I never met Michael Jackson, but I met his mum and his brother once—in a slightly scuffed coach-party hotel, by the north Devon coast in the off-season.
It came about because, late last spring, my girlfriend, Alice, was filming a documentary about the Jackson family moving to the town of Appledore. Alice and her director were staying in a hotel in nearby Bideford. I arrived to visit her for the weekend—and there they were, installed in the lobby bar. There was Mrs Jackson, Michael's brother Tito—five years Michael's senior, Tito was the third of ten Jackson siblings and the guitarist in the Jackson 5—and his pouting sort-of-girlfriend, and the family's all-capable secretary and gatekeeper, Janice. Tito's sort-of-girlfriend seemed to be a little on the make. When I met him again a few months later she had vanished from the scene.
Tito mooned after his sort-of-girlfriend in a sweet way. He was gently spoken, pacific, guarded, entirely charming. He fretted with his bowler hat in his hands as he spoke. He spoke loyally when Michael was mentioned and never said anything quotable. The documentary was unravelling. The idea was that the Jacksons—including, theoretically, Michael—were going to house-hunt for a country retreat somewhere round Appledore. We hoped for footage of pop superstars greeting woolly-hatted locals, sampling warm beer, perhaps eating a whelk or two.
But it gradually became clear Michael wasn't coming. Whether the documentary was documenting or occasioning the action was a question that hung stinkily in the air. The guy who'd fixed the whole thing up—a sometime friend of Michael's—was in the process of falling out with the Jacksons and the film-makers.
The night I arrived, the Jackson party had been stranded without transport or food. Alice and her director and I decided to give them supper in our hotel. So we drove them back to their rental cottage to pick up Tito's son.
Outside the gate there was a car parked with a man sitting in it. Alice told me the man had been sitting there when they left the house that morning. When we pulled up and got out to open the gate, the guy jumped out and stuck his head in the window.
"You all right, Tito?" he said. "All right, yeah?"
Tito smiled and said something bland and friendly to him.
"Where you going later? You going out?" the man asked.
Again, Tito smiled and said something bland and friendly. We got the gate open and went in. In the living room was a moon-faced, young-looking guy in his mid-thirties, with short dreadlocks. He was fiddling with his laptop. This was Tito's son Taj.
Tito's children were also in a band, called 3T. They are called Taj, Taryll and TJ. TJ stands for Tito Joe. The Jacksons like to name their children after themselves. Jermaine has a child called Jermajesty. Michael called his children Michael, Paris-Michael and Prince Michael.
"I saw the spooky guy waiting outside," I said to Taj.
"Spooky guy?" Taj said.
"At the bottom of the drive. He's been there all day, apparently, just waiting for you to come back."
"That's not a spooky guy," said Taj. "That's Thomas. He's just a guy who is always there. The spooky ones are different."
Taj was so accustomed to having people sitting in a car outside his house all day long that he made a routine distinction between "spooky" and "always there." It was just part of being a Jackson. Like the rules: never be in a room one-on-one with a fan; avoid physical contact, particularly with female fans; never be rude, always be cautious.
Over dinner, I watched Tito chew quietly as various courtiers—someone's agent, a fixer, someone's agent's husband—offered him advice on how to deal with the courtier with whom he was falling out. He was bland, non-committal. "Not knowing who to trust" is not an idle figure of speech for the Jacksons. Everyone around them seems to be a little on the make.
Yet the point about Jesus was that, in the end, he was one of us. Michael Jackson's situation was far stranger than that.
