Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (19 page)

Tatum had appeared in the 1973 film, Paper Moon, opposite her real-life
father. She stole the picture from him as the tough-talking, cigarette-smoking
orphan. At the age of ten, she became the youngest performer to win an Oscar.
Before her subsequent decline and eventual marriage to tennis player John
McEnroe, she was considered a "hot child actor."

As unbelievable as it sounds, twelve-year-old Tatum called Michael and
asked him out on a date. He accepted. To his surprise, she took him to a dinner in Holmby Hills. It turned out to be within the notorious mansion of Hugh
Hefner, the Playboy publisher. Ryan O'Neal was a frequent visitor to the mansion and a favorite of the "Bunnies," allegedly because of his great skill in the
sack. On their first night together, Tatum and Michael watched part of the TV
mini-series, Roots, by Alex Haley.

Michael was enthralled by Roots, relating his own experiences in Senegal
to Tatum. At one point she became distracted and invited Michael to join her
in Hefner's "hot tub," where male movie stars often cavorted in the nude with
Playboy Bunnies.

When he protested that he didn't have a bathing suit, she called him a
"square," but finally secured one for him from one of Hefner's waiters.

Apparently, a waiter at Hefner's mansion that night tried to sell a story to the National Enquirer that he'd spotted a
"totally nude" Tatum and a "jaybird
naked" Michael fornicating in the hot tub.
The rumor spread like wildfire. One underground paper in Hollywood carried the
headline: TATUM BUSTS MICHAEL'S
CHERRY. Yet another scurrilous rag, skirting the laws of libel, proclaimed that GAY
MICHAEL SAMPLES STRAIGHT SEX
WITH UNDERAGE TEEN STAR.

Ryan O'Neal

Michael later suggested that all Tatum
and he did that night was "look for shooting stars and share our deepest secrets." He
later asked a question of a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times: "Why do people insist
on always finding something dirty in the
most harmless pastimes?"

Tatum left early that night to go home, but Michael was invited to stay on
by Hefner himself. The original Playboy had just emerged from one of the
upstairs boudoirs where he'd been occupied for most of the evening.

"You're a virgin, I hear," Hefner asked Michael as a way of introducing
himself.

Michael blushed but did not directly answer the question. "We've all got
our dark secrets."

"I can introduce you to one of my `Special Ladies' tonight," Hefner
offered. "She will rob you of your virginity forever."

"No thanks," Michael said.

"Come on, boy, live a little," Hefner urged. "I never recommend a
brunette for the job of cherry stealing. A brunette is a type of woman you
marry or at least take for a mistress. For the initial seduction, blondes are preferred, as they are always dangerous and forbidden, whether bottle or natural.
They represent the forbidden sexuality, danger. As for redheads, they are a
mere variation of the blonde. Also, danger. So what will it be: blonde or redhead."

"Mr. Hefner, I'm sure your Bunnies are wonderful," Michael said in a soft
voice. "But at my age, the only Bunny I'm interested in is Bugs Bunny."

"Oh, I get it," Hefner said. "You're gay. Don't worry, I have several handsome waiters here who are most accommodating."

"Excuse me, Mr. Hefner," Michael said, getting up. "But I've got to go. I
really thank you for your hospitality."

Their personalities could not have been more different, but after that night at the Playboy mansion, Michael and Tatum developed an unlikely friendship.

Sassy and precocious, Tatum was the very opposite of Michael. She was
hip whereas he was square. She was cynical, Michael dreamy-eyed. But
nonetheless, Tatum and Michael bonded, perhaps because of the childhood
trauma each had endured. Both had "distant" fathers.

But there were differences: Michael claimed that his mother, Katherine,
was a saint. Tatum's own mother, actress Joanna Moore, was an alcoholic,
drifting in and out of her daughter's life, often destructively.

As their friendship deepened, Tatum poured out her past angst to Michael.
She described how her Darvon-addicted mother once left her and her brother,
Griffin, locked away in a room for hours. "We had no choice but to defecate
on the floor," Tatum said. One time Joanna went away for a weekend, according to Tatum, having locked Tatum and Griffin in a bathroom. "She simply
forgot about us." Once Joanna left them locked in a garage where they had to
eat dog food to survive. Tatum's life with her mother made Christina
Crawford's upbringing with Joan Crawford, as related in the 1981 Mommie
Dearest, seem like a garden party. In her memoirs, A Paper Life, Tatum
claimed that Joanna "was freewheeling with her fists, coming from a generation that was big on beatings."

Oddly enough, both Michael and Tatum had adopted rats as pets. At a
ramshackle ranch where Tatum lived with her mother, Tatum set out food for
the rodents along with water. Her brother, Griffin, and Tatum adopted the rats
as pets and gave them names.

Michael's love for his pet rats ended badly when he came home one day
and saw Father Rat eating his young babies. Tatum's love affair with rodents
ended when her mother's fifteen-year-old boyfriend claimed that rats had
rabies and threw them in a pond "and made us watch them drown," Tatum
claimed. "Since rats can swim, it took a very long time, and it completely
freaked us out. I grieved for days."

With such an unlikely beginning, Michael and Tatum continued this "odd
couple" relationship that he'd repeat with both genders throughout the rest of
the 20th century.

Tatum did admit that she found her long drawn-out conversations with
Michael so boring that she would often hand over the receiver of the phone to
a friend who listened as Michael droned on and on.

She found Michael "incredibly sweet and innocent," surprising, she
admitted for a world-renowned performer. "His usual subject was sex," Tatum
said, although admitting that at the age of twelve, even though worldly for her
years, she didn't have a lot to contribute on the subject, except what she'd
heard coming from her father's bedroom next to hers.

If Tatum is to be believed, the so-called seduction that Michael once bragged about didn't really happen, and Tatum is most trustworthy, having
written such a candid memoir. Having rarely, if ever, viewed a girl's bedroom
before, Michael asked to see where Tatum slept. "He sat on my bed, and we
kissed very briefly," Tatum confessed, "but it was terribly awkward." All she
remembered was Michael, "sweating profusely," jumping up and apologizing,
claiming he had to go.

At the time of Michael's so-called "affair" with Tatum, various publications were offering good money to the first girl-or woman-who seduced
Michael, taking his virginity. Various bets were placed, and some incidents of
dubious authenticity were reported in headline news in such national publications as The Star. Various actresses, models, and singers were said to have
attempted to seduce Michael-but to no avail.

Even Margaux Hemingway got in on the act. Born in Idaho, she was the
daughter of Jack Hemingway, son of the Nobel Prize winning author Ernest
Hemingway. She met Michael at the height of her fame when she had a budding movie career and a one-million-dollar promotional contract with Faberge
perfume. Her face was appearing on magazine covers around the world.

In Key West, Florida, in 1996, a few months before her suicide by overdose in Santa Monica, California, Margaux told her hostess, Hazel Triplett,
that she once had a standing bet with Tatum as to which one could seduce
Michael first. Margaux, who stood six feel tall in her bare feet, claimed that
she had encountered Michael on several occasions. She even took to calling
him "Boopsie" and invited him to go hiking with her in Idaho-"I know all
the best trails."

"I completely struck out, and as I understand it, so did Tatum," she said.
"I tried everything, but Michael eluded me. I hear he was as fleet footed as
Mercury and outran his father to escape beatings. He got away from me, too,
even though I was fast on my feet in spite of my size."

Later in her life, as she plunged into drugs
and alcohol, Margaux in her decline sent several
urgent appeals to Michael to help her. It is not
known if these letters were even delivered to
him. Once she invited him to Cicada, one of
Hollywood's hippest restaurants, to hear her sing
the blues, but he never showed up. Margaux was
desperate for money and was forced to declare
bankruptcy and to appear in sexually kinky 13movies. At one point, she lent her endorsement
to a psychic hotline and supported herself by
autographing nude photos of herself in Playboy.

Griffin O'Neal

Margaux confessed that her last attempt to seduce Michael occurred one night at Studio 54 in New York. "He was there
with the Liza Minnelli and Warhol crowd, and I went for him but he didn't go
for me, although he did dance with me. I loved to dance. But somehow after
he rejected me, I ended up feeling like a big potato from Idaho."

"Many doors were open to me because my last name was Hemingway,"
she once told Michael. "But to tell you the truth, I never cracked one of Papa's
books. I have dyslexia."

Although Michael attacked rumors about himself for most of his career,
he deliberately encouraged speculation about a romance with Tatum. Tout
Hollywood wasn't to be fooled. At cocktail parties, some insiders of the industry were circulating far different rumors about Michael and his involvement
with the O'Neals. As one made the party circuit in those days, the word was
out that Michael had fallen not for Tatum but for her cute little brother, Griffin.
If there were a crush-and this is pure speculation and gossip-it was strictly
on Michael's part, not on Griffin's.

Griffin admired Michael's musical talent, and perhaps a friendship developed, but that was it. Tatum herself called her brother a "musical savant," and
he was known for his skill not only at the drums but on the guitar. "He wasn't
Liberace, but he could play a mean piano," his father said. Even Michael was
impressed with Griffin's talents, and he would play the drums with Griffin,
seemingly enjoying time spent with him instead of with Tatum. Tatum didn't
seem jealous in the least, since she harbored no romantic fantasies about
Michael.

These concerts between Michael and Griffin took place at 9897 Beverly
Grove Drive in a house that had once belonged to John Barrymore. At the
time, Griffin was small for his age and had a slight frame. Since this was the
type of young boy Michael was allegedly drawn to, rumors were rampant,
although completely untrue. "When did rumors ever have to be true in
Hollywood?" a future friend of Michael's, Marlon Brando, once asked. "In
fact, rumors often reveal more about the people spreading them than the subject of the gossip."

According to Tatum, within the text of her autobiography, A Paper Life,
Michael lectured Griffin on the evils of pot-smoking and tried to get him to
give up the habit. But Griffin refused. An intimate of the O'Neals, Michael
quickly learned the family secrets. It brought back painful memories of his
own father when he witnessed Ryan physically striking Griffin. As the boy
cried from his beatings, Michael tried to console him, wishing someone in his
own family, especially Katherine, had done the same for him.

Also within her autobiography, Tatum revealed that her father had sometimes sent Griffin on drives in her BMW to secure drugs. Even though he was
at the time too young to even legally drive a car, Griffin carried out these dan gerous drug runs anyway, and was once returned to
the Barrymore/O'Neal house by the police.
Michael seemed horrified when learning of these
stories. Griffin was just thirteen at the time.

Michael was saddened by later events in
Griffin's life as he struggled with substance abuse.
In 1986 that would lead to a tragic boating accident
that snuffed out the life of Gian-Carlo, the son of
Francis Ford Coppola. Griffin was indicted for
manslaughter in connection with that accident. The
charges were later reduced to negligent boat operation, of which Griffin was found guilty.