Authors: Steve Knopper
Goin’ Places
, though, had even less to say than
The Jacksons
had—lyrically and musically. Two years into the Jacksons experiment, Alexenburg’s folly began to spread like a fungus throughout CBS Records.
“My staff was less than enthusiastic about the Jacksons’ commercial prospects,” Yetnikoff, his boss, sniffed.
It’s hard to say why Gamble and Huff couldn’t connect with a group that had had so much success at a like-minded indie label, Motown, and a singer whose superstar potential was obvious to everybody. Maybe it was that Philly International had picked the wrong single: Pete Humphreys and other studio engineers were enamored of the title track, a breezy song about the feeling you get when riding in a jet, and lobbied Gamble to release it first. He did.
“It didn’t sell real well,” Humphreys says. “And it was thrown in our faces. Who knows why? Maybe it didn’t get the right connections, the right timing.” Or maybe Gamble and Huff didn’t feel they owned the project, as they had with Philly bands they’d discovered and created. “I didn’t see Gamble and Huff as emotionally involved in that project as they have been in others,” says a source close to the label.
One of the first things Joe Jackson did after signing the boys to CBS was take advantage of the synergy with CBS-TV and work out a deal for a variety show. That was too much Vegas supper club for Ronnie Rancifer, keyboardist and crucial tie between the Jacksons and their home region of northwest Indiana. He decided to split:
“I just told Joseph, ‘Man, I’m tired, I gotta go.’ I was pretty much just tired of
him
.” Johnny Jackson, whose name had appeared on the Jackson 5 drum kit in the early days, followed soon afterward.
Michael made it explicitly clear he wanted no part of the TV show.
“I hated every minute,” he said. He told his father it was a big mistake. “On the show our sets were sloppy, the lighting was often poor and our choreography was
rushed,
” he said. Watching episodes of the yearlong half-hour hit show from 1976 and 1977, it’s hard to comprehend that Michael felt so negatively about the experience. His evident joy seems impossible to fake in his dancing. In a segment with a deliberately clumsy Dom DeLuise, Michael and his brothers reprise a popping-and-locking bit from
Soul Train
, complete with obnoxiously loud patterned
outfits, flat caps, and striped knickers. Michael pulls off one extraordinary sequence in which he does the Robot, spins, mimes rope pulling, kicks his leg Damita Jo Freeman style, and splays out his knees. Marlon follows with the splits, and his moves are smooth, but, as ever, he’s no match for his brother. One of the most humorous recurring themes of the show is during a segment called “On the Wall,” when guests attempt to dance with an inviting MJ. They seem to realize on the spot, in front of cameras, that it’s harder than it looks. Young, beautiful Lynda “Wonder Woman” Carter tries, but comes off square in the process. Comic Redd Foxx takes the more effective approach—he gamely half steps with MJ for a second, then wordlessly concludes, “Ah, to hell with it,” as he gives up and watches Michael instead.
“Aw, he loved it. He had his own quick spins and his own special moves,” says Bill Davis, the show’s director and producer, retired and in his eighties. “But there’s something about his body style, too—he was so slender, and he seemed to do it effortlessly. That went back to his constant study of Fred Astaire. He just endlessly practiced.”
In his whispery voice, Michael delivered commands to Davis on the set. For one dance sequence, he demanded a Western-style saloon so he could dress as a cowboy (not like John Wayne, exactly—he wore a blue-and-white fringed shirt, yellow chaps, and a white scarf, with a Stetson atop his Afro). Davis’s designers built a stylized TV background, but Michael hated it. “That isn’t a Western saloon!” he blubbered. Davis tried to calm him down: “What’s a Western saloon to you?” Michael declared, “Like the one in
Gunsmoke
!”—with solid walls and a solid bar to dance on. In a funk, the singer retreated to his dressing room. Davis had to coax him out.
The moves Michael picked up and worked out during the
Jacksons
series were pivotal to his dance development. But Michael declaimed the show to the end. “Michael hasn’t wanted that series to surface in any way,” Davis says. “Because it was the old Michael. It was his old face—before he had any adjustments made. He didn’t want that comparison.
Any retrospectives of the Jacksons definitely avoid that particular series.”
But
The Jacksons
had a profound impact.
“Huge influence,” rapper-turned-actress Queen Latifah would tell late-night star David Letterman, who had himself appeared on the Jacksons’ show as a satirical sportscaster. “This is where you realize, like, ‘Wow, you can make it onto television. . . . Black people, young like me, little girls, boys: we can do this.’ ”
* * *
The Wiz
came along at a perfect time for Berry Gordy and Motown Records. To finish
Lady Sings the Blues
, Gordy had to sink in $2 million of his own money because Paramount’s top executive, Frank Yablans, had told him the maximum a studio could spend on a black film at the time was
$500,000.
“This is not a
black film,
” Gordy corrected him. “This is a
film
with
black stars.
” There were clashes on the set, as star Diana Ross made her transition from music diva to Hollywood diva, demanding an upgrade of her period-piece wardrobe. But the 1972 drama was a success in the end, drawing five Oscar nominations, although Ross lost Best Actress to Liza Minnelli of
Cabaret
.
Motown’s follow-up,
Mahogany
, was more problematic—shooting began with Gordy firing British director Tony Richardson and ended with Ross slapping Gordy in the face and walking off the set. The film, a hastily edited, soap-opera mess, received savage reviews and flopped.
In 1977, Motown bought the rights to
The Wiz
, a script based on a Broadway hit with African-American stars putting their own spin on
The Wizard of Oz
. Gordy and producer Rob Cohen cast Ross, then thirty-three, as Dorothy. The director who signed on, after a number of false starts, was Sidney Lumet, who had collaborated with a young Al Pacino on
Dog Day Afternoon
and
Serpico
. At fifty-three, Lumet was an old Hollywood hand with fast-talking charisma, ending sentences with “darling sweetheart.” To give
The Wiz
an orchestral punch, Lumet sought out an old friend to request a favor.
He called Quincy Jones.
Q didn’t want to do it. Jones liked only three songs from the Broadway show—“Home,” “Brand New Day,” and a funky ensemble number called “Ease On Down the Road.” But he felt indebted to Lumet, who’d hired him for many film scores in the past. “I felt I owed him more than one,” Jones said of Lumet. “I owed him a lot.”
The musical production of
The Wiz
was more daunting than anything Jones had ever done. It involved nine singing stars, 120 dancers, six sound technicians, three conductors, four contractors, 300 musicians, 105 backup singers, nine orchestrators, six copyists, and five music editors. Jones hunkered down at his office in Bel Air, frantically scribbling notes and music on a huge bulletin board containing the beginning sections of each of the movie’s fifteen numbers.
“It’s like a war zone,” he explained.
Lumet stocked
The Wiz
with top-tier African-American talent—Ross, Richard Pryor, Lena Horne. Rob Cohen, head of Motown Productions, thought Michael Jackson would be perfect for the role of the Scarecrow, and he approached Gordy with the idea. To his surprise, Gordy agreed.
“Aw, Michael’s great,” said the Motown chief not far removed from years of litigation with the Jacksons over contracts. “Michael’s a star.”
Lumet was harder to convince. He wanted Jimmie “J. J.” Walker, star of TV’s
Good Times
. “Michael Jackson’s a Vegas act. The Jackson 5’s a Vegas act,” the director told Cohen. Quincy Jones was skeptical of Jackson, too, but
Cohen arranged a meeting, flying nineteen-year-old MJ to New York. Finally, Lumet and Jones saw the qualities that Cohen saw. “That boy is so sweet! He’s so pure!” Lumet exulted. “I want him as the Scarecrow.”
The final barrier was Joe Jackson, who wasn’t thrilled about Michael doing a project that separated himself financially from the rest of his siblings. Cohen mollified Joe by offering roughly $100,000 for Michael to play the Scarecrow. When
The Wiz
began filming in New York, the
twenty-seven-year-old producer moved Michael and La Toya into a Manhattan apartment, and Michael was on his own for the first time. He lived a normal life, except for a strange habit Cohen happened to discover—taking baths in
Perrier water.
The shoots were long and grueling, lasting all day underneath the World Trade Center towers. At night, the young cast went out to play in New York City. Cohen took Michael, along with other members of the cast, to Studio 54, the disco hot spot known for both its crazy sexual escapades and celebrity regulars like Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Cary Grant, and Brooke Shields. Jackson danced there, insulated from the public within his broad movie entourage, including extras Iman and Pat Cleveland, both supermodels. One of Cleveland’s girlfriends had the hots for Michael. The rest of the club took notice whenever Michael Jackson danced.
“The gay side of the dance floor would stop,” Cohen says, “and the hetero side would stop.”
At Studio 54, Michael wore red pants and a lot of colorful leather, and when he danced, five movie friends gathered around him in a circle. “He danced more like a tap dancer, like a jazz dancer—he’d get down really low and snap his fingers,” Cleveland recalls. “That’s the only time he seemed rowdy to me, when he was dancing.” Jackson didn’t stay out late—he had to be on set early in the morning—and he resolutely didn’t respond to Cleveland’s hot friend or the other impossibly sexy disco chicks who paid attention to him. During lunch on
The Wiz
set, Lumet, the director, told an oblivious Michael that women around him were
“like ricocheting bullets all over the place.”
On the set, Michael took extremely seriously his choreography sessions with Louis Johnson, who’d been a pioneering African-American ballet dancer over years of punishing Hollywood racism. In the film, Michael’s most impressive steps are with Diana Ross, as he clumsily learns to walk after being imprisoned by crows on his scarecrow pole. In giant clown shoes, he stumbles, rolls on the ground, and knocks out his knees.
“He had seen Charlie Chaplin. He was a great fan of Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly,” says Johnson, who is in his early eighties, by phone from his New York home. “So I let him use it. . . . He asked me, ‘Could I do this?’—and then enhanced it.” But Michael also improvised his own simple steps, sometimes just
“feelings,” as supermodel extra Cleveland recalls, and taught them to the choreographers and dancers on the spot. When he snapped, he threw out his left hand like a windmill, leading the dancers as a soft-spoken drill sergeant: “Did you get that?”
Jackson’s Scarecrow costume was hot and cumbersome, with a huge curly wig, a hat and vest stuffed with scraps of newspaper, not to mention a painted-on nose. Tony Walton, the film’s production and costume designer, didn’t know Michael was tormented by his brothers’ constant teasing—they called him “Ugly” and “Big Nose.”
“He was thrilled to have his nose covered,” Walton says. His costume, stuffed with newspaper and bits of trash bags, was more cumbersome, but Jackson made it work. “He would be suffering in the heat, trying to stand still and keep it calm,” Cleveland says.
Quincy Jones was always present. (In the film, Jones appears dressed in gold, playing a giant piano in Times Square.) He, too, began to pay attention to Jackson. He frequently approached Tom Bähler, on hand as choir director, and told the veteran songwriter he’d never seen anything like Michael Jackson. Bähler agreed:
“He’s our generation’s Fred Astaire—but better.” The two found themselves talking frequently about MJ—how he danced, how he sang, how his discipline didn’t come across as drudgery. When they were laying down vocals for the
soundtrack at A&R Recording Studios in New York, Ross showed up to do her part on “Ease On Down.” As she was singing, Jackson sat quietly in the corner, waiting his turn. She finished, and Jones turned to Jackson:
“Okay, Michael, let’s just see what you’re thinking.” Jones and engineer Bruce Swedien played back Ross’s vocal. When it came time for the Scarecrow part, Michael stepped to the microphone and began to sing, not the bright-sounding Michael Jackson of “I Want You Back”
but the eighteen-year-old MJ whose voice had evolved into something as smooth and powerful as the Concorde. Cohen, the producer, noticed Jones gaping.
“He looked at Michael the way a jaguar looks at a goat,” Cohen says. “It was like, ‘I want
him.
’ ”
Jones made his move on the set. At one point, he took Michael aside to explain a Scarecrow bit in the script—that the Greek philosopher’s name is pronounced “
Sock
-ra-tees” and not “Sow-
cray
-tees.” As Jones would tell the story, he asked Michael right then if he could
“take a shot” at producing his next solo album. That stuck with Michael. During
The Wiz
post-production, he called Quincy unexpectedly during a rare home hiatus from touring. They were on the line for forty-five minutes, the experienced producer doing most of the talking, about studio equipment,
Star Wars,
the newest synthesizer models, and unfinished
Wiz
clips he’d seen. Michael mostly listened, with “mmm-
hmms
” and an occasional “whoo!” When Quincy enthusiastically mentioned he’d seen the Rolling Stones perform, Michael sniffed,
“You know it’s not talent, though.” The key moment in this nascent partnership came when Michael said he’d been writing songs: “I hear something in my head. I make the sounds with my mouth—I can do that.” Quincy became excited. “There’s an instrument that can make the sounds you want. I can write anything down on paper,” the veteran arranger said. “If you can hear it, I can write it down.” The exchange, which MJ recorded, ends with Quincy requesting his number.
I