No tears for father who whipped Michael Jackson when he missed a beat
Joe Jackson moulded pop’s most famous musical family — but he died in obscurity shunned by them
As PATRIARCH of the biggest family in showbusiness, Joe Jackson made no apologies for ruling his many children with a rod of iron.
‘I don’t regret it,’ he told Oprah Winfrey in 2010 of the merciless beatings he would hand out with a leather strap and a switch to his son, Michael, and his eight siblings. ‘It kept them out of jail and kept them right.’
A few years later, he sounded even more defiant, telling an interviewer: ‘I’m glad I was tough because look what I came out with.’
Jackson denied his hitting of Michael could be categorised as a beating, though. ‘I whipped him with a switch and a belt. I never beat him. You beat someone with a stick,’ he said.
‘You whip them and punish them over something they did, and they will remember that . . . that’s the way I was.’
Jackson died yesterday at 89 from pancreatic cancer — almost nine years to the day since the death of his son Michael. His wife, Katherine, their children and grandchildren were reportedly at his bedside in Las Vegas.
It would have been a fraught family reunion after years of estrangement and ugly accusations. Michael once admitted he was so terrified of his father that just seeing him was enough to make him physically sick. Jackson snr retorted that like Michael’s mother Katherine, the superstar’s problem was that he was ‘too easy with people’.
Being ‘too easy’ with people was never a charge that could be made of Joe. As his children’s manager in their early years, he undoubtedly helped propel them to global fame — but they never forgot the merciless way he did it.
A darker story always lay behind the glittering success of the Jackson Five and the Jacksons as well as Michael and his sister Janet’s solo careers. For many, Joe Jackson was at the heart of it. A failed rhythm’n’blues singer who struggled to provide for his large family as a crane operator in the steel town of Gary, Indiana, Jackson discovered his sons’ musical talents and pushed them into showbusiness. A domineering bully, he forced them to rehearse to the point of exhaustion and would whip them if they missed a dance step or musical note. Michael dropped his father as manager in 1983, but it took him another decade to publicly talk about the treatment that he and his brothers Jackie, Jermaine, Tito and Marlon suffered.
In 1993, he told Winfrey that his father had combined physical punishment with verbal viciousness, taunting him about supposedly having a big nose.
some believe the mockery drove the performer to embark on his disastrous series of plastic surgery operations in later life. Others say Michael was actually trying to make sure he no longer resembled Joe.
His father ‘practised us with a belt in his hand’, Michael told TV interviewer Martin Bashir in a 2003 documentary. ‘If you didn’t do it the right way, he would tear you up.’
Michael recalled how one night, while he was asleep, his father climbed into his bedroom through the window, wearing a fright mask. He said later he wanted to teach his children not to leave the window open when they went to sleep.
some of his brothers rejected Michael’s claims of physical abuse, but he was backed up by their sister, Janet. she revealed her father only allowed them to call him ‘Joseph’ — never Daddy or Dad — and that he first beat her when she was seven.
‘I think he means well . . . and wants nothing but the best for his kids,’ she said. ‘I just think that the way he went about certain things wasn’t the best way, but it got the job done.’
It might have ‘got the job done’, but Jackson fans always wondered what psychological damage it did to Michael, whose childhood effectively ended aged five when he joined the Jackson Five.
After Michael was embroiled in allegations of child sex abuse in 2005, many diehard fans preferred to see Joe cast as the villain of the piece.
He WAs further vilified when it emerged he had a string of extramarital affairs while endlessly touring with the Jackson Five. Aware that they wouldn’t dare tell their mother, at home with the younger children, Jackson didn’t even bother to conceal his philandering from his sons.
The family discovered he had a daughter by a longtime mistress. According to some family members, even in later life he called himself ‘The Hawk’ for his propensity to spot and seduce much younger women.
However, even Michael acknowledged his father’s enormous contribution to his success.
In a speech he made at the Oxford Union in 2001, Michael said: ‘I have begun to see that even my father’s harshness was a kind of love, an imperfect love, to be sure, but love nonetheless. He pushed me because he loved me. Because he wanted no man ever to look down at his offspring.’
He added: ‘And now with time... in the place of revenge, I have found reconciliation. And my initial fury has slowly given way to forgiveness.’ Michael said he was ‘always torn’ about his father. ‘On the one hand he was this horrible man. Then, on the other, he was this amazing manager.’
Jackson, meanwhile, always insisted he deserved credit for sparing his children the impoverished and unfulfilling life he had endured as a mill worker.
‘something inside of me told me there was more to life than this,’ Jackson — the son of a high school teacher — said of his decision to find a way out of Indiana.
A school dropout and champion boxer who endured a tough upbringing during the Depression, Jackson himself had strict parents who found it difficult to show affection. He met his future wife — a Jehovah’s Witness — at a party and they wed in 1949.
When an R&B band he was in broke up, Jackson hid his guitar from his boys to protect it, but they found it and started playing it in secret. He recognised their potential when, discovering what they were up to, he asked them to play for him.
JACKSON came back from work the following day with an electric guitar for the boys. He didn’t waste time, soon enforcing a tough rehearsal regime in which they practised every day for at least three hours.
Michael became the group’s lead singer and Jackson — who earned just $65 (about £30 then) a week — invested almost everything in buying the boys instruments and sound equipment.
They performed their first professional dates in the mid1960s in Gary and nearby Chicago. At weekends, they travelled further afield in a VW bus, supporting R&B stars such as the Temptations and Jackie Wilson.
They signed to the famous record label Motown in 1969 and had their first number One hit, I Want You Back, later that year. It sold two million copies.
Michael began a parallel solo career two years later, by which time his father had become so successful that he could afford to buy a large estate in encino, California.
In the same year, Katherine threatened to divorce him after learning he’d had an affair that ended with a miscarriage, but they stayed together.
The excrane operator had business brains, switching the Jackson Five to epic, a subsidiary of industry giant CBs Records, in a deal which secured them 10 times more royalties.
While Janet became almost as successful as Michael, she and the other siblings were just as keen as he was to shrug off their father after their years of harsh treatment.
Many rushed into marriage at an early age to distance themselves from him and his unrelenting aggression.
Insiders claimed that even when his sons were in their 20s and married, Jackson would still try to hit them with his belt when he got angry. Katherine reportedly had to intervene repeatedly, telling him: ‘They are grown now, Joe. They are stars. They have fans. What are you going to do with a belt?’
none of his alienated offspring were quite so vengeful towards him as their younger sister, La Toya, who in 1991 wrote a tellall memoir in which she accused Jackson of having
sexually abused her and her sister Rebbie as children.
Rebbie claimed at the time of the book’s publication that she wasn’t raped. When interviewed later for a planned book of her own, she said: ‘Joseph did inappropriately touch me.’
The once all-powerful Jackson patriarch spent his later years shunned by his children, with insiders insisting he wasn’t considered part of the family. He and Katherine never divorced, but they lived separate lives for years.
Michael completely left his father out of his will and Jackson struggled to support himself, living in a modest flat in Las Vegas and once trying to sell perfume in a local strip mall. The venture failed after the mall noticed the perfume line used Michael’s image and demanded Jackson prove he had the legal right to sell it. He didn’t.
The once feared showbiz magnate also tried to demand $50,000 (£38,000) for interviews, only to find that nobody was interested.
Jackson revealed his lonely existence on social media four years ago, complaining: ‘When I suffered four strokes last year and was in the hospital recovering, only two people in my family travelled all the way to see me. My granddaughter Brandi [Jackie Jackson’s daughter] and my baby girl, Janet.’
Family insiders noted that Jackson’s admission ‘I never tell her this, but I am proud of Janet’ spoke volumes about his refusal to ever compliment his children when they were growing up.
No Jackson passing goes without controversy and, sure enough, the family complained in recent weeks that his minders had kept them away — apparently on his orders — as he lay on his death bed.
Yesterday, the same family that had shunned him were showering him with love and praise on social media. La Toya said: ‘I will always love you! I will never forget our moments together and how you told me how much you cared.’ Given she once accused him of molesting her, it seemed a curious tribute.
Perhaps, like her brother Michael, she may have decided to let fury give way to forgiveness.