Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson (22 page)

MJ with Miss Ross and Quincy Jones, 1973

The filming of The Wiz began in October and lasted until Christmas of
1977. The site was the old Astoria Studios in Queens, where the early greats
of the silent screen had emoted. "It had a lot of dusty memories and cobwebs,"
Michael said. The studio had not been used since the heyday of the Roaring
Twenties and the virtual birth of the cinema on a grand scale.

Michael's "girl friend," Stephanie Mills, who had played Dorothy on
Broadway, desperately wanted to do the movie version. But one night Diana
Ross woke up and decided she wanted to play Dorothy. She had star power
back in those days, and the studio was willing to pay her one-million dollars.

Her Svengali, Berry Gordy, pleaded with her to abandon the dream of
playing Dorothy. "You're not the right age."

"Dorothy is ageless!" Ross countered. At the time of her signing for the
film, Ross was thirty-three years old. Ross claimed she could "outdazzle"
Judy Garland in the part. Fresh from directing Equus with Richard Burton,
Sidney Lumet knew Ross was wrong for the role, but signed on as director of
The Wiz anyway.

An all-star black cast was signed up, including Nipsey Russell as the Tin
Man, Ted Ross as the Lion, Richard Pryor as The Wiz, and even the legendary
Lena Horne as Glinda the Good. Quincy Jones, who was to play a vital role in
Michael's future singing career, signed on as musical director.

From the very beginning of their relationship, Michael was impressed
with Jones, who grew up on the mean streets of Chicago's South Side, watching his mother descend into madness.

His credentials were awesome, including having played backup for Billie
Holiday and touring with Lionel Hampton. During the course of his long
career, he would arrange albums for Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Sarah
Vaughan, and Count Basic, even Frank Sinatra. Jones would also master virtually every form of American popular music, including African, jazz, urban,
gospel, and, later, hip-hop.

Michael's one command to his musical director was: "I don't want our
music to sound like The Jacksons. I want to be different."

During the filming of The Wiz, Jones "saw a depth that was never apparent in Michael before. I saw that Michael was growing up right before my
eyes."

Jones found that Michael "had the wisdom of a sixty-year-old and the
enthusiasm of a child." He also said, "Beneath that shy exterior was an artist
with a burning desire for perfection and an unlimited ambition to be the
biggest entertainer in the world-make no mistake. He would watch tapes of
gazelles, cheetahs, and panthers to imitate the natural grace of their movements. He wanted to be the best of everything-to take it all in."

Michael told Jones that "the curse of my life is that girls are always after
me, even climbing over the walls in Encino to get at me." Later in their work
together, he related an incident in which one young woman, escaping the
Jackson security guards, slipped onto the property and lounged by the pool for
hours before she was discovered and ejected. Later, the woman sued, claiming Michael was the father of "just one of my twins."

Although their dialogues would be fraught with future tension, the relationship between Ross and Michael went fairly smoothly during filming. "I
owe her a lot she was my 'main' on the set," he said. "Always there for me
with a helping hand or some advice. We were really close. I have to say, I love
her!"

In spite of these protestations of devotion, jealousy reared its head
between Ross and Michael. In the ballroom of the St. George Hotel in
Brooklyn, Michael learned the dance steps too quickly to please Ross, who
was struggling with even the simplest of routines. She called him aside one
afternoon and charged him with deliberately trying to embarrass her. "I take
much longer to learn the steps, and you get them right away. You're doing this
just to show me up. Stop it!"

Michael apologized. In the next dance rehearsal, he deliberately flubbed
the steps one time after another. Ross smiled proudly at his "mistakes."

Michael secretly watched in delight as two great divas, Lena Horne and Diana Ross, came together and clashed. "It was not a love-in," Michael said,
seemingly taking glee at the bitchery going on between them.

Michael had great respect for the Brooklyn-born Lena Home, who was
ethereally beautiful with a lucid singing voice. He knew the contribution she'd
made to the advancement of black entertainers in America. During her early
days as a performer, Horne had been identified as a "cafe au lait Hedy
Lamarr" and "the chocolate chanteuse."

During her short time on the set with Michael, Home shared with him
some of her triumphs and failures in show business, going back to the days
when she was a chorus girl in the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. "And, yes,
darling," she told a wide-eyed Michael, "I was one of the Blackbirds of 1939."

She explained to Michael that even when she appeared before the cameras
in Hollywood of the 1940s, her songs did not blend with the plot. "That
allowed racist theater owners in the Deep South to remove my segment without interfering with any of the action."

"You mean they wouldn't even let black singers entertain the devils?"
Michael asked in astonishment.

Home also told Michael that
when she was photographed for her
original screen test at MGM, her
face appeared so light that the studio feared that she'd be mistaken
for a white woman.

Jackson and Ross,
Los Angeles, 1984

"Is that cameraman still
around?" Michael asked. "I want to
photograph as white."

"Your own color is perfect
the way it is," she told him. "I'm
addicted to Godiva chocolates. Be
what you are. It's a different time
now for black entertainers."

Horne explained that the
make-up genius, Max Factor, created a whole new line for her called
"Dark Egyptian." Hedy Lamarr
used this same make-up in White
Cargo in 1942 when she played a
half-caste African native.

Home laughed that Lumet,
her son-in-law-soon to be her exson-in-law-was married to her daughter, Gail Jones. "I'm the wicked mother-in-law. A little nepotism never
hurt nobody, honey. If you got it, use it. Press on with it."

On her last day on the set, Horne took Michael's hand and sang to him her
signature song, "Stormy Weather."

Before their final good-bye, she gave him some advice. "It's not the load
that breaks you down, kid, but the way you carry it. And, remember, be
smarter than the people who hire you."

Horne would resurface once again in the lives of the Jackson family.
Following Janet's so-called "wardrobe malfunction" debacle at the 2004
Super Bowl, Horne demanded that Janet be dropped as the star in a television
biopic portraying Lena Horne's life and career. At first ABC executives resisted Horne's demand, but Janet's representatives told Variety that she abandoned the role willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet, asked that
Janet not take the part.

Michael dreaded it when The Wiz was completed and "cried all day,"
according to a crew member. "You could hear him sobbing in his dressing
room."

After watching the final cut of The Wiz, Lumet called Michael, praising
him as "the most brilliant actor since James Dean."

"Who is this Dean?" Michael asked.

The Wiz opened across the country around Thanksgiving in 1978 and was
one big disappointment. "About as airy as an elephant dancing in quicksand,"
wrote one reviewer.

At least one hit song came out of it:
"Ease on Down the Road," which Michael
recorded with his mentor-"and my only
one true love," Diana Ross.

Lena Horne

Many critics praised Michael's performance as the Scarecrow, blaming
Lumet and Ross for creating "the bomb."

Michael cried for days in his bedroom in Encino. Katherine tried to get him
to eat, but he refused food, subsisting on
fruit juices. "I dreamed of being a movie
star. Now it's all over for me." There was
even an unconfirmed report that Michael
attempted suicide.

The movie did rather well among
black audiences but most white film
patrons stayed away. Some critics thought
that The Wiz "suffocated in its own lavish production," and that it missed the freshness and sparkle of the stage show.

Michael loved the film, feeling that it was "far superior to the Garland version," which it obviously wasn't, of course. "We made the story and the point
more recognizable," he said somewhat enigmatically.

Ross, commenting on the film's failure at the box office, claimed, "I don't
care that it didn't make the big bucks. The Wiz wasn't about some stupid
movie as much as it was about moil"

That was her public front. Privately, she was reported to have been almost
"suicidally disappointed" over the critics's attack on her interpretation of
Dorothy.

Liza Minnelli went to see the film and privately told friends, "Thank God
mother never lived to see this travesty." As an afterthought, she diplomatically added, "Michael was wonderful."

Despite the financial collapse of The Wiz, many film projects for Michael
reached the planning stage. Michael himself felt he would be perfect cast as
Bill Bojangles, the famous black dancer, but the movie was never made.

"I wanted the filming of The Wiz to last forever," Michael said three years
later. "Working on the movie was the happiest time of my life. From now on,
I'm going to dwell forever in the Land of Oz."

"It's the combinations that really distinguish him as an artist.
Spin, stop, pull up leg, pull jacket open, turn, freeze. And the
glide where he steps forward while pushing back. Spinning
three times and popping up on his toes. That's a trademark
and a move a lot of professionals wouldn't try. If you go up
wrong, you can really hurt yourself. "

--Dancer Hilton Battle

"You look like an angel; you walk like an angel, but I got wise;
you're the Devil in disguise.""

--Elvis Presley

"I see God in the face of children. And, man, I just love being
around them all the time.""

--Michael Jackson

"Often isolated from other kids when he was growing up,
Michael learned everything he knew from TV. Everything he
saw on television that represented class and glamour was
white. "

--Former aide to the Jackson family
(name withheld)

"Pedophiles are often adults who never grow up and they
have a unique ability to identify with children, a Pied Piper
effect. Their homes are often shrines to children and exhibit a
Disneyland like atmosphere.""

--Ken Lanning
A Behavioral Profile of Pedophiles

"You want to see the boy next door? Then don't go see
Michael Jackson, because he ain't the boy next door. "

--Sammy Davis Jr.

During the making of The Wiz in New York, Katherine moved La Toya
and Michael to a luxurious rented apartment on chic Sutton Place on
Manhattan's East Side. Here Michael was to enjoy the taste of freedom and
independence for the first time in his chaperoned life.