ability?
“He’s everything,” says Toure, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone Magazine. “He’s got a fantastic voice, powerful, clear, clean, with a wonderful tone to it. He can dance. He can write. And he also had the ability to change... And the first thing that you have to remember with ‘Thriller,’ is before ‘Thriller,’ MTV was not playing black artists at all. ‘Thriller’ is the first time that they start to play black artists. So this is a huge benchmark in the history of modern American music, that finally the apartheid system ends.”
Mankiewicz: “So ‘Thriller’ not only made him the biggest musical star in the world, but it also opened the door for a lot of people to follow.”
Toure: “Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, he was so huge that MTV couldn’t ignore him. And then after that, you had a lot more black artists on the channel. I mean there is tremendous, Jackie Robinson almost, you know, barrier-breaking that happened.”
‘Thriller’ also broke ground in other ways, selling tens of millions of copies, making it perhaps the best selling album of all time.
It won eight Grammy awards, and won Jackson a huge endorsement deal to promote Pepsi.
Director Bob Giraldi says shooting the big budget TV commercial was thrilling — for all the wrong reasons, beginning with an off camera scream.
“‘Ahhhh!’ We realized the scream was from Michael,” says Giraldi. “And everybody looks at, my God, somebody shot him, captured him, kidnapped him. And we followed the scream and it comes from the bathroom. We go into the bathroom, fling open the door and he’s standing in front of the toilet. Pointing, ‘Aaahh. Get it! Get it!’”
Floating in the bowl was Michael’s signature sequined glove.
“Thank God for a prop guy who was nearby, who got a hanger real quick and came in and got the glove out. Dripping,” says Giraldi. “Took it over here, got the hair dryer out.”
And on the set it only got worse. It was also during the filming of the Pepsi commercial that Jackson suffered a painful injury. It was the last take of the day when a spark from the pyrotechnics ignited Michael’s hair.
“I was looking at him and his hair was ablaze,” says Jermaine Jackson.
“All of a sudden we see Michael — now he’s swatting his head,” says Giraldi.
It’s not every day in Hollywood that your million-dollar star catches fire.
“He come running down the stairs and does one of things and falls flat on the stage,” says Giraldi. “And there lying in a fetal position, is America’s pop icon with a little bit of smoke coming up from his crown of his head. And it was bizarre. It was a macabre portrait.”
How much of a showman is he? Even in the excruciating pain, Michael wouldn’t let the medics take him away without his recently-rescued glove.
“When eventually the ambulance carried him away,” says Giraldi, “he had the foresight to reach down and get that glove, put it on and wave goodbye to the audience. It’s fascinating.”
This video was the lead story on almost every news broadcast.
“I can tell you when ‘Thriller’ sales really increased was after I put Michael’s hair on fire,” says Girlaldi.
Sales increased enough for Thriller to go platinum 26 times. Today those platinum albums line the walls of the Jackson family home in Los Angeles.
And in the 80’s, he surely was the man. He was ready to start making his own decisions. He fired as his manager, the man whose pressure to succeed had denied him a childhood — his father, Joe.
Michael Jackson had made the transformation from child star to adult superstar. But he was about to start another kind of transformation, one that would perplex his fans as much as his music had thrilled them.
Questions of privacy, sexuality
Jackson takes rocky relationship with media to new heights
The year was 1987. The album was “Bad,” and sales were pretty good. But how do you follow “Thriller”? Even Michael Jackson couldn’t do that.
“I REMEMBER with ‘Bad’ it started to turn because suddenly he did not produce a perfect album, which he’d been doing,” says Toure. “‘Off the Wall’ is a perfect album, and ‘Thriller’ was unbelievable. But ‘Bad’ was the first time that he was not King Midas. So that was the beginning of, ‘Oh, okay. He’s not infallible.’
Jackson, clad in leather and snarling at the camera, and sporting what appeared to be still an after-market cleft on his chin, seemed to be reaching for a new image.
But he was reaching for something else, too. That was also the year Jackson began, well, touching himself, for lack of a better phrase.
And for a while, he seemed dedicated to setting new standards for public weirdness. One year, he arrived for the Grammys with not one, but two stars on his arm, six-foot-tall Brooke Shields and three-foot-four Emmanuel Lewis, star of the television show “Webster.”
“He was already, what mid-20s, and there was no sexual energy whatsoever,” says Toure. “It was totally unclear. Is he straight or gay?”
In that odd threesome, music writer Toure sees signs of a confused sexual identity. But was Jackson himself confused, or was he just trying to confuse us?
Toure: “And to this day, the evidence seems asexual, really. So, you know, what are you doing? Like what, I mean, you gotta have sexual urges. Everybody has sexual urges.”
Mankiewicz: “And eventually that asexuality, as you put it, would have caught up with him?”
Toure: “I think people would continue to go, ‘Well, you know, what’s the deal?’ I mean, show up with somebody, you know? But we know you’re not touching Brooke Shields. And then there’s Emmanuel Lewis on the other side. Now you’re making us really nervous but like, you know, who are you with?”
“Around that time, 1983, at the peak of his fame, some strange things started to happen,” says Nick Maier, the editor of “Freak: Inside the Twisted World of Michael Jackson,” published by the creative team behind the National Enquirer. “I like Bubbles.”
Bubbles is a chimp, the pet with whom Jackson spent so much quality time.
“I think that’s my favorite,” says Maier. “I think that him dressing the chimp up to look exactly like him, holding his hand, serving Bubbles high tea, changing its diapers, loving it, cuddling it, that’s probably my favorite.”
Talk to Michael Jackson’s defenders and you hear accusations that the press, particularly the tabloid press, has gone to war against him, that stories about him are made up because they sell newspapers.
His video “Leave Me Alone” is a plea for privacy. But was he being honest with us?
It turns out that Michael Jackson’s strange image wasn’t something that was done to him. It was something he did to himself. A performer with a keen sense of showmanship, Jackson decided to craft his own tabloid image, feeding the stories about him, like a fire fed by pure oxygen.
On Sept. 19, 1986, the National Enquirer carried this story: Michael Jackson had begun sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that might allow him to live to the age of 150. The mainstream press picked it up because it was such a great story. The only problem was that it never really happened.
“Well, the true story behind the 1986 photo of Michael Jackson sleeping in the hyperbaric chamber is Michael Jackson’s press representative called the National Enquirer, asked us to meet him, and gave us a Polaroid of Michael Jackson laying in a hyperbaric chamber,” says Maier.
Jackson had planted the story, and Jackson’s public-relations team insisted that the Enquirer use the word ‘bizarre’ to describe Jackson. But that was truly a double-edged sword. It gave Jackson the edgy image he craved, but it also whet the appetite of a tabloid press that needed a weekly dose of something lurid.
Mankiewicz: “How much damage did he do to himself by deliberately putting out stories about how eccentric he was?”
Toure: “It was working fine for him in the ’80s when there was great music and great videos to go along with it. It heightened the perception that, ‘Here’s a genius artist.’ You know, he’s weird, geniuses are supposed to be weird. So that’s fine. In the ’90s, when the music’s not so good—”
Mankiewicz: “All that was left was the eccentricity.”
Toure: “Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, you let it go, ‘cause he was so good. You know that thing that we do as Americans, that quality sort of washes away, you know the badness, the wack stuff that you do. So I don’t think we were that concerned when we first heard about the llama. ‘Okay, well you know he’s a genius.’ So, thus you get to be eccentric.”
Jackson had read a biography of P.T. Barnum and had decided that he wanted to be known as a showman without peer. It worked, but it was also the beginning of a regular practice of deceiving his public by manipulating the press.
“Many celebrities try to create a buzz around themselves,” says Maier. “And Michael Jackson did exactly that. In the end, that backfired; his bizarre behavior became less of a joke and something much more serious once the pedophilia crisis hit.”
Creation of real-life ‘Neverland’
Jackson opens door to passion for childhood and children
It was 1988, and Michael Jackson was probably the biggest and perhaps the richest star in the music world. He had it all: fame, money and success. So you might find it odd that at age 30, Jackson was just doing something that most people do at a much younger age: He moved out of his parents’ home in suburban Los Angeles, out of the bedroom he’d had since he was a child.
FOR $17 MILLION, he bought a ranch outside Santa Barbara and re-named it Neverland, after the mythical home of the forever-young Peter Pan.
“By going to Neverland, no matter how serious a person is you feel like a kid,” says Brian Stoller, a Jackson friend who has spent time at what became Michael Jackson’s fixer-upper. “And you love it, you know, because you can just play. And there’s like games. And there’s trains. And there’s films and there’s the amusement park and all that. And what Michael is doing, is he’s living his childhood in a sense.”
But if Neverland provided the very private Jackson with solitude, it was also the perfect place to indulge his passion for children.
“Neverland is part and parcel of his fascination with everything childish,” says Maier.
And as a backyard video shows, Jackson has set out to prove that if you have money, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood — and to make sure a lot of other kids are able to enjoy theirs.
He regularly opens his doors and his checkbook to all manner of children, some of them sick, all of them apparently delighted to visit this mansion-turned-amusement park, presided over by the world’s most famous man-child.
“No one writes about the generosity, for instance, the millions that he probably gave away to charities,” according to Uri Geller, who says he’s been friends with Michael Jackson for five years. The singer was best man as Geller renewed his wedding vows. Geller said we could identify him as an author-paranormalist.
But you’ll remember Geller as the guy who could bend spoons and keys with his mind back in the 1970’s and who lately has been bending America’s ear about how his pal Michael Jackson is getting the shaft.
“There is almost some kind of a vendetta against Michael Jackson by the press,” says Geller. “Have you seen a positive story about him in the last 15 years? I haven’t. I write stories about him for newspapers and they are positive. But you won’t find them on the front page of the New York Post or the Daily News or the Observer here in England or the Times.”
And as for the idea that Jackson cultivated his oddball image and is now paying for it...
“A lot of people will say that he’s driving the negative press, but that’s not true,” says Geller.
“Because every time they report something new about Michael Jackson they bring in the child molestation lines. He is— he was never convicted of a crime, for goodness sake. But they bring that up. They sting him again.”
He’s talking about reporters like Nick Maier.
“Here’s someone that’s put children above all else,” says Maier. “No one helps children like Michael Jackson. And maybe that fascination with children has a dark side. That’s what the public has seen and that’s what he’s never been able to shake. Maybe this guy has a unnatural fascination with children.”
Was there more to Michael Jackson’s interest in children than just the actions of a big kid with a big heart? His best friends seemed to be 13-year-old boys. They accompanied the singer on tour, often traveling around the world. Were the rest of us too suspicious, or were we not suspicious enough?
“Why does he have little boys around him all the time?” says Toure. “Like this was already making America uncomfortable.”
Music writer Toure points to Jackson’s surrounding himself with other people’s children, which began in the mid-80’s, as one of the first signs that the singer, who had always seemed to know exactly what his audience wanted, either no longer did, or no longer cared.
“This is a person who has lived in a bubble for most of his life,” says Toure. “You know, I mean he lives on a gigantic ranch. Barely anybody comes to see him.
“You know he’s pretty much estranged from the world. So you start to lose sense of what is going to be acceptable and what is appropriate. I mean, just the entire relationships with children, this is inappropriate. Why is a 30-year-old having a sleepover with a six-year-old? What could you possibly be talking about?”
As the 90’s dawned, he couldn’t have been more popular. But his fall would be every bit as startling as his rise.
Michael Jackson Unmasked
Jan. 17 — He’s spent a lifetime in the public eye, making and selling his music. But lately, Michael Jackson has turned to the media for a different reason: to battle allegations of bizarre, even dangerous, behavior. With someone as mercurial as Michael Jackson, it’s hard to know where the truth lies. Clearly, the glow of his celebrity and the depth of his pockets attract opportunists. For months now, “Dateline” has been investigating the life of Michael Jackson. In this story, you’ll hear from people who know the story behind his plastic surgery, and those highly-publicized 1993 allegations of child sex abuse — the stories you haven’t heard and the Michael Jackson you don’t know. Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz has this “Dateline” exclusive.
EVERYTHING MICHAEL JACKSON does and just about anything he says becomes instantly controversial.
You may have seen Michael Jackson look into a TV camera and try to give the record of his life a new spin. You think he’s had too many plastic surgeries? He admits to only two. You think he’s deliberately whitened his skin? He says it’s a skin condition. You think there’s something wrong about sharing his bed with boys young enough to be his children? He doesn’t — and he says, there’s nothing sexual about his love for kids.
Is he telling the truth about any of that? “Dateline” spoke to a doctor who witnessed many of Jackson’s visits to his plastic surgeon, to a friend who’s worried about the toll surgery has taken on the singer, and for the first time, a police detective who personally investigated the allegations of sexual molestation — and who is speaking out, on the record, for the first time, with details of the investigation that threatened a show business legend.
Once, he ruled the world of music. And he didn’t just rule it, he transformed it. He was the Sinatra of his day, singing and dancing, while composing hit after hit.
But he was also the Elvis of his time, doing things with his body that defied the laws of motion. Blending Sinatra’s cool and Elvis’ heat, Michael Jackson was a showman so talented, so fluent in the language of entertainment, it seemed there was no audience he could not dazzle.
Today, it’s hard to believe the adorable boy who won our hearts has turned himself into someone who looks so different. A surgery designed to resolve a medical problem may now have become a dangerous obsession. It turned a national icon into a national punch line.
“NBC’s ‘Dateline’ is going to do an entire show on Michael Jackson’s face,” Jay Leno said in a recent monologue. “And Michael Jackson is furious, he is so upset, he’s so mad about this, in fact today he was so mad he ordered his plastic surgeon to put an angry look on his face.”
So what happened to Michael Jackson?
Almost a decade ago, at the height of his success, Jackson unveiled his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But just days ago, a much smaller gathering of his beloved fans met at that same spot.
This time, they were holding a candlelight vigil to show their support because, they said, they were afraid, in light of recent events, that their beloved singer might take his own life.
It has been a tough few weeks for Jackson, especially when you consider that just about everything that’s happened to him, has been his own doing.
To understand how far Michael Jackson has fallen, you need to understand how high he flew. For more than 30 years, his has been a steady rise to the top of the music world, stopping only long enough to pick up a pile of awards, a mountain of cash, and a swarm of fans.
He was a child star who had everything except a childhood, a kid from Indiana who made it bigger in Hollywood than anyone could have imagined, a sensation from almost the first time he sang into a microphone.
Brothers Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, and Marlon vibed 70’s funk in those day-glo colors, but the frontman of the Jackson Five was the family’s seventh child. And although it was Michael the public came to see, the fuel behind this stage family was someone audiences never saw, a frustrated musician named Joseph Jackson, a father who spotted the glint of talent in his children and pushed them hard to polish it.
“He was the driving force behind getting us together, and I guess getting us to rehearse, and my mother showed us the love and I guess she gave us our voices really,” said Michael’s older brother, Jermaine, speaking last year to a British documentary crew. “My father was very, very strict. He was just one of those dads who wanted things to be right.”
“It did feel, in many respects, I think, that the kids felt that he was managing them and not really parenting them,” says J. Randy Taraborrelli, who wrote a biography of Michael Jackson. It is definitely unauthorized, but Taraborrelli has interviewed Jackson a dozen times.
Taraborrelli: “Things began to change for the Jacksons when Joseph decided that these kids were going to begin to toe the line and have to rehearse and be disciplined.”
Mankiewicz: “And rehearsing didn’t mean once a week.”
Taraborrelli: “No, they were rehearsing all the time, every day.”
Michael Jackson has said his father was more than just tough, that he beat young Michael. His father denies that and says whatever he did, it was with the aim of getting his family out of Gary, Ind., out of the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house where Joe and Catherine Jackson raised their nine children.
“It was a close-knit family,” says Taraborrelli. “All they had, really, was each other.”
Michael was five when the group played their first paying gig at Mr. Lucky’s Lounge, where the pay was about $7.
But Joe Jackson’s dreams were bigger than that. And so the Jackson Five went to school during the day, then worked into the night, wherever they could. The closest thing they had to a hit was a song called “Big Boy.”
The family got three cents for every record sold, and promoting it was anything but glamorous. By his sixth birthday, Michael Jackson had performed to “Big Boy” in front of the audience at a number of strip clubs.
The Jacksons spent their boyhood and their adolescence in front of a microphone. And according to musician Bobby Taylor, who wrote and produced some of their early hits, that hurt one Jackson more than the others.
“The other boys got their childhood,” says Taylor. “Michael didn’t. He was never able to be that little kid.”
That would have an effect on Michael for years to come.
“I remember once we were out in Indiana where he was born,” says his former publicist, Lee Solters. “And we were in a limousine. And he was looking out on the fields. And he said, ‘You know, I was born here. I never had a childhood.’”
But when you’re a star about to burn more brightly than the rest...
“Sometimes there are things in life that you have to sacrifice to accomplish certain things at certain levels,” says Jermaine Jackson. “I guess the fact that he didn’t have a childhood is why he’s so great at what he does.”
Joe Jackson thought his sons were ready. So he turned to Bobby Taylor, who was impressed with little Michael.
“And he was singing like James Brown,” says Taylor. “And I’m saying, ‘This kid,’ I said, ‘How old is that little sucker out there?’”
He helped the group make a videotape audition, and sent it to Motown Records head Berry Gordy.
“I called Berry Gordy and I said, ‘Listen, man, we’ve got somebody better than The Beatles.’ I said, ‘This kid is gonna knock your socks off,’” says Taylor.
Gordy was looking for new acts. However, child acts could be hard to book and even harder to control. But Gordy stopped worrying about that after he saw the Jackson Five in their videotaped audition.
“Soon as he saw Michael Jackson with that voice, he realized that it was worth the investment,” says Taraborrelli.
With the stroke of a pen, Michael Jackson was headed for the big time. At the age of 10, the little boy from Gary, along with his brothers, had just signed a contract with one of the biggest record labels in the business.
A childhood left behind
The Jackson Five begins Michael’s launch to stardom
Michael Jackson was a musical prodigy. By the age of 10, he was already overshadowing his older brothers in the Jackson Five and had the full attention of Motown. But it hadn’t been easy. It took endless rehearsing and late nights playing any gig the group could get, even at strip clubs. Now Michael Jackson’s career was about to take off, leaving any chance at a childhood far behind.
THE JACKSON FIVE had arrived in more than one way. They had a Motown makeover and made their first national TV appearance on an episode of The Hollywood Palace TV show. Michael was 11.
But in the 1960’s in America, you didn’t really arrive until you did the Ed Sullivan Show — which they did on Dec. 14, 1969.
“And these boys found out they were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, they rose to the occasion,” says Taraborrelli. “It was such an amazing performance, an amazing unit of talent. And there was no way that they weren’t going to be huge. There was just no way.”
That first single “I Want You Back” shot to the top of the charts. Jackson mania had been launched.
They began appearing regularly on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere. There were product endorsements, a Saturday morning cartoon, their own TV variety show, and Michael was the center of attention.
At 14, on The Dating Game, three lucky girls competed for him.
Had Michael Jackson found success or had it found him? Either way, what passed for his childhood was over. From obscurity to Hollywood to the Jackson Five, not only had the stardom Joe Jackson had envisioned for his sons become reality, but as huge a phenomenon as Michael Jackson was, he was about to become even bigger.
“I remember Michael back then saying, ‘I just wanna record my own music. I just wanna try to write songs. I just wanna think that maybe I can produce. You know? I think I have it in me but I’m not really sure.’ He wasn’t so bold as to think he was going to be the greatest artist of all time,” says Taraborrelli. “He just wanted to have a chance, he just wanted a shot.”
He would get his shot, but with stardom would come the first signs of trouble, signs that Michael Jackson didn’t really like being Michael Jackson, and the public’s first glimpse of the odd, self-destructive behavior that would one day become as synonymous to this singer’s image as his music.
The star, the face, the fire
Michael Jackson makes some changes, accident on set
It was with the song “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough,” and the 1979 release of Jackson’s first solo album “Off The Wall,” that his fans first began to notice that, like his career, Michael Jackson’s face was undergoing some subtle changes. His biographer Randy Taraborrelli says Jackson had plastic surgery on his nose for the first time, for a good reason.
“HE HAD THE first nose job as a result of falling on stage and breaking his nose when he was about 19,” says Taraborrelli. “And so it wasn’t for, you know, a vanity purpose. It was a medical procedure.”
Mankiewicz: “But he decided he liked it.”
Taraborrelli: “Guess he liked it, yeah.”
Whether you’re male or female, cosmetic surgery is practically a rite of passage in show business. But at the time he started having plastic surgery, Jackson was no rookie looking for a big break, which makes his decision a little harder to understand.
Taraborrelli: “You know, this is a person that we grew up with.”
Mankiewicz: “And he wasn’t a bad looking guy.”
Taraborrelli: “No, he was a cute kid.”
Mankiewicz: “But he didn’t perceive it that way?”
Taraborrelli: “There’s just something about this theory that I think might be true. And that is that Michael had such an acrimonious relationship with his father, Joseph. All of the kids in the family grew up to kind of resemble Joseph. And in the beginning, some of the plastic surgery was to sort of erase his father’s image from the man in the mirror... And I think that when Michael looked at the man in the mirror and saw Joseph sort of emerging, that on some level he just wanted to eradicate that.”
But there are other theories as well, some that suggest Jackson’s surgeries are driven more by vanity than by anything else. He hated his adolescent acne, and musician and family friend Bobby Taylor recalls how young Michael’s nose was often the center of family attention.
“Michael, he hated his nose,” says Taylor. “We would play basketball and we would team up and say, ‘Michael, man, you can’t play. Your nose is too big. It’s gonna get in the way.’”
But did those childhood jokes set the stage for a lifetime of surgery? Does Jackson suffer from a little-known anxiety-related disorder?
“Just an offhand comment, somebody being mean, saying, you know, you got a big nose, that person can internalize that comment and believe that about themselves,” says Karen Pickett, a therapist who specializes in treating patients with body dysmorphic disorder. It’s sometimes called the ugliness syndrome, in which otherwise healthy, attractive people go through repeated cosmetic procedures with the aim of trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
“And because it’s so painful for them to hear that comment, then they will do anything to change what they believe to be this flaw, this big nose,” says Pickett.
Professionally at least, Jackson had few flaws to worry about. His next album would make music history.
“Thriller” was released the first of December, 1982. Nearly every song, nearly every video was a hit. And it was no accident. Michael Jackson saw it coming.
“Michael would put it in his mind that he wanted that album to be the greatest album of all time,” says brother Jermaine. “He would write it on a mirror that he wanted the greatest-selling album. It was on a mirror in this home right here. He wanted to be the biggest entertainer of all time and have the best-selling album of all time.”
With “Thriller,” he was, and he did.
What made Michael Jackson the standout star? His voice? His dancing ability?
“He’s everything,” says Toure, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone Magazine. “He’s got a fantastic voice, powerful, clear, clean, with a wonderful tone to it. He can dance. He can write. And he also had the ability to change... And the first thing that you have to remember with ‘Thriller,’ is before ‘Thriller,’ MTV was not playing black artists at all. ‘Thriller’ is the first time that they start to play black artists. So this is a huge benchmark in the history of modern American music, that finally the apartheid system ends.”
Mankiewicz: “So ‘Thriller’ not only made him the biggest musical star in the world, but it also opened the door for a lot of people to follow.”
Toure: “Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, he was so huge that MTV couldn’t ignore him. And then after that, you had a lot more black artists on the channel. I mean there is tremendous, Jackie Robinson almost, you know, barrier-breaking that happened.”
‘Thriller’ also broke ground in other ways, selling tens of millions of copies, making it perhaps the best selling album of all time.
It won eight Grammy awards, and won Jackson a huge endorsement deal to promote Pepsi.
Director Bob Giraldi says shooting the big budget TV commercial was thrilling — for all the wrong reasons, beginning with an off camera scream.
“‘Ahhhh!’ We realized the scream was from Michael,” says Giraldi. “And everybody looks at, my God, somebody shot him, captured him, kidnapped him. And we followed the scream and it comes from the bathroom. We go into the bathroom, fling open the door and he’s standing in front of the toilet. Pointing, ‘Aaahh. Get it! Get it!’”
Floating in the bowl was Michael’s signature sequined glove.
“Thank God for a prop guy who was nearby, who got a hanger real quick and came in and got the glove out. Dripping,” says Giraldi. “Took it over here, got the hair dryer out.”
And on the set it only got worse. It was also during the filming of the Pepsi commercial that Jackson suffered a painful injury. It was the last take of the day when a spark from the pyrotechnics ignited Michael’s hair.
“I was looking at him and his hair was ablaze,” says Jermaine Jackson.
“All of a sudden we see Michael — now he’s swatting his head,” says Giraldi.
It’s not every day in Hollywood that your million-dollar star catches fire.
“He come running down the stairs and does one of things and falls flat on the stage,” says Giraldi. “And there lying in a fetal position, is America’s pop icon with a little bit of smoke coming up from his crown of his head. And it was bizarre. It was a macabre portrait.”
How much of a showman is he? Even in the excruciating pain, Michael wouldn’t let the medics take him away without his recently-rescued glove.
“When eventually the ambulance carried him away,” says Giraldi, “he had the foresight to reach down and get that glove, put it on and wave goodbye to the audience. It’s fascinating.”
This video was the lead story on almost every news broadcast.
“I can tell you when ‘Thriller’ sales really increased was after I put Michael’s hair on fire,” says Girlaldi.
Sales increased enough for Thriller to go platinum 26 times. Today those platinum albums line the walls of the Jackson family home in Los Angeles.
And in the 80’s, he surely was the man. He was ready to start making his own decisions. He fired as his manager, the man whose pressure to succeed had denied him a childhood — his father, Joe.
Michael Jackson had made the transformation from child star to adult superstar. But he was about to start another kind of transformation, one that would perplex his fans as much as his music had thrilled them.
Questions of privacy, sexuality
Jackson takes rocky relationship with media to new heights
The year was 1987. The album was “Bad,” and sales were pretty good. But how do you follow “Thriller”? Even Michael Jackson couldn’t do that.
“I REMEMBER with ‘Bad’ it started to turn because suddenly he did not produce a perfect album, which he’d been doing,” says Toure. “‘Off the Wall’ is a perfect album, and ‘Thriller’ was unbelievable. But ‘Bad’ was the first time that he was not King Midas. So that was the beginning of, ‘Oh, okay. He’s not infallible.’
Jackson, clad in leather and snarling at the camera, and sporting what appeared to be still an after-market cleft on his chin, seemed to be reaching for a new image.
But he was reaching for something else, too. That was also the year Jackson began, well, touching himself, for lack of a better phrase.
And for a while, he seemed dedicated to setting new standards for public weirdness. One year, he arrived for the Grammys with not one, but two stars on his arm, six-foot-tall Brooke Shields and three-foot-four Emmanuel Lewis, star of the television show “Webster.”
“He was already, what mid-20s, and there was no sexual energy whatsoever,” says Toure. “It was totally unclear. Is he straight or gay?”
In that odd threesome, music writer Toure sees signs of a confused sexual identity. But was Jackson himself confused, or was he just trying to confuse us?
Toure: “And to this day, the evidence seems asexual, really. So, you know, what are you doing? Like what, I mean, you gotta have sexual urges. Everybody has sexual urges.”
Mankiewicz: “And eventually that asexuality, as you put it, would have caught up with him?”
Toure: “I think people would continue to go, ‘Well, you know, what’s the deal?’ I mean, show up with somebody, you know? But we know you’re not touching Brooke Shields. And then there’s Emmanuel Lewis on the other side. Now you’re making us really nervous but like, you know, who are you with?”
“Around that time, 1983, at the peak of his fame, some strange things started to happen,” says Nick Maier, the editor of “Freak: Inside the Twisted World of Michael Jackson,” published by the creative team behind the National Enquirer. “I like Bubbles.”
Bubbles is a chimp, the pet with whom Jackson spent so much quality time.
“I think that’s my favorite,” says Maier. “I think that him dressing the chimp up to look exactly like him, holding his hand, serving Bubbles high tea, changing its diapers, loving it, cuddling it, that’s probably my favorite.”
Talk to Michael Jackson’s defenders and you hear accusations that the press, particularly the tabloid press, has gone to war against him, that stories about him are made up because they sell newspapers.
His video “Leave Me Alone” is a plea for privacy. But was he being honest with us?
It turns out that Michael Jackson’s strange image wasn’t something that was done to him. It was something he did to himself. A performer with a keen sense of showmanship, Jackson decided to craft his own tabloid image, feeding the stories about him, like a fire fed by pure oxygen.
On Sept. 19, 1986, the National Enquirer carried this story: Michael Jackson had begun sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that might allow him to live to the age of 150. The mainstream press picked it up because it was such a great story. The only problem was that it never really happened.
“Well, the true story behind the 1986 photo of Michael Jackson sleeping in the hyperbaric chamber is Michael Jackson’s press representative called the National Enquirer, asked us to meet him, and gave us a Polaroid of Michael Jackson laying in a hyperbaric chamber,” says Maier.
Jackson had planted the story, and Jackson’s public-relations team insisted that the Enquirer use the word ‘bizarre’ to describe Jackson. But that was truly a double-edged sword. It gave Jackson the edgy image he craved, but it also whet the appetite of a tabloid press that needed a weekly dose of something lurid.
Mankiewicz: “How much damage did he do to himself by deliberately putting out stories about how eccentric he was?”
Toure: “It was working fine for him in the ’80s when there was great music and great videos to go along with it. It heightened the perception that, ‘Here’s a genius artist.’ You know, he’s weird, geniuses are supposed to be weird. So that’s fine. In the ’90s, when the music’s not so good—”
Mankiewicz: “All that was left was the eccentricity.”
Toure: “Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, you let it go, ‘cause he was so good. You know that thing that we do as Americans, that quality sort of washes away, you know the badness, the wack stuff that you do. So I don’t think we were that concerned when we first heard about the llama. ‘Okay, well you know he’s a genius.’ So, thus you get to be eccentric.”
Jackson had read a biography of P.T. Barnum and had decided that he wanted to be known as a showman without peer. It worked, but it was also the beginning of a regular practice of deceiving his public by manipulating the press.
“Many celebrities try to create a buzz around themselves,” says Maier. “And Michael Jackson did exactly that. In the end, that backfired; his bizarre behavior became less of a joke and something much more serious once the pedophilia crisis hit.”
Creation of real-life ‘Neverland’
Jackson opens door to passion for childhood and children
It was 1988, and Michael Jackson was probably the biggest and perhaps the richest star in the music world. He had it all: fame, money and success. So you might find it odd that at age 30, Jackson was just doing something that most people do at a much younger age: He moved out of his parents’ home in suburban Los Angeles, out of the bedroom he’d had since he was a child.
FOR $17 MILLION, he bought a ranch outside Santa Barbara and re-named it Neverland, after the mythical home of the forever-young Peter Pan.
“By going to Neverland, no matter how serious a person is you feel like a kid,” says Brian Stoller, a Jackson friend who has spent time at what became Michael Jackson’s fixer-upper. “And you love it, you know, because you can just play. And there’s like games. And there’s trains. And there’s films and there’s the amusement park and all that. And what Michael is doing, is he’s living his childhood in a sense.”
But if Neverland provided the very private Jackson with solitude, it was also the perfect place to indulge his passion for children.
“Neverland is part and parcel of his fascination with everything childish,” says Maier.
And as a backyard video shows, Jackson has set out to prove that if you have money, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood — and to make sure a lot of other kids are able to enjoy theirs.
He regularly opens his doors and his checkbook to all manner of children, some of them sick, all of them apparently delighted to visit this mansion-turned-amusement park, presided over by the world’s most famous man-child.
“No one writes about the generosity, for instance, the millions that he probably gave away to charities,” according to Uri Geller, who says he’s been friends with Michael Jackson for five years. The singer was best man as Geller renewed his wedding vows. Geller said we could identify him as an author-paranormalist.
But you’ll remember Geller as the guy who could bend spoons and keys with his mind back in the 1970’s and who lately has been bending America’s ear about how his pal Michael Jackson is getting the shaft.
“There is almost some kind of a vendetta against Michael Jackson by the press,” says Geller. “Have you seen a positive story about him in the last 15 years? I haven’t. I write stories about him for newspapers and they are positive. But you won’t find them on the front page of the New York Post or the Daily News or the Observer here in England or the Times.”
And as for the idea that Jackson cultivated his oddball image and is now paying for it...
“A lot of people will say that he’s driving the negative press, but that’s not true,” says Geller.
“Because every time they report something new about Michael Jackson they bring in the child molestation lines. He is— he was never convicted of a crime, for goodness sake. But they bring that up. They sting him again.”
He’s talking about reporters like Nick Maier.
“Here’s someone that’s put children above all else,” says Maier. “No one helps children like Michael Jackson. And maybe that fascination with children has a dark side. That’s what the public has seen and that’s what he’s never been able to shake. Maybe this guy has a unnatural fascination with children.”
Was there more to Michael Jackson’s interest in children than just the actions of a big kid with a big heart? His best friends seemed to be 13-year-old boys. They accompanied the singer on tour, often traveling around the world. Were the rest of us too suspicious, or were we not suspicious enough?
“Why does he have little boys around him all the time?” says Toure. “Like this was already making America uncomfortable.”
Music writer Toure points to Jackson’s surrounding himself with other people’s children, which began in the mid-80’s, as one of the first signs that the singer, who had always seemed to know exactly what his audience wanted, either no longer did, or no longer cared.
“This is a person who has lived in a bubble for most of his life,” says Toure. “You know, I mean he lives on a gigantic ranch. Barely anybody comes to see him.
“You know he’s pretty much estranged from the world. So you start to lose sense of what is going to be acceptable and what is appropriate. I mean, just the entire relationships with children, this is inappropriate. Why is a 30-year-old having a sleepover with a six-year-old? What could you possibly be talking about?”
As the 90’s dawned, he couldn’t have been more popular. But his fall would be every bit as startling as his rise.
I just wish it had been something positive... people seem to love attacking people they don't like better than praising people they like... sad but true