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He basically admits to having manikins so he can talk to them like friends.
[From RS 389 - February 17, 1983]
Cover Story: Michael Jackson
Life in the magical kingdom
GERRI HIRSHEY
Posted Feb 17, 1983 1:47 PM
It's noon, and somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, the front shades of a row of condos are lowered against a hazy glare. Through the metal gate, the courtyard is silent, except for the distant splat of a fountain against its plastic Bower. Then comes the chilling whine of a real-life Valley girl. "Grandmuther. I am not gonna walk a whole block. It's bumid. My hair will be brillo."
And the soothing counterpoint of maternal encouragement: "Be good pup, Jolie. Make for mama."
All along the courtyard's trimmed inner paths, poodles waddle about trailing poodle-cut ladies on pink leashes.
"Not what you expected, huh?" From behind a mask of bony fingers, Michael Jackson giggles. Having settled his visitor on the middle floor of his own three-level condo, Michael explains that the residence is temporary, while his Encino, California, home is razed and rebuilt. He concedes that this is an unlikely spot for a young prince of pop.
It is also surprising to see that Michael has decided to face this interview alone. He says he has not done anything like this for over two years. And even when he did, it was always with a cordon of managers, other Jackson brothers and, in one case, his younger sister Janet parroting a reporter's questions before Michael would answer them. The small body of existing literature paints him as excruciatingly shy. He ducks, he hides, he talks to his shoe tops. Or he just doesn't show up. He is known to conduct his private life with almost obsessive caution, "just like a hemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way." The analogy is his.
Run this down next to the stats, the successes, and it doesn't add up. He has been the featured player with the Jackson Five since grade school. In 1980, he stepped out of the Jacksons to record his own LP, Off the Wall, and it became the best-selling album of the year. Thriller, his new album, is Number Five on the charts. And the list of performers now working with him ? or wanting to ? includes Paul McCartney, Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Queen and Jane Fonda. On record, onstage, on TV and screen, Michael Jackson has no trouble stepping out. Nothing scares him, he says. But this....
"Do you like doing this?" Michael asks. There is a note of incredulity in his voice, as though he were asking the question of a coroner. He is slumped in a dining-room chair, looking down into the lower level of the living room. It is filled with statuary. There are some graceful, Greco-Roman type bronzes, as well as a few pieces from the suburban birdbath school. The figures are frozen around the sofa like some ghostly tea party.
Michael himself is having little success sitting still. He is so nervous that he is eating — plowing through — a bag of potato chips. This is truly odd behavior. None of his brothers can recall seeing anything snacky pass his lips since he became a strict vegetarian and health-food disciple six years ago. In fact, Katherine Jackson, his mother, worries that Michael seems to exist on little more than air. As far as she can tell, her son just has no interest in food. He says that if he didn't have to eat to stay alive, he wouldn't.
"I really do hate this," he says. Having polished off the chips, he has begun to fold and refold a newspaper clipping. "I am much more relaxed onstage than I am right now. But hey, let's go." He smiles. Later, he will explain that "let's go" is what his bodyguard always says when they are about to wade into some public fray. It's also a phrase Michael has been listening for since he was old enough to tie his own shoes.
Let's go, boys. With that, Joe Jackson would round up his sons Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael. "Let's go" has rumbled from the brothers' preshow huddle for more than three-quarters of Michael's life, first as the Jackson Five on Motown and now as the Jacksons on Epic. Michael and the Jacksons have sold over a 100 million records. Six of their two dozen Motown singles went platinum; ten others went gold. He was just eleven in 1970 when their first hit, "I Want You Back," nudged out B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," for Number One.
Michael says he knew at age five, when he sang "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" in school and laid out the house, that something special was going on. Back then, such precocity frightened his mother. But years later it soothed hearts and coffers at Epic when Off the Wall sold over 5 million in the U.S., another 2 million worldwide and one of its hit singles, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," won him a Grammy. The LP yielded four Top Ten hit singles, a record for a solo artist and a feat attained only by Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and by the combined efforts on the Grease and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks.
If a jittery record industry dared wager, the smart money would be on Michael Jackson. Recent months have found him at work on no fewer than three projects: his own recently released Thriller; Paul McCartney's work-in-progress, which will contain two Jackson-McCartney collaborations, "Say, Say, Say" and "The Man"; and the narration and one song for the storybook E.T. album on MCA for director Steven Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones. In his spare time, he wrote and produced Diana Ross' single "Muscles." This is indeed a young man in a hurry. Already he is looking past the album he is scheduled to make with the Jacksons this winter. There is a chance of a spring tour. And then there are the movies. Since his role as the scarecrow in The Wiz his bedroom has been hip-deep in scripts.
At twenty-four, Michael Jackson has one foot planted firmly on either side of the Eighties. His childhood hits are golden oldies, and his boyhood idols have become his peers. Michael was just ten when he moved into Diana Ross' Hollywood home. Now he produces her. He was five when the Beatles crossed over; now he and McCartney wrangle over the same girl on Michael's single "The Girl Is Mine." His showbiz friends span generations as well. He hangs out with the likes of such other kid stars as Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol, and ex-kid star Stevie Wonder. He gossips long distance with-Adam Ant and Liza Minnelli, and has heart-to-hearts with octogenarian Fred Astaire. When he visited the set of On Golden Pond. Henry Fonda baited fishhooks for him. Jane Fonda is helping him learn acting. Pen pal Katharine Hepburn broke a lifelong habit of avoiding rock by attending a 1981 Jacksons concert at Madison Square Garden.
Even E.T would be attracted to such a gentle spirit, according to Steven Spielberg, who says he told Michael, "If E.T. didn't come to Elliott, he would have come to your house." Spielberg also says he thought of no one else to narrate the saga of his timorous alien. "Michael is one of the last living innocents who is in complete control of his life. I've never seen anybody like Michael. He's an emotional star child."
Cartoons are flashing silently across the giant screen that glows in the darkened den. Michael mentions that he loves cartoons. In fact, he loves all things "magic." This definition is wide enough to include everything from Bambi to James Brown.
"He's so magic," Michael says of Brown, admitting that he patterned his own quicksilver choreography on the Godfather's classic bag of stage moves. "I'd be in the wings when I was like six or seven. I'd sit there and watch him."
Michael's kindergarten was the basement of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was too shy to actually approach the performers the Jackson Five opened for — everyone from Jackie Wilson to Gladys Knight, the Temptations and Etta James. But he says he had to know everything they did — how James Brown could do a slide, a spin and a split and still make it back before the mike hit the floor. How the mike itself disappeared through the Apollo stage floor. He crept downstairs, along passageways and walls and hid there, peering from behind the dusty flanks of old vaudeville sets while musicians tuned, smoked, played cards and divvied barbecue. Climbing back to the wings, he stood in the protective folds of the musty maroon curtain, watching his favorite acts, committing every double dip and every bump, snap, whip-it-back mike toss to his inventory of night moves. Recently, for a refresher course, Michael went to see James Brown perform at an L.A. club. "He's the most electrifying. He can take an audience anywhere he wants to. The audience just went bananas. He went wild?and at his age. He gets so out of himself."
Getting out of oneself is a recurrent theme in Michael's life, whether the subject is dancing, singing or acting. As a Jehovah's Witness, Michael believes in an impending holocaust, which will be followed by the second coming of Christ. Religion is a large part of his life, requiring intense Bible study and thrice-weekly meetings at a nearby Kingdom Hall. He has never touched drugs and rarely goes near alcohol. Still, despite the prophesied Armageddon, the spirit is not so dour as to rule out frequent hops on the fantasy shuttle.
"I'm a collector of cartoons," he says. "All the Disney stuff, Bugs Bunny, the old MGM ones. I've only met one person who has a bigger collection than I do, and I was surprised ? Paul McCartney. He's a cartoon fanatic. Whenever I go to his house, we watch cartoons. When we came here to work on my album, we rented all these cartoons from the studio, Dumbo and some other stuff. It's real escapism. It's like everything's all right. It's like the world is happening now in a faraway city. Everything's fine.
"The first time I saw E.T., I melted through the whole thing," he says. "The second time, I cried like crazy. And then, in doing the narration, I felt like I was there with them, like behind a tree or something, watching everything that happened."
So great was Michael's emotional involvement that Steven Spielberg found his narrator crying in the darkened studio when he got to the part where E.T. is dying. Finally, Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones decided to run with it and let Michael's voice break. Fighting those feelings would be counterproductive — something Jones had already learned while producing Off the Wall.
"I had a song I'd been saving for Michael called "She's Out of My Life," he remembers. "Michael heard it, and it clicked. But when he sang it, he would cry. Every time we did it, I'd look up at the end and Michael would be crying. I said, 'We'll come back in two weeks and do it again, and maybe it won't tear you up so much. 'Came back and he started to get teary. So we left it in."
This tug of war between the controlled professional and the vulnerable, private Michael surfaces in the lyrics he has written for himself. In "Bless His Soul," a song on the Jacksons' Destiny LP that Michael says is definitely about him, he sings:
Yes, he says, he feels used, declining specifics, saying only that in his profession, "They demand that, and they want you to do this. They think that they own you, they think they made you. If you don't have faith, you go crazy. Like not doing interviews. If I talk, I say what's on my mind, and it can seem strange to other peoples' ears. I'm the kind of person who will tell it all, even though it's a secret. And I know that things should be kept private."
For his own protection, Michael has rigged himself a set of emotional floodgates, created situations where it's okay to let it all out. "Some circumstances require me to be real quiet," he says. "But I dance every Sunday." On that day, he also fasts.
This, his mother confirms, is a weekly ritual that leaves her son laid out, sweating, laughing and crying. It is also a ritual very similar to Michael's performances. Indeed, the weight of the Jacksons' stage show rests heavily on his narrow, sequined shoulders. There is nothing tentative about his solo turns. He can tuck his long, thin frame into a figure skater's spin without benefit of ice or skates. Aided by the burn and flash of silvery body suits, he seems to change molecular structure at will, 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 to some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps and squeals. He has been known to leap offstage and climb up into the rigging.
At home, in his room, he dances until he falls down. Michael says the Sunday dance sessions are also an effective way to quiet his stage addiction when he is not touring. Sometimes in these off periods, another performer will call him up from the audience. And in the long, long trip from his seat to the stage, the two Michaels duke it out.
"I sit there and say, 'Please don't call me up, I am too shy,'" Jackson says. "But once I get up there, I take control of myself. Being onstage is magic. There's nothing like it. You feel the energy of everybody who's out there. You feel it all over your body. When the lights hit you, it's all over, I swear it is."
He is smiling now, sitting upright, trying to explain weightlessness to the earth-bound.
"When it's time to go off, I don't want to. I could stay up there forever. It's the same thing with making a movie. What's wonderful about a film is that you can become another person. I love to forget. And lots of times, you totally forget. It's like automatic pilot. I mean ? whew."
During shooting for The Wiz, he became so attached to his Scarecrow character, the crew literally had to wrench him from the set and out of his costume. He was in Oz, and wasn't keen on leaving it for another hotel room.
"That's what I loved about doing E.T. I was actually there. The next day, I missed him a lot. I wanted to go back to that spot I was at yesterday in the forest. I wanted to be there."
Alas, he is still at the dining-room table in his condo. But despite the visible strain, he's holding steady. And he brightens at a question about his animals. He says he talks to his menagerie every day."I have two fawns. Mr. Tibbs looks like a ram; he's got the horns. I've got a beautiful llama. His name is Louie." He's also into exotic birds like macaws, cockatoos and a giant rhea.
"Stay right there," he says, "and I'll show you something." He takes the stairs to his bedroom two at a time. Though I know we are the only people in the apartment, I hear him talking.
"Aw, were you asleep? I'm sorry...."
Seconds later, an eight-foot boa constrictor is deposited on the dining-room table. He is moving in my direction at an alarming rate.
"This is Muscles. And I have trained him to eat interviewers."
Muscles, having made it to the tape recorder and flicked his tongue disdainfully, continues on toward the nearest source of warm blood. Michael thoughtfully picks up the reptile as its snub nose butts my wrist. Really, he insists, Muscles is quite sweet. It's all nonsense, this stuff about snakes eating people. Besides, Muscles isn't even hungry; he enjoyed his weekly live rat a couple of days ago. If anything, the stranger's presence has probably made Muscles a trifle nervous himself. Coiled around his owner's torso, his tensile strength has made Michael's forearm a vivid bas-relief of straining blood vessels. To demonstrate the snake's sense of balance, Michael sets him down on a three-inch wide banister, where he will remain, motionless, for the next hour or so.
"Snakes are very misunderstood," he says. Snakes, I suggest, may be the oldest victims of bad press. Michael whacks the table and laughs.
"Bad press. Ain't it so, Muscles?
The snake lifts its head momentarily, then settles back on the banister. All three of us are a bit more relaxed.
"Know what I also love?" Michael volunteers. "Manikins."
Yes, he means the kind you see wearing mink bikinis in Beverly Hills store windows. When his new house is finished, he says he'll have a room with no furniture, just a desk and a bunch of store dummies.
"I guess I want to bring them to life. I like to imagine talking to them. You know what I think it is? Yeah, I think I'll say it. I think I'm accompanying myself with friends I never had. I probably have two friends. And I just got them. Being an entertainer, you just can't tell who is your friend. And they see you so differently. A star instead of a next-door neighbor."
He pauses, staring down at the living-room statues.
"That's what it is. I surround myself with people I want to be my friends. And I can do that with manikins. I'll talk to them."
All of this is not to say that Michael is friendless. On the contrary, people are clamoring to be his friend.That's just the trouble: with such staggering numbers knocking at the gate, it becomes necessary to sort and categorize. Michael never had a school chum. Or a playmate. Or a steady girlfriend. The two mystery friends he mentioned are his first civilians. As for the rest....
"I know people in show business."
Foremost is Diana Ross, with whom he shares his "deepest, darkest secrets" and problems. But even when they are alone together, their world is circumscribed. And there's Quincy Jones, "who I think is wonderful. But to get out of the realm of show business, to become like everybody else...."
To forget. To get out of the performing self.
"Me and Liza, say. Now, I would consider her a great friend, but a show-business friend. And we're sitting there talking about this movie, and she'll tell me all about Judy Garland. And then she'll go, 'Show me that stuff you did at rehearsal.'" He feints a dance move. "And I'll go, 'Show me yours.' We're totally into each other's performance."
This Michael does not find odd, or unacceptable. It's when celebrity makes every gesture a performance that he runs for cover. Some stars simply make up their minds to get on with things, no matter what. Diana Ross marched bravely into a Manhattan shoe store with her three daughters and had them fitted for running shoes, despite the crowd of 200 that convened on the sidewalk. Michael, who's been a boy in a bubble since the age of reason, would find that intolerable. He will go to only one L.A. restaurant, a health-food place where the owners know him. As for shopping, Michael avoids it by having a secretary or aide pick out clothes for him. "You don't get peace in a shop. If they don't know your name, they know your voice. And you can't hide."
End of part one (continue in reading)
[From RS 389 - February 17, 1983]
Cover Story: Michael Jackson
Life in the magical kingdom
GERRI HIRSHEY
Posted Feb 17, 1983 1:47 PM
It's noon, and somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, the front shades of a row of condos are lowered against a hazy glare. Through the metal gate, the courtyard is silent, except for the distant splat of a fountain against its plastic Bower. Then comes the chilling whine of a real-life Valley girl. "Grandmuther. I am not gonna walk a whole block. It's bumid. My hair will be brillo."
And the soothing counterpoint of maternal encouragement: "Be good pup, Jolie. Make for mama."
All along the courtyard's trimmed inner paths, poodles waddle about trailing poodle-cut ladies on pink leashes.
"Not what you expected, huh?" From behind a mask of bony fingers, Michael Jackson giggles. Having settled his visitor on the middle floor of his own three-level condo, Michael explains that the residence is temporary, while his Encino, California, home is razed and rebuilt. He concedes that this is an unlikely spot for a young prince of pop.
It is also surprising to see that Michael has decided to face this interview alone. He says he has not done anything like this for over two years. And even when he did, it was always with a cordon of managers, other Jackson brothers and, in one case, his younger sister Janet parroting a reporter's questions before Michael would answer them. The small body of existing literature paints him as excruciatingly shy. He ducks, he hides, he talks to his shoe tops. Or he just doesn't show up. He is known to conduct his private life with almost obsessive caution, "just like a hemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way." The analogy is his.
Run this down next to the stats, the successes, and it doesn't add up. He has been the featured player with the Jackson Five since grade school. In 1980, he stepped out of the Jacksons to record his own LP, Off the Wall, and it became the best-selling album of the year. Thriller, his new album, is Number Five on the charts. And the list of performers now working with him ? or wanting to ? includes Paul McCartney, Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Queen and Jane Fonda. On record, onstage, on TV and screen, Michael Jackson has no trouble stepping out. Nothing scares him, he says. But this....
"Do you like doing this?" Michael asks. There is a note of incredulity in his voice, as though he were asking the question of a coroner. He is slumped in a dining-room chair, looking down into the lower level of the living room. It is filled with statuary. There are some graceful, Greco-Roman type bronzes, as well as a few pieces from the suburban birdbath school. The figures are frozen around the sofa like some ghostly tea party.
Michael himself is having little success sitting still. He is so nervous that he is eating — plowing through — a bag of potato chips. This is truly odd behavior. None of his brothers can recall seeing anything snacky pass his lips since he became a strict vegetarian and health-food disciple six years ago. In fact, Katherine Jackson, his mother, worries that Michael seems to exist on little more than air. As far as she can tell, her son just has no interest in food. He says that if he didn't have to eat to stay alive, he wouldn't.
"I really do hate this," he says. Having polished off the chips, he has begun to fold and refold a newspaper clipping. "I am much more relaxed onstage than I am right now. But hey, let's go." He smiles. Later, he will explain that "let's go" is what his bodyguard always says when they are about to wade into some public fray. It's also a phrase Michael has been listening for since he was old enough to tie his own shoes.
Let's go, boys. With that, Joe Jackson would round up his sons Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael. "Let's go" has rumbled from the brothers' preshow huddle for more than three-quarters of Michael's life, first as the Jackson Five on Motown and now as the Jacksons on Epic. Michael and the Jacksons have sold over a 100 million records. Six of their two dozen Motown singles went platinum; ten others went gold. He was just eleven in 1970 when their first hit, "I Want You Back," nudged out B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," for Number One.
Michael says he knew at age five, when he sang "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" in school and laid out the house, that something special was going on. Back then, such precocity frightened his mother. But years later it soothed hearts and coffers at Epic when Off the Wall sold over 5 million in the U.S., another 2 million worldwide and one of its hit singles, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," won him a Grammy. The LP yielded four Top Ten hit singles, a record for a solo artist and a feat attained only by Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and by the combined efforts on the Grease and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks.
If a jittery record industry dared wager, the smart money would be on Michael Jackson. Recent months have found him at work on no fewer than three projects: his own recently released Thriller; Paul McCartney's work-in-progress, which will contain two Jackson-McCartney collaborations, "Say, Say, Say" and "The Man"; and the narration and one song for the storybook E.T. album on MCA for director Steven Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones. In his spare time, he wrote and produced Diana Ross' single "Muscles." This is indeed a young man in a hurry. Already he is looking past the album he is scheduled to make with the Jacksons this winter. There is a chance of a spring tour. And then there are the movies. Since his role as the scarecrow in The Wiz his bedroom has been hip-deep in scripts.
At twenty-four, Michael Jackson has one foot planted firmly on either side of the Eighties. His childhood hits are golden oldies, and his boyhood idols have become his peers. Michael was just ten when he moved into Diana Ross' Hollywood home. Now he produces her. He was five when the Beatles crossed over; now he and McCartney wrangle over the same girl on Michael's single "The Girl Is Mine." His showbiz friends span generations as well. He hangs out with the likes of such other kid stars as Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol, and ex-kid star Stevie Wonder. He gossips long distance with-Adam Ant and Liza Minnelli, and has heart-to-hearts with octogenarian Fred Astaire. When he visited the set of On Golden Pond. Henry Fonda baited fishhooks for him. Jane Fonda is helping him learn acting. Pen pal Katharine Hepburn broke a lifelong habit of avoiding rock by attending a 1981 Jacksons concert at Madison Square Garden.
Even E.T would be attracted to such a gentle spirit, according to Steven Spielberg, who says he told Michael, "If E.T. didn't come to Elliott, he would have come to your house." Spielberg also says he thought of no one else to narrate the saga of his timorous alien. "Michael is one of the last living innocents who is in complete control of his life. I've never seen anybody like Michael. He's an emotional star child."
Cartoons are flashing silently across the giant screen that glows in the darkened den. Michael mentions that he loves cartoons. In fact, he loves all things "magic." This definition is wide enough to include everything from Bambi to James Brown.
"He's so magic," Michael says of Brown, admitting that he patterned his own quicksilver choreography on the Godfather's classic bag of stage moves. "I'd be in the wings when I was like six or seven. I'd sit there and watch him."
Michael's kindergarten was the basement of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was too shy to actually approach the performers the Jackson Five opened for — everyone from Jackie Wilson to Gladys Knight, the Temptations and Etta James. But he says he had to know everything they did — how James Brown could do a slide, a spin and a split and still make it back before the mike hit the floor. How the mike itself disappeared through the Apollo stage floor. He crept downstairs, along passageways and walls and hid there, peering from behind the dusty flanks of old vaudeville sets while musicians tuned, smoked, played cards and divvied barbecue. Climbing back to the wings, he stood in the protective folds of the musty maroon curtain, watching his favorite acts, committing every double dip and every bump, snap, whip-it-back mike toss to his inventory of night moves. Recently, for a refresher course, Michael went to see James Brown perform at an L.A. club. "He's the most electrifying. He can take an audience anywhere he wants to. The audience just went bananas. He went wild?and at his age. He gets so out of himself."
Getting out of oneself is a recurrent theme in Michael's life, whether the subject is dancing, singing or acting. As a Jehovah's Witness, Michael believes in an impending holocaust, which will be followed by the second coming of Christ. Religion is a large part of his life, requiring intense Bible study and thrice-weekly meetings at a nearby Kingdom Hall. He has never touched drugs and rarely goes near alcohol. Still, despite the prophesied Armageddon, the spirit is not so dour as to rule out frequent hops on the fantasy shuttle.
"I'm a collector of cartoons," he says. "All the Disney stuff, Bugs Bunny, the old MGM ones. I've only met one person who has a bigger collection than I do, and I was surprised ? Paul McCartney. He's a cartoon fanatic. Whenever I go to his house, we watch cartoons. When we came here to work on my album, we rented all these cartoons from the studio, Dumbo and some other stuff. It's real escapism. It's like everything's all right. It's like the world is happening now in a faraway city. Everything's fine.
"The first time I saw E.T., I melted through the whole thing," he says. "The second time, I cried like crazy. And then, in doing the narration, I felt like I was there with them, like behind a tree or something, watching everything that happened."
So great was Michael's emotional involvement that Steven Spielberg found his narrator crying in the darkened studio when he got to the part where E.T. is dying. Finally, Spielberg and producer Quincy Jones decided to run with it and let Michael's voice break. Fighting those feelings would be counterproductive — something Jones had already learned while producing Off the Wall.
"I had a song I'd been saving for Michael called "She's Out of My Life," he remembers. "Michael heard it, and it clicked. But when he sang it, he would cry. Every time we did it, I'd look up at the end and Michael would be crying. I said, 'We'll come back in two weeks and do it again, and maybe it won't tear you up so much. 'Came back and he started to get teary. So we left it in."
This tug of war between the controlled professional and the vulnerable, private Michael surfaces in the lyrics he has written for himself. In "Bless His Soul," a song on the Jacksons' Destiny LP that Michael says is definitely about him, he sings:
Two of the Jackson-written cuts on Thriller strengthen that defensive stance. "They eat off you, you're a vegetable," he shouts on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." "Beat It," a tense, tough dance cut, flirts with paranoia: "You have to show them that you're really not scared/You're playin' with your life, this ain't no truth or dare/They'll kick you, then they beat you/Then they'll tell you it's fair."
Yes, he says, he feels used, declining specifics, saying only that in his profession, "They demand that, and they want you to do this. They think that they own you, they think they made you. If you don't have faith, you go crazy. Like not doing interviews. If I talk, I say what's on my mind, and it can seem strange to other peoples' ears. I'm the kind of person who will tell it all, even though it's a secret. And I know that things should be kept private."
For his own protection, Michael has rigged himself a set of emotional floodgates, created situations where it's okay to let it all out. "Some circumstances require me to be real quiet," he says. "But I dance every Sunday." On that day, he also fasts.
This, his mother confirms, is a weekly ritual that leaves her son laid out, sweating, laughing and crying. It is also a ritual very similar to Michael's performances. Indeed, the weight of the Jacksons' stage show rests heavily on his narrow, sequined shoulders. There is nothing tentative about his solo turns. He can tuck his long, thin frame into a figure skater's spin without benefit of ice or skates. Aided by the burn and flash of silvery body suits, he seems to change molecular structure at will, 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 to some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps and squeals. He has been known to leap offstage and climb up into the rigging.
At home, in his room, he dances until he falls down. Michael says the Sunday dance sessions are also an effective way to quiet his stage addiction when he is not touring. Sometimes in these off periods, another performer will call him up from the audience. And in the long, long trip from his seat to the stage, the two Michaels duke it out.
"I sit there and say, 'Please don't call me up, I am too shy,'" Jackson says. "But once I get up there, I take control of myself. Being onstage is magic. There's nothing like it. You feel the energy of everybody who's out there. You feel it all over your body. When the lights hit you, it's all over, I swear it is."
He is smiling now, sitting upright, trying to explain weightlessness to the earth-bound.
"When it's time to go off, I don't want to. I could stay up there forever. It's the same thing with making a movie. What's wonderful about a film is that you can become another person. I love to forget. And lots of times, you totally forget. It's like automatic pilot. I mean ? whew."
During shooting for The Wiz, he became so attached to his Scarecrow character, the crew literally had to wrench him from the set and out of his costume. He was in Oz, and wasn't keen on leaving it for another hotel room.
"That's what I loved about doing E.T. I was actually there. The next day, I missed him a lot. I wanted to go back to that spot I was at yesterday in the forest. I wanted to be there."
Alas, he is still at the dining-room table in his condo. But despite the visible strain, he's holding steady. And he brightens at a question about his animals. He says he talks to his menagerie every day."I have two fawns. Mr. Tibbs looks like a ram; he's got the horns. I've got a beautiful llama. His name is Louie." He's also into exotic birds like macaws, cockatoos and a giant rhea.
"Stay right there," he says, "and I'll show you something." He takes the stairs to his bedroom two at a time. Though I know we are the only people in the apartment, I hear him talking.
"Aw, were you asleep? I'm sorry...."
Seconds later, an eight-foot boa constrictor is deposited on the dining-room table. He is moving in my direction at an alarming rate.
"This is Muscles. And I have trained him to eat interviewers."
Muscles, having made it to the tape recorder and flicked his tongue disdainfully, continues on toward the nearest source of warm blood. Michael thoughtfully picks up the reptile as its snub nose butts my wrist. Really, he insists, Muscles is quite sweet. It's all nonsense, this stuff about snakes eating people. Besides, Muscles isn't even hungry; he enjoyed his weekly live rat a couple of days ago. If anything, the stranger's presence has probably made Muscles a trifle nervous himself. Coiled around his owner's torso, his tensile strength has made Michael's forearm a vivid bas-relief of straining blood vessels. To demonstrate the snake's sense of balance, Michael sets him down on a three-inch wide banister, where he will remain, motionless, for the next hour or so.
"Snakes are very misunderstood," he says. Snakes, I suggest, may be the oldest victims of bad press. Michael whacks the table and laughs.
"Bad press. Ain't it so, Muscles?
The snake lifts its head momentarily, then settles back on the banister. All three of us are a bit more relaxed.
"Know what I also love?" Michael volunteers. "Manikins."
Yes, he means the kind you see wearing mink bikinis in Beverly Hills store windows. When his new house is finished, he says he'll have a room with no furniture, just a desk and a bunch of store dummies.
"I guess I want to bring them to life. I like to imagine talking to them. You know what I think it is? Yeah, I think I'll say it. I think I'm accompanying myself with friends I never had. I probably have two friends. And I just got them. Being an entertainer, you just can't tell who is your friend. And they see you so differently. A star instead of a next-door neighbor."
He pauses, staring down at the living-room statues.
"That's what it is. I surround myself with people I want to be my friends. And I can do that with manikins. I'll talk to them."
All of this is not to say that Michael is friendless. On the contrary, people are clamoring to be his friend.That's just the trouble: with such staggering numbers knocking at the gate, it becomes necessary to sort and categorize. Michael never had a school chum. Or a playmate. Or a steady girlfriend. The two mystery friends he mentioned are his first civilians. As for the rest....
"I know people in show business."
Foremost is Diana Ross, with whom he shares his "deepest, darkest secrets" and problems. But even when they are alone together, their world is circumscribed. And there's Quincy Jones, "who I think is wonderful. But to get out of the realm of show business, to become like everybody else...."
To forget. To get out of the performing self.
"Me and Liza, say. Now, I would consider her a great friend, but a show-business friend. And we're sitting there talking about this movie, and she'll tell me all about Judy Garland. And then she'll go, 'Show me that stuff you did at rehearsal.'" He feints a dance move. "And I'll go, 'Show me yours.' We're totally into each other's performance."
This Michael does not find odd, or unacceptable. It's when celebrity makes every gesture a performance that he runs for cover. Some stars simply make up their minds to get on with things, no matter what. Diana Ross marched bravely into a Manhattan shoe store with her three daughters and had them fitted for running shoes, despite the crowd of 200 that convened on the sidewalk. Michael, who's been a boy in a bubble since the age of reason, would find that intolerable. He will go to only one L.A. restaurant, a health-food place where the owners know him. As for shopping, Michael avoids it by having a secretary or aide pick out clothes for him. "You don't get peace in a shop. If they don't know your name, they know your voice. And you can't hide."
End of part one (continue in reading)
It hurts me deep inside. He seems to be so lonely in the first parts of the interview. Just makes you want to give him a hug and some love, telling him everything is gonna be just allright. Thank you so much for sharing, very interesting to read 
