by Chrissy Iley
I am waiting for La Toya Jackson in her Beverly Hills office. There are four international clocks above the reception. They all have stopped. I wonder if it is some kind of metaphor for a cocooned world where time and space don’t really exist or whether it is simply lazy.
I wait for a while, say 30 minutes, and eventually Jeffre Phillips, her fiancé/business partner/gatekeeper shows me into her office, which is all red velvet and leopard. She is tiny, face like a painted doll, but there have been masses of facial landscaping. She is 58, but looks no age at all, just somewhat distorted and sounds about 12.
We are here to talk about her work as a co-producer on Dancing In Jaffa, a documentary which follows 150 young Jewish and Palestinian Israelis as they ballroom dance together creating harmony and trust by putting their cultural differences aside. Children running the world. It is a very Michael Jackson idea.
“Yes it is” – she coos. “Children setting examples is something that Michael would have really loved and been a part of and I’ve always loved the elegance and opulence of ballroom. As a little kid I looked at pictures and fantasised about things like that. Jews and Arabs ballroom dancing together; I got on board 1,000 per cent.”
She and Michael were only two years apart in age. Michael would love to put on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies which they used to watch together. `Sometimes I really feel he is here with me, he would have loved this.”
The documentary is moving and informative and surprisingly classy. Phillips plans that they work as producers together for many more movie projects to come. A horror movie is in the works.
La Toya got engaged to Phillips on her reality show at the end of 2013. He says he was always trying to get her to date people but she wasn’t interested because of her abusive marriage to Jack Gordon, which ended in 1997.
It’s hard to know if their relationship is real or just real for reality TV. No one can blame her for her reticence to become emotionally involved; her marriage sounds a nightmare even by Jackson family proportions.
She grew up in that crazy family with its strict Jehovah Witness upbringing. Jack Gordon was hired to co-manage her along with her father Joseph. Gradually he became more and more hands on and she swapped a controlling father for a controlling and abusive husband.
By the time she did a pay-per-view raunchy Special, filmed in Reno, Nevada, called Sizzling Spectacular, Gordon had brainwashed her and forcibly married her, telling her it was for her own good because her family were trying to kidnap her.
“I was doing a show in Reno and he took me off the stage at the end and said, ‘Get in the car,’ and the limousine drove right up to the place where you get married and he shoved me through the door.
“The marriage was extremely abusive and it was a relationship where I didn’t ask to marry him. I didn’t ask to be married at all. He put me into a marriage without my knowledge and I know it sounds weird and awkward but he just said, ‘What’s your mother`s maiden name?’ and I said, “Why?” and he said, ‘Go in that room right over there,’ and that’s where the Justice of the Peace was and I kept running out saying, “I can’t marry you, I don’t even like you. How can I marry you.”
“Security kept pushing me back in and the last time they said, “There are certain things you have to do in your life if you want to or not.” He promised me after three months that I could get it annulled. Well that didn’t happen, he didn’t allow that. He was very very controlling. It was just awful through every little detail. He made me do things against my will. He said, “I’m going to make you say this against your family…against Michael. I’m going to make you take your clothes off for Playboy…And do this, and do that…”
She bows her eyes in shame and looks to Phillips for approval before she continues. Her mother Katherine said recently that she thought Gordon made her do all those things to alienate her from her family. It seemed very unlikely a Jackson would strip for Playboy, peeling away all those religious ideals and strict family values making it all the more salacious.
“I was so naive because I was extremely religious and he took me away (they went on tour in Japan), and he took my passport and said ‘You are never going back to America.’”
As her manager it seemed completely feasible for him to book her a world tour. But what was not feasible was the total control he exacted over her. “It first started because my father couldn’t go to Japan with me, my mother couldn’t go to Japan with me, so they got him to look after me and once we got over there he took my passport and said, ‘You’re never goIng back again.’ He meant I was never going back to my family.”
She was 34 when she was tricked into the marriage, but by her own admission she was not a normal 34-year-old. She was much more vulnerable. Much more child-like. “That’s exactly what it was like because even when I left him I felt like I was only 16-years-old (in 1997 she was 40). `I wasn’t allowed to see people or talk to people or talk to my family on the phone, nothing. He didn’t allow me to do any of those things.”
Is she saying he made her do Playboy against her will? She nods. And made her say that her brother Michael was a child abuser so that her family would not want to talk to her? She nods again, extremely solemnly.
‘I believe it was an evil streak in him, that he had and I think it was part jealousy, part extortion, all of that just to break me down, to break my family down, controlling me, beating me and trying to cause a rift between my family. He didn’t want them to come after me. If they came after me he told me that he would tell them, “I’m going to kill Michael” – he would say – “so don`t come after her”. So these are barriers that he put up and it made it very difficult, I couldn’t use the phone. I couldn’t reach out to people; I couldn’t do anything. I was being beaten at least three times a week.
‘He felt like Michael was the closest thing to God. He was so unique and kind. He couldn’t stand that I looked at him that way, so he tried to destroy my relationship with Michael and he also couldn’t stand that Michael was one of the biggest entertainers in the world. He despised that.’
The strangest thing in all of it is that the brother to whom she always seemed so devoted, who she calls Christ-like she also called a child abuser. It was in 1993 when Michael first got accused of it. Incredibly it did not cause the rift.
‘At the end of it Michael knew who I was when I reached out saying I need to talk to you, he said, ‘I know what you’re going to talk to me about, I know you, I know your heart, I know he made you do those things, I know he made you say those things, I know that’s not you at all.’ So we embraced, we cried, we hugged, we kissed, we did all those things and I just wanted to make sure but he knew all this. And he kept saying, “ I know you, you think I don’t know you.”
She still looks visibly shaken when she is talking about the abusive husband. “He would lock me in. I would spend over eight hours a day in a closet. Even when I wasn’t locked in the closet I wasn’t allowed to look outside the window or be beside the window. If I did any of that he would put me back in the closet. He would come home, pick up the phone and press redial to see if I had called anyone. He would go down to the doorman to ask if I had gone out and if I had there would be another beating and even if I hadn’t. So to come out of that, to the person I am, makes me very proud.” She and Phillips exchanged knowing looks.
“During my eight years of marriage, the only thing I saw was the stage, airports and hotel rooms. Girls would look up at the stage and say I wish I was you and in my head I would be saying I wish I was you. I wish I was free.
‘The beatings were so bad I would have to wear thick make-up all the time but mostly he was beating me on the parts of my body that were covered so the world couldn’t see. Once, I was on a television show and he accused me of sitting sideways so that people could see the bruise, or trying to show that I was in pain. He would accuse me of shifting my weight because I was in pain and trying to tell people…”
She is very still when she tells me all of this, not shifting any weight. “But it was my past and I have moved on and moved forward. My strength was in God and He gave me the strength to move on.”
How did she finally escape? “He is deceased. Well to be frank with you he would be torturing me now, at this very moment if he were here. Why is he so hateful to innocent people that have done absolutely nothing to him? Then I began to put the pieces together. He didn’t like himself. He was born in a brothel and he carried hatred along with him.”
I wondered if she feels she got into an abusive marriage because she’d had an abusive childhood. ‘Your childhood is your make-up. It’s basically who you are. I see a lot of elements in me that still stem from my childhood. The shyness, it is still there, I may be a bit more outgoing at times to try and compensate for that because there are times I can`t even walk into a room I’m so shy, I have to tell myself, you can do this, keep going.’
It is time to segue seamlessly into her abusive father, Joseph Jackson. Surely she sees the connection. ’What do you mean?’ she says with what I mistake for mock horror. Then I tell her I met her mother, Katherine, three years ago who seemed to be long suffering and must be relieved to be finally separated from the husband who beat up her children. Her face crumples. Turns out her horror was real.
‘How can you say that? You never met him’ She and Phillips chorus that he is a wonderful man. This I find confusing, that she wants to whitewash pain, revise history. It has been well documented that he horsewhipped the young Jackson 5 as they practiced their dance routines. In 1993 La Toya recalled, “I can still see my father standing in the living room, whip in hand. If someone missed a dance step, crack!” She does not see that man with a whip today; it is as if she has transferred all that pain into her marriage. And even though it has been well documented that her parents no longer live together, she revises the facts.
“They are still married and together, they get along but they don’t live together.” At this point you feel unease; you wonder if La Toya really believes in the sham of her parents’ marriage. What can she think a marriage really is? You wonder if she will ever marry her fiancé; certainly no date has been set. And when I ask them for their plans they only will discuss their work plans. She once said the hardest thing about being a Jackson is to be isolated from normality. “I fight very hard against that”.
You see her fight but you wonder if she will ever get there. An abusive father who she now does not remember being abusive, a husband who locked her in closets and a fiancé who proposed on reality TV and with whom she had never been out on a date. The doll eyes and childlike voice, but then there is a glimpse of steel in her. She believes she went through it all for a reason.
“God took me through the path that he took me though because it was my job and my responsibility to learn what that reason was and I figured it out. God put me with this stranger, this con artist, this guy that manipulated me, who just basically used me to do what he wanted, I was a puppet, he was a puppet master and I believe God took me through this to show me what is out there.
‘There are vultures out there, there are con artists and He took me through the worst time in my life to show me what is was like. I had to learn from that experience and I did learn from that experience. I went through what I went through in order to be who I am today sitting in this chair. If it happens again it would be my fault.
‘I talked to God “ Why me? Why when I gave him everything and he took everything from me and he used me, he abused me, he did all those things, why me? It was a lesson, so I could never let this happen again. Otherwise it makes no sense that a person can do everything in their power to torture you. He felt a hatred for Michael because Michael was the closest thing to God. He couldn’t stand that I looked at him that way but to me he was the closest thing to God. He was so angelic.”
Once again Michael invades the room. There are pictures of him everywhere and outside her office, a shrine. She believes he is an angel, but who knows if that is just another fairy tale.
* Dancing In Jaffa is in cinemas now.