Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (11 page)

When he died, Lymon was survived
by three wives. A polygamist, he never
divorced any of his wives and
remained married to three women up
to his death.

Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers

When he heard of Lymon's death,
Michael vowed that, "That will never
happen to me." At this early age, he
saw how drugs or alcohol could
destroy promising careers. It is not
known if he was also familiar with
how a sex scandal could destroy a
career as it had done with silent screen
comedian Fatty Arbuckle and many
other performers.

Instead of acquiring a drug habit,
Michael remained deeply religious and committed to his faith as a Jehovah's
Witness. He spent a lot of time reading the Bible. When he wasn't doing that,
or rehearsing, he escaped into a fantasy world of cartoons or motion pictures
that definitely carried the family seal of approval.

When Joe built a 32-seat screening room onto the 22-room Encino mansion, Michael began to spend hours there watching films that an eight-yearold could enjoy. He was addicted to Shirley Temple movies, and he saw The
Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland thirty-five times, little knowing that one day
he'd be cast in the black version of this classic. He also began to collect animals as pets, and was particularly fond of snakes. Both he and Jermaine
owned their own boa constrictors. "Mine is bigger than yours," Michael
reportedly told his brother Jermaine, referring to his pet snake. "Dream on,
girl!" Jermaine said. "I'm the best hung of all the Jackson brothers. Just ask
any gal."

As the Jackson coffer filled with gold, Katherine no longer insisted that
her children perform chores around the house. Servants began to appearmaids to keep the place clean, chauffeurs to drive them around Los Angeles
(often to the recording studio), gardeners to tend the landscaped grounds and
feed the animals, and cooks to prepare their favorite foods. Even though
Michael had switched to a healthier diet, his siblings still preferred the soul
food that Katherine had once fed them back in Gary.

Because fans held the Encino property under siege virtually day and night,
the Jacksons had walls, iron gates, and police dogs to keep them out. Even so,
the most ingenious fans found ways of getting onto the property. Occasionally,
they even managed to invade the Jackson living quarters, and had to be forcibly ejected by armed security guards.

Michael's efforts to attend public school failed. He had been enrolled for
less than two weeks as a sixth grader at the Gardner Street Elementary School
in Los Angeles when fans crawled through the windows to get at him, seeking his autograph or a piece of his clothing.

When he was enrolled in Emerson Junior High School in elegant Beverly
Hills, some fanatic called the principal of the school and threatened to bomb
one of Michael's classrooms, killing him and all the other students.
Subsequently, Katherine made a decision to withdraw Michael from Emerson.
After that, a chauffeur drove him more or less regularly to The Buckley
Private School in Sherman Oaks, where wealthy Californians, including an
assortment of movie stars, placed members of their brood.

"That school had more faggots-in-training than Bill Gates today has quarters," said Buddy Epson, years later. He attended the school very briefly.
"When we first met Michael, we just assumed that he was gay like us. I
checked him out. If it walks like a faggot, talks like a faggot, acts like a faggot, and looks like a faggot, then what were we to assume? We had circle jerks
in those days. We also went into the heavy stuff. A friend asked Michael to
join one of our parties. Apparently, Michael not only turned down my friend
but lectured him on the evils of being gay. He even brought religion into it. He
was a Jehovah's Witness, or some such shit. Michael got really offended-at
least according to my friend-when he was asked if black dicks are bigger
than the pricks on white boys. We had some really big boys at that school,
even though they were still pubescent, and we wanted to know how Michael
measured up. But he came on like a preacher's son. We didn't pursue him after
that. We got the impression he was some religious fanatic."

Actually, Michael only attended class occasionally, living on the road with
his brothers most of the time. Joe had hired Rose Fine, a white tutor who gave
the brothers private lessons, even traveling with them to and from their bookings. "I feel I was a mother to the boys in another life."

Michael never really got an education. To this day, his spelling is atrocious, as is his grammar, unless it's written out for him. (A rather scurrilous
article in The New Republic, published in 1984, claimed that Michael was illiterate, which isn't true.)

When he did go to school, Michael was delighted to see his unpimpled
image marketed on everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes. "I liked the red
lunchboxes," he later said, "not the yellow or blue ones."

Newly organized fans waited outside their schoolroom doors or massed to
ambush them when the brothers emerged from the Cow Palace in San
Francisco or the Convention Hall in Philadelphia. "There is an explosion of
adolescent chemistry that rivals the first teen bombs detonated by The Beatles," wrote author Albert Goldman. "Sheets of screams hang in the air,
hysterically contorted mouths and hands rise to the lights, scrimmages clog
the aisles-the air of the corrida, the cockfight, the gladiatorial combat fills
the plastic vastness."

Katherine called her son "sensitive," and Bob Jones, who once was
charged with hyping Motown's stars, referred to Michael as an "introvert,"
who stayed alone in his hotel room or in his Encino bedroom while his brothers were often out "raising hell." Sensitive and introvert are words often used
to describe a young homosexual in the making, but Jones and Katherine
apparently didn't mean to suggest that.

Sammy Davis Jr. had been right in fearing future competition from the
"midget." Originally, Davis was to have recorded Maybe Tomorrow.

Gordy intervened and gave the song to The Jackson 5, thinking it would
be a mega-hit for the brothers. He was disappointed, although the song did
make it to the Top Ten but at the bottom of Billboard's chart.

Davis was "seriously pissed." But Sinatra, who liked to tease his pal,
found it amusing. "You're being replaced as the hottest dancing Jungle Bunny
in show biz," he jokingly chided his friend. Davis always hated it when
Sinatra called him a Jungle Bunny, but smiled as if those words didn't hurt
him.

In the wake of their successful album, Maybe Tomorrow, taking its title
from the hit single, The Jacksons also recorded another album, sentimentally
called Goin'Back to Indiana, which included a single with that name as well
as their hit, "I Want You Back," and once again, "Maybe Tomorrow."

Goin' Back to Indiana was also the name of an ABC-TV special, which
included, among other footage, film of the Jackson brothers during their triumphant return to Gary.

A comedy and variety show, it featured Diana Ross (then pregnant), Bill
Cosby, Tommy Smothers, and a badly shaken Bobby Darin who arrived at the
studio after a violent fight with the alcoholic star, his ex-wife, Sandra Dee,
whom he'd foolishly married in
1960, divorcing her in 1967.

The Jackson home in Encino

Michael was delighted when
Katherine applauded the show,
although Joe told his sons that
they "could have done better."
Before Katherine's eyes, her sons
were growing up and trying to
break away from the harsh influence of Joe. Michael avoided his
father whenever he could, but "stayed tied to his mama's apron strings," Gordy said.

It would take Michael a long time to escape the bondage of his family. The
way out for many of the older siblings was marriage. At the age of eighteen,
Tito broke away to marry Delores Martes on June 17, 1972. Called "Dee
Dee," she was only seventeen at the time. He'd met her at Fairfax High School
in Hollywood. Katherine and Joe only reluctantly agreed to welcome this
Mexicana into the family and were turned off by her ghetto upbringing in the
Dominican Republic and in New York's Harlem. Fearing that she might be "a
gold digger," they insisted that Tito force her into a prenuptial agreement.

Maureen (Rebbie) had been the first sibling to flee the nest when in 1968,
at the age of eighteen, she fell in love with Nathaniel Brown, another
Jehovah's Witness. Joe opposed the marriage, but Rebbie stood firm, marrying Brown and moving to Kentucky. "She fled Joe's prison," La Toya claimed.

After he'd crashed his Datsun 240-Z, and incurred Joe's violence, Jackie
didn't marry right away but moved out into his own "bachelor pad."

It was only natural that the older brothers spent more and more time thinking about girls-or, in some cases, their wives-and less and less about their
music.

Michael was only thirteen when a reporter for Crawdaddy magazine
inquired about his love life. He claimed he was "not old enough" to have a
girlfriend. But even at that age, he could have had one if he wanted to. But he
wasn't interested.

Female groupies were readily making themselves available to the
Jacksons, even to Joe himself. One girl, Elizabeth Ashe, claimed that "I had
Jackie first, then the daddy, then Jermaine. Jermaine was the best in spite of
lover boy Jackie's reputation. Joe didn't turn me on at all. I just went along
with it to get to the brothers."

Many of the sexual adventures of Jackie and Jermaine were conducted
directly in front of Michael, in the same room. He feigned sleep, but the
moans would have awakened the soundest sleeper.

Although Jermaine often preferred more than one girl per night, Jackie
would select "someone special in the audience." That object of his eye would
then be invited backstage and introduced to Jackie. In almost every case the
girl ended up in Jackie's hotel room for the night.

Michael tried in vain to uphold the morality of his brothers. Often he
would approach girls going to his brothers' bedrooms and beg them to go
home. "It's against the teachings of God," he would tell a startled groupie.
"It's a sin."

"Get out of my way," one determined fan, Betty Pittsfield, told Michael in
Cincinnati, pushing him aside. "What are you? Some little faggot? I'm gonna
sleep with both Jackie and Jermaine tonight."

Before heading for one of the bedrooms, Betty turned to Michael. "I bet
you want to sleep with your older
brothers yourself. You're such a little
wimp." All she remembered was
Jackie answering the door in tight-fitting white jockey shorts, nothing else.
She looked back at Michael. Sobbing,
he turned from her in disgust and ran
down the hallway.

A poster for Ben, the movie

Over the years many female fans
have come forward to discuss their
one-night stands with the Jackson
brothers. Some have claimed the boys
were gentle, skilled lovers; others
have spoken of violence.

One white girl, who was only sixteen
at the time, claimed that she was brutally raped-"both front and back. I
was a virgin. I was also made to perform oral sex on the brothers. Michael
was in the room at the time watching
everything. At four o'clock I left the room in tears. I felt used. They were no
longer the sweet, clean-cut brothers they were on stage. They were monsters.
I went home and found that I had bled all over my pants. I was afraid they'd
made me pregnant. But I switched my loyalty. From then on, it was Mick
Jagger and the Rolling Stones for me. No more Jackson brothers. After that
ordeal, I never had sex with another black man."