The following appeared as a column in the Los Angeles Daily News June 26, 2009, a day after Michael Jackson's death at his home.
Almost two decades ago, an actress friend and I posed as a grieving couple at a gravesite at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, all just to catch a peak of a fellow mourner.
I was being wooed, as it were, to write an unauthorized biography about the world’s most mysterious man since the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and I had insisted on at least getting a glimpse of the subject, if even from a distance, before I signed on.
As it turned out, I would have a face-to-face meeting with Michael Jackson himself, if only for a fleeting moment.
Michael was among the Jackson family members getting out of a limousine to attend the burial of his grandmother Martha Bridges, and his path to her gravesite took him directly past where we were standing, which we had known it would when we chose to stand there. When he was inches away, he slowed almost to a stop for a split-second and looked at us.
My friend, a gorgeous blonde from a popular TV show, could have that affect on people, which is why I had asked her to join me.
Michael was dressed in black except for a dark maroon shirt, sporting a black fedora under which his trademark black curls dangled over his forehead as if icicles of death. As he neared the tree shade approaching his grandmother's gravesite, he removed his sunglasses. He wasn’t wearing the surgical mask that had become a part of his wardrobe, and for an instant our faces couldn’t have been more than a foot apart.
The man looked like a sci-fi flick space alien. The skin was pasty. His eyes were lifeless. The famous nose job and jaw implant looked ruddy and rubbery. The only sign of color was the pinkish gloss on his lips. I half wondered if he wasn’t wearing a mask.
He walked on to his grandmother’s grave, and I momentarily made eye contact with the person in the Jackson mourning party who had tipped me off that Michael would be there -– the person who wanted me to co-author the biography of Michael with her.
Enid Jackson, the estranged wife of Michael’s older brother Jackie, discreetly nodded in my direction, and I acknowledged her.
This was how I had finally agreed to write Michael: From Motown to the Moon, a 100,000-word book that was soon commissioned by William Morrow & Co. for a six-figure advance.
It set off an 18-month period of long tape-recorded interview sessions with Enid and an array of Jackson family friends, disgruntled employees, former employees, lovers and ex-lovers and late-night hours copying Jackson documents that Enid had secretly taken from the family compound in Encino.
As they say, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Enid was that woman.
She had met Jackie Jackson in 1969 shortly after the Jacksons relocated to California from Gary, Ind. Enid Spann was then a student at Beverly Hills High School when she all but began living with Jackie at the family home on Havenhurst Street in Encino, where she was practically another of Michael’s older sisters.
Enid and Jackie married in 1974, but Jackie had discarded her by the late 1980s. According to Enid, Jackie soon paraded a series of affairs with Los Angeles Lakers cheerleaders, Playboy magazine pinups and starlets in her face.
“I guess I could put up with that,” she told me in one interview. “But when it came to cutting me out of the money, that’s where I get nasty.
By the time she approached me about the book in 1989, Enid was at her wits' end. She was on welfare and food stamps and claimed Jackie was close to a year behind in paying alimony and child support. When we met, she already had a William Morris literary agent and a lot of potential interviews lined up -– even documentation of a second family that Jackson patriarch Joseph had started with another woman, including a home he had bought her.
I signed on board and into the bizarre world of celebrity biography.
Enid had promised many of her contacts that they would be paid for their cooperation, and most wouldn’t cooperate without cash changing hands.
Others would only agree to be interviewed if their information was not attributed to them. Many of the disgruntled former friends and employees still held out hope that one day they might return to the good graces of the Jackson household.
A few sources overflowed with paranoia. One insisted the Jehovah’s Witnesses employed former CIA agents to keep tabs on anyone suspected of gossiping about the family. Another maintained that reporters for one of the supermarket tabloids were bugging his phones. A former worker at Michael’s Neverland Ranch even feared retributions from the superstar’s menagerie of animals.
Enid herself was willing to tell all about her famous brother-in-law, who by this time was well into his face and complexion transformation.
I had actually met the old Michael in the early stages of those changes. In 1983, I had attended the taping of the Motown 25th anniversary show, and in the early hours of the following morning, after an exhausting marathon taping, Michael and his brothers wandered into an after-hours private party across the street from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Michael had stolen the show, debuting his Moonwalk dance in the middle of performing “Billie Jean” from the “Thriller” album. He was ecstatic, too, thanking people who encircled their area for their compliments in that falsetto voice that became so familiar.
His nose was noticeably thinner than from the cover photo on his previous “Off the Wall” album, but I think none of us who were still there -– from then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner – could have imagined what was to come.
In helping me with the book, Enid sneaked out years of home movies, videos and photographs of the Jacksons that documented the transformation: the Jacksons at Disneyland after-hours, the family at get-togethers, Michael and his brothers cutting up at home. The home movies were from the early 1970s when Enid began living with the Jacksons to 1990 and showed the pop icon from pre-teens to adulthood in his early 30s.
“It's as if Michael was black one day and white the next,” Enid said. “He had the face that God gave him and traded that in for one that his doctors created.”
Watching those videos and looking at those photographs was both riveting and disturbing. We are all filled with self-doubts, self-destructiveness and maybe even self-hatred, but you had to wonder about the psychological and emotional well-being of someone who could do this to himself.
That was why I wanted to lay eyes on Michael at this stage of his face-change when I told Enid I couldn’t work on the book without seeing the metamorphosis for myself.
“I guess when you see him every day or almost every day, it doesn't seem like he’s changed that much,” Enid said. “He’s Michael.”
Still, what Enid provided was just too good to be true. Hand-written notes from Princess Di to Michael on her personal stationery. Thank-you cards from Elizabeth Taylor. Private photographs of Michael with directors Steven Spielberg and John Landis and of Michael with one of his plastic surgeons, Dr. Steven Hoefflin.
Some of Enid’s pilfered documents, though, were too explosive. Like Jackson family financial statements -– including their religious contributions -– and medical records, which were illegal to have in hand and which lawyers quickly urged that she immediately return.
Then there were the few real jewels. Sources like Chico Ross, Diana Ross’ baby brother who had befriended the young Michael in 1969 when the Jacksons moved to California. Michael stayed at Diana’s house for months, and he became the little brother Chico hadn’t had.
Chico later spent much of his time at the Jackson’s new house in Encino where he occasionally jammed with the family. He later played drums briefly with Kerry Gordy, the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, in a band called Kryptonite, and dabbled as a Hollywood club promoter
Chico’s recollections of Michael in his young and middle teenage years were priceless, and his anecdotes painted a youngster who, for a short period of life, enjoyed the closest he would ever experience to a normal existence.
“Michael never had a real childhood,” Chico said in an interview. “It was stolen from him so that there could be the Jackson Five and later the Jacksons.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think Enid ever seriously intended to go through with having her name appear as a co-author of a published biography of Michael. Once we had the money from the advance, she slowly began moving away from the deal, first adamantly insisting she couldn’t be identified as one of the writers and later acting somewhat mysteriously herself.
It wouldn’t be until later that I would learn that, in addition to pocketing money off the advance on this book deal, Enid had also signed on as an anonymous collaborator on another unauthorized biography of Michael –- at more than she could make from our book.
It soon became apparent, too, that Enid had used her role in both books to get an even better deal –- a better settlement from the Jacksons in her eventual breakup from Jackie.
About this time, lawyers for the Gordys, the Rosses and the Jacksons had started a legal war against other recent biographies about Diana and Michael. One publisher was forced into a big settlement. Another biographer went bankrupt.
William Morrow & Co., my publisher, simply decided it wanted no part of a potential publishing war with Michael. It chose to eat a loss on the advance and never published Michael: From Motown to the Moon.
I didn't speak to Enid again for several years. Then, on December 2, 1997, she called me, extending happy birthday wishes and apologizing for using me to get back in the good graces of the Jacksons. I sensed she was out of the Jackson money again.
“I’ve got even more and better material for another book that I want to give you to make up for the past,” she said. “It’s enough for a book and a film deal.
“I’ll treat you to lunch at The Ivy after the holidays and tell you all about it.”
I figured I'd never hear from her again. I was right. Eighteen days later, on Dec. 20, 1997, Enid died of a brain aneurysm in a movie theater bathroom.
© Copyright 2021, Tony Castro
