EXCLUSIVE: Inside the bizarre world of Michael Jackson




FROM the mid-1970s until the early 90s, Walter Yetnikoff was the most powerful man in the music business. As head of CBS Records, he launched Michael Jackson's solo career, gaining unique access to the superstar's troubled life. In part one of our exclusive series, he describes what it was like to be part of the eccentric Jacko phenomenon.

THE Jackson 5 show at the 1975 Westbury Music Fair was less than spectacular.

The boys' baby sister Janet looked silly doing a Mae West impression. Their dance steps looked tired.

The only bright spot was 16-year-old Michael, who was lit from within.

His dancing was spectacular. But when he sang Ben - the theme song for a film about a boy and a rat - I had my doubts.

In my new role as president of CBS Records wouldn't I be a schmuck to authorise a million-dollar-deal to a guy pouring his heart out to a dead rat.

I okayed the deal anyway, buying the Jacksons from Motown. Their first album with CBS spawned one hit, but the second album bombed and my staff were less than enthusiastic about the band's prospects.

But a few weeks later, Michael Jackson came to me himself, reasoning rightly he'd be a better spokesman than his bullying dad, Joe.

Sitting across from my desk, he was a composed young man, dressed in jeans and a plain red T-shirt.

I saw a tall, good-looking 19-year-old with an easy smile and ingratiating manner.

He spoke so quietly I had to lean in and listen. His words were carefully chosen. He was shy, but determined, a young man on a mission.

"I want to write and produce our next record myself," he said.

I DIDN'T doubt Michael's hard work, drive or sincerity. What I didn't know was whether he could produce hits.

"I'll take a chance," I said. "But if your new record bombs, I'll be selling you back to Motown."

"You won't be sorry," Michael said. I wasn't. In 1979, an otherwise dismal sales year, the Jackson's Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground) was a top 10 hit, selling over two million copies.

Next, Michael wanted to do a solo record. Off The Wall was a perfect piece of pop soul, exceeding all sales predictions. Michael, who wrote three songs and co-produced three tracks, had his first taste of multi-platinum solo action.

My respect for his talent grew, along with my puzzlement about his personality. He seemed a sweet guy, exceedingly eager to please.

Off The Wall re-tooled his childlike image. Now, he was pictured as a dark-skinned handsome young man in a bow-tie, tux and fashionably coiffed Afro.

He was ready to rock, and his love songs - especially Don't Stop Till You Get Enough - suggested adult sexuality. But when you spoke to Michael, the adult was not always present.

"I never had a childhood," he was always saying. "I was a star when I was six."

Sometimes I felt that he was still six. He had no social skills. He was a child who sought the company of other children. Michael liked to call me his "good father" when I was okaying promotional plans for his record. At other times, he was a world-class whiner.

After Off The Wall won only a single Grammy, he called me to complain. Michael's high, almost inaudible voice changes tone when he's unhappy. He becomes an angry little boy.

"Mine was the first solo album to have four top 10 singles," he said. "I should have got at least four Grammys."

"Make more records and you will get more Grammys," I said.

"My next record will win every Grammy there is," he said. "From your mouth to God's ear," I told him. Turned out God was listening. No single record changed the business - and my life - as powerfully as Michael Jackson's Thriller. At one point the damn thing was selling one million copies a WEEK.

"You delivered," I said to Michael. "You delivered like a motherf*****."

"Please don't use that word, Walter."

"You delivered like an angel."

"That's better. How will you promote it?"

"Like a mother-f*****."

Michael giggled.

When he performed the album's first single, Billy Jean, on the Motown 25th Anniversary television special, he moonwalked his way into a new stratosphere. Michaelmania spread around the world.

Michael worked tirelessly, but he also became obsessed with how he looked. He literally resculpted his image, chose young children and chimps as companions, and slept in oxygen chambers.

Thriller stayed No.1 for months, but whenever it fell to second place, he'd berate me for failing to pump up the promotion.

"I'm pumping, Michael," I'd say. And I was. I screamed bloody murder when MTV refused to air his videos. They argued their format - white rock - excluded Michael's music. I argued they were racist assholes - and I'd trumpet it to the world if they didn't relent. I've never been more forceful or obnoxious.

When I threatened to pull all our videos, they caved in. The stunning creativity of Michael's videos - Billie Jean, Beat It, Thriller - set a new standard and opened the door for black artists. But I still needed Michael on the cover of Rolling Stone.

"I rarely put R&B artists on the cover," Jann Wenner, the editor, said. "And black artists don't sell magazines."

"I'm not sure that he's black. He's not sure he's black," I said. "But keep him off the cover and I'll report your prejudice to every media outlet in the world."

Wenner put him on the cover.

Even Michael's scary accident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial - when he was badly burned - turned up the media heat.

The Guinness Book Of Records announced that Thriller, with 25 million records sold, was the best-selling album ever. I threw a party to celebrate at the Natural History Museum and the President and Mrs Reagan sent a telegram.

At the moment I was about to introduce Michael to the glittering crowd, he whispered in my ear: "I have to tinkle. Can you take me to the potty?"

Grammy time came round again, and Michael was still obsessed.

"I think I'm going to win a lot of Grammys," he said. "But everyone says Quincy (Jones, his record producer) is going to win some, too. And I don't want him to. I produced the record. He only helped out."

"Go to the goddamn Grammys, Michael," I said. "And act like you're happy."

Thriller won more than a dozen Grammys and Michael acted like he loved Quincy more than life itself. Seated in the front row in spangled mock-military garb, his glittering single glove on full display, he had Brooke Shields on one side and child star Emmanuel Lewis on the other.

When his name was called as winner, he asked me to join him onstage.

But mostly, Michael wanted me to be the bad guy.

"That's a great idea for the title if my next solo album," he said.

"What is?"

"Bad."

In every sense of the word, Michael was bad. I noticed he looked different one day as we drove through LA.

His face had been altered, his skin lighter, his nose smaller.

COMPARED to the handsome young man who had come to my office to argue for his autonomy back in the 70s, he was starting to look downright weird.

"What are you doing to yourself?" I asked.

"I never liked the way I looked," he said. "Now I do. When I was a kid, my brothers teased me about my bad skin and my big nose."

"So now you have good skin and a little nose. Leave yourself alone, Michael."

"Surgeons these days can perform miracles. They're like sculptors."

"You're a nice-looking guy. You don't want to look like a piece of sculpture."

My old friend Frank Dileo, Michael's manager, hated the cover of Bad. "It makes him look like a fag," he said.

Michael called from California. "I think you should reconsider the cover," I said. "All that make-up, Michael."

"I'm hardly wearing any make-up. Everyone in Hollywood wears make-up and everyone in Hollywood has plastic surgery. Why is everyone always picking on me?"

We wined and dined 60 of the key salespeople for Bad at the Jackson family home. Michael clung to me all night like a little child. The only other object of his attention was Bubbles the chimp, who was wearing diapers. Bubbles held Michael's left hand and I held his right.

The next time I saw him was in Tokyo on his world tour. Backstage, I saw that Michael's entourage included a cute young boy, not older than 13. I asked him what he was doing on the tour.

"I'm Michael's friend," he said.

Given Michael's discomfort with adults, I wasn't surprised. It was strange - but then, everything about Michael was strange.

Extracted by ROS WYNNE-JONES

Walter Yetnikoff, extracted from Howling At The Moon, published by Abacus (TimeWarner Books), £12.99. To buy a copy for £11.99 (p&p free) call Mirror Direct on 0870 0703 200 or send a cheque/postal order payable to Mirror Direct to Mirror Direct, FREEPOST, PO Box 60, Helston, Cornwall, TR13 0TP

ude comments about the state of Michael Jackson's face don't exactly raise the level of discourse, but come on, when that mug shot hit the news, you had to stop and shriek a little. Had Jacko spent the entire flight to Santa Barbara playing around with his M.A.C products? (Or maybe the eyeliner and lip color are permanently tattooed—yeah, in fact, I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.) Did he—desperate to avoid a Nick Nolte—end up uncannily echoing the pleading eyes and near grimacing mouth of that other alleged child abuser, Joan Crawford? And how 'bout that nose, huh?

But wait a Neverland minute! We need to separate the blusher from the bullshit. I'm terrified that we may be turning into a tabloid version of Brandon Teena's lynchers, making merciless fun of any celebrity's gender nonconformity or fashion extremism. I of all people shouldn't be casting stones, having spent my entire adult life celebrating drag queens, freaks, and kooks (though most of them are openly gay and the worst thing any of them has ever done to a kid is scream, "Sit down!" at a birthday party). Are we all just afraid to accept a female-bloused Cat in the Hat who simply provides a playland of wonderment and life lessons to needy little ones? Maybe we need to decide if Jackson's giving drag queens a bad name or people are giving him a bad name because he's a drag queen.

But—end of compassionate sidebar—back to the lip jokes, all right? It's way more fun to ick-ify Jacko, and besides, it's not too hard to argue that his cosmetics (and cosmetic surgery) are less self-expression than cover-up. Our collective "eew" can be justified—after all, this guy hasn't been straight with us! Any remaining fans I knew lost faith when Jacko bought off his last accuser in '94 because he didn't want to bother with a trial. ("Extortion!" he cried, then promptly paid up.) Since then, even when coming off completely out of it, Jacko's often reeked of sheer calculation, from getting various women to farm out babies for him to dangle, to bizarrely thanking Britney Spears for the Artist of the Millennium award on the VMAs when all she'd offered was a piece of birthday cake. Jacko marches so loudly to his own arrested-development drum that no one was surprised when he turned up as an ick-tegral part of Liza and David's wedding party last year. (These people all shill for each other's dysfunctions. They're—this feels so good—freeeaks!) Worst of all, he loves children—but mainly if they're drop-dead gorgeous, and in some cases even ready to drop dead.

Yes, Jackson's aggressively weird, and inspiringly enough, this has united a nation in political disarray! His excesses bond us against a collective enemy—he's much more popular to attack than Iraq—while fueling our desperate desire for the charges to be true. No, we're not rooting for anyone to have been molested, but we want Jackson to be the repository of all our fears so we can agree on something, send him away, and bring on the sunshine. We couldn't get Rosie or Martha to melt—and we can't even find bin Laden or Hussein—but if Jacko would just agree to be a pedophile, we could have our kook and eat him too.

The trouble is that no one else has exactly been behaving with any restraint or dignity either. For all his insistence that he's not making this into a vendetta, D.A. Tom Sneddon Jr. has been grinning like a rat with a ham hock. Sneddon's smug press conference last Wednesday inappropriately started with a jokey tone and a plug for Santa Barbara commerce and went on to spew a little too much bluster, which was undercut by Sneddon begging anyone else who'd been molested by Jacko to please come forward and help the case.

Even less credibly, the level of around-the-clock "experts" wrapping their unlicensed pop psychology around the subject quickly became thinner than those pained ruby lips. Alternating squeals of "He had no childhood!" and "How can these families leave their children with him?" (this from the same pundits trying to make a living off his name) proved as obvious as a Chanel top with Peter Pan hair. One cable channel proudly featured a Jackson family friend who'd brought his two girls to Neverland and said they absolutely loved it. Yeah, well, they're girls. Another one had the usual array of chattering heads, under which absurdly flashed the fun fact, "Michael Jackson once dated Brooke Shields." (So he does like girls? This was getting shocking.)

And the Jacko camp was sending out its minions, convicted sexual assaulter Rick James damagingly coming to the singer's defense and brother Jermaine making his usual rounds, coming off a little like he'd be at home on Christopher Street himself. In his brief Barbara Walters interview, jaunty Jermaine cried racism, invoked the power of his family (which my crazy ass thought was the most dysfunctional one in pop history), and even suggested that the cops may have planted evidence. With O.J., we had to at least wait for the evidence before people were accused of planting it. The persecution of superstar sociopaths is happening faster and faster these days!

Things reached an even more feverish pitch when I got a press release from a child sex-abuse expert who feels Jacko should submit to "a penile plethysmograph"—a device that measures your sexual arousal patterns to various pervy scenarios. All righty, who wants to be the one to hook up the plethysmograph?

Eventually, some cleansing truths will flush out all the murk, but until Bonnie Fuller outs the cancer kid (which at least one Brit tab has already done, in addition to breaking the love-letter scoop that gave us twisted hope), we're only left with more trash-minded questions. Like, if the kid ends up detailing Michael's penis on the stand, couldn't the defense argue that he might have just read all that in the book about Michael's other molestation charges? (Not that I've read the epic work nine times. It's circumcised, with very little pubic hair, and pink and brown patches on the testicles.) And when the Daily News outlined the secret passageway to Jacko's kiddie stay-over room, were we sick to relish lines like, "In the back of Michael's closet, there's a hidden door"?

And psst, how 'bout that freakin' schnoz?

twink69 never

actually said:

way to copy and paste!

I've always found it hilarious that his major complaint in life is "daddy made fun of my big nose and my funny skin". We should all be so lucky. Who fucking cares about this clown, really?

VoicesCarry said:

The person featured in you signature, for one.

Marrk said:

Yeah, by contractual obligation

I did mean the average members of the public, though. His problems are laughable compared to what some people go through (and without hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, I might add). No support rallies for them, though!
[This message was edited Sun Mar 21 4:21:47 2004 by VoicesCarry]

Marrk said:

I know! I was thinking the same thing!

VoicesCarry said:

You just know he has millions of people around the world rooting for him. I didn't buy his last album myself, but 1.5m of my fellow Brits did. People still care.

Marrk said:

Buying his album means you like the music, not necessarily the person. I don't think you can equate "buying" with "caring", otherwise I'd be guilty of caring about Michael's problems considering the amount of his music I own, lol. I buy his music, but I don't root for him. Most people are casual fans.
[This message was edited Sun Mar 21 5:47:50 2004 by VoicesCarry]

twink69 said:

lol

VoicesCarry said:

I wouldn't put money in an alleged paedophiles pocket. I don't think most people would let alone casual music buyers, that says something the fact his product still sells when they could buy anything else. I'm pretty sure most people that bought No1's had those songs already on other albums.

I'll admit i'm not sure what i mean here!

Marrk said:

Hmmm.....I have to wonder about those people if they're buying greatest hits collections when they already have the tracks, lol. Could have just bought the One More Chance maxi. But no, most people don't really give a shit about the artist's image, especially when they haven't even been convicted of a crime. Will Thriller's sales fall drastically if Michael's convicted? No, because it's good music.

Look at R. Kelly. His popularity has actually increased since he was accused (even though it's obvious he's guilty). And I don't think that's because people are cheering him on, somehow.

Number Ones sold so well, I think, because most of the stuff on there is actually good music. Additionally, greatest hits collections usually do boffo business in European and Asian markets, because CDs are on the whole much more expensive over there. I mean, Engelbert Humperdinck just debuted at #7 on the UK charts with "Greatest Love Songs", with other collections from Duran Duran, Leann Rimes and TFF hitting the top 5 (and still in the top 30). A collection from Teddy Pendergrass is in the top 30. How long has it been since he even CHARTED in America? So a greatest hits collection is a sure thing. The performance of Number Ones in the US was less than stellar. If Michael were to release an album of new material today, I'm not so sure how it would fare.
[This message was edited Sun Mar 21 10:14:22 2004 by VoicesCarry]

The weirdest thing I think is that people are actually almost stopping to care about whether Michael's guilty or not. Most see him as a freak anyway, loved "Smooth Criminal" or some other olden goldie, and are somewhat willing to forgive him because everybody knows he has serious mental problems. I guess, everybody wants to see the final outcome from the courtroom but as far as sympathy or general malevolence goes, they're almost irrelevant.

never said I wote it, it was part of my post, it's actually from Michael Musto's column, I thought it it fitted in with the post