One of the more confusing things about my career was how, within months of cutting a record, I was rubbing elbows with and getting to know artists who had all paid serious dues—amazing musicians I looked up to and knew I had no business being around. Rod Stewart, Elton John, Peter Frampton—I had not earned my way into this club, yet there I was. And not because of how I sounded, but because of how I looked. I never felt worthy of being around those people, but then again, I was there, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to enjoy the moments.
Growing up in the early 1970s, I loved the Jackson 5. So it was especially cool getting to know Michael and his brothers. I didn’t see them that much, but there were occasionally some social settings and parties where we ran into one another—along with weird celebrity events, like the ABC-TV Rock ’n’ Roll Sports Classic competition in 1978. (I’m still kind of pissed off that I came in second behind Kenny Loggins in the fifty-meter freestyle swim, but that’s another story)
The Jacksons all seemed to be pretty good guys. I got to know Randy fairly well, but it was Michael who would always seek me out at these events. At that time, he and I were both appearing on the covers of many magazines and getting so much attention, we both truly related to the shared madness that had become our lives. He was always pulling me aside and asking for little pieces of advice, sort of what I imagined a kid would ask an older brother. Yet he was a couple of years older than me. It was all innocent stuff. “Hey, Leif, how do you talk to somebody you’re interested in? I see you with all of those pretty girls. How do you get the nerve to talk to them? How do you get over being nervous?” Out of the entire family, it seemed like he was the only one living in a bubble. His brothers were confident and self-assured, but Michael had a shyness and soft-spoken insecurity I noticed when he and I talked privately. His lifestyle at that point was obviously the exact opposite of my endless sex and drug binges, but, of course, I totally respected his monstrous talents and also the fact that he did have an innocence about him. When traveling the world as much as all of us were at that point, I couldn’t even imagine maintaining an ounce of that innocence. It was gone. Temptation was everywhere. Still, I had no idea just how innocent Michael was, or how innocent he seemed, anyway.
In February 1979, in the middle of one of my many PR swings across Europe, I traveled to the beautiful Swiss ski resort called Leysin to appear in a three-part TV spectacular. The first part was called ABBA in Switzerland and featured the popular Swedish singing group, along with Bryan Ferry and Kate Bush. The second part was called Disco in the Snow and featured Leo Sayer, Boney M., myself, the Jacksons, and others. The third part was called Christmas in the Snow and featured a host of other artists. They were shooting all of the episodes over four days, so the resort and all of the surrounding luxurious ski lodges were crawling with famous singers and lots of people trying to get close to the action. I was traveling alone with my road manager, Al Hassan, but I was happy when I checked into the hotel and saw the entire Jackson entourage. It was always cool bumping into people I knew throughout the world. It reminded me that we were all lucky to lead the lives we were living.
For the show, I was going to be lip-syncing my song “Feel the Need”—in the snow, no less, surrounded by five local Swiss girls posing around me and a giant snowman. The best part, though, was they wanted me to hit the slopes so they could film me skiing and incorporate it into the show. Being an avid skier, I loved the idea, but Al, on the other hand, got his ass handed to him by the Scotti brothers from back in Los Angeles when they heard about it over the phone. Their thinking was, We can’t have our little moneymaker doing something as risky as downhill slaloming in the Swiss countryside. I felt kind of bad for Al, but there was no way I was not going skiing.
As it turned out, the Jacksons would also be filming their performance outside in the snow, lip-synching their hit “Shake Your Body.” They were all wearing ski suits, and I was impressed that Michael was still hitting all of his dance moves despite the bulky outerwear. At this point in their career, even though they had just kicked off what would be a yearlong worldwide tour to support their album Destiny, the Jacksons were not quite as hip as they had been early in their career when they debuted as a bunch of hardworking blue-collar kids from Gary, Indiana. At this point the act was a lot more Vegas than it was Motown, but still, they worked a lot and were very popular.
One day while we were there shooting, I got bored in my hotel room and wandered down to the hotel bar. I found a few of the Jacksons, including Randy and Michael, ensconced with some of their crew members, killing time and hanging out. I joined them for small talk. I was commenting on a few girls I had my eye on, and Michael was looking at me as if he wanted to tell me something in private. We both turned our bodies away from the group at the table, and I could tell he was going to ask me for a little bit of advice, like he usually did. “Leif,” he said, with a mixture of both mischievousness and excitement, “can you tell me how to…masturbate?”
Okay, I did not see this coming.
I said, “Michael, you’re kidding, right?” Well, he wasn’t. I could see in his eyes that he did not know how to do it and that this was a big deal for him. He was twenty years old. I didn’t want to let him down, but I didn’t want to go into too much detail—and I sure as hell was not going to show him. But he was my friend. “Listen, Michael,” I whispered. “I’m going to give you my room key. Go up there and go over to my bed. You’ll see a copy of Penthouse magazine and some Lubriderm on the nightstand. Look through the magazine and you’ll be okay. If you want to take it to your room, that’s totally cool. No worries.” Was he blushing? I handed him the key, and he slipped away from the group.
Over a couple of Cuba Libres, I sat there wondering, How can he not know how to masturbate? He’s got all of these older brothers. Is he really that sheltered? Apparently he was. He returned a short while later and discreetly returned my room key. I pulled him aside and said, “So? How’d it go, dude?” By now he was kind of giggling like he had done something naughty, and he told me, “I couldn’t do it, Leif. I just couldn’t do it. But…I looked through the magazine…Leif,” he said, all wide-eyed and high-pitched. “Man, those pictures are nasty.”
I wouldn’t see Michael again for almost a year. He and his brothers were on the road for most of 1979. But somehow in the middle of that crazy schedule he managed to squeeze in the recording of an album called Off the Wall. It was the game changer for him, the artistic triumph that didn’t just bring him unprecedented success but also liberated him from the family act. It also changed music and would eventually influence many other big stars.
The next time I saw Michael was in January 1980 at the American Music Awards. Along with Chuck Berry, I presented Michael with the award for Favorite Soul Album of the Year, for Off the Wall, which would go on to sell more than thirty million copies. When he came to the podium, I felt happy for him. It was his night, but I couldn’t help but flash back to that moment in Switzerland, which all of a sudden felt like a lifetime ago. “Leif…can you tell me how to masturbate?”
That kid who had been so painfully self-conscious and inexperienced was no doubt concerned as to whether he would be able to get out from under his child stardom to forge his own career, yet he had done it in the biggest of ways. He was such an enigma. On the one hand, he had asked me how to masturbate. But that same year, as was discovered recently, he wrote this letter to himself:
MJ will be my new name. No more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look. I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang “ABC,” “I Want You Back.” I should be a new incredible actor, singer, dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews, I will be magic, I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a master. I will be better than every great actor roped in one. I must have the most incredible training system. To dig and dig and dig until I find. I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further than where the greatest left off.
It was impossible for me to have known in that hotel bar that he had it all figured out. The shy, somewhat confused twenty-year-old had a lot more going on inside than he let on, and it didn’t matter if he knew how to masturbate or not. He was taking control of his future and where he was headed. Me? I had yet to even perform an actual concert at that point and barely sang on my own records. I felt like a puppet on the Scotti brothers’ strings, and he was creating his own destiny on his own terms. If only I had asked him how to do that.
(You may be wondering, given what we know today about the many allegations against Michael regarding young boys, if I think he was hitting on me. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe he was. Maybe he was asking me about girls as an excuse to make a connection with me. I’ll never know, and he is not here to defend himself, so I won’t make any assumptions.)