Revisiting Candid Conversations With Michael Jackson About Film and Family

When I first interviewed Michael Jackson he was 19 years old. I wasn’t much older myself. It was 1977 and I had scrounged a one-way ticket from London to Los Angeles to be a rock writer. My only credentials then were a column I wrote for a UK teenage girls’ magazine. One of the first interviews I did in LA was with Michael. I spoke to him again in 1981 and 1984. After that the shutters slammed down.I thought back to our interviews with the release of “Michael”, the new biopic about Michael Jackson, in which his nephew Jaafar Jackson plays the singer. Despite mixed reviews, “Michael” is a huge hit, grossing $97 million domestically and $217 million globally in its first weekend of release. While the filmmakers’ decision to end the movie in 1988 has generated heated debate, the timeframe within the film encompasses the period when I met Michael.I have a vivid memory of standing on the sidewalk outside the closed black iron gates of an imposing house in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. On the other side of the gate Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, was loudly, furiously, berating somebody, perhaps one of the staff. This went on for a while before he turned around, looked me up and down, and the gate opened. Someone led me through the house — past the bar with bubblegum machines on the counter; the sunken living room where Michael’s mother Katherine sat quietly reading; the swimming pool surrounded by Greek statues — and into the room where Michael sat with four of his brothers, the Jacksons, who were about to go on tour. The older brothers dominated the proceedings. While they were more interested in making jokes, Michael didn’t laugh. He didn’t say much at all, reluctant maybe to upstage them in the interview as he’d done in his career. As I was getting ready to leave, he came over and shyly asked in that tiny voice, “Would you like to see my studio?” He had a 24-track studio on the property where he was working on songs for his solo album “Off The Wall.”Once in the studio, that fragility of Michael’s underwent a transformation. He was laughing and dancing as well as being unselfconscious and chatty. One story he told me was how he woke up early one morning and came out for a swim, and there was a woman by the pool, a stranger. She told him Jesus had sent her and she had to see him. She also told him she had “turned on all the gas and she was going to blow us up.” Michael told me, “I rounded up my family and my brothers and sisters and there was all of us in our pyjamas running towards the pool.” While they waited for the police to arrive, the woman sat there singing their songs, assuring Michael she was his biggest fan.Michael Jackson pictured in 1980. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesLife chez the Jacksons was weird. Our second interview had its own peculiarities. This was 1981, two years after “Off The Wall,” and a year and a half before “Thriller.” Michael was living in a townhouse in Encino. The family house was under reconstruction; Michael was planning to move back in once it was done. He was friendly but jittery, wide-eyed and very thin. I remember how his jacket hung off him and how painfully thin his arms were. He looked like a light breeze could blow him over. He told me in his strange, small voice that he hadn’t slept or eaten. He’d been dancing for 24 hours. He fasted and danced every Sunday, he said. He was a Jehovah’s Witness. He went door to door, witnessing, disguised in a hat and fake mustache. He decided to ask his younger sister Janet to join us — a pretty girl aged 15, a year away from coming out as a singer. Janet, who does not feature in the new biopic, sat next to him at the big polished table. When I asked Michael a question, she would repeat it to him soberly, like an interpreter translating English into, well, English. Clearly Michael understood me, so maybe it gave him more time to think. Several times the interview was interrupted by members of the extended family dropping by who needed one thing or other from him. But it was a good interview and a long one.Michael talked a lot about his childhood. “There was this huge baseball pitch at the back of where I grew up, with children playing and eating popcorn,” he recalled, but his father wouldn’t let him join them, because an injury might put paid to a tour and cost the family money. “But I didn’t really feel left out,” he said, “and I got to see and do a lot of things other kids never will in a lifetime.”Michael Jackson pictured in 1981. Frank Edwards/Getty ImagesBut there was a melancholy in him there. When I asked where he would go on a night off, he answered he rarely went out, and when he did he sat on the floor in the back of the car so no one could see him.He was happiest “working,” he said. “My career is the main thing I think about. Music and doing films and scoring for movies and choreography. There have been a lot of TV and movie offers since “The Wiz,” and I’d love to do them all. It’s just hard to juggle your responsibilities around — my music here, my solo career and movies there, TV, and everything else. There isn’t time for much anything else.”Would he ever make a film of his own life story, I asked. He grimaced and said, “No. I’d hate to play my own life story. I haven’t lived it yet. I’ll let someone else do it.”Jaafar Jackson in ‘Michael.’ LionsgateContrasting what many now say about Michael Jackson, my encounters with him happened at a time when he wasn’t that much crazier than other singers, songwriters and performers I was interviewing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Given that is the era much of the new movie is focused on, it was smart and straightforward for the filmmakers to produce a hagiography. Just like last year’s “Becoming Led Zeppelin” documentary movie, “Michael” focuses on the beginning and middle of his story and his greatness, ending before most of the dark stuff kicked in. In the case of Michael Jackson, he seemed to want to change everything about himself: His color, his age, and his entire face — he’d only had a modest nose job during the time I spoke to him.The last time I saw Michael was in 1983. It was in a warehouse in downtown LA, where he was filming the video for his new single “Beat It.” The plot had Michael waking from a dream about a gang war he had to single-handedly stop. His solution was to dance the gang members out of the building like Peter Pan. It was a wonder to see him dance at close range, the grace of movement and strength of this skinny body.I had been warned of dire circumstances if I tried to talk to him at the shoot, but we chatted for a while. I asked if we might do an interview later but he answered apologetically that he’d stopped talking to the press because of all the twisted stories. If we did it by fax, I said, he would have a copy of everything we said. He told me to send him six questions and he would answer them.The last question was on how he felt about writers calling him “innocent,” a “child” and “Peter Pan.” “I don’t mind,” he wrote back. “I feel I’m Peter Pan as well as Methuselah and a child. I love children so much. Thank God for children,” he concluded. “They save me every time.”

Revisiting Candid Conversations With Michael Jackson About Film and Family

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