Chapter 4

On March 6, 2001, Michael Jackson traveled by car from London with his friends Uri Geller and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to add his name to the list of illustrious and celebrated figures (including several U.S. presidents, the Dalai Lama, author Salman Rushdie, and actor Johnny Depp) who have addressed the Oxford Union Society. He opened his remarks with an observation that he had been making in one form or another for going on twenty years: “All of us are the products of our childhoods, but I am the product of a lack of a childhood.”

It was the central fallacy of his adult life. He had had a childhood, just not the one he wished for. This dissonance between what he imagined and what he had was the primary source of both his creativity and his unhappiness. It made him rich and famous and lonely all his life. He owed his mother Katherine for it every bit as much as he owed his father Joe, but of all the truths Michael avoided, that was at the top of the list.

Katherine Jackson was born Kattie B. Scruse in Alabama, to a family that on her father’s side had been listed as “mulatto” in an early twentieth-century census. Stricken at eighteen months with polio, she either wore braces or walked with crutches until she was sixteen, and suffered merciless teasing by her classmates in East Chicago, where her family had moved when she was four. She grew up as a child apart, painfully shy and quiet except when she got the chance to sing or make music. She and her sister Hattie were each members of their high school’s orchestra, band, and choir. Kate, as her family called her, played both clarinet and piano, and possessed a sweet and rich soprano voice that more than one person told her should be heard on records. She and Hattie adored a Chicago radio program called Suppertime Frolic that played nothing but country and western music. The two sisters adored especially the songs of Hank Williams, and it was an early dream of Kate’s to become the first black female country star.

By the time the braces came off and the crutches fell away, Kattie B. Scruse had grown into a lovely young woman who dreamed of a career in show business, either as an actress or a singer, but never found the self-confidence to strive for such a life. Instead, at nineteen, she was terribly smitten by the dashing local ladies’ man, recently divorced twenty-year-old Joseph Jackson. They married only a few months after meeting. She had legally changed her name to Katherine Esther Scruse not long before the wedding, but never quite got over the feeling that a poor crippled girl like “Kattie B. Screws” (as the other kids had called her) was lucky to land a man so many other women admired. The whispers of Joe’s infidelity started early but Kate ignored them for as long as it was possible.

She seemed far more accepting of their lot in life than Joe did, making many of the children’s clothes herself or shopping for them at the Salvation Army store. She worked at Sears part-time as a saleswoman to supplement Joe’s earnings at the mill. Religion was the anchor of her life. She was raised Baptist and became a Lutheran but abandoned both churches when she discovered that the ministers of her local congregations were conducting extramarital affairs. Right around the time that Michael made his famous kindergarten performance at Garnett Elementary, Kate was converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses by a pair of proselytizers who were going door-to-door through the neighborhood. She was determined to get the entire family involved, forcing them all to dress up each Sunday morning and walk with her to the local Kingdom Hall. Joe lasted only a few weeks, and her older sons fell away soon after that. Only Michael and her two older daughters, Rebbie (who was an ardent Witness) and La Toya, fully embraced the principles of Kate’s faith. The others, though, all accepted the tenets that separated the Witnesses from American society. There were no birthday celebrations in the Jackson home, and no celebrations of the “pagan” holidays Christmas and Easter, either. Even Jackie and Tito refused to engage in the idolatrous practices of saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, but none of the Jackson boys made a display of their defiance.

Though indifferent to the religious practices of the Witnesses, Joe appreciated the discipline and structure that his wife’s faith imposed on their children. Witnesses were taught to think of themselves as sheep, and of those who surrounded them as goats. When the battle of Armageddon was fought (any day now), the goats would be slaughtered and only the sheep would survive, resurrected to a life on earth as subjects of the Kingdom of God, ruled over by Jesus Christ. Joe had no interest at all in the spiritual dimensions of his wife’s faith, but it pleased him immensely to have his children indoctrinated into the belief that they must remain separate from the “goats” of their depressed and declining community.

Rebbie, La Toya, and Michael would accompany Katherine when she went door-to-door through the neighborhood each week to witness her faith and distribute copies of the Watchtower magazine. Perplexed by his father’s refusal to attend services at the Kingdom Hall, Michael was more deeply bonded to his mother than ever by their shared beliefs, and became in some regards her special favorite by being the only one of the boys who would join her in regular Bible study. Katherine had always given him the love and affection he craved, though she was also quite willing to smack any of her children across the face if they talked back to her, or in some way offended God. The only real trouble between Katherine and Michael had arisen out of his habit of filching pieces of jewelry from her dresser drawer to give as presents to his favorite teachers at Garnett. His mother had him whipped for that, and yet covered up for some of his other transgressions, especially when she knew that Joe was in the mood to administer a truly terrible beating.

A strange, even insidious ambiguity developed out of Katherine’s enthusiasm for Joe’s push to make his boys into a successful singing group. Early on, she would sew the boys’ costumes and drive them to their local engagements when Joe was unavailable. Later, she seemed to relish their success every bit as much as her husband did. They all could see that she loved the money and the attention, and yet she was constantly reminding them that wealth and fame weren’t what mattered—that only preaching and proselytizing were important in the eyes of God. An implicit and troubling hypocrisy became an undercurrent of Katherine’s character; what she said and what she did seemed to grow further and further apart.

This was nowhere more evident than in the blind eye she turned to Joe’s infidelities and in the exposure to the more sordid aspects of sexuality she permitted her six-year-old son after he became the Jackson Brothers’ lead singer. Many of the clubs the Jacksons played in the early days were strip joints. Michael’s memories of those dates were a large part of why he was so uninterested in clubbing when he got older: “Fights breaking out, people throwing up, yelling, screaming, the police sirens.” He stood in the wings watching women undress before a rowdy mob of drunken men any number of times as he waited to go onstage and sing for the same crowd. Forty years later, he could still vividly recall “the lady who took off all her clothes.” Rose Marie was her name, remembered Michael, who watched her at the age of seven with a stricken fascination as the young woman twirled the tassels attached to her nipples, lashing with them at the men who groped her from the front of the stage, then stepped out of her panties and threw them into the audience, where “the men would grab them and sniff them.” Returning home in the predawn light with a father who had enjoyed Rose Marie’s show as much as any man in the audience, to a mother who preached that such licentiousness was satanically inspired and would result in exclusion from the Kingdom of God, Michael defended his soul with a prudish romanticism that in years to come would not merely inhibit his sexuality, but simultaneously crush and distort it.

Michael saw less and less of his mother when the Jackson 5 hit the chitlin’ circuit and began to travel throughout the Midwest and Northeast with their father. Those absences became prolonged after the signing with Motown, and Michael went weeks and months without seeing his mother—“the only person who made me feel loved”—at the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve. An early experience of severe turbulence made him terrified of flying and his father had to carry him onto the airplane kicking and screaming when their concert schedule forced the Jackson 5 to take off in a storm. Joseph “would never hold me or touch me,” Michael remembered, “and the stewardesses would have to come and hold my hand and caress me.” He cried all day before their first trip to South America, Michael remembered. “I did not want to go and I said, ‘I just want to be like everyone else. I just want to be normal.’ And my father found me, and made me get in the car and go, because we had to do a date.”

He had long been denied the right to make friends outside the family, and now, constantly on the move, he began to experience all new relationships as fleeting. “You meet people on the road, somebody on your floor, could be a family,” he recalled, “and you know you have to have as much fun as you can in a short time, because you are not going to see them again.”

Michael was shocked and appalled by the attitudes of the groupies who swarmed around the Jackson 5 when they became a big act. They bore no resemblance at all to what his mother had told him about the fairer sex. He was every bit as shocked, and even more appalled, by how his father and his brothers took advantage of young women who would do anything for a little attention from a famous family. From the first, Joe made no effort to hide the way he reveled in all that available young flesh, saying good night to his sons in their hotel rooms with both arms full of girls half his age, at once showing off his boys to the girls and the girls to his boys, then cackling as he headed off down the hall to enjoy the sweet fruits of success. Michael and Marlon, the two youngest members of the Jackson 5, were especially wounded by the constant betrayal of their mother, and in some way felt betrayed themselves by her unwillingness to hear about it. The older Jackson brothers, though, learned well from their father, and in almost no time Joe was accepting sloppy seconds from his strapping, handsome oldest son, Jackie, while Jermaine stood third in line. The hurt and shame and impotent angst were all still audible in Michael’s voice twenty-five years later when he described what it was like for him as a prepubescent, pretending to sleep in his hotel room bed while his brothers thrust away at groupies who lay on their backs or bellies right next to him. On more than one occasion he tried to convince the girls who gathered at the backstage door that they should go no farther, warning that they would be used and discarded. When they went ahead anyway, he was confused and frightened at first and then, over time, disheartened.

Between tours, Joe and his sons returned home to a two-acre estate on the north face of the Santa Monica Mountains, with a private driveway off Hayvenhurst Drive just below Mulholland in the affluent enclave of Encino. It had become the new Jackson family home in the spring of 1971, a five-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion that was supposed to be Katherine’s dream house. Her sons’ friends called it “The Big House,” more because it felt like a prison than because of its size. Janet Jackson’s first husband, James DeBarge, gave the Hayvenhurst mansion its most resonant nickname: “The House of Fears.” Their new home was as far removed from the house the Jackson boys had grown up in as their former neighbors in Gary could have imagined. There was an Olympic-size swimming pool, basketball and badminton courts, an archery range, a guest house, a playhouse, and servants’ quarters, all contained within a gated compound that overflowed with citrus trees and flowering shrubs. The driveway was filled with luxury automobiles and the walls of the family room were lined with gold and platinum records.

Joe’s already nasty personality darkened during those years. He bitterly resented that Berry Gordy now seemed to have more control over his sons’ careers than he, the father who had molded them into a professional act, and he went to maniacal lengths to remind the entire family that he and he alone was the boss around the house. A five-minute limit was imposed on phone calls and Joe enforced the rule with a leather strap that he used on even his teenage sons. He had refused for years to be addressed as “Dad” by his children, demanding that they call him “Joseph.” Some imagined that it was his way of instilling a professional attitude in his brood, but Michael saw through that to the truth: “He felt that he was this young stud. He was too cool to be Dad. He was Joseph.” The boys were regularly reminded that Joe thought of himself as their manager first, and as their father only when all else failed. Michael would remember the chill that went through them all when Joseph told them, “If you guys ever stop singing, I will drop you like a hot potato.” Inside the Hayvenhurst compound, what Joe called “discipline” became more ritualized and sadistic. He would make you strip naked first, Michael remembered, then slather you with baby oil before bringing out the cut-off cord from a steam iron that he was using now instead of a leather strap, and crack it across the back of your thighs, so that when the tip struck it felt like an electric shock. “It would just be like dying,” Michael remembered, “and you had whips all over your face, your back, everywhere . . . and I would just give up, like there was nothing I could do. And I hated him for it, hated him. We all did.”

Their Bible-reading mother did little to stop it. “She was always the one in the background . . . I hear it now,” Michael recalled. “‘Joe, no, you’re going to kill them. No! No, Joe, it’s too much!’ And he would be breaking the furniture. It was terrible.” They would all beg Kate to divorce him, but, “she used to say, ‘Leave me alone.’” Katherine’s defenders would describe Mrs. Jackson as an abused woman who had been constantly bullied, threatened, and intimidated by her husband, and whose religion taught her that breaking up a marriage—any marriage—was a transgression against God.

Terror would run through the Hayvenhurst house the moment they heard Joe’s car in the driveway, Michael said: “He always drove a big Mercedes, and he drives real slow. ‘Joseph’s home! Joseph’s home! Quick!’ Everybody runs to their room, doors slam.” More than a few times, he either fainted or retched when forced to be in his father’s presence. “When he comes in the room, and this aura comes and my stomach starts hurting, I know I am in trouble.” Michael and his little sister Janet used to play a game of closing their eyes and picturing Joseph dead in his coffin, Michael remembered, and when he would ask if she felt sorry, Janet’s answer was always the same: No.

It was worse when they were on tour. The scene Michael dreaded most was the one Joe created after a performance, when he would send his sons into the room where a buffet dinner was set up, then bring in perhaps a dozen girls that he had selected from the group at the stage door. “The room would be just lined with girls giggling, just loving us, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ and shaking,” Michael remembered. “And if I was talking and something happened and he didn’t like it, he’d get this look in his eye like—he’d get this look in his eye that would just scare you to death. He slapped me so hard in the face, as hard as he could, and then he’d thrust me out into the big room, where they are, tears running down my face, and what are you supposed to do, you know?”

The more Motown elevated Michael above the others, the angrier Joe seemed to become. There was nothing he could do, though, to prevent Gordy and his executives from launching the solo career that they saw in Michael’s future. Michael’s first solo single, “Got to Be There,” was a sweetly innocent love song that was released in October 1971 and by Christmas had hit #1 on the Cash Box chart. The song became the title track of an album that was released in January 1972 and sent two more singles into the top ten. One of them, Michael’s chirpy cover of “Rockin’ Robin,” actually sold better than “Got to Be There,” rising to #2 on the Billboard pop chart.

The first Michael Jackson solo track to become a Billboard #1 was, in essence, a love song to a rat. Released only a few months after the Got to Be There album, “Ben” was the theme song for the movie sequel to the popular horror film Willard, about a meek social misfit whose strange affinity for rats leads ultimately to his being devoured by them. The leader of the rats, Ben, returned in the sequel, adopted by a character with whom Michael would identify: a lonely boy without friends who finally finds a companion in the superintelligent rodent. Michael, who kept pet rats himself, delivered a haunting, sentimental theme song for Ben that was both weirdly moving and astoundingly successful, not only reaching #1 on the Billboard chart, but nominated for an Academy Award as well. Michael sneaked into theaters on at least a dozen occasions to watch the film from the back of the audience, waiting until he could hear his song during a credit roll that included his own screen-size name.

The “normal life” that Michael repeatedly said he longed for was slipping further and further into impossibility. He had tried to follow Marlon to Emerson Junior High but being mobbed in the hallway made that difficult. Girls lined up outside his classrooms, trying to get a look at him through the tiny glass windows in the doors. A jealous boy made a death threat and that was the end of Michael’s public school experience.

He had turned fourteen the month the album Ben was released and finally hit puberty around the same time. Reporters began to catch on to the lie about his age. Rumors about his sexuality were spreading by the time he turned fifteen. Publicly, Joe and his other sons countered with the laughable story that Michael was so promiscuous they had to keep the groupies away from him. The other male members of the Jackson family persisted in trying to convince Michael it was time to surrender his virginity. According to his sister Rebbie, one of them had tried to shake Michael’s sexuality loose with some Jackson-style shock therapy, locking him in a hotel room with two adult hookers who left him scared, shaken, and still a virgin. The prostitutes were pretty rattled themselves; Michael had resisted their attempts to undress him, they said, by picking up his Bible and reading passages from Scripture aloud to them.

The loneliness that would become an increasingly chronic condition for Michael worsened year by year. He felt abandoned by his older siblings, who were all using marriage as an excuse to get places of their own and escape Joe’s oppression. Rebbie had been the first to go, just eighteen when she announced that she intended to marry another Jehovah’s Witness named Nathaniel Brown. Joe was adamantly opposed. Rebbie was a looker who had the biggest voice of all his children, and the richest, except for Michael’s. She possessed everything she needed to be a star, Joe said, but instead the girl wanted to marry a man who was even more religious than her mother and become a housewife. For one of the very few times in her life, Katherine had opposed her husband and supported the marriage. Tito left in 1972, marrying at age eighteen—just like his older sister—a pretty seventeen-year-old of mixed black and Hispanic background named Dee Dee Martes. The wedding of nineteen-year-old Jermaine one year later made big news because the bride was Berry Gordy’s oldest daughter Hazel. The year after that, twenty-three-year-old Jackie married Enid Spann, a mixed black and Korean beauty whom he had been dating since she was fifteen. In August 1975, shortly before Michael’s seventeenth birthday, his eighteen-year-old brother Marlon secretly married a young fan from New Orleans named Carol Ann Parker, but didn’t tell his parents about it until four months later.

The Jackson 5 was by then in an increasingly steep professional decline. After scoring consecutive #1 hits with their first four single releases, the group’s fifth release, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” would peak at #2. The Jacksons sent one more song to the top of the charts later in 1971 with “Mama’s Pearl,” but the group managed to chart in the top twenty only three times in the next several years, with 1971’s “Sugar Daddy,” 1972’s “Lookin’ Through the Windows,” and 1974’s disco number “Dancing Machine.” Both at Motown and throughout the record industry, the Jackson 5 were regarded as a dwindling resource. Joe and his four oldest sons all blamed Motown’s refusal to let the members of the group mature as artists. Though they played their instruments onstage, the music on their albums was still being made by either Motown’s sizzling in-house studio band, the Funk Brothers, or by the Wrecking Crew at Hitsville West. The Jacksons had produced at least an album’s worth of material at their home studio in the Hayvenhurst compound but Gordy’s reluctance to let them perform their own songs either in the studio or onstage meant that not one of those songs had been heard by the public.

The group was being squeezed between Gordy’s money-grubbing resistance to sharing songwriting royalties with his artists and the opinion of the man who was really running Motown, Ewart Abner, that the Jackson 5’s time had passed. Michael was becoming as frustrated as his brothers. His third and fourth solo albums, Music & Me and Forever, Michael, had peaked on the pop charts at 93 and 101. Joe was furious that neither Michael’s solo albums nor the newest Jackson 5 albums were receiving much promotional support from Motown and began to tell his sons they should leave the label. The executives and producers at Motown insisted that Joe’s obnoxious attitude and clumsy incompetence were the problems; nobody wanted to work with the Jacksons because nobody wanted the stress and irritation of having their father around.

Amid the mounting tensions, sixteen-year-old Michael amazed everyone by phoning Berry Gordy personally and demanding a meeting, at which he let the Motown chief know just how unhappy he and his brothers had become. Gordy flattered and cajoled but made no promises. Joe and the other Jackson brothers were indignant when they learned that Michael had “gone behind our backs.” Though outwardly apologetic, Michael was inwardly thrilled. He had asserted himself as never before and in the process won more respect from Gordy than his father ever did. It was the first of many indications to come that, for all his apparent social and sexual timidity, he could be as aggressive as necessary when it came to business. Things were different between him and his brothers—and especially between him and his father—from that day forward. Still, Michael went along with Jackie, Tito, and Marlon when they voted to leave Motown and let Joe look for a better deal at another label. Jermaine was excluded from the vote, and not just because he was out of town at the time: His marriage to Hazel Gordy had divided his loyalties and his brothers feared that he might stick with his father-in-law if things came to a head.

By the summer of 1975, Joe had negotiated a deal with CBS Records that provided the Jacksons a ten-fold increase in their royalty rate, a $750,000 signing bonus, and a $500,000 “recording fund,” plus a guarantee of $350,000 per album, more than they had received for their most successful releases at Motown. The Jackson brothers were also given the right to choose three of the songs for each album, and to submit their own compositions for consideration, something Gordy and Abner had never permitted. Still, Michael said, he only signed the CBS contract after Joe “cajoled” him “with the promise that I’d get to have dinner with Fred Astaire . . . My father knew that I loved Fred with all my heart. He knew I would sign without reading the contract . . . It broke my heart that he did that. He tricked me.”

Jermaine, though, not only refused to sign the CBS contract but immediately informed Gordy that the brothers were leaving Motown. He would be the president of the company some day, Gordy told his son-in-law. “I believed in Berry, not Joe,” Jermaine explained to a reporter. At Gordy’s insistence, Jermaine left the Jackson 5 thirty minutes before a scheduled performance at the Westbury Music Fair. Michael was nearly as upset as Joe when they learned that Gordy had successfully separated one of the brothers from the family. The difference was that Michael believed some of the blame was his father’s.

Berry Gordy wasn’t done making his displeasure felt among the Jacksons. His opening salvo was the announcement that a clause in the group’s Motown contract gave him ownership of the name “Jackson 5” and the brothers would not be allowed to use it at CBS. Gordy also enlisted Jesse Jackson to raise whatever fuss he could about CBS “stealing a black act from a black record label.” Finally, he sued Joe Jackson, the Jackson 5, and CBS for $5 million. Gordy let it be known that Motown would also begin compiling albums from some of the 295 unreleased Jackson 5 recordings that were still held in Motown’s vaults. Joe and Richard Arons were convinced that Gordy would go as far as having them killed; the two actually began checking under the hood for bombs before they would start their cars and took roundabout routes whenever they drove in Los Angeles in order to avoid Gordy’s supposed assassins.

Now recording for CBS subsidiary Epic Records as “The Jacksons,” the brothers replaced Jermaine with fourteen-year-old Randy, and one year after signing with the company they celebrated the announcement that the five of them, along with their three sisters, were about to become the stars of the first television variety show in American history hosted by a black family. The Jacksons would run on CBS television for less than a year and was ranked last in the Nielsen ratings at the time of its cancellation in March 1977, but the show was seen as seminal nonetheless, launching the career of the one Jackson who showed any ability as a comic actor, ten-year-old Janet. She was subsequently hired by Norman Lear to play the role of Millicent “Penny” Gordon Woods on his sitcom Good Times.

The Jacksons was also the title of the brothers’ first album for CBS. It went no higher than #36 on the charts, possibly because Gordy had confused the public by releasing his own Jacksons album, the weak Joyful Jukebox Music, at almost the same time. Jermaine’s first solo release for Motown, My Name Is Jermaine, did far worse, peaking at 164 on the top two hundred. Billboard called the album a bomb. Disgusted that Joe reveled in Jermaine’s failure, Michael began to look for some way to get time away from his family and his father to think about where his career was headed. The opportunity to do just that came along in the summer of 1977 when he was offered the role of the Scarecrow in the all-black cast of The Wiz, a musical film based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that would be directed by Sidney Lumet. Shooting would take place in New York at the Astoria Studios in Queens.

Production of The Wiz was burdened from the start by the casting of Diana Ross as Dorothy, a role most of the public identified with Judy Garland’s performance in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. Ross was thirty-three, twice the age that Garland had been when she played the twelve-year-old Kansas farm girl. Stephanie Mills, the young actress who had been Dorothy in the Broadway production of The Wiz, had just signed a recording contract with Motown and was the preferred choice for the part, but Ross wrested the role away from her, overcoming even the resistance of the film’s producer, Berry Gordy.

The Wiz was a commercial disaster but not due to any fault on Michael’s part. He’d pushed himself hard during the 1978 production, collapsing with a burst blood vessel after nearly dancing himself to death on set—the critics took notice and Michael was credited with the film’s one really strong performance. Joe had vigorously opposed Michael’s decision to act in The Wiz, fearful that becoming a movie star would set the Jacksons’ lead singer even further apart from his brothers. Michael’s decision to go to New York and work on the film anyway was the boldest declaration of independence that he had made up to that point in his life.

Michael was now openly questioning his father’s abilities as a manager. Joe’s abrasive personality was already making relations difficult with the producers and executives at CBS, whose help the Jacksons needed if the group was to make a comeback. Lots of people in the record business by then didn’t like Joe, in part because he refused to hide his disdain for people with light complexions. That bothered Michael almost as much as Joe’s tendency to repeatedly go for the short money, the sure thing, instead of planning for the long term. His father’s foremost concern continued to be the Jacksons franchise, even as it was becoming increasingly clear to everyone at CBS that Michael’s solo career was the future. Jermaine’s absence from the group was making that fact obvious. The pretense that the brothers were a package of major talent had gradually dissolved as Jermaine’s solo career at Motown floundered. His second album, Feel the Fire, had performed even worse than the first, evidence for many that backing his little brother was the best use of Jermaine’s singing voice. Jackie’s sweet but thin high tenor had been exposed in the one solo album he was allowed to record for Motown, Jackie Jackson, which failed to chart. Tito continued to be no better than a journeyman guitarist, and everyone knew that Marlon, the funniest and friendliest of the Jackson brothers, was just along for the ride. Joe wanted that ride to continue for all his sons, but especially for himself, and had never offered more than lukewarm support for Michael’s solo career, which he foresaw as the demise of the group. Joe did battle with CBS to win the company’s approval for a new album that the Jacksons would write and produce, but for him that meant all the boys, equally. CBS executives, though, were beginning to recognize that Michael wasn’t simply the best singer and dancer among the Jacksons, but also the best writer. The one notable song on the Jacksons’ second album for CBS, Goin’ Places, had been “Different Kind of Lady,” a jittery R & B/disco hybrid penned by Michael that was hugely popular in the dance clubs in both Los Angeles and New York. Even as CBS’s new president, Walter Yetnikoff, confided to other company executives that he was inclined to drop the Jacksons from the label, he was urged by some of them to let Michael put together a solo album of his own compositions.

Michael’s increasing confidence in his abilities as an artist was undercut by the shame he felt about his appearance. Around the time of his fifteenth birthday, he had begun to suffer severe acne. He was already self-conscious about his looks, especially his wide nose. Nothing wounded him more during this period than the expression of disbelief he so often saw in the faces of those who were introduced to him at the Hayvenhurst house. Strangers “would come up and ask if I knew where that ‘cute little Michael’ was,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times music writer Robert Hilburn. People actually shook their heads when they realized that “cute little Michael” had been replaced by this awkward teenager with erupting skin. He began refusing to leave the house when he didn’t have to, and was unable to look people in the eye when he was forced to go out in public. His mother would say that the difficulties of this period, in particular the blooms of acne that circled his face from forehead to chin, actually changed her son’s personality: “He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. He was quieter, more serious, and more of a loner.”

Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, it struck Michael hard that he had never in his life made a real friend. His attempt to rectify that confused everyone around him, especially the members of his family. At the 1974 American Music Awards ceremony, Michael and Donny Osmond had served as cohosts with six-year-old Rodney Allen Rippy, a child actor who had appeared in several feature films, including Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, but was best-known for a series of sickly sweet Jack in the Box commercials that had featured his frustrated attempts to get a grip on a Jumbo Jack. The boy had been taken aback when Michael asked for his phone number, and was stunned when the pop star began to call him every Saturday morning, at exactly ten o’clock. They were buddies, nothing more, as Rippy would take pains to make clear later: “Michael would give me advice about how to handle myself in show business, about smiling at people and shaking their hands. It was just stuff like that we talked about. Very ordinary. It absolutely amazed me that Michael Jackson was interested in what was going on in my little world.”

Even among those who did not know that Michael’s best friend was a boy who had just started elementary school, questions about his sexuality were proliferating, and he took these more and more personally. He was especially stung by the false rumor that his father was having him injected with female hormones to keep his voice high. In the months before moving to New York to work on The Wiz, he had attempted to normalize his image by dating Tatum O’Neal, then a thirteen-year-old Oscar winner for Paper Moon with a woman’s body and a wild thing reputation. They’d “taken up,” as Michael would put it, after an encounter at On the Rox, a small satellite club attached to the Roxy on Sunset Strip, where they happened to be seated at adjacent tables one evening in the spring of 1977. Without warning or introduction, Tatum had reached out to hold Michael’s hand as she sat with her father, actor Ryan O’Neal, while Michael chatted with a pair of publicists from Epic Records. For him, this was “serious stuff,” Michael would explain: “She touched me.” Their first date was the next evening, when Tatum invited Michael to a dinner party hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, where the girl suggested they go hot-tubbing together—naked. Michael insisted on swim suits. “I fell in love with her (and she with me) and we were very close for a long time,” Michael would write later in his “autobiography” Moonwalker. That wasn’t exactly how O’Neal recalled the relationship. Tatum told friends that Michael could barely bring himself to speak to her, let alone make sexual contact. The affair, to use the term loosely, would finish in an infamous fizzle during a party at Rod Stewart’s house in Beverly Hills. According to a story that was repeated throughout Hollywood and reported later in the tabloids, O’Neal and a female friend of hers had tried to pull Michael into bed with them. He had not only refused sex, it was said, but dashed from the house blinking back tears, chased by the taunts and jeers of other guests. Whispers about the young man’s sexuality grew into a murmur of innuendo and ridicule that would increase in volume over the next decade.

The worst part for Michael might not have been how he left the party, but his realization that he had nowhere else he wanted to be. The closed circle of his family was making him feel more and more claustrophobic and life at the Hayvenhurst house had become all but unbearable. His brothers had married, but their brides were never really admitted to the Jacksons’ inner circle. Katherine referred to them collectively as “the wives,” as if to make clear they weren’t quite the same as those she called “the family.” Michael was still phoning Rodney Allen Rippy every Saturday morning but longed for someone to share his thoughts with on the other days of the week. Instead, he was forced to substitute the rats and snakes and birds he kept in cages in the playhouse.

In New York, he had discovered the joy of being in disguise. Concealing his identity (and perhaps more important, covering his acne) with the full makeup that transformed him into the Scarecrow while he was working on The Wiz had allowed Michael an opportunity to hide and hold his head up high at the same time. He reveled in the discovery of how freeing it could be to meet people when you were wearing a mask. Members of the crew would say later that they had to literally drag him off the set each evening. When he went out at night as Michael Jackson, he now at least had a ready explanation for his bad skin—all that makeup he had to wear. And he was going out a lot that autumn in New York.

Michael became a regular at Studio 54 just as the disco club was reaching the crest of its popularity. Watching the floor show there was the closest he had ever come to forgetting he was a Jehovah’s Witness. People were shoveling cocaine up their noses at Studio 54, spilling more on their shoes than could be found in some small American cities, then following the coke with chasers of amyl nitrate. Upstairs, the “Rubber Room” was the stage for a disorganized orgy, with people having sex of every conceivable variety under no more cover than a darkened corner, and lots more having sex on the catwalks overhead. Michael came in many nights with Liza Minnelli, who had befriended him at the club and took him regularly to the so-called VIP room in the basement, a dingy little space bordered by chain-link fences where celebrities sat in white plastic lawn chairs laughing about what the people who couldn’t get in imagined it must be like down there. On the main floor, Michael was often seen at the same table with Andy Warhol, who like him was much more interested in watching sex than having it, and who didn’t expect him to make conversation. Truman Capote, another companion, described Michael and his sister La Toya as “oases of innocence” amid the debauch of Studio 54. The two didn’t drink, didn’t use drugs, and certainly didn’t have sex. Michael would watch people acting out sexually, Capote recalled, but did it the same way that he watched James Brown dance, like he was studying what he saw in order to put it to use at some later time.

Michael’s greatest breakthrough in New York had come when he secured a promise from the executives at Epic Records that he would have creative control of his next solo album. He wanted to start work on it as soon as he returned to Los Angeles. But the brothers all insisted he had to wait until they had finished the next group album, Destiny, and outvoted him four-to-one. They proceeded with apprehension, though, deferring to Michael’s opinion in ways they never had before. Even Joe was walking softly, fearful of alienating the one group member they all knew was indispensable.

Michael had come back from New York skinnier than anyone had ever seen him, speaking in a peculiar breathy falsetto that made people lean in close to hear him. At the same time, he exuded a new authority and seemed reluctant to share his thoughts with anyone in the family. He was itchy and irritable around the house, snapping at even his mother for the first time any of them could remember. Joe responded to Michael’s moodiness by demanding that CBS and Epic give his boys the same sort of control of the Jacksons’ new album that had been promised to Michael as a solo act. He knew how much was riding on Destiny. Joe was concerned enough about the Jacksons’ future, in fact, to hire a couple of white comanagers, Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann, to ensure not only that CBS kept its promise about letting his sons write their own material but also that the company would push for crossover promotion, giving just as much attention to securing a white audience for the boys as it did to satisfying the Jacksons’ black fans.

The result was the best album the brothers Jackson had so far released, either at Epic or at Motown. Throughout the music industry, it was agreed that there wasn’t a weak song on Destiny and that Michael Jackson had delivered a tremendous performance on the album. The range of his voice, combined with his ability to adapt to varying styles and tempos, was what most amazed people. Ever since passing through puberty Michael had been dealing with questions about whether he had a voice that would work for him as an adult. Ben Fong-Torres observed how skillfully Michael was coping with his vocal slippage “by switching registers in the middle of phrases and by changing the keys,” but there was still a feeling that his best performances as a singer might have been delivered before he turned fourteen. On Destiny, though, Michael had transitioned with seeming effortlessness from the lush ballad “Push Me Away” to the snap and crackle of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” handling each masterfully. The latter song, written by Michael with his younger brother Randy, was a huge hit, hailed from the first as one of the handful of truly great disco numbers ever released. There was perhaps more to Michael Jackson, several reviewers observed, than anyone had previously realized.

Michael, though, was more embarrassed by Destiny than proud of it. He was especially upset by a jacket photo in which his brothers, egged on by Joe, had posed behind the studio control board as if they were writers and producers of the album. Mike Atkinson and Bobby Colomby had actually produced the album, but only Michael among the five brothers voted to give the pair credit. Atkinson and Colomby (the latter more responsible for persuading Walter Yetnikoff to give the Jacksons another chance than anyone at CBS) had to obtain affidavits from the engineers and musicians who worked on Destiny in order to win their executive producer credits.

The disappointing release of The Wiz in the midst of the Destiny tour was little more than a footnote in the swirl of discontent that surrounded Michael in early 1979. The depth and intensity of his wish to become a movie star was something Michael would not share with his brothers or with Joe. He agonized in private over the one plum part he was offered after the release of The Wiz, that of the transvestite dancer in the film version of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. Michael turned down the role, concerned he would be seen by the public as “that way.” It was an old wound. Jetmagazine reported as fact the gossip that he was considering a sex change operation so that he could marry actor Clifton Davis (who had written the Jackson 5 song “Never Can Say Goodbye”). When J. Randy Taraborrelli, the Soul magazine reporter who would become the chief chronicler of Michael’s youth, had felt compelled to ask him if he was homosexual, it upset him further. “I am not homo,” Michael snapped in reply. “Not at all.” As a devout Jehovah’s Witness, he was required to see homosexuality as an abomination. “What is it about me that makes people think I’m gay?” Michael demanded. “Is it my voice? Is it because I have this soft voice? All of us in the family have soft voices. Or is it because I don’t have a lot of girlfriends?”

Michael worried also that his movie star ambitions would be hindered by his appearance, a subject that made him even more uncomfortable than questions about his sexuality. He was still fighting severe acne outbreaks and increasingly bothered that he had the darkest skin among his siblings, who teased their brother during Taraborrelli’s visit to the Hayvenhurst estate a week before Michael’s twentieth birthday by calling him “Big Nose” and “Liver Lips.” He was most deeply injured, though, by one his father’s typically cruel remarks. “I was going through an awkward puberty when your features start to change, and he went, ‘Ugh, you have a big nose. You didn’t get it from me,’” Michael recalled in a conversation with Rabbi Boteach. “He didn’t realize how much that hurt me. It hurt me so bad, I wanted to die.”

By the time Michael returned home to Los Angeles from the Destiny tour in the spring of 1979, the tension created by a constant effort to counter deep insecurities with towering ambitions was fueling an obsessive focus on the solo album he had deferred for nearly a year now. His brothers wanted to work on the album with him, but Michael refused, even when Katherine attempted to convince him that he owed them. The balance of power had shifted for good. This new record was nothing to worry about, Joe assured his other sons. Michael’s first two solo albums, made when he was still a prepubescent boy soprano, had charted well enough, but the two made after his voice changed were miserable failures, and this new one would most likely be the same.

Michael was receiving a good deal more support from Quincy Jones, the musical director from The Wiz, whom he had chosen to produce his new album. He had asked if he could produce Michael’s next solo album, Jones would recall, while they were preparing to begin principal photography on The Wiz. “At rehearsals with the cast, during the part where the scarecrow is pulling proverbs from his stuffing, Michael kept saying ‘So-Crates’ instead of ‘Socrates,’” Jones recalled. “After about the third time, I pulled him aside and told him the correct pronunciation. He looked at me with these big wide eyes and said, ‘Really?’ and it was at that moment that I said, ‘Michael, I’d like to produce your album.’ It was that wonderment that I saw in his eyes that locked me in. I knew that we could go into completely unexplored territory, a place that as a jazz musician gave me goose bumps.”

The young man’s oddities and uncertainties were on full display when they began work on the new album in Los Angeles nearly one year later, but Jones could see that they were more than matched by his effort and ambition. Michael was coming into the studio better prepared than any artist he had ever worked with before, Jones said. “Driven” and “determined” were the two adjectives the album’s producer would most often use to describe his young star. On top of that, Michael was more willing to accept criticism than any other performer he had seen, Jones said, even when distraught over the announcement that only three of his own compositions had been selected for the album’s final cut. Throughout the production, “I saw his sensitivity and his focus,” Jones recalled. “There was such an innocence, but he didn’t miss a thing.”

Anyone associated with the record who would later claim they knew it was going to be a big hit was “a flat-out liar,” Jones would say thirty years later. “We had no idea Off the Wall was going to be as successful as it was, but we were thrilled. Michael had moved from the realm of bubble-gum pop and planted his flag square in the heart of the musical pulse of the ’80s.”

The three songs from Off the Wall that Michael had written would turn out to be among the albums most successful numbers. Michael’s falsetto funkfest “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” in fact, was the biggest hit of an album stocked with them, becoming his first recording to reach #1 on the pop charts in more than seven years. The pulsating “Rock With You” (written by Rod Temperton) also hit #1, while two other cuts from the album, “Off the Wall” (also by Temperton) and “She’s Out of My Life” (written by Tom Bahler), reached the top ten, making Michael the first solo artist in pop history to put four singles off the same album into the top ten. Reviewers were almost unanimous in praising the record, agreeing that there wasn’t a weak number on it. The buying public agreed: Off the Wall would sell nearly five million copies domestically, and another two million in the foreign market.

Jackson had his publicist send a letter to Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor and publisher, suggesting that Michael should be on the magazine’s cover in light of Off the Wall’s success. Wenner wrote back, “We would very much like to do a major piece on Michael Jackson but feel it is not a cover story.” Furious, Michael said it was because editors believed that putting a black person on the cover resulted in fewer sales at the newsstand and vowed to prove them wrong. When Off the Wall won only a single Grammy, for best R & B album, Jackson sobbed around the house for weeks, then repeated his vow to deliver another solo album as soon as he could, to “show them.”

Michael turned twenty-one shortly after the release of Off the Wall and celebrated his legal adulthood by announcing that he intended to hire his own attorney to examine his business affairs and explain to him where all the money was going. Joe was incensed and confronted his son but Michael refused to budge, and the two stopped speaking to one another. Katherine tried to intervene, urging her son to believe that his father was working in his best interest, but Michael held firm.

His search for new representation was a short one. Michael had been deeply impressed by the very first attorney he interviewed, a thirty-one-year-old corporate tax specialist named John Branca, who was at that time best known for being the nephew of Ralph Branca, the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who had given up the playoff-deciding “Shot Heard ’round the World” to the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson in 1951. Branca offered to organize Michael’s finances and promised to renegotiate his contract with CBS. The attorney proceeded to do just that and was soon reporting back to Michael that from this day forward he would receive the highest royalty rate in the business as a solo artist, 37 percent, the same as Bob Dylan. Not only that, Branca added, but CBS had agreed to let Michael leave the Jacksons any time he wanted, without affecting his brothers’ relationship with the company.

Branca would say later that he had motivated himself during his negotiations with CBS by recalling something Michael told him right at the start of their first meeting: “I intend to be the biggest star in show business, and the richest.”

“Thriller Time” was how Michael Jackson would refer to the two-year period of his life that followed the release of his seminal album, as if recalling an alternate dimension of temporal reality. Thriller Time changed everything, certainly, and just as certainly, changed nothing at all. In those twenty-four months, and in the twenty-four years that followed them, Michael Jackson would demonstrate as completely as any person ever has that the central truism of the celebrity experience is that getting what you want will never make up for not having what you need.

All Michael knew for sure in early 1980 was that the success of Off the Wall had not satisfied him. His next record, he assured everyone around him, would sell twice that many copies. He would have to wait to prove that, though, because his family had already made sure that the next Michael Jackson record would belong to them.

Released in July 1980, the Jacksons’ Triumph was, all things considered, a major success for the group. Critics called it the strongest album the brothers had ever put out, and the public was only slightly less enthusiastic. Three songs (all either written or cowritten by Michael) from Triumphcharted in the top twenty and the album itself was certified platinum within six months of its release. Michael sang lead on nearly every number, but even during those recording sessions had scarcely concealed his frustration at being forced to delay work on a new solo album. His brothers, on the other hand, could barely contain their excitement about the impending Triumph tour, scheduled to visit thirty-nine cities beginning in July 1981, in spite of Michael’s reluctance to accompany them.

He certainly didn’t need the money; Off the Wall had made him wealthier than the rest of his family put together. For the first time in his life, he was acquiring assets, among them the house his parents lived in. Joe surrendered his interest in the Hayvenhurst estate to Michael in February 1981. In his determination to prove to the world (and to Berry Gordy in particular) that he could stand on his own as a businessman, Joe had dug himself a hole so deep that in the end there was nothing to do but cry out for help. It had started in 1974 when he formed his own record company, Ivory Tower International Records, planning to build the business around a female quartet from Ohio that called itself M.D.L.T. Willis. The group and the label went nowhere. Joe would sign, manage, and produce several other singing groups during the next seven years, and they all fizzled as well. By the beginning of 1981, he was hugely overleveraged and so desperate for cash that he offered Michael half of the Hayvenhurst estate for $500,000. It wasn’t long after that before Joe sold Michael half of the half of the property that the parents had tried to keep for themselves, leaving Katherine with just a 25 percent interest in the estate and Joe with the understanding that he was now his son’s tenant.

Joe still had his share of the management fees from Triumph coming in and would receive about 5 percent of the net profits from the Triumph tour—if Michael agreed to participate. As usual, Joe counted on Katherine to make that happen. Despite having filed her second divorce action against Joe just a few months earlier, Katherine did what her husband and her other sons begged her to do and persuaded Michael that he owed the family a piece of his enormous success. Half of whatever Joe got out of the deal, after all, was hers.

It was understood from the beginning that Michael would be the stand-alone star of the show on the Triumph tour. The grandest productions and the biggest applause at each stop came whenever he performed one of his solos from Off the Wall. The last number of every show would be “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” which ended with Michael disappearing into a giant smoke screen created by Doug Henning, the magician who was accompanying the Jacksons on the tour. Neither the audience nor his brothers would see him after that. Michael not only refused to socialize with anyone connected to the tour but issued strict instructions that no one was to use swear words, make sexual references, or tell dirty jokes while in his presence. Still upset that he had ended the Destiny tour with a bad case of laryngitis, Michael declined to speak except when he had to, sipped a brew of lemon and honey constantly, and insisted that air conditioners be turned off whenever he was in a room—even if it was ninety-five degrees outside. All he wanted, Michael made clear, was for this tour to be over. “I will never do this again,” he told Soul magazine’s Taraborrelli. “Ever.”

Robert Hilburn interviewed Michael in the back of a tour bus after the show in St. Louis and found the star to be quite different in person from “the charismatic, strutting figure” he had seen onstage. The Michael Jackson he met face-to-face was “anxious,” the Los Angeles Times writer recalled, “frequently bowing his head as he whispered answers.” At one point Hilburn asked Michael why he didn’t live on his own like his brothers. Unbeknownst to the writer, Michael had bought a condominium near the Hayvenhurst compound back in February 1981, but rarely slept there. “I think I’d die on my own,” Michael told Hilburn. “Even at home I’m lonely. I sit in my room and sometimes cry. It is so hard to make friends and there are some things you can’t talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home.”

Michael was making such admissions more often in interviews, as if he wanted people to understand how strange he was, how strange his life had been, and how strange the world they lived in was to him. “See, my whole life has been onstage,” he explained to Gerri Hirshey when she interviewed him for Rolling Stone, “and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations, and people running after you. In a crowd, I’m afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage.”

CBS president Walter Yetnikoff had been quick to recognize Michael’s vulnerability and quicker still to exploit it. “He had no social skills,” Yetnikoff would recall later. “Sometimes I felt like he was still six.” On his first visit to the CBS corporate headquarters, Yetnikoff remembered, Michael interrupted a meeting to say, “Walter, I have to tinkle. Can you take me to the potty?” At another meeting, Michael confided how hurt his feelings had been by Joe. “He said, ‘You know, I’ve accomplished a lot,’” Yetnikoff recalled. “‘And my father has never told me that he’s proud of me.’ And I became Daddy, and I said, ‘Come here, Michael, let me give you a hug and tell you how proud everyone in the pop music field is of you.’” Soon after, Yetnikoff began to point out that if he really wanted to show Joe who he was, breaking away from the Jacksons to continue his solo career was the way to do it. It was exactly what the young star wanted to hear.

Michael returned to Los Angeles in spring 1982 prepared to impose his will. The Hayvenhurst house had been demolished at his instruction during the Triumph tour and rebuilt into a Tudor mansion with beveled glass windows and clinker brick chimneys. On the grounds, he assembled his first full-scale menagerie, buying black and white swans for the ponds out back, a pair of peacocks named Winter and Spring, two llamas named for Louis Armstrong and Lola Falana, a couple of deer he called Prince and Princess, a giraffe he dubbed Jabbar, and a ram he named Mr. Tibbs. All the animals slept in a stable at night but were free to roam during the day. Neighbors would complain about the stench when summer came.

The centerpiece of this early attempt to create an environment tailored to his fragile psyche was a small-scale version of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. (with its own candy store) next to the garage. Even as he fussed over every detail of the Hayvenhurst house reinvention, though, Michael’s bedroom on the upstairs floor of the house continued to look as if he had just moved in or was about to move out. Books and records remained stacked in knee-high piles and clutter was everywhere. He never bothered to put a bed in his room, preferring to sleep on a thick green rug by the fireplace. His one effort to personalize the space was a multicultural collection of five life-size, female mannequins—one white, one black, one Asian, one Latina, and one Middle Eastern—all of them elaborately dressed in the latest fashions. He gave the mannequins names and introduced them as his friends.

His mother complained that Michael never seemed to eat and La Toya, whose room was just down the hall, swore that he never turned the lights off at night. Michael was up reading long after she went to sleep and she was often awakened at two, three, or four in the morning by the sound of him laughing hysterically at a Three Stooges video he had seen ten times before. He was working in there all the time, too, though, filling the notebook he carried with lyrics, humming melodies into a tape recorder, or studying the songs other writers had submitted to him, like a mad scientist locked up in his laboratory.

The recording of the new album began at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles during April 1982. He and Quincy Jones gradually winnowed a list of thirty songs down to the nine that would appear on the album. Michael had decided that “Thriller,” a spooky, feral number enlivened by the catchy hooks that were songwriter Rod Temperton’s specialty, would be the title track. “This is going to be a big album,” Jackson declared more than once during the engineering sessions, and Jones suspected that might be true. “All the brilliance that had been building inside Michael Jackson for twenty-four years just erupted,” Jones told author Alex Haley in an interview for Playboy magazine. “I was electrified, and so was everyone else involved in the project.” Musicians and engineers were so caught up in the drama of it all that during one recording session they kept cranking the volume up higher and higher until suddenly the speakers overloaded and burst into flames. “Only time I saw anything like that in forty years in the business,” Jones said.

Yet immediately before Thriller’s release on November 30, 1982, Jones was among those who warned Michael not to expect too much. The country was in the midst of the worst recession in more than twenty years and record purchases, like every other form of discretionary spending, had dropped off dramatically. Selling two million units would be a big success in this market, Michael’s comanager Ron Weisner advised him one day when engineers were putting the final touches on the album. Michael sputtered in fury for a few moments, then stalked out of the studio. The next morning, he phoned Walter Yetnikoff and said that if the people he trusted had so little faith in him, he didn’t want to even release the album. Yetnikoff played him perfectly: “Who cares what they say?” the CBS Records president told Michael. “You’re the superstar.”

Thriller’s release two weeks later was a tsunami that caught the entire music industry by surprise. The first song from the album released as a single was the weakest cut on it, Michael’s sugary duet with Paul McCartney on “The Girl Is Mine,” which rose to #2 on the Billboard Top 100. The second single, “Billie Jean,” was a song into which Michael channeled his disturbances with astounding skill and unnerving passion. Randy Taraborrelli popularized the notion that “Billie Jean” was inspired by an obsessed female fan who had tried to convince him to join her in a double suicide. Plastic surgeon Steven Hoefflin claimed that “Billie Jean” had been inspired by a beautiful young woman Michael spotted in a crowd gathered at the gates of the Hayvenhurst compound. Hoefflin said that Michael told him he’d been in a car with two of his brothers and wrote the entire song during that drive, later sketching the girl’s nude form and giving it to Hoefflin as a gift.

Michael himself would insist that he wasn’t thinking of any one girl in particular when he wrote “Billie Jean” (in three minutes, according to Hoefflin), but had created a composite of the especially persistent groupies whom he and his brothers had encountered while touring over the years. This claim probably had some truth to it, but in the end “Billie Jean” was more about Michael himself, as if he’d observed his own impending nervous breakdown and responded by creating the most danceable therapy imaginable. Katherine was as much a catalyst of the lyric as any groupie or fan, the mama who warned him to “be careful who you love.” The girls Joe and his brothers had used and discarded on the road floated like ghosts through the lyric and so did the young women who had tempted Michael along the way.

“I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it,” Michael said of “Billie Jean.” He was so consumed by the song, Michael recalled, that he failed to notice his Mercedes catch fire on the freeway one day while he was driving to the recording studio, and was alerted only when a young motorcyclist waved him over. Quincy Jones didn’t get “Billie Jean,” though, and wanted to keep it off the album. When a stunned Michael insisted it remain, Jones suggested changing the title to “Not My Lover,” because he worried that listeners would think Michael was referring to the tennis player Billie Jean King. Jones then demanded that Michael cut the song’s lengthy percussive introduction. That was the part that made him want to dance, Michael said; it stayed. The dispute between the two turned nasty for a couple of days, but might ultimately have served “Billie Jean.” Jones instructed engineer Bruce Swedien that if Michael insisted upon opening the song with thirty seconds of drumbeats, then they had to be the most memorable drumbeats anyone had ever heard—a “sonic personality,” as Jones described it. Swedien, who usually mixed a number just once, mixed “Billie Jean” ninety-one times in order to create the percussive platform from which the song arose, adding a bass drum cover that came in after the first four bars of kick, snare, and hi-hat, then taps on a flat piece of wood that were filtered in between the beats. Swedien’s removal of reverberation from the opening drum sequence gave “Billie Jean” a stark, emotionally naked quality that grew gradually into a kind of euphoric hysteria as notes were doubled by a distorted synth bass that turned sharply staccato, underlaid by a deep echoing throb.

Michael’s voice came in softly, accompanied by finger snaps as it increased steadily in volume and intensity. By the time the violins and guitar solos entered, a seemingly random series of shouts, screams, and spectral laughs (overdubs made by Michael singing through a cardboard tube) began to sound in the spaces between notes, like a sort of viral insanity trying to gain entry to the listener’s mind. Michael accompanied the eerie, disembodied chatter with a series of what sounded like musical hiccups, as if he were trying to cough up some evil spirit, while the propulsive bass line just kept moving ahead toward some inexorable reckoning that everyone who heard the song knew would not have a happy ending. Michael would never again deliver a song that was either so relentless or so revealing.

People moaned and shrieked when “Billie Jean” first began to be played in the clubs of Los Angeles, as if the song had infected them with a compulsive fusion of madness and glee, pouring onto dance floors and demanding that it be played again. The level of sexual display it inspired was unprecedented. Reviewers called the song “scary,” “bizarre,” and “eccentric,” then added that they absolutely loved it. “Billie Jean” went to #1 on the pop charts almost overnight and stayed there for weeks, followed shortly by “Beat It,” the first true rock song Michael had ever recorded, a cut included on the album because he wanted to prove that no genre was beyond his grasp. Quincy Jones had suggested trying the song and recruited Eddie Van Halen to contribute a guitar solo that sounded like the flapping wings of a metal bird in a wire cage. By March 1983, Michael was among the handful of performers who had ever placed two songs in the top five at the same time. The critical mass that created would sustain Thriller commercially for sixteen months, as seven of the album’s nine songs were released and became top ten singles, from the edgy “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the symphonic “Human Nature” to the sassy “P.Y.T.,” which was the biggest hit among black audiences. By April 1983, Thriller was selling as many as 500,000 copies per week and putting up numbers the music business had never seen before, recession or no recession. Michael became, as Rolling Stone put it, “quite simply, the biggest star in the pop music universe.”

That star was about to go supernova. On March 25, 1983, two weeks after “Beat It” reached #1 on the pop charts, an invitation-only audience at the Pasadena Auditorium was present to watch the taping of the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever NBC television special. Like Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye, Michael had nearly refused to participate in the program, which was meant to honor Berry Gordy. The gradual realization of how poorly he’d paid them had alienated many of Gordy’s Motown stars, forcing the proud mogul to make a series of pleading phone calls. Michael withheld consent until he was promised a solo spot after he performed with his brothers, and even then refused to sing one of his Motown hits, insisting instead that his solo would be “Billie Jean.” Much as he wanted to say no to that, Gordy knew he couldn’t. He would be glad he didn’t.

Jermaine was back with his brothers when the Jackson 5 went on before an audience that had already sat through performances by Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. The Jacksons’ “reunion” began with Michael singing lead on “I Want You Back” and built momentum right up through his moving duet with Jermaine on “I’ll Be There.” The brothers exchanged hugs before the adoring crowd, then trotted offstage—all except Michael, who seemed to hover in darkness for a moment, until the spotlight settled on him. He looked different than people remembered him. He had always been slender, but now he was lithe. The macrobiotic diet he’d adopted and whatever dermatology treatments he was receiving had vanquished his acne. His skin was lighter, but still dark, his nose a little narrower, but not altered in a jarring feminine way. His high, stiff Afro had settled into soft curls.

The costume he wore would become a trademark ensemble, but that night was the first time anyone had seen the sequined black jacket (borrowed from his mother’s closet) with spangled silver cuffs that matched his shirt and the black tuxedo pants hemmed above the ankle to show off his glittery white socks and shiny black Bass Weejuns. And of course there was the rhinestone-studded glove worn on his left hand. He seemed diffident at first, as if unsure what to say or do, speaking softly as he paced the stage, restlessly shy, and thanked the audience for letting him share those “magic moments” with his brothers. No one watching could have imagined that every bit of what he did or said was rehearsed. “Those were the good songs,” Michael said, as he approached a curtain at the edge of the stage and grabbed a black fedora from someone’s hand. “I like those songs a lot,” he continued, moving back toward the center of the stage. “But especially I like . . . the new songs.”

Louis Johnson’s splatting bass guitar riff from “Billie Jean” kicked in at that moment, as Michael stuck the fedora on his head and began a rhythmic pumping of his pelvis so pronounced that it looked almost cartoonlike. An audience that consisted mostly of music executives, music writers, and music makers sat rapt, mouths open, palms on cheeks as they watched Michael Jackson translate the language of his song into dance. There were people present who would swear that he levitated when he brought his performance to a climax with his unveiling of the “moonwalk,” a reverse toe-to-heel glide that moved him—magically it seemed—backward across the stage, before he finished by spinning into a pose balanced on the very tips of his toes. What he got in return was more than a standing ovation. People actually climbed onto their chairs to applaud him. Weeping and laughing, members of the audience congratulated one another for having been there to see it.

The rapture of the crowd was palpable even through a television screen when Motown 25 aired on May 16, 1983. The day after Michael Jackson’s performance was seen by an audience of fifty million Americans—more than had ever viewed a musical special before—he found himself standing atop the Mount Everest of adulation, alone at a summit of fame and fortune that no solo performer other than Elvis Presley had reached before him. And he wouldn’t have to come down for at least another year.

Billboard listed Thriller as the #1 record in the country for an unprecedented thirty-seven weeks and the album remained on the charts for two solid years. Everyone who was anyone wanted to meet Michael Jackson. The matinee idols of his youth reached out to him from every direction. Fred Astaire wanted Michael to come over to the house and teach him the moonwalk. Elizabeth Taylor phoned to ask for tickets to his next concert appearance. Marlon Brando invited him to drop by for lunch.

The crazy velocity of it all kicked into a still higher gear in December 1983 when the “Thriller” video premiered. The project had been initiated when Michael saw the film An American Werewolf in London, then phoned the movie’s director John Landis to say, “I want to turn into a monster. Can I do that?” Landis brought makeup artist Rick Baker along to his first meeting with Michael and the two showed the star a big book of Hollywood creatures. Michael was frightened by the images, Landis would recall—“he hadn’t seen many horror films”—but nevertheless asked the director to write something that featured a combination werewolf–cat person character. CBS balked at the extravagant script for the video that Landis submitted. Nearly a year after its release, the Thriller album was beginning to slip down the charts and shooting from this script would cost a fortune. Landis persuaded Showtime and MTV to ante up the money for the video’s budget and began putting together his cast and crew.

MTV’s participation in the production was yet another triumph for Michael. Only a few months earlier, he had broken the young cable network’s de facto apartheid when MTV began playing his “Billie Jean” video, one of the first starring a black performer it had ever aired in heavy rotation. Now MTV was cofinancing his new production. Along with Rick Baker, the creative team assembled by Landis included choreographer Michael Peters, composer Elmer Bernstein, and horror film veteran Vincent Price. Landis wanted Playboy centerfold Ola Ray to play Michael’s sexy, strutting date in the video, but knew he would have to run the idea by his star, who seemed confused when the director asked if it was okay to cast a centerfold in the part. “I don’t think he even knew what I was talking about,” recalled the director, who was amazed once again by Michael’s naïveté, but relieved to obtain his consent. The most difficult conversation Landis had with Michael came when the director explained a scene in which Michael asked Ray to go steady, then presented a ring, warning her, “I’m not like other guys.” Michael didn’t understand his dialogue was supposed to be a laugh line.

The premiere of the fourteen-minute “Thriller” video at the end of November 1983 was a Hollywood event that rivaled the release of the biggest budget theatrical film, with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, and Cher all in attendance. Made on a budget of about $500,000, “Thriller” became the highest selling music video ever, eventually shipping nine million copies, and continued to hold that position for the next quarter century. Music videos were never the same after its release and neither was MTV, which began to play more and more black performers. Sales of the Thrilleralbum climbed again after the video’s release and Michael Jackson’s stardom seemed to have crossed some sort of cultural threshold. There had never been a success on the order of the one he was experiencing.

Yet in the weeks before the video’s release, Michael was demanding that it be destroyed. The elders at the Encino Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had gotten wind of the “Thriller” video’s concept and summoned Michael to a meeting at which they expressed concern about “the state of Brother Jackson’s soul.” He at first resisted their attempts to force him to change the video, but when the elders threatened him with a “defellowship” that would have resulted in expulsion from the church, Michael wilted. His membership among the Witnesses was, he believed, the most stabilizing force in his life, both the strongest link he had to an experience of ordinary life that he craved and the fundament of his relationship with his mother. Even at the height of Thriller’s success, what he looked forward to most each week were the “pioneering” expeditions he made with the Witnesses. Michael loved everything about it, including the disguises he wore when visiting the shopping malls and suburban neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley. His favorite getup combined a fake mustache and beard, a pair of glasses with clear lenses and thick black rims, and a wide-brimmed hat that he pulled low on his forehead, all worn with a pullover sweater and a neatly knotted necktie. The adults on whose front doors he knocked almost never recognized him when he offered a copy of Watchtower, Michael said, and neither did the grown-ups he approached at the malls. Kids, though, often spotted him right away. “Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin,” he recalled, “I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn’t reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides.” Michael also continued to forswear alcohol, tobacco, and profanity, as a devout Witness was expected to do, and accompanied Katherine to the Kingdom Hall four times each week when he was in Los Angeles. “Church was a treat in its own right,” he would explain. “It was a chance for me to be ‘normal.’ The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else.”

That became a problem, though, after he admitted the “occultism” of the “Thriller” video. He was already on shaky ground with some of the church elders, who were not only critical of the “worshipful attitude” shown by his legions of fans, but concerned as well about the increasingly provocative queries he was making during the question and answer sessions at the end of services. Michael had been particularly obstinate on the subject of the Genesis story, saying repeatedly that he didn’t understand why Adam and Eve should have been tested with forbidden fruit. If God was God, Michael reasoned, then He must have known the choice that Adam and Eve would make. And if God knew their choice, then why would He be angry at them for choosing it? It didn’t make sense. Furthermore, he wondered if Cain and Abel were the products of incest. “And they were two boys,” he noted, “so how did they have children, anyway?” He was unsettled as well by what he had begun to recognize as a sort of, well, contradiction in his mother’s adherence to their religion. Like her, Michael continued to reject Christmas and Easter as pagan holidays, even though he always found himself aching to participate in the festivities when they rolled around. He had also accepted for his entire life that he should enjoy no birthday celebrations. So it troubled him that each May 4, Katherine would accept birthday gifts, as long as they were presented in brown paper bags rather than wrapping paper. But she was so good otherwise, “a saint, really,” as he would often say, that this seemed a minor transgression. And he did not want to lose the connection the two of them had formed around their faith, or his place among the one group of people he knew who treated him like a regular human being.

The morning after his meeting with the church elders in Encino, Michael phoned John Branca and demanded that the tapes of the “Thriller” video, now held at a local processing plant, be shredded and discarded. The befuddled attorney pointed out that Jackson had already spent half a million dollars of other people’s money on the video but Michael refused to be dissuaded. By the time Michael phoned his office the next day, Branca had the tapes sitting on his desk and an idea that he hoped might preserve them. He’d been reading a book about Bela Lugosi, the most famous of the movie Draculas, Branca said, and was surprised to discover that Lugosi was a devout Roman Catholic who believed that playing a vampire in the movies had no effect on his personal faith. With that set up, Branca suggested a disclaimer at the beginning of the video explaining that nothing in it reflected Michael’s religious beliefs. Grateful to be offered a way out of this corner he was in, Michael quickly agreed. John Landis, though, refused—at least until Branca convinced him that without the disclaimer the video would never be released. It was Landis himself who eventually wrote the sentence that was inserted at the video’s beginning: “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way expresses a belief in the occult.—Michael Jackson.”

The disclaimer only added to the swirl of rumor, innuendo, and mystique that surrounded Michael at the beginning of 1984. “If 1983 wasn’t the year of Michael Jackson,” Dick Clark had observed during his annual New Year’s Eve television special, “then it wasn’t anyone’s.” He was being given a level of public permission to live in his own world that had never before been extended to anyone, celebrity or not. The dissonances of his personality actually contributed to the fascination with him. People marveled at the sexual energy that this twenty-five-year-old virgin generated onstage, especially when he danced. “Aided by the burn and flash of silvery bodysuits, he seems to change molecular structure at will,” a short article in Rolling Stone observed, “all robot angles one second, and rippling curves the next. So sure is the body that his eyes are often closed, his face turned upward toward some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps, and squeals.” Michael would later describe it this way: “I am like caught up in a trance with it all. I am like feeling it, but I don’t hear it. I’m playing everything off feeling . . . It just empties you out. You are above it all. That’s why I love it, because you are going to a place of nothing nobody can do. It’s gone, the point of no return. It’s so wonderful. You have taken off.” His need for the experience had become an addiction he had to feed even when he wasn’t touring. Each Sunday he would not only fast in accordance with the requirements of his religion, Michael explained to Rolling Stone, but also would lock himself up alone in his room to dance to the point of physical collapse, until he was laid out on his back, bathed in sweat, laughing and sobbing uncontrollably, utterly spent, and finally free. Free of what, the magazine’s reporter had asked. Free of myself, Michael answered: “I love to forget who I am.”

That was becoming more and more difficult. On February 7, 1984, Michael was the guest of honor at the Guinness Book of World Records induction ceremony staged at New York City’s Museum of Natural History, where Thriller, with twenty-seven million copies sold already, would be certified as the biggest selling album of all time. Wearing one of the quasi-military jackets, replete with sequins and epaulets, that had become the staple of his wardrobe, Michael arrived with actress Brooke Shields on his arm. It was their first date—and her idea. The centerpiece of the party was an eight-foot world globe studded with lights that spelled out, “Michael Jackson—The Greatest Artist in the World.” Walter Yetnikoff read a telegram sent by President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. The First Couple had saluted Michael by writing: “Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us.”

Three weeks later, on February 28, the Grammy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles was the Michael Jackson show from start to finish. Brooke Shields was again Michael’s date, but this time had to share him with Emmanuel Lewis, the twelve-year-old, three-foot, four-inch-tall star of the hit TV show Webster, who spent most of the evening perched on Michael’s lap, while Shields sat next to them wearing a dazed expression. The crowd was giddy to the point of delirium with the weird charm of it all, as Michael was summoned to the stage again and again, accepting a record-tying eight of the gilded gramophone statuettes in all. Each time Michael’s name was mentioned, or even when his image appeared on the studio monitors beside the stage, the fans in the balcony erupted into a cascade of applause that was more frenzied and sustained than anything those in the orchestra seats had ever witnessed at an awards ceremony. The biggest stars on the planet were like extras in his home movie. For the first time in his life, Michael seemed beyond caring what anyone thought about him. Backstage, the press eagerly asked him what was his favorite song and Michael promptly answered, “‘My Favorite Things’ by Julie Andrews.” The reporters began to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but then in the next instant realized he was serious, and stood with frozen grins as he literally skipped off down the hallway, singing the song at the top of his lungs. The after-party was held that year at the downtown restaurant Rex il Ristorante, where Michael and Brooke looked down from their balcony table on a crowd of commoners who included Bob Dylan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Murphy.

Michael was the main attraction even at that April’s Academy Awards ceremony. When he showed up with Liza Minnelli at the most exclusive annual affair in Hollywood—legendary agent Swifty Lazar’s party at Spago—“The stars were reduced to mush,” as a USA Today columnist who was there put it, “as if the evening hadn’t been about the movies, but about Jackson instead.” The world-famous celebrities in attendance literally stepped on one another’s feet trying to get close to him.

Even after the Grammys and the Oscars, even when he had been worshiped by fans who seemed to regard him as a sort of walking, breathing deity, he still had to go home alone at the end of the evening and wonder why he was so unhappy. “I was so lonely I would cry in my room upstairs,” he would remember of that time. “I would think, ‘That’s it, I’m getting out of here.’ And I would walk down the street. I remember really saying to people, ‘Will you be my friend?’ They were like, ‘Michael Jackson!’ I would go, ‘Oh, God! Are they going to be my friend because of Michael Jackson? Or because of me.’”

“Michael Jackson” was now somebody else, the character he played in public. “I hate to admit it, but I feel strange around everyday people,” he told Gerri Hirshey. Alone, in private, he was nameless, a little boy lost. The only relief from the overwhelming sense of isolation he felt at that time, Michael would remember, came when he made his way down to Encino Park and sat in a swing among the kids on the playground. They didn’t know who he was and, more important, they didn’t care.

Those walks to the park were ended by the crazed fans who literally camped in the bushes outside the gates of the Hayvenhurst estate. The expressions on some of their faces terrified him. “Oh, no, I can’t go out there,” he told one journalist who asked if they could conduct their interview at a nearby restaurant. “They’ll get me for sure. They’re around the corner, and they want to get their hands on me.” More and more often he was surrounded by bodyguards when he ventured forth from the Hayvenhurst house, burly men who were instructed to let no one who was not a child get near him.

He tried to explain himself, as best he could, to the occasional interviewer who seemed sincerely interested. “I am a very sensitive person,” he told Robert Hilburn at the Los Angeles Times. “A person with very vulnerable feelings. My best friends in the whole world are children and animals. They’re the ones who tell the truth and love you openly and without reservation.” And he was more and more wary of adults. He explained his increased reclusion to Rolling Stone’s Hirshey by describing himself as “just like a hemophiliac who can’t afford to be scratched in any way.” When Hirshey asked about being on tour, Michael let her know precisely how unlike other pop stars he was: “Girls in the lobby, coming up the stairways. You hear the guards getting them out of elevators. But you stay in your room and write a song. And when you get tired of that, you talk to yourself. Then let it all out onstage. That’s what it’s like.” He disliked parties and hated clubs. “I did that when I was a baby,” he would explain. “Now I want to be a part of the world and life I didn’t have. Take me to Disneyland, take me to where the magic is.” He made trip after trip to Walt Disney’s original park in Anaheim, where the security staff would usher him through the secret passageways that connected rides, so he could avoid the people in lines. Pirates of the Caribbean was his favorite attraction at Disneyland. He would cruise through those dark grottoes again and again, in disguise, praying that no one would shout, “There’s Michael Jackson!” and wishing at the same time he could join the laughing children in the boat next to him. He was yearning desperately, Michael told one interviewer, for something he could identify only as “playtime and a feeling of freedom.”

Emmanuel Lewis continued to be his closest companion. When he wasn’t giving him piggyback rides, Michael enjoyed carrying the twelve-year-old dwarf in his arms like a toddler. Visitors to the Hayvenhurst estate stood stunned, forcing polite smiles as they watched Jackson and the boy playing cowboys and Indians on the front lawn like a pair of five-year-olds. Those who knew him couldn’t help but be touched by the fact that there was at least one thing in his life that seemed to make him happy.

Michael’s determination to retreat into a second childhood was never more evident than when he visited the White House in May 1984 as the guest of President and First Lady Reagan. Promised that he would be meeting just Ron and Nancy and a few children of staff members, Michael was dismayed when he stepped into the Diplomatic Reception Room and found it filled with excited adults. He immediately fled down a hallway to a bathroom just off the White House library, locked the door, and refused to come out until a White House aide ordered his assistant to round up some kids and make most of the grown-ups leave. “It’s all so peculiar, really,” Nancy Reagan would remark. “A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand, and sunglasses all the time.”

He still didn’t know a single adult he could call a friend and it was becoming more difficult for him to connect to his family. The joint management contract with their father and Weisner and DeMann that Michael shared with his brothers had expired back in March 1983 and he had been formally without representation ever since. The brothers were waiting to see what he would do next, and Joseph was hanging in there, hoping to hold on to some percentage of the family superstar’s future. Joe tried to distance himself from Weisner and DeMann, but in the process only deepened the contempt Michael felt for his father. “There was a time when I felt I needed white help in dealing with the corporate structure at CBS,” Joe explained to an interviewer. “And I thought Weisner and DeMann would be able to help. But they never gave me the respect you expect from a business partner.” Weisner and DeMann responded with a statement that they had “no problem with Michael or the Jacksons”—other than Joe. “True, we don’t have a good relationship with him,” DeMann conceded, “but I don’t think he enjoys a good relationship with anyone whose skin is not black.” Michael weighed in with the most public expression of scorn for his father he had ever permitted himself, telling Rolling Stone, “To hear him talk like that turns my stomach . . . Racism is not my motto.”

Any doubt about Joe’s future was erased in June when he received a letter written by John Branca that informed him that he, Joe, no longer represented Michael Jackson and should refrain from suggesting that he did in any further business contacts. The brothers, nearly as upset as Michael that Joe had responded to Katherine’s most recent divorce filing by deliberately concealing assets, followed suit with letters from their own attorneys telling their father that he was no longer their manager. It was the first time anyone in the family saw Joe cry.

Michael had already spoken to Frank Dileo, the promotions director at Epic Records, about leaving the label to work as his manager. The squat-bodied, staccato-speaking Dileo had been credited by many for orchestrating the release of singles from Thriller in a sequence that resulted in songs appearing among the Billboard top ten at the same time, creating much of the synergy that lifted the album to its stratospheric success. Frank was a Technicolor character whose hardscrabble hustler persona provided an odd sort of balance to Michael’s image of ethereal weirdness. Dileo cast himself as a roly-poly phoenix raised from the ashes of multiple disasters, including the death of his uninsured father when he was a teenager, a misdemeanor conviction for working as a bookie for college basketball games, and a house fire that cost his family everything they owned. Sporting a skinny ponytail and a fat cigar, the big-bellied, loud-voiced Dileo was affable but not easily intimidated, especially by the likes of Joe Jackson.

Joe still had some steel in his spine, though, and was as canny and calculating as ever. He knew from past experience that playing the boys against one another was a winning strategy, five against Michael. What a great idea it would be, he suggested to Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy, to capitalize on the tremendous success of Thriller by including Michael in a “reunion tour” that would celebrate Jermaine’s return to the group. Michael still hadn’t made plans for a Thriller tour, Joe pointed out, and could fold his solo performances into the Jacksons’ stage show, turn it into something really huge financially for them all.

Jermaine was in the moment the idea was put to him, but Michael resisted more tenaciously than before. He was tired of touring, he said, tired of all the attention, tired of travel and hotel rooms—tired of his family, period. What he didn’t say was that there was nothing he could gain by continuing to associate professionally with his brothers. Much as they needed him, he didn’t need them at all. The brothers first tried using guilt to sway him. Marlon was going through a nasty divorce, was in real financial difficulty, and couldn’t even make his mortgage payments. Maybe he should sell that house and buy a smaller one, Michael suggested. The brothers then called a meeting at which they showed up with a life-size poster of Michael and told him they were going to put it onstage in his place. Michael still wouldn’t relent. It was time to play their ace in the hole.

Katherine was still the only woman in Michael’s life. The dates with Brooke Shields were just a show. Brooke had tried to kiss him a couple of times, Michael confided to one of his brothers, but he was grossed out when she put her tongue in his mouth. With Katherine, though, it was true love. And true love was the only thing that could change Michael’s mind. During a private meeting Katherine requested with Michael, she implored him to join his brothers on the reunion tour. They needed the money, badly in a couple of cases, she told her son. This was family. Finally, when all else failed, she pulled out the big gun: “For me, Michael, please?”

It was a choice between the only two things Michael had, his mother’s love and his career. He chose his mother’s love, of course, but did not fold completely. He insisted that his involvement in Victory, the album that would launch the tour, be kept to a minimum: two songs that he would write and sing. One of them, a duet with Mick Jagger titled “State of Shock,” would be the only hit the album produced. That was fine with the brothers; this album and the tour that followed were about money for them and they intended to fill their pockets with as much of it as possible.

An unanticipated problem developed when several promoters said they were afraid to book the Jacksons into the large outdoor stadiums they planned to pack with paying customers for fear of the crush of fans who would try to get to Michael. “I could not guarantee the safety of those in front of the stage,” New York promoter Ron Delsner told reporters. “I don’t think anybody can—if they do, they’re liars.” “Michael Jackson whips people to a fever pitch,” chimed in Atlanta’s Alex Cooley. “His fans are the root of the word ‘fan’—they’re fanatic about it. So, yeah, there’re problems.” Joe and Katherine joined forces to suggest a promoter who was not troubled by such concerns.

Best known for his electroshock hair style and for staging championship boxing matches (including the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier “Thrilla in Manila”), Don King had served four years in an Ohio prison for killing a man in a Cleveland street fight. He was loud, coarse, controversial, given to outrageous and racially loaded statements. King had showed up for his first meeting with the family wearing a white fur coat and a gold necklace with a pendant on which a gold crown was topped by the name DON. Michael despised the man from the moment he met him: “Creepy,” he called King, and let everyone know he wanted the promoter kept away from him. After King forked over a $3 million cash payment he called “good faith money”—a pittance to Michael but a fortune to his brothers—King said the forty shows he had planned would gross at least $30 million, which, after expenses and the 15 percent management fee that he and Joe agreed to split, would leave about $3.4 million apiece for the brothers. King’s next coup was the negotiation of a deal with the Pepsi-Cola company to sponsor the tour for $5 million dollars, ten times what the Rolling Stones had received from the same company for their 1981 tour. Michael resisted, saying he didn’t drink soda, didn’t need the money, and didn’t want to appear in a commercial. Once again, the family pressured him into accepting.

The dreaded Pepsi commercial was filmed on January 27, 1984, at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, which was filled with a crowd of 3,000 to simulate the atmosphere of a live concert. With his brothers, Michael was to sing the lyrics of a jingle titled “You’re a Whole New Generation” set to the music of “Billie Jean.” Paul McCartney warned Michael that appearing in a TV commercial would leave him “overexposed” and hurt his career in the long run. Bothered by the idea of shilling for a product he didn’t believe in and filled with a sense of foreboding about the shoot, Michael agreed to only a single four-second close-up.

At 6:30 that evening, the Jacksons were beginning their sixth rendition of “You’re a Whole New Generation,” the highlight being Michael’s descent down a staircase to the main stage through a pyrotechnic arc of brightly colored explosions. He was posed at the top of a platform above the staircase when a magnesium flash bomb went off about two feet from his head. As he descended through the smoke and began to spin at the bottom of the stairs, he felt a hot spot near the crown of his head, but assumed it was the stage lights. As he finished his third spin and rose onto his toes, Michael realized his hair was literally on fire and fell to the stage floor, pulling his jacket up over his head as he shouted for help.

Amid the screaming chaos, many of those in the audience believed that there had been an attempt on Michael’s life. Jermaine, standing less than ten feet away, thought his brother had been shot. Videotape of Michael being loaded into an ambulance, with one sequin-gloved hand poking out of the blankets, led all three national news broadcasts that evening. (Michael had told the ambulance attendants to leave the glove on so people would know it was him.) At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, doctors found a fist-size second-degree burn on the back of his head near the crown, with a spot of third-degree burn about the size of a quarter in its center. For his recuperation, he was transferred to Brotman Medical Center, which recruited six volunteers to answer phone calls about Michael’s status. Tens of thousands of cards and letters arrived, including one from the president of the United States. Pepsi paid Michael $1.5 million to avoid a lawsuit, all of which he donated to Brotman to establish the Michael Jackson Burn Center, earning an incalculable amount of goodwill from the city of Los Angeles in the process.

Two negative effects of the accident on the Shrine Auditorium set, though, would endure far longer than the good publicity. His hair never grew back in fully on the spot where the third-degree burn had been. More important, after first refusing to take painkillers, Michael swallowed a Dilaudid pill that was the first narcotic ever to enter his system. His discovery that the drug not only eased the pain on the surface of his body but numbed an ache deeper inside would change him over time in ways that no one then could have imagined.

His more pressing problem in the summer of 1984, though, was the runaway greed of his father and brothers, and Don King’s encouragement of it. The brothers and King had decided that tickets for the Victory tour concerts would be priced at $30 apiece and be made available to the public only by mail order in lots of four. This was at a time when the highest priced concert tickets in the country, for shows by Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, went for $16 a seat. News that no one who couldn’t afford to shell out at least $120 would get into the Jacksons’ shows not only roused the media to charges of gouging, but shocked and angered the group’s core fans: inner-city youth. Michael had opposed setting the ticket prices so high and objected to making them available only by mail order, but was again outvoted five to one.

As the star of the tour, Michael suffered the brunt of the negative publicity. In the end, he had no choice but to threaten his brothers and King that if they refused to change the ticket policy he would refuse to perform. Shortly after they yielded, Michael announced that he would be donating all of his earnings from the tour to charity, dividing approximately $5 million between the United Negro College Fund, a foundation for cancer research, and Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times.

The tour itself was sheer indignity from start to finish. At the first stop in Kansas City, Jermaine told a reporter, “Even though Michael is very talented, a lot of his success has been due to timing and a little bit of luck. It could have been him, or it could just as easily have been me.” Michael steadily distanced himself from his brothers as the tour progressed, refusing to stay on the same floor with them at their hotels and insisting his attorneys be present at the business meetings that, within the first few dates, became the only conversations he had with his siblings. The other Jacksons traveled to their concerts in separate vehicles before the tour was half finished and insisted upon collecting their payments immediately after each show. The brothers saw a chance to double their money when a producer offered millions for the right to tape the tour and edit Michael’s footage into a home video, but Michael threatened not to perform at one more show if his brothers agreed. By the time the tour arrived at its final stop—six dates at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles—the stress was so great that Michael had all but stopped eating, his weight falling to an all-time low of 110 pounds. Joe and Don King were already negotiating a deal to take the Victory tour to Europe, but when Michael learned of it he informed them there was no chance. No one in his family, though, was prepared for the shout-out Michael gave from the stage on December 9, 1984: “This is our last and final show. It’s been a long twenty years and we love you all.” Michael looked at the shocked expressions on his brothers’ faces and couldn’t quite suppress his smile.

Michael was still flush with the phenomenal success of Thriller in 1985, well on his way to earning more than $200 million from sales of the album alone, when he taped a sheet of paper printed with “100 million” on his bathroom window that would remain in place during the two years he spent recording his follow-up to Thriller, 1987’s Bad. The note would become the artifact of a self-inflicted curse that shadowed the remainder of his career. “This has to be bigger than the last one,” Michael repeatedly told the musicians who were working on the album with him. “If it sold a hundred million copies, I don’t think he’d be totally satisfied,” Bad’s coproducer Bruce Swedien confided to Rolling Stone. “But he’d hold still for that.”

Jackson was no less determined to create a private life that corresponded to the scale of his public success. Having grown up in a world where indulging one’s whims was the license of stardom, he increasingly insisted upon living without limitation. During the Bad world tour, he demanded that a bus, a plane, and a helicopter be available to him at all times, regardless of cost. Michael hired Martin Scorsese to direct the “Bad” video after Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola proved unavailable, then spent an unprecedented $2 million on the project. Such grandiosity could be justified when Bad went on to become the first album ever to produce five #1 records and racked up domestic sales of seventeen million units, plus another thirteen million internationally. The Bad tour grossed $125 million and the star of the show walked away with $40 million of that. Badwas an astounding success by the standards of almost anyone else, but a crushing disappointment for Michael Jackson. Rolling Stone’s review argued that Bad was “actually a better record than Thriller,” but other critics were less enthusiastic.

The “Bad” video was greeted with outright derision. Scorsese shot from a script by gritty New York City novelist Richard Price, based on the story of Edmund Perry, a young black man from Harlem who had gone to prep school on a scholarship, only to be shot dead by a plainclothes police officer who claimed the kid had tried to mug him. Scorsese, Price, and Jackson all envisioned the Perry character as a solitary figure struggling to maintain footholds in two very different worlds where his isolation was bracketed by snobbish preppies and menacing street toughs. The story would come to a climax with the young man’s transformation into a rebellious badass intent on dishing out every bit as much pain as he had absorbed. Jackson and his dancers spent hours watching West Side Story and Michael intended to model his performance in the video on the one delivered by George Chakiris, who in the movie had played the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.

The project appeared to be shaping up into a music video that would be every bit as big as “Thriller,” but the reaction of most viewers when Michael strutted onscreen in his tough guy getup had been to nearly suffocate on a simultaneous eruption of gasps and giggles. It wasn’t simply the black leather that encased the star from head to toe but a blinding array of metal accents affixed to every tuck, fold, and surface. The absurd silver heels and buckles on his boots were the most understated part of the costume, outshined—literally—by the glinting studs, buckles, and numerous zippers that decorated his wristband, belt, and jacket. Radio stations across the country held contests that challenged listeners to guess just how many zippers and buckles there were on the jacket. More startling was Jackson’s appearance. Pale-tone pancake makeup was slathered onto the surgically altered features of an androgyne who bore little resemblance to the young black man who had gazed pensively from the cover of Off the Wall only eight years earlier. The general public’s response to the star’s new album and video was encapsulated by the headline on the cover of Peoplemagazine: “Michael Jackson: He’s Back. He’s Bad. Is This Guy Weird or What?”

The world’s reigning pop star had officially become a freak. Recognizing what he was up against, Jackson had taken the stage at the following year’s Grammys to deliver a blistering live performance of “Man in the Mirror,” then spent most of the rest of the evening sniffling in a front-row seat, barely able to blink back tears as he was shut out of the awards and watched the ceremony turn into a coming-out party for U2. By then his plastic surgery makeover and “Wacko Jacko” image (the nickname had become a staple of the British tabloids) were alienating more and more music lovers. In the United States, Jackson issued instructions that photographers at press conferences use only a medium telephoto lens with a shutter speed of 1/125, an f-stop of four, and film compatible with tungsten lighting, rules that were meant to disguise Jackson’s multiple plastic surgeries but only served to infuriate and disgust the media.

In 1988, even as his three-and-a-half-octave tenor reached the peak of its power, Rolling Stone’s readers voted him “worst artist” in almost every category of the magazine’s annual poll. Still the biggest selling recording artist on the planet, Jackson felt massively unappreciated, especially by music critics. Bruce Springsteen (“He can’t sing or dance”) was called “The Boss,” while various newspaper and magazine polls were naming Madonna (“That heifer!”) Artist of the Decade. Don King, whom Jackson initially despised, finally got Jackson’s ear by telling him, “The white man will never let you be bigger than Elvis.”