Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (37 page)

Freddie Mercury

Unlike La Toya, Michael's sister,
Rebbie, always denounced those who
speculated that her brother was gay.
"That's inconceivable. Homosexuality is against the tenets of our faith," she said, referring to the Jehovah's Witness
cult. "Anyone who turned out to be gay would be disfellowshipped, cut off
right away." The statement is only startling in its naivete.

In 1983, Michael invited Lewis to attend a concert with him at the Los
Angeles Forum to hear Freddie Mercury, the flamboyant lead singer of the
group, Queen.

Previously, Michael had urged Mercury to release "Another One Bites the
Dust" as a single. Soon after, it shot to number one on the charts, and since
then, Mercury had been urging Michael to record a duet with him, as he had
with Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger.

Michael and Mercury were often compared to each other, one critic claiming that, "Both artists have an androgynous image.. .their appearance has
blurred the conventional and traditional barriers surrounding gender, race, and
age in society."

Watching Mercury perform, Michael reportedly was awed by this BritishIndian singer, who was impressive not only for his powerful vocal abilities but
for his charisma as a live performer. Later Michael went backstage for a
reunion with Mercury, in the process introducing him to Lewis.

In his dressing room, Mercury was on the phone talking to his cats-yes,
that's not a misprint. The mercurial singer was devoted to his cats and even
dedicated his solo album, "Mr. Bad Guy," to his felines. Michael noted that
Mercury was wearing a vest on which he'd painted portraits of each of his
cats. The song, "Delilah," was written about his favorite cat.

Slamming down the phone, Mercury turned to Michael and Lewis. "Don't
either of you ask my hand in marriage. I can't cook, and I'd be a terrible
housewife. I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear." He uttered those lines to
many visitors. Perhaps in deference to the presence of the obviously underaged Lewis, he didn't express another one of his favorite quips: "The bigger
the better-in everything."

After Michael and the pint-sized actor had departed, Mercury turned to
the stage manager. "I'm gayer than Michael, but I like my men six feet tall
with twelve-inch dicks."

A reporter, David Rowland, once asked Michael who his closest friends
were. He said, "Freddie Mercury, Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor ..." Rowland
claimed that Michael then added the name of a kid standing beside him. "I
didn't get his name. He looked ten years old, very cute, very blond, and blueeyed. It certainly wasn't Emmanuel Lewis."

Michael said, "My grown-up friends and this boy here are the only people in the world who don't want anything from me. They love me for myself."

When Mercury learned that he had AIDS, seven years before he eventually died from the disease, he was reported to have said: "I should have used Michael as a role model and dated only ten-year-old virgins."

In public, Michael sometimes defended his unusual friendship with
Lewis. "I was Emmanuel's form of inspiration-he loved my humor and just
hanging out and having fun. Not just with me, but my whole family."

"Michael is not only my friend, he's my family," Lewis claimed.

Michael's nickname for Lewis was "Manny."

Initially, Margaret Lewis didn't think that there was anything wrong about
her young son pursuing a relationship with a big star like Michael. But when
reports reached her that Michael and her son had checked into the Beverly
Hills Hotel, registering themselves as father and son, she moved to sever the
relationship. "There was something wrong here," she reportedly said. "The
friendship didn't seem right. Michael was getting obsessional about my son."

Years later, in 2003, when Lewis was on The Howard Stern Show promoting the TV series, The Surreal Life, the controversial interviewer noted that
Michael used to carry Lewis around like he was a little baby. Stern asked
Lewis if Michael had been in love with him. Lewis seemed to want to drop
the subject but Stern was persistent, asking Lewis if Michael used to bathe
him. Stern also wanted to know if Michael ever "came on to you or fondled
you?" Lewis denied that any incident like that ever happened. He later said, "I
was ready to go over and kick Howard's ass for asking such questions."

Michael's other "date" at the 1984 Grammy Awards was Brooke Shields.
Respected in later years as a Broadway actress, she was known at the time as
a young Hollywood goddess, a sex kitten, a sensual starlet, an undergraduate
at Princeton, and the scandalous star of 1978's Pretty Baby, 1980's The Blue
Lagoon, and 1981's Endless Love.

In some ways, their early lives had run along roughly parallel courses.
Michael had Papa Joe beating, pushing, and shoving him into early stardom.
Brooke had a small-time actress, Teri Shields, the ultimate stage mother, placing her daughter in front of the camera before she was even one year old. As
the Ivory Snow pin-up, Brooke was once hailed as "the most beautiful baby
in America." Francesco Scavullo, the celebrated photographer who changed
her diapers for the Ivory Snow ads, once said: "Brooke was born beautiful, she
stays beautiful, and she gets more beautiful every month."

Brooke's first biographer, Jason Bonderoff, described a startling event
that happened to Brooke when she was only two years old. One afternoon in
Central Park, Teri Shields was guarding the baby carriage containing Brooke.
An elderly woman in large sunglasses and an Hermes scarf strolled by and
peered inside the carriage. Teri thought that the woman's face looked vaguely
familiar. Staring at the baby, the woman said, "The child is magnificent. She'll
go far." Teri recognized the husky Swedish accent. Greta Garbo had predicted Brooke's future before walking on without another word.

Reportedly, Michael had refused to see Pretty Baby, a movie in which
Brooke played a child prostitute living in a brothel. There were numerous
nude scenes. The release of the film caused an outcry from right-wing fundamentalists and groups attacking child porn. Michael was also said to have boycotted The Blue Lagoon because of its nude scenes. The release of this film
led to Brooke's testifying at a U.S. congressional inquiry, where she insisted
that older body doubles had been used during the filming of her nude scenes.

Brooke had created a sensation, and made a cool million, when she'd
posed for Calvin Klein in his jeans, plugging the slogan, "Nothing comes
between me and my Calvins."

Neither Brooke nor her stage mother, Teri, seemed to have a problem with
Brooke becoming romantically linked in the press with "a man of color," as
one public relations agent privately commented years later. "Of course, in
Michael's case, if a girl didn't like him black, he could switch to white,"
quipped one reporter.

Michael, perhaps because of his lower class origins, was intrigued by
Brooke's aristocratic background. She was a descendant of Lucrezia Borgia,
one of the Holy Roman Emperors (Charles V), King Henri IV of France,
Prince Rainier of Monaco, and the Marquis de Sade.

Michael was said to have been jealous when he learned that Brooke was
dating John Kennedy Jr. When Capote heard this, he said, "He's only jealous
because he can't have John-John for himself."

Before her arrival at the Grammys, the actress had unsuccessfully sued
photographer Garry Gross in an attempt to stop him from exhibiting or selling
nude pictures of herself for which she'd (voluntarily) posed when she was
only ten years old. She had tearfully testified in court that the photographs
embarrassed her. But despite Brooke's tears, and despite the fact that some
commentators had defined the pictures as "child porn," the court decided that
Gross had the right to display the pictures.

After her 1983 disaster, the film Sahara, for which she'd been paid
$1,500,000, Brooke took a four-year sabbatical from pictures to attend
Princeton. Nonetheless, her promoters jockeyed, during that era, to keep her
name in the press. What better person to date than Michael Jackson himself,
as he rode the crest of his fame?

"Dating Michael was a way to get Brooke's picture on the front page of
every newspaper in America," a publicist said. "And Michael needed to show
up with a beautiful woman to prove he was straight. It was a match made in
heaven."

Except it wasn't, as subsequent events on the actual night of the Grammys
revealed.

Michael had already escorted Brooke as his date to the January 1984, American Music Awards, produced by "eternally young" Dick Clark. She had
to share Michael with his other escorts of the evening, Emmanuel Lewis and
La Toya. All four of them sat smiling as Clark claimed, "If 1983 wasn't the
year of Michael Jackson, it wasn't the year of anybody."

According to La Toya, Michael was very reluctant to take Brooke once
again to the Grammy Awards in February. His sister remembered Michael
coming into the kitchen of their Encino home, joining Janet and her for a
"confessional." Meanwhile, Brooke sat in the living room of the Jackson
home, "cooling her heels," as Janet remembered. La Toya's claim was that
Brooke was trying to cajole Michael into taking her to the awards ceremony,
which was destined to attract worldwide press coverage.

It isn't known why Michael was reluctant to take Brooke to the Grammys.
Even if she were only "arm candy," he could use his association with her to
defend against rumors that he was gay. And she would get national publicity.
Even so, many members in the press, even thousands of Michael's fans, were
suspicious of this coupling. Speculation appeared that Michael had paid
Brooke anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 for each of their joint appearances.
None of the allegations from those provocative web postings was ever proven.

Janet Jackson may have referred to Brooke as "giraffe butt," but she was
one of the most beautiful teenagers to emerge in the 1980s. Garbo had been
right to an extent. Brooke did go far, but, as is usually the case in Hollywood,
not as far as she dreamed. She did not, for example, become the next Ava
Gardner, as some had predicted.

In one of the more fanciful paragraphs in his autobiography, Moonwalk,
Michael falsely claimed that in addition to Diana Ross, "another love was
Brooke Shields. We were romantically serious for a while."

Brooke has denied that there was any romance or love affair between
Michael and herself, and she did so on national television. She'd met Michael
when she was only thirteen, and they had bonded in their discussions over the
difficulties associated with being a child star.

"There were a handful of child stars at the time-actress Jodie Foster,
Michael, and myself among them-and we were friends because we shared an
understanding of how difficult life was in the public eye," Brooke said. "When
we were together, we were in a safe place. We could be ourselves."

Accompanied by both Emmanuel Lewis and Brooke, Michael arrived customarily late on the biggest night of his life, the presentation of the Grammys
on February 28, 1984, at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium. The televised
event would be watched by sixty million viewers.

Michael's major competition of the evening, Lionel Richie, spotted him
backstage. Destined to become the big loser of the evening, Richie was overheard talking to Quincy Jones, "My God," he allegedly said upon seeing Michael's costume, "It's Sergeant Pepper and he's wearing more makeup than
Brooke Shields."

Michael arrived at the glitzy gala, the music industry's Oscars, in full military uniform, his thin waist encased in a gold sash. A black sequined jacket
with wide lapels fitted tightly over a pair of black sequined pants. Across his
chest he'd hung a gold bandolier, and on each shoulder rested a mammoth
epaulette. He skipped the tie but wore a white wing-collared dress shirt. Of
course, he had on his trademark white socks and a spangled glove on one hand
as well as a spangled wrist band. His eyes were concealed from his millions
of fans behind dark aviator sunglasses.

Michael had been nominated for a dozen Grammys, and no star in the history of the academy had ever received such accolades, not even Elvis Presley.
Even The Beatles had received only four Grammys, which one critic of the
music awards called "a scandal."

The evening began with Michael winning Best Rock Vocal Performance
by a Male for "Thriller." He had fully expected to win Best Song of the Year
for his rendition of "Billie Jean," but he lost to The Police for "Every Breath
You Take."

He bounced back, hitting the stage with Quincy Jones to accept Grammys
as Producers of the Year for the Thriller album.

In many ways, the most meaningful Grammy was Michael's win for Best
Children's Album honoring his work on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. As he
accepted the award, his fans in the balcony broke into hysterical screaming as
they rose to their feet shouting, "We love you, Michael."

More Grammys waited in the wings for Michael to pick up. Best R&B
vocalist went to Michael for "Billie Jean," and he also won the Best Record
award for "Beat It" and Best R&B Song Award for "Billie Jean."