him in the backyard, giving out candy from across the chain-link fence to other kids from the street. The kids who were less fortunate than us – and he was mobbed. ‘How much you sell ’em for?’ Joseph asked.
‘I didn’t. I gave them away for free.’
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, AND MORE than 20 years later, I visited Michael at his ranch, Neverland Valley, in the Santa Ynez region of California. He had spent time and money turning his vast acres into a theme park and the family went to check out his completed world. Neverland has always been portrayed as the outlandish creation of ‘a wild imagination’ with the suggestion that a love of Disney was its sole inspiration. Elements of this may be correct, but the truth runs much deeper, and this was something I knew immediately when I saw with my own eyes what he had built.
Childhood memories were brought to life in a giant flashback: white Christmas lights trimming the sidewalk, the pathway, the trees, the frame and guttering of his English Tudor mansion. He had them turned on all year round to ensure that ‘it was Christmas every day.’ A huge steam train with carriages ran between the shops and the movie theatre, and a miniature train toured the circumference of the estate, via the zoo. In the main house – through the doors, passed the welcoming, model life-size butler with tray, up the wide stairway and down the hallway – was the playroom. Inside, beyond the full-size Superman and Darth Vader at the door, was the biggest table dominating the room. On it, a vintage Lionel train set was always running: two or three trains travelling the tracks with lights on, around a model landscape of hills, valleys, towns and waterfalls. Inside the house and out, Michael had built himself the biggest electric train set you could ever imagine.
Back outside, there was a full-on professional go-kart track with chicanes and tight bends, and the merry-go-round was spinning to music, a beautiful carousel of ornate horses. There was a candy store too, where everything was free, and a Christmas tree lit up all year round. In 2003, Michael said he developed the ranch ‘to create everything that I never had as a child.’ But it was also about re-creating what he had enjoyed for too short a time, rebuilding it in an exaggerated version. He called himself a ‘fantasy fanatic’ and this was his eternal fantasy.
Neverland brought back our lost days because that is how he perceived his childhood – as a missing person; an inner child wandering around his past looking to somehow reconnect with him in the future. It wasn’t a refusal to grow up because if you asked him, he never felt like he was a boy in the first place. Michael was expected to be an adult when he was a kid, and he regressed into a kid when he was expected to be an adult. He was more Benjamin Button than the Peter Pan comparison he made himself. However much I might remember laughter in our childhood, he struggled to recall it, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that I am four years older.
A friend, a nephew and I took quad bikes to explore Neverland’s 2,700 acres, which seemed endless, rolling beyond every green horizon, scattered with oak trees. One dusty fire road took us climbing to the highest peak, far away from the developed area, and a plateau, providing a 360-degree vista. My eyes scanned it all – the property, the theme park, the lake, the ferris wheel, the trains, the greenery – and it filled me with awe and pride. Look at what you’ve created, I said to my brother in my head, and repeated to him later.
‘A place of ultimate happiness,’ he told me.
The later warped perception of Neverland shows how Michael was judged on the face value of his world and, in many cases, on the claims of others. There only ever seemed to be lurid judgements about him and his ranch without any attempt to figure out the more complex ‘why?’. As with everyone, his background shaped him. But fame – especially the iconic status attached to my brother – built a public barrier as big as a dam in front of his need to be understood. But to understand him, we need to walk in his shoes and see life from his perspective. As Michael said in 2003, in a message to his fans via Ed Bradley at CBS: ‘If you really want to know about me, there’s a song I wrote. It’s called “Childhood”. That’s the one song people should listen to …’
Michael’s honest awareness that he was a grown man with a kid’s mind shows in the lyrics: ‘People say I’m strange that way because I love such elementary things … but have you seen my childhood?’ His way of saying, this is the way I’ve been made. This is who I am.
Many people have attempted to look through the window of our childhood, and see past the smears of media coverage and the persona of a pop icon. But I feel that you need to have lived it, and shared it, to truly know and understand it. Because ours was a unique world, as brothers and sisters under the roof of one big family. It was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street – named after President Andrew Jackson, not us – that we shared memories, music and a dream. It is here that our stories and his lyrics begin, and where, I hope, a better understanding of just who Michael was can be found.
CHAPTER TWO
2300 Jackson Street
IT ALL STARTED ONE DAY WHEN we found our voices around the kitchen sink.
It was more assembly line than kitchen sink, the wash-dry-stack-put away ritual after dinner. We divided the chore into weekly shifts as pairs – two children drying, two others putting away, our mother standing in the middle, an apron over her gown, hands deep in soap suds. She always whistled or sang some tune, but the song that first enticed us into joining her was ‘Cotton Fields’, an old slave number by blues musician Lead Belly. This hit resonated with her, for her roots were in Eufaula, Alabama, where she was born Katie Scruse in May 1930.
Her grandparents had been cotton farmers in what was then named ‘the Cotton State’ and her great-grandfather was a slave to an Alabama family called Scruse. This forefather could sing, too – ‘You could hear his voice from church ring out through the valley’ – and so could Papa Prince, her father. She swears that the voice we heard in our kitchen was channelled from her ancestors and developed in a church choir; she was raised a Baptist. Fine voices ran in the family, we were told. My father’s father, Samuel Jackson, was a teacher and school director who always gave a near-perfect rendition of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ but he also had ‘a beautiful high voice’ that graced a church chorus. Our mother played the clarinet and piano at high school, and Joseph the guitar.
When our parents met in 1949, their individual DNA must have combined to create some kind of super-gene for our musical inheritance. It was no accident of birth, Mother assured us: it was God’s gift. Or, as Michael later put it, ‘the divine union of song and dance.’
We each loved the sound of Mother’s voice. Standing at the sink singing, she was lost in those fields of Alabama, and she sent a shiver down my spine with a voice that was never flat and always on pitch. Her voice singing was like her voice talking: warm, soft and soothing. We began singing at the sink for entertainment when our black-and-white television was sent for repair, and one day I started making harmonies with Mother. I must have been about five, but I was keeping it high and staying on note. She looked down at me, still singing but beaming with surprise. Before she knew it, my brothers, Tito and Jackie, and sister Rebbie had joined the chorus. Michael was a baby, still stumbling into a walk with diapers on, but when the dishes were put away and the surfaces wiped spotlessly clean, Mother sat down, cradled him and sang him to sleep. ‘Cotton Fields’ was my vocal initiation and Michael’s lullaby.
Michael in his diapers is my first memory of him. I don’t remember his birth, or Mother walking through the door with him. New arrivals were no big event in our family. I was five when I started changing his diapers. I did what we all did – helping Mother where we could, providing an extra pair of hands for what would become a family of nine children.
Michael was born hyper, with boundless energy and curiosity. If any of us took our eyes off him for a second, he’d have crawled
