He had been performing almost as long as he had been alive. Michael Joseph Jackson, born August 29, 1958, was still in diapers when he began to entertain his mother by shaking and shimmying to the rhythm of the washing machine at the family home in the sooty industrial city of Gary, Indiana. As a five-year-old, he brought down the house at a Garnett Elementary School pageant with an a cappella rendition of the Sound of Music tune “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” that made his kindergarten teacher weep. By age six, he was the lead singer of a group called “The Ripples and Waves Plus Michael,” which included his four older brothers. The Ripples and Waves had become the Jackson Brothers by the time they answered an advertisement in a local newspaper for musical groups to perform at a fashion show for a local modeling school. More than two hundred groups showed up at the audition, but six-year-old Michael Jackson stood out even in a crowd that size. “All of the brothers were talented, but Michael was magical,” recalled Evelyn LaHaie, the school’s owner, who chose the Jackson Brothers to perform as her modeling students walked the runway at the Big Top department store in Gary. On Michael’s seventh birthday in 1965, his song-and-dance routine during a performance of “Doin’ the Jerk” led the Jackson Brothers to a first place finish at Gary’s “Tiny Tots’ Back to School Jamboree.” A little more than six months later, what was now the Jackson 5 won the annual talent show at Gary’s Roosevelt High School behind a lead singer who was in the second grade. Even at that age, Michael Jackson was an astounding mimic who could produce eerily exact replications of Wilson Pickett’s shouts and James Brown’s yowls.
The Jackson 5’s first real gig was at a local club called Mr. Lucky’s, where they earned seven dollars for their performance. Not quite eight years old, Michael was fronting a band that now performed regularly at small black clubs, strip joints, and the occasional private party all over northwest Indiana and East Chicago. The group was still obscure enough to enter amateur contests and in early 1967, when Michael was eight, won the biggest talent show in the midwest at the Regal Theater in Chicago for three consecutive weeks. In August 1967, the Jackson 5 was awarded first prize at the biggest talent contest in the country, Apollo Theater’s “Amateur Night.” Within a year they were signed to a contract at Motown Records, and a year after that delivered a debut record that shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
The father that drove this success was a shrewd, vain, domineering brute who in the process of advancement so wounded the most sensitive of his six sons that the controlling force of Michael Jackson’s adult existence became a determination to be as little like Joseph Jackson as possible.
Up until the time he found a way to live off his sons’ talent, Joe had been a busted-out boxer and bluesman who supported his sprawling family by working the four-to-midnight shift as a crane operator amid the grime and grit and blast furnace heat of the Inland Steel Mill. He earned just over $8,000 in his best year, barely enough to sustain the Jackson family home—a tiny, aluminum-sided cube without landscaping or a garage—in which eleven people shared a single bathroom. In the spring of 1964, when the Jacksons began performing publicly, Joe’s five older boys had the smaller of the home’s two bedrooms, where they slept in a triple bunk bed, with six-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Marlon squeezed together on the middle mattress, while nine-year-old Jermaine squirmed to make space on the upper bunk he shared with ten-year-old Tito, so that the oldest son, thirteen-year-old Jackie, could sleep alone on the bottom. The two oldest girls, Maureen (called Rebbie by her family), who was not quite fourteen, and eight-year-old La Toya made their beds on a convertible sofa in the living room, with two-year-old Randy asleep on a loveseat nearby. The youngest Jackson, Janet, would not be born until two years later, in 1966, and joined her sisters on the sofa as soon as she left her crib.
Thirty-five years old in 1964, and already the father of eight children, Joe Jackson was an inch and a half shy of six feet tall, with heavily muscled shoulders and a cheek mole; he was handsome in a heavy-lidded way, and more ambitious than anyone outside the immediate family realized. Determined to mold his sons into a musical act that would achieve the success he never did, Joe pushed them relentlessly. Michael’s memories of those early rehearsals all centered on the father/manager who brandished a belt and bellowed at them constantly, smacking his sons on their backsides or throwing them into walls if they made a mistake. Being locked in a closet was the punishment for repeated failure.
Joe’s own rhythm and blues band, the Falcons, had disbanded a couple of years earlier after failing to obtain more than a handful of bookings in local bars. The guitar Joe loved more than anything else he owned sat on the shelf of a clothes closet that little Michael considered “a sacred place,” mainly because he and the other children were strictly forbidden from entering it. Their mother Katherine would take the guitar down from time to time when Joe was out of the house to teach the children her favorite country and folk songs. Tito was seven when he began sneaking into his parents’ bedroom to borrow Joe’s guitar, playing it for the oldest brother, Jackie, who had just turned ten, and six-year-old Jermaine, who harmonized as Tito picked and strummed. The three of them were learning at least one new song a week until Tito broke a string on the guitar and was discovered by his father. The whipping he got for that “tore me up,” Tito remembered. It was a phrase all the Jackson boys used to describe the beatings their father gave them when he was in a fury. As he sat crying on his bed afterward, Tito insisted to his father between sobs, “I can play that thing.” Joe demanded that the boy prove it, and Tito did just that, with Jackie and Jermaine sliding in beside him to sing along. In that moment, Joe Jackson decided that the steel mill would not be the end of his road. He brought home a new red guitar for Tito the next day, then told all three boys they were going to “rehearse,” which they would swiftly learn was not at all the same as “playing.”
Five-year-old Marlon was soon added to the group, at his mother’s insistence, even though he possessed little if any musical talent (though he was a terrific dancer), but nearly two more years went by before Michael was let in and changed everything for everyone. None of them, especially Joe, wanted to acknowledge that it was the sublime talent of the band’s youngest member, and that talent alone, which would make the Jackson 5 a star attraction.
Michael figured it out, of course, and by the age of nine he was the only one of Joe’s children who dared to fight back against his father—“just swinging my fists,” as he remembered it. “That’s why I got it worse than all my brothers put together . . . my father would kill me, just tear me up.” The other boys would say that Michael deserved the beatings he got. He was defiant, they said, and brought a bad attitude to rehearsals, demanding to know why they had to do things this way instead of that one. Joe’s other sons followed their father’s lead—right into adulthood—but Michael never would, not even as a very young child. Once, when he was three and had just received a spanking, Michael pulled off one of his shoes and threw it at his father’s head. Joe responded by snatching the boy up by one leg and holding him upside down as he administered a whipping so severe that it became a family legend. During his first couple of years with the Jackson 5, Michael caught the back of Joe’s hand more times than he could count, and was regularly whipped with a strap or a switch. The older boys were increasingly baffled by their little brother. On the one hand, it was obvious that Michael took the abuse their father dished out far more personally than any of them did, and that he was much more deeply hurt by it. On the other hand, he refused to stop saying and doing the very things that he knew would result in another beating. It wasn’t a lack of fear, Michael would say: He was so afraid of his father for most of his childhood that he could taste vomit in his mouth whenever Joe came near him. Anger welled up beneath that fear, though, and fermented into hatred. Shamed by a sense of powerlessness, he found only one weapon he could use against his father—the threat that when it was time to take the stage he would refuse to sing. It worked once in a while, when Joe could see that Michael truly meant what he said, but more often the result was a beating worse than the one before it.
For all that, Michael never failed to admit as an adult that there had been two main ingredients in the success of the Jackson 5: his own ability and Joe’s will. By the time the Jacksons began performing professionally, Joe had choreographed their movements down to the smallest detail. “He told me how to work the stage and work the mike and make gestures and everything,” Michael recalled. The price of Joe’s attention to detail, though, was that, “If you didn’t do it the right way, he’d tear you up.”
Like his own father, an Arkansas schoolteacher named Samuel Jackson, Joe was a humorless taskmaster who discouraged—even disallowed—socializing with anyone outside the family. He wasn’t going to allow any “bad associations,” as he put it, to distract his sons from their primary mission of showbiz success. The Jacksons were among the few children in their neighborhood who looked forward to going to school, because lunchtimes and recesses were the only opportunities they ever got to play with other kids.
As it had been for Samuel, the distinction between discipline and cruelty was largely lost on Joe. On more than one hot summer night he popped through the boys’ bedroom window wearing a grotesque fright mask that left Michael and Marlon crying in bed long after he’d pulled the disguise off, chuckling at its effectiveness. His purpose, Joe would explain, was to make sure they didn’t put themselves at risk by leaving the damn window open. He was protecting his boys.
Joe never stopped working on his sons’ act and wouldn’t allow the boys to slack off either. During the week, he rehearsed his sons twice a day: in the morning before school and in the afternoon when they got home. Kids from the neighborhood who already despised the Jacksons for shunning them would stand outside throwing rocks and taunts at the house, telling them they thought they were special but really, “You ain’t nothin’!”
Once they began to get bookings at talent contests and in dive clubs, Joe would have the boys doing as many as five shows a night on weekends, all over the Gary and East Chicago area. There were lots of nights that ended when Joe would roust them out of bed at three in the morning to go to work. “I’d be sleeping and I’d hear my father—‘Get up! There’s a show!’ Michael would recall thirty-five years later. “We’d have to perform.” He would whine sleepily the whole drive there, but once he took the stage Michael always seemed fully awake. He loved performing that much, and loved it almost as much when people threw money at the stage afterward. He and his brothers would run around madly collecting coins from the floor and stuffing them into the pockets of the pants they had learned to wear with belts cinched tight to help support the weight of all that money. He spent most of his “earnings” on candy, Michael would remember. Joe kept the fees, which were becoming the family’s main source of income.
Weeknights, when the kids went to bed, Joe would be in the audience at nearly every performance of every important musical act that came through the Chicago area, always sitting with a notebook in his lap, jotting down a description of each dance step or act of stagecraft that was worth stealing. The next morning, he’d make his sons learn this new move or that one. They had to get it right, of course, or out came the belt. He’d use the buckle on anyone who made the same mistake twice.
By the time Michael was eight, the Jacksons were good enough to play what was known as the “chitlin’ circuit,” a loose association of two- or three-thousand-seat theaters located in inner-city neighborhoods that stretched from Kansas City to D.C. As soon as school let out on Friday afternoon, the boys would “line up for inspection” next to the Volkswagen bus where their equipment was piled into the luggage rack on top, then depart for a weekend of work that often wouldn’t end until they rolled back into Gary early Monday morning, just in time to eat breakfast and head off to school. They were opening for acts that included the Temptations, the O’Jays, Jackie Wilson, and Bobby Taylor. Sam & Dave became big supporters. On the chitlin’ circuit, it was Michael who studied the other entertainers. Joe, like his older boys, loved to socialize backstage, but Michael hated that even as a boy. “It makes me shy,” he would explain. “I don’t know what to say.” Instead, he would stand at the back of the theater, watching the acts he most admired. James Brown was at the top of that list, a performer who left puddles of sweat on the stage and a state of ecstatic exhaustion in the crowd. Timid as he was offstage, Michael constantly probed the adult performers for tips or advice. He pestered the notoriously prickly Etta James in her private dressing room, persisting even when she told him to scat. I just want to learn from the best, Michael would say, and, like James, most of the chitlin’ circuit’s stars couldn’t resist the compliments of such a cute kid.
The Jacksons were catching more and more eyes. Some of the other opening acts grew resentful of the group, complaining that those kids wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t have a damn midget as their lead singer. It seemed the only way to explain Michael Jackson, who at the age of eight was already using his voice to convey an impossibly complex range of adult emotions, from love and loss to hurt and betrayal to disillusion and yearning. He had no idea where it came from and neither did anyone else. Yet he got no compliments from Joe. “If I did a great show, he’d tell me it was a good show,” Michael recalled. “And if I did an okay show, he’d tell me it was a lousy show.” His father also never told him, not even a single time, that he was loved, Michael remembered. He was aching for something he didn’t even know existed, until he began to see it among some of the families they met in hotels.
Sam & Dave did say they loved him, though, and the kings of call-and-response finagled a spot for the Jacksons in the country’s most prestigious and competitive talent contest, the “Superdog,” held at the Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Harlem. Backstage, the boys touched the fabled “Tree of Hope,” a pedestal-mounted log that had been cut from the tree that stood outside the most famous restaurant in Harlem, the Barbecue, where Louis Armstrong and Count Basie had used the rehearsal halls upstairs. Then the Jackson Brothers went out and won the Superdog to a standing ovation. It was August 13, 1967, two weeks before Michael’s ninth birthday.
Their triumph at the Apollo helped the Jacksons land their first recording contract. Gordon Keith, one of five partners in Gary’s Steeltown Records, arranged for an audition at the family home. “They set up right in the living room,” Keith recalled. “The furniture was pushed back. They and their equipment took up pretty much the entire room. The whole family was there; Janet was a babe in arms. They were getting ready and there was a thick cord stretched between two of the amps Michael was near. It came up to his chest. From right where he was standing, without a running start, he jumped straight up from a flat-footed position right over this cord to clear it. He had all my attention from there on. I knew I was looking at a boy who was superhuman. When they sang, Michael sang like an angel . . . but when Michael danced, all while singing, he blew away James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Fred Astaire, and anyone else you can name . . . I was flabbergasted. Knocked out. Blown away. Speechless.” On January 31, 1968, Steeltown released the Jackson 5’s first single and one week later the whole family sat around the radio in the living room, stunned and giggling as they listened together to the first time “Big Boy” was played on WWCA, unable to quite grasp that they’d come to this. By the summer of 1968, the Jacksons were opening for the Motown acts Gladys Knight & the Pips and Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers at Chicago’s premier venue, the Regal Theater. After watching Joe Jackson’s boys from the wings, both Knight and Taylor phoned Detroit, urging Motown’s executives to take a look at these kids.
Even though Joe hated white people, he hired one—a lawyer named Richard Arons—to help him manage the group. Others had already contributed to the Jacksons’ development, people like Shirley Cartman, the junior high school orchestra teacher who persuaded Joe to replace the weak drummer and lead guitarist he’d recruited from the neighborhood with a couple of talented local musicians named Johnny Jackson (no relation) and Ronnie Rancifer. At Cartman’s urging, Tito moved up to lead guitar, while Jermaine switched from rhythm to bass. The result was a band that was tight enough to give Michael’s soaring boy-soprano vocals the structural support they needed, yet fluid enough to accommodate the dramatic pitch changes that the child seemed to pluck out of thin air. And it was that local talent agent in Gary, Evelyn Lahaie, who had convinced Joe to change the group’s name to the Jackson 5. “So many groups at that time that had names that ended in ‘Brothers’ or ‘Sisters,’” LaHaie remembered. “It was too common. I knew that they should have something different.”
Joe never surrendered even the tiniest percentage of control over his sons until Berry Gordy came into their lives. Joe had shown the boys just about everything you could get done in business when you combined ruthless with rough. Berry Gordy taught them how much more effective a man might be when he knew how to mix ruthless with smooth.
Like Joe, Gordy had a parent who was a schoolteacher, had tried to make his mark first as a boxer and, failing at that, had joined the blue-collar labor force. Gordy was still working on the assembly line at a Lincoln-Mercury plant when he opened a store called the 3-D Record Mart that featured jazz music. When that went under, he was reputed to have worked briefly and unsuccessfully as a pimp before going partners in a company called Rayber Music that recorded cheap demos for aspiring musicians. He was also writing songs by then, and one of them, “Reet Petite,” became an R & B hit for Jackie Wilson in 1957. That was the same year he discovered a group called the Matadors (later called the Miracles), whose lead singer, Smokey Robinson, encouraged Gordy to invest his songwriting royalties in music production. By 1959, Gordy had coauthored four more songs that were recorded by Wilson, including “Lonely Teardrops,” which not only topped the R & B chart, but rose as high as #7 on the pop chart. He founded what became Motown Records in a bungalow on Detroit’s West Grand Avenue in December of that same year. One of the first records the company produced, “Shop Around” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, not only hit #1 on the R & B chart in 1960, but climbed to #2 on the pop chart. A year later, Motown’s release of “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes reached the top of both the R & B and pop charts.
By the summer of 1968, when the Jackson 5 auditioned for the company, Gordy had a roster of talent that included the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder. Motown’s artist development division, which educated performers in subjects like etiquette, grooming, and fashion, had helped make the label’s black acts more successful in white America than any before them, and the Supremes’ lead singer, Diana Ross, was in a class by herself as a crossover talent. Nothing Gordy accomplished so amazed the rest of the music business, though, as his uncanny ability to create a sense among his artists that they were members of “The Motown Family” while at the same time effectively robbing them blind with the stingiest royalty rates in the business.
Gordy wasn’t even present at the Jackson 5’s Motown audition on July 23, 1968. After all the child labor law headaches he had suffered for signing Stevie Wonder, Gordy was reluctant to take on another underage act. When he saw the 16 mm black-and-white film his aides had made of the Jacksons’ audition, though, Gordy sent back word to sign them immediately. The contract Joe Jackson executed on his sons’ behalf paid each of the boys slightly more than 1 percent of what their records earned, which would come to about two cents apiece per album. Berry Gordy made a lot more from their music than the band ever would during the years the Jackson 5 recorded for his label.
This disturbed Joe far less than Gordy’s insistence that Michael was the star of the show and that his brothers were merely a supporting cast. The Motown chief had made his position clear from the moment of the Jackson 5’s public debut during the late summer of 1969 in Southern California, where Gordy was determined to relocate both his primary residence and his company. The press release-slash-invitation that announced the event was prepared by Gordy personally, even though it was “signed” by the young woman who had become Motown’s signature asset: “Please join me in welcoming a brilliant musical group, the Jackson Five, on Monday, August 11, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Daisy, North Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills,” it read. “The Jackson Five, featuring sensational eight-year-old Michael Jackson, will perform live at the party. Diana Ross.” Joe fumed, concerned that singling out Michael would not only create dissension among his boys, but further undermine his authority over them.
The major impact Gordy made on Michael with this event, though, was what he taught the boy about the malleability of so-called reality. When Michael tried to tell Gordy and Ross that they’d made a big mistake in the press release because he was ten years old, not eight, Gordy explained that it wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t a lie, either, because a lie wasn’t a lie when you told it for the purpose of public relations. “It’s for your image,” chimed in Ross, who was already going along with Gordy’s story that she had “discovered” the Jackson 5 at a benefit concert for the campaign of Gary’s first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. “I thought I was going to be an old man before being discovered,” Michael had breathlessly confided to one interviewer after his performance at the Daisy. “But then along came Miss Diana Ross to save my career. She discovered me.” When a suspicious reporter told the young performer she had heard that he was almost eleven (his birthday was in eighteen days), Michael vehemently denied it. So how old are you, the interviewer asked. “I’m eight,” Michael answered.
Whatever his age, Michael’s performance at the Daisy wowed the crowd. Soul magazine’s reviewer hailed the Jackson 5’s lead singer as “an eight-year-old boy who became a man when a microphone was in his hand.”
Gordy was already finding other ways to separate Michael from his family. Joe and his sons endured Gordy’s cheapskate accommodations for more than a year after their signing with Motown, sleeping on the floor of Bobby Taylor’s apartment while they recorded fifteen songs during weekend sessions at the company’s studios in Detroit, driving up from Gary every Friday evening, then driving back during the predawn hours of Monday morning, all at their own expense. When Gordy moved them out to Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, he put them up at Hollywood’s most notorious palace of sleaze, the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where most of their neighbors were hookers and drug addicts. After a month, he moved them into an even more run-down motel on Sunset Boulevard. Gordy was himself ensconced at his stupendously opulent mansion in Bel Air, where the walls were covered with paintings of him dressed as Napoleon and Caesar.
A little more than a month after the Daisy show, though, Gordy arranged for Michael to begin living with Diana Ross at her lovely home in Beverly Hills. Gordy was just about to release the Jackson 5’s first single and, confident it would be a hit, urged Ross to help Michael understand that a star had to think of himself differently than other people. “Wherever you go from now on,” Ross told the boy, “people will be watching you.” Though Michael meant far less to Diana than the boy wanted to believe, she instructed him simply by letting herself be observed. When they were alone in the house, she usually wanted the boy to draw pictures and leave her alone.
Michael was still spending his days, and many of his evenings, with his brothers at Motown’s West Coast studios, where the five of them were working under the command of Deke Richards, the songwriter and producer who, as Motown’s creative director of talent, was running the company’s West Coast operation. With A-list songwriters Freddie Perren and Fonce Mizell, Richard and Gordy had formed what they called “The Corporation” to craft the songs and package the performances that would make the Jackson 5 a hit. Gordy and Richards, along with their producers, invested a remarkable amount of time and money in the recording and engineering of the song that would be the group’s first release, “I Want You Back.” The demands on his older brothers were not nearly those made of the group’s eleven-year-old lead singer, who was spending as many as twelve hours a day in the studio. His strongest memories of that time, Michael would say later, were of falling asleep at the microphone, and of staring out the windows between takes at the children on the playground in the park across the street: “I would just stare at them in wonder—I couldn’t imagine such freedom, such a carefree life—and wish more than anything that . . . I could walk away and be like them.”
Gordy and Richards and just about everyone else at Motown, though, were mesmerized by the seventy-pound boy standing in front of them. Watching Michael step to the microphone and summon up emotions that seemed to befit a forty-year-old man who had done a lot of hard living, then as soon as the song was finished go looking for somebody to play hide and seek with, was both eerie and enthralling. Gordy would talk to the press about Michael’s “deep and intuitive understanding” of things, but not even he seemed to have a clue about what its source might be. The things Michael did onstage were obviously practiced—anyone could see that he had copied and combined the moves of James Brown and the stage drama of Jackie Wilson—and yet he somehow owned the result entirely. Diana Ross had taught him about the power of the “oooh,” especially when it was used to put an exclamation mark on a lyric, something everyone agreed Diana did better than anyone ever had—until they heard Michael do it.
“Never seen anything like him,” Smokey Robinson would observe of Michael. And the whole world seemed to agree, in October 1969, when “I Want You Back” was released and shot straight to the top of both the Billboard and Cash Box pop charts. Shortly after the song’s release, the Jackson 5 made its national television debut on an ABC program called The Hollywood Palace. For Michael’s brothers, and for his father in particular, the experience was one more hard lesson in the reordering of their reality. Diana Ross was the special guest host for that episode of the show, but whenever she came backstage, Ross spoke only to Michael, whispering encouragement that was for him alone, and entirely ignoring the other boys. She introduced the group by saying: “Tonight, I have the pleasure of introducing a young star who has been in the business all of his life. He’s worked with his family, and when he sings and dances, he lights up the stage.” Sammy Davis Jr. came bounding out from behind a curtain wearing an excited smile, only to be politely rebuffed by Ross, who explained to the audience that she was talking about “Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5.” Stepping onstage in the lime green suits they wore with matching gold shirts and green boots, the same outfits they had appeared in at the Daisy, the other Jackson brothers looked stunned. Joe was incensed, demanding to know if Berry Gordy was trying to rename the group. Not at all, said Gordy, who stood with him backstage, but Michael was “obviously the star.” Surely Joe could see that. “They’re all stars,” Joe retorted, but what he thought really didn’t count anymore and deep inside he knew it.
The older Jackson sons absorbed another blow to their pride when their first album was released a month after “I Want You Back” came out. Under the title—Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5—the other boys were pictured holding instruments they had not been allowed to play, on an album to which they had contributed little more than a chorus of backup vocals. The truth was that Jackie and Tito possessed only modest musical talent, and Marlon had none at all. No one had ever told them this, though, until they were about to become big stars. The process by which Michael had been separated out from the others was perhaps hardest on Jermaine, who had a perfectly adequate singing voice but just not one that was remotely in the same league as Michael’s. Jermaine had suffered at the age of nine when he was replaced as the group’s lead singer—his family believed the spell of stuttering that followed was a direct result—but tried to accept that he was, as his father put it, the group’s “second soloist.”
Diana Ross wrote the liner notes for the Jackson 5’s first album. She began with the declaration that, “Honesty has always been a special word for me—a special idea,” then repeated the lie that the Jackson 5 was “five brothers by the name of Jackson that I discovered in Gary, Indiana.” By this time, Michael seemed to actually believe this was true, and more than a few of those who promoted the album were unnerved by the boy’s capacity for blending fiction and reality so seamlessly that lines of demarcation seemed utterly erased.
His brothers were back on their game by December 14, 1969, four days before their album’s release, when the Jackson 5 made its first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show wearing huge smiles and swaying in perfect rhythm behind their little brother as he took the stage in a crimson cowboy hat and delivered a performance of “I Want You Back” that had the girls in the audience pulling their hair from the first note to the last.
Satisfied that his investment would pay off, Berry Gordy moved the Jacksons out of the motel where they had been living and into a home he had leased on Queens Road in the Hollywood Hills, with a living room that offered more floor space than their entire house back in Gary, and a view of the Los Angeles Basin that after dark looked like diamonds spilled on sable. At Fairfax High School, where they had begun attending classes in September, Jackie and Tito were all but worshiped. Fourteen-year-old Jermaine saw the junior high girls from his classes literally fighting to sit next to him. It was not so difficult to nurse a bruised ego, the other boys found, when the whole world loved you.
In February 1970, the Jackson 5 released its second single, “ABC,” which also went to #1 on the pop charts, displacing the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Like “I Want You Back,” it sold more than two million copies. The Jacksons’ third single, released that May, was “The Love You Save.” It hit #1 too, bumping the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” from the top spot. They had become the first band of the rock era to send their first three songs to #1. Their second album, ABC, was released that same month and was even more successful than the first had been. In July, the Jackson 5 concert broke every attendance record at the Los Angeles Forum, and a screaming crowd that was largely composed of young black women got so out of control that the boys were hustled off the stage before they could finish their set for fear that the security staff would not be able to protect them. On October 10, 1970, just as their fourth single, “I’ll Be There,” was being released, the Jackson 5 sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Game 1 of the World Series in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. “I’ll Be There,” would provide a further revelation of Michael’s gifts. Even white critics who had dismissed the Jackson 5 as “bubblegum soul” loved “I’ll Be There,” which sold more than any of the three singles before it, and made the Jackson 5 the first group ever to send its first four releases to the top of the pop charts.
Michael Jackson, a twelve-year-old pretending to be ten, had become all but iconic in what seemed the blink of an eye. When he and his brothers flew back to visit Gary, it was for a ceremony at which the street where they once lived was renamed “Jackson 5 Boulevard.” That April, Michael had become the youngest person to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, with a headline that read, “Why does this eleven-year-old stay up past his bedtime?” He was four months from his thirteenth birthday, but the delayed onset of puberty helped the lie about his age remain viable. “Here you have the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and the Tempts and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum,” Ben Fong-Torres had gushed inside the magazine. The most memorable anecdote from Torres’s article was about Michael telling a concert audience that he could sing the blues because he knew all about them, then describing how his heart had been broken by a girl he met in the sandbox, only to see it all go downhill after “we toasted our love during milk break.”
He kept his cover by holding fast to the enthusiasms of childhood, far more excited about the premiere that September of a network cartoon show called The Jackson 5ive than he was about the cover of Rolling Stone. Even though the voice of the animated character named Michael Jackson was not his, “I woke up every Saturday morning” to watch, he would remember. “I felt so happy, you have no idea . . . I think I felt more special about that than the records and the concerts and everything.”
The Jackson 5 kicked off its first big national tour that October in Boston, where, even with a large security staff and a twelve-foot-high fence protecting them, the boys had to be pulled offstage before they were mobbed by an audience of young women who had gone completely berserk. At Cincinnati Gardens, thousands of girls who had been turned away when the concert sold out staged a near riot outside the stadium, while those who got inside the gates crammed the aisles and shrieked themselves into a near delirium, even as local disc jockeys took turns pleading for calm. Fourteen girls had to be carried outside unconscious after fainting. Girls collapsed in the aisles at every stop after that, and by the hundreds clamored and chanted afterward outside the Jacksons’ hotels.
Michael seemed to enjoy the attention at first, but his pleasure quickly diminished. Halfway through the tour, he didn’t want to leave the hotel except to perform, and what he seemed to love most about their stopovers were water balloon and shaving cream fights with his brothers. That stopped when first Jackie, then Tito, and then even Jermaine, grew more interested in the girls gathered at the stage door after a concert than they were in fun and games with their little brother.
When the Jackson 5 left the United States in October 1972 for a twelve-day European tour, they discovered that the white girls there were just as crazy for them as the black girls in America. A full-scale riot erupted in the streets of Amsterdam when it was announced that the Jacksons would perform only one night in the Dutch city. On their way to a command performance before Queen Elizabeth in London that would launch the tour, the boys were nearly crushed by the screaming mob of girls who awaited them at Heathrow Airport. Plugs of Tito’s Afro were ripped from his scalp within seconds of his stepping off the plane. The shrieking inside the terminal was so intense that it brought tears to Marlon’s eyes. The five brothers were swiftly separated by the surge of the crowd and had to scramble and shove their way separately to the limousine waiting at the curb outside. Michael, still not five feet tall, was nearly strangled by girls who grabbed opposite ends of the scarf he wore, and had to work the fingers of one hand up under the scarf to push it off his larynx, using the other hand to protect his eyes from the fingernails that clutched and slashed at him from every direction.
“Sheer pandemonium,” was how a release issued by the delighted executives at Motown described the scene. Their English fans barricaded the entrance to the Churchill Hotel, where the Jacksons were staying in London, and had to be dispersed by bobbies firing water cannons. The next day, a nine-year-old girl tried to force her way into Michael’s room at knifepoint. Dozens of other girls brandished knives at the police outside the hotel; one girl swung a sledgehammer to try to get inside. The Rolls-Royce limo that carried the group to their performance that evening was dented and scraped in dozens of places as it crawled through the swarm of young girls who scratched at the windows with their fingernails, smashing their faces against the glass. While the boys were performing inside the Talk of the Town nightclub, the limo was stripped to its frame and they had to ride back to their hotel in taxis.
The older Jackson brothers surveyed the mad scene that surrounded them with fear and wonder, but for Michael only the fear was real. He was a prepubescent boy standing four feet, ten inches tall and weighing less than eighty pounds—“round eyes, round dimples on a round face, under a round Afro,” was how Ben Fong-Torres had described him in Rolling Stone—who had no way of understanding the sexual frenzy he elicited from the young women who charged and clutched and clawed at him. “They were so big,” his mother Katherine would explain. “And he was so small.”