Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (10 page)

At this point in her career, Charming no longer looked as she did when she
played Lorelei Lee in the original Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on stage in 1949,
the 1953 movie role going to the sexier Marilyn Monroe.

"Ugh!" Michael reportedly said when viewing the aging Channing's fallen breasts. "That's disgusting."

A writer for Rolling Stone later jokingly said, "The sight of Carol
Charming in the nude turned Michael off women for life."

Like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, like Elvis Presley, like John
Lennon and the other Beatles, the Jackson brothers took advantage of their sex
appeal in whatever city they were appearing. Female groupies followed the
Jackson brothers back to their hotel suites where all the brothers, except
Michael, enjoyed their sexual favors. "I was first seduced by the father, Joe
Jackson," confessed Petula Robin, "in Philadelphia. He introduced me to both
Jermaine and Jackie, and they seduced me too. I met Michael but seducing
him was out of the question. I heard he didn't like girls all that much, and he
was far too young."

In some respects, the brothers used their father as a role model. Away from
Katherine, Joe reportedly slept with some of the more attractive Jackson
groupies, both white and black, as if he were one of the performers himself.
Perry Elkins, a stage manager in Milwaukee, claimed that "Joe used his sons as bait - in other words, `you sleep
with me and I'll fix you up with
Jermaine or Jackie,"' or whichever
brother they fancied. "At his young
age, Michael was off-limits," Elkins
claimed. "One night I heard Michael
lecturing his brothers that they were
violating the tenets of their religion as
Jehovah's Witnesses. If I recall, Jackie,
or maybe it was Jermaine, just laughed
Michael off. Except for Michael, I
never knew one Jackson brother from
the other."

The Jackson children

It appears that Jermaine, from the
age of 15 or 16, seduced far more girls
and women than even his promiscuous
brother, Jackie. "Jackie would have his
pick of the girls," Elton Jenkins, who
once worked for Motown in Los
Angeles, claimed. "He'd pick out the
most beautiful and bring her back to
his hotel room. But Jermaine would
top him. On any given night, he'd line up at least three girls - one for midnight, one for one o'clock, and one for two o'clock."

Since Michael often shared a room with Jermaine, he would watch his
older brother in action. Jermaine may have been deliberately showing off his
sexual prowess to his younger brother. "I think it was part of that sibling rivalry Gordy was always talking about," Jenkins said. "Jermaine might have been
trying to show Michael that although his kid brother was the star on stage, in
the boudoir, Jermaine was the king."

Adele Ferguson, a secretary who lived in Tampa at the time, claimed that
Jermaine was the greatest lover she'd ever experienced "before or since. He
must have read the Kama Sutra from cover to cover. In one night he taught me
sexual positions I'd never heard of. Until Jermaine, my boyfriends had been
the missionary position types. While Jermaine and I were going at it, I just
knew that Michael, with his saucer-wide eyes, was taking in all the action. In
some ways, it made it more exciting for me to know that we were educating
the kid about how to do it. After that night with Jermaine, my husband never
really satisfied me. What a lover Jermaine was!"

Jermaine and Michael joined their other brothers on April 18, 1971 to
appear on Diana! a TV special featuring Diana Ross. The highlight of the show was when Michael, only 12 years old at the
time, came out to do his impression of Frank Sinatra
in a tuxedo with a raincoat slung over his shoulder.
Like Blue Eyes himself, Michael wore the characteristic Sinatra brown fedora, tilted at a rakish angle.
Michael parodied "It Was a Very Good Year."

Carol Channing

After the song, Diana, a vision in a metallic
silver lame gown, and Michael presented a skit in
which he played her lover who was leaving her.

In a hotel suite, Sinatra watched the skit in
disgust. One of his henchmen reported that the singer
was so outraged by Michael's imitation, that he took
a bottle of bourbon and tossed it at the TV screen. "If
I ever catch up with that little fag, I'll break his legs,"
Sinatra shouted. "No, not that! I'll hire two guys
from Jersey to do it for me."

In addition to their career bursting into full
bloom, the Jackson brothers experienced another
milestone in 1971. They moved into a mansion at
4641 Hayvenhurst in affluent Encino, California, a property Joe had purchased for a quarter of a million dollars. Their Encino neighbors included such
celebrities as Mike Connors, Dick Van Dyke, Dennis Weaver, and, Michael's
favorite, "Soul Sister" Aretha Franklin.

On beautifully landscaped two-acre grounds, studded with orange and
lemon trees, the estate contained six bedrooms, which meant that the Jackson
siblings would have to double up.

Katherine herself made the room assignments, saving the master bedroom
for Joe and herself. Michael's younger brother, Randy, became Michael's
new roommate. La Toya and Janet shared a room, as did Marlon and Jermaine,
and so it went. "For me, it would become an Alcatraz instead of a real home,"
La Toya was quoted as saying later in life when she fled Encino.

In the beginning, Michael was enchanted with the property, which included an Olympic-size swimming pool. He would live for years at Encino until
there were too many eyes spying on his increasingly secret private life.

"I once delivered some demos to the Jackson family," Motown's Elton
Jenkins claimed. "I must have arrived after a free-for-all. There was evidence
of violence. I got out of there as soon as I could. That Joe Jackson had some
temper. I didn't want to become a victim. As the years went by and more and
more scandals were revealed, I came to realize that the address in Encino
housed America's most dysfunctional family."

"Only in America can you be born a black man and end up a
white woman. "

--Truman Capote

"I would kill myself if I couldn't be close to young boys."

--Michael Jackson

"You can't say somebody's guilty of a crime when you have no
evidence to prove it...I hate the media for what they do to
Michael, I do hate them."

--Whitney Houston

"He wasn't at all sure that he could make it on his own. And
me too. I had my doubts. "

--Quincy Jones before Off the Wall

"Michael Jackson is like a skyscraper built on eggshells. "

--Former CBS Records executive
(name withheld)

"He had a real intensity... People take him for a simpleton with
a head full of silly songs, but he's a complex young man, curious about everything, who wants to go further and further. He
behaves like an adolescent and, at the same time, like a wise
old philosopher. "

--Quincy Jones

"Michael would rather cut his wrist than harm a child. "

--Elizabeth Taylor

Michael would spend the rest of his life fretting over and eventually altering his appearance. His obsession with his looks began in 1971 when he broke
out with "history's worst case of acne." At the same time, his body shot skyward. No longer was he mistaken for a midget.

"My years as a cute kid were suddenly over," he said. "I was a gangly adolescent at almost five feet ten inches." He spent a good part of the day staring
at his reflection in the mirror. Every night seemed to bring a fresh pimple or
two. "It was like having measles," he later said.

He became even shier around people. Some of the business associates in
the record business Joe introduced Michael to didn't even believe he was who
he said he was, but one of his "uglier brothers." For the first time in his life,
he began to think of himself as "disfigured," and he longed to be beautiful like
Diana Ross. He was all right as long as he was on stage, because heavy coatings of makeup obscured his bad complexion. "At night I lived with my
demons," he said. "I came to hate mirrors as my pimples got worse." He gave
up greasy processed foods such as hamburgers and French fries and began to
consume a healthier diet, concentrating on fresh fruits and vegetables.

In addition to his acne, Michael had to endure the taunts of his brothers,
who, for some reason, had taken to mockingly calling him "Liver Lips" or
"Big Nose."

At the same time, Berry Gordy Jr. was putting pressure on Michael to
make solo recordings. At first Joe opposed it, seemingly not wanting Michael
to be a star on his own. Perhaps Joe thought he'd lose control of his boy if he
broke away from his singing brothers. Berry went so far as to urge Michael to
start rehearsals for an album all his own.

There were some bright moments along the way. In 1971, The Jackson 5
Show, a Saturday morning cartoon film, was launched on network TV. The
brothers recorded the musical numbers for this animated series. Michael later said, "I couldn't wait to wake up on a Saturday morning and see myself in a
fantasy cartoon." He was less enthusiastic when he learned that the entire
group, including himself, was being paid less than $4,000 per episode. With
this series on his own family, Michael began his lifelong fascination with animated motion pictures. He developed a consuming passion for all the commercial products inspired by founding father Walt Disney.

Someone at Motown, the identity of the person not known, showed
Michael a Hollywood newspaper with its "Second Coming" headline: WALT
DISNEY WAS A HOMO. The underground newspaper was published right
before Christmas in 1966, following Disney's death on December 15. Michael
apparently had no immediate reaction, but friends reported that he was almost
in a state of shock, particularly when he read that Disney preferred to seduce
young boys.

Someone suggested that Michael couldn't believe that the one artist
responsible for bringing so much joy to young boys all over the world could
also be capable of molesting them. At this point in his life, Michael could not
have known that the same charges leveled against Disney would one day be
brought against him.

Michael's watching of endless cartoons, his fondness for pets, and his silly
little pranks, such as locking his brothers out of their hotel rooms without their
underwear, were relatively harmless.

Many young performers pursued more dangerous games. At the start of
the 1970s, Michael was often compared to the ill-fated young singer, Frankie
Lymon, nicknamed "The Golden Throat." He was the first black teenage
singing idol, and his success had inspired The Jackson 5 back in Gary.

In the 1950s Lymon was the lead singer for "The Teenagers," a popular
group at the time, scoring such hits as
"Goody, Goody." By the time he was
only thirteen, Lymon could travel anywhere in America and hear his own voice
on the jukebox singing "Why Do Fools
Fall in Love?"

Walt Disney

Michael's adolescent voice in the
early 70s evoked Lymon's soprano
sounds. But their lives would take different turns as Lymon succumbed to drug
addiction. At the age of eighteen, his
career was all but over. In 1968, and only
twenty-five years old, Lymon was found
dead from a heroin overdose in New
York, a syringe by his bed.