Patriarch who managed family acts the Jackson 5 and Janet Jackson – but was later accused of cruelty and abuse – died in hospital in Las Vegas
Joe Jackson has died, aged 89. The music manager and father to 11 children, including pop superstar Michael and Janet Jackson, was being cared for in a hospital in Las Vegas. Jackson was said to be in the final stages of terminal cancer. He had previously suffered a stroke in São Paulo in 2015, along with a number of heart attacks. His grandson, Taj Jackson, confirmed the news on Twitter.
Joe Jackson was one of the most monstrous fathers in pop Read more
His fourth child, Jermaine, told the Daily Mail before Jackson’s death that his father had attempted to prevent visits from his family, withholding information about his location and diagnosis. They were permitted to see him on 19 June. “No one knew what was going on,” said Jackson. “We shouldn’t have to beg, plead and argue to see our own father, especially at a time like this. We have been hurting.”
On 24 June, Joe Jackson appeared to tweet from his personal account: “I have seen more sunsets than I have left to see. The sun rises when the time comes and whether you like it or not the sun sets when the time comes.” The tweet was accompanied by a photograph of Jackson looking at the horizon.
However, Paris Jackson, Michael’s daughter, tweeted her doubts that it had come from her grandfather: “This is a beautiful tweet. Though it upsets me to see whoever is in charge of this account taking advantage of it. My grandfather did not tweet this. I’m not sure if he’s ever used this account.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Jackson 5 at Buttes Chaumont Studios, Paris, in 1977. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX
Michael Jackson’s estate released a statement after his death.
“We are deeply saddened by Mr. Jackson’s passing and extend our heartfelt condolences to Mrs. Katherine Jackson and the family,” said John Branca and John McClain, co-executors of the estate. “Joe was a strong man who acknowledged his own imperfections and heroically delivered his sons and daughters from the steel mills of Gary, Indiana to worldwide pop superstardom.”
Joe Jackson’s legacy is the shaping and promotion of the Jackson 5, comprising his sons Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, and later Randy. The young family band from Gary, Indiana, became a phenomenon in the late 1960s and 70s, with their first four singles, I Want You Back in 1969, and ABC, The Love You Save and I’ll Be There in 1970, topping the Billboard charts.
But Jackson’s legacy is also one of cruelty. In 2003, he told the BBC that he whipped Michael as a child. In 2010, he told Oprah Winfrey that he beat his children with a strap and didn’t regret doing so. “It kept them out of jail and kept them right,” he said. In the 2003 ITV documentary Living With Michael Jackson, the singer told interviewer Martin Bashir that his father would oversee the Jackson 5’s intense rehearsals “with a belt in his hand” and “tear you up, really get you” if one of the brothers missed a step.
“I just remember hearing my mother scream, ‘Joe you’re gonna kill him, you’re gonna kill him, stop it,’” Michael recalled. “I was so fast he couldn’t catch me half the time, but when he would catch me, oh my god it was bad, it was really bad.” Michael also said his father would taunt him about his “fat nose”, and later told Winfrey he was so afraid of his father that he would sometimes vomit when he saw him. In 1979, Michael fired his father as his manager and took control of his career himself. The rest of the Jackson 5 followed suit in 1983.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael and Joe Jackson in 2005. Photograph: Joshua Gates Weisberg/EPA
In her 1991 memoir, La Toya Jackson wrote that her father beat his children and molested her and her sister Rebbie, claims she later said she regretted. Janet Jackson said her father only beat her once, but that they had a distant relationship. She confirmed rumours that he made his children call him by his first name. “‘You call me Joseph,’” she recalled him saying. “‘I’m Joseph to you.’” Receiving the inaugural Janet Jackson award at the 2018 Radio Disney music awards on 22 June, she paid tribute to “my incredible father”, who “drove me to be the best that I can.” Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon have denied that their father was abusive. His wife, Katherine, described his treatment of their children as in keeping with the times.
La Toya tweeted the following tribute: “I will always love you! You gave us strength, you made us one of the most famous families in the world. I am extremely appreciative of that, I will never forget our moments together and how you told me how much you cared. #RIP Joe Jackson”
Joe Jackson was born Joseph Walter Jackson on 26 July 1928 in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, the oldest of five children. His parents split when he was 12 and he moved to Oakland, California, to live with his father Samuel. When he turned 18, he moved to be near his mother in East Chicago, Indiana. In Indiana, Jackson pursued his dreams of becoming a boxer and played guitar in an R&B group called the Falcons. He married Katherine Scuse in November 1949. After the birth of their first child, daughter Rebbie, in 1950, Jackson left boxing and became a full-time crane operator for US Steel to support his family.
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Jackson is survived by his wife, Katherine, and their children Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Randy and Janet. Their seventh child, Brandon, died at one day old on 13 March 1957. Michael Jackson died aged 50 on 25 June 2009. Jackson is also survived by another daughter, Joh’Vonnie, by Cheryl Terrell.
In 2013, Jackson defended his parenting and managerial style on Piers Morgan’s CNN talk show Tonight: “I’m glad I was tough, because look what I came out with,” he said. “I came out with some kids that everybody loved all over the world. And they treated everybody right.”
At the risk of damning a dead man with faint praise, perhaps the best thing you can say about Joe Jackson is that he may not unequivocally be the most tyrannical and monstrous father in pop history. There are other contenders for the title, not least the appalling Murry Wilson, father of the Beach Boys’ Brian, Dennis and Carl, a man whose idea of disciplining his children involved yanking out his glass eye and forcing them to stare into the empty socket and who, in a final act of belittlement stemming from his insane conviction that he was the only real talent in the family, signed away the Beach Boys’ songwriting catalogue in 1969 for $700,000, costing them somewhere in the region of $100m in royalties. An early 1990s court case alleged that Brian Wilson’s signature on the sale documents had been forged.
Joe Jackson, father of Michael Jackson, dies at 89 Read more
Even against such stiff competition, Joe Jackson has a shot at the title. A former boxer and failed blues musician, his main skill appeared to be devising innovative ways to make his children’s lives miserable. He constantly added new chapters to a catalogue of physical and mental abuse, that, when it finally came to light in the 1980s, seemed to provide the answer to a number of questions about his son Michael. Once you knew what Michael Jackson’s childhood and early career had been like, the issue wasn’t so much why he was apparently turning so weird but why it hadn’t happened sooner.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Jackson and his parents, Katherine and Joe, at the Golden Globe awards in 1973. Photograph: Fotos International/Getty Images
Michael Jackson's personal photographer: 'He didn't identify as one gender' Read more
Even without their father’s influence, the Jacksons’ childhood would have been unusual. Their mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, fond of getting her kids to pore over the Watchtower’s illustrations of the imminent armageddon. She was also said to swab her children with rubbing alcohol – part of an obsession with cleanliness so extreme it turned her children into germophobes – and smear their faces with Vaseline on the grounds that it made them look “nice and shiny”. In winter, she reportedly sent them to school with hot boiled potatoes in their pockets in the belief this would ward off the cold.
But it was Joe Jackson who transformed their home life from merely unusual to nightmarish. He was a distant parent. “None of us can remember him holding us or cuddling us or telling us ‘I love you’,” Jermaine Jackson subsequently recalled. But the discovery that his offspring had musical talent turned him from merely cold and violent into a despot. He would beat them with a belt buckle or the cord of an electric kettle, or make them spend hours carrying cinder blocks from one side of their garden to the other when they incurred his wrath. The Jackson 5, as they were to become, were not allowed outside to play with other children: they rehearsed for five hours a day after school, their enthusiasm incentivised by the fact that if they got a dance step wrong their father would order them to break a branch off a tree in their garden that he then hit them with.
He seems to have reserved a particularly cruel streak of psychological bullying for Michael, the band’s youngest and most talented member. When Joe Jackson learned his teenage son was self-conscious about the size of his nose, he took to referring to him as Big Nose, an insult that haunted him into adulthood. Michael developed a nervous tic of constantly touching and covering his nose with his left hand as if sniffing it – hence producer Quincy Jones giving him the nickname Smelly. Then he began a series of surgical procedures so extreme that he was reportedly forced to wear a prosthesis to cover up the results. (A Rolling Stone story quoted witnesses to his body in an LA morgue claiming the prosthesis was missing, leaving only a hole in his face surrounded by bits of cartilage.)
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Jackson two months before his death, addressing a press conference at the O2 arena in London in 2009. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images
Michael eventually did everything he could to distance himself from his father. After the success of Thriller, he had reunited with his brothers only under sufferance, and after unexpectedly calling time on a final 1984 Jacksons family tour, scuppering plans to bring it to Europe, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid his family. But he couldn’t escape Joe’s shadow. In his 40s, Michael was still telling reporters that the very thought of his father made him nauseous. The kindest interpretation of some of Michael Jackson’s later eccentricities is that they were a desperate attempt to recover a childhood his father had denied him.
There is a case for the defence. Many of the above accounts of Joe Jackson’s cruelty come from his son Jermaine’s memoir You Are Not Alone: Michael Through a Brother’s Eyes. It is a book so devoted to insisting there was nothing peculiar or untoward about the Jackson family that it is unintentionally hilarious and also disturbing. There are only so many times you can try to pass off as ordinary behaviour things such as owning a pet chimpanzee, giving it a wardrobe and dousing it in Poison by Christian Dior, before you venture into the realms of unwitting comedy.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Jackson 5, from left, Tito, Jackie, Michael, Jermaine and Marlon Jackson. Photograph: Fin Costello/Redferns
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Jermaine Jackson details his father’s actions and then justifies them. In his telling, Joe’s behaviour was a way to keep the brothers in line and off the streets. As he points out, life in their corner of Gary, Indiana, was no picnic. Gang violence was endemic, but the brothers didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to get involved: they were always rehearsing and they were too scared of their father. Jermaine claims his father honed their talents and instilled them with discipline and a will to succeed, both of which found their most extreme expression in the perfectionist, ambitious Michael. Without Joe, who knows if the world would ever have heard of Michael or the other Jacksons?
Perhaps Jermaine has a point. Then again, watch the footage of Michael performing Billie Jean at the Motown 25th-anniversary concert in 1983, the night he broke out the moonwalk for the first time. It seems almost insulting to the level of talent on display to suggest that it required physical and psychological abuse to bring it out. And then think of the unrelenting grimness of Michael’s declining years, and his death amid rehearsals for shows he was patently too ill to perform but into which – in Jermaine’s account at least – he had been pressured by promoters fearful of losing money: a man bullied into singing and dancing whether he wanted to or not. That seems most likely to represent Joe Jackson’s legacy.
Joe Jackson passed away on Wednesday at the age of 89.
DailyMail.com revealed last week that the King of Pop's father was on his deathbed and later hospitalized as he battled stage four pancreatic cancer.
A family source tells DailyMail.com that Jackson, who had his wife Katherine by his side when he passed away, faded into unconsciousness on Tuesday.
Katherine made the decision to move Jackson into hospice care over the weekend as his health began to rapidly decline.
The patriarch of the Jackson family had voiced his desire to hold on through Monday said the family source, which marked the ninth anniversary of his son's death.
Jackson and his wife had been living apart for the past few years following a tumultuous 69-year relationship during which Jackson fathered a love child, had multiple affairs and was accused of abusing the couple's children.
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RIP: Joe Jackson (above in 2014) has passed away at the age of 89 one week after he was hospitalized with stage four pancreatic cancer
Rhythm nation: The patriarch of the Jackson family led his children to remarkable success in the music industry, particularly son Michael and daughter Janet (Janet and her father in 2000)
Tragedy: His death comes almost nine years to the day that his son Michael passed away on June 25, 2009 (Jackson and his son Michael in 2005 above)
Jackson had been ailing for months, but took a turn for the worse in the past two weeks according to sources close to the family.
His famous family all clambered to be by the bedside of the sickly father-of-eleven, but Jackson's handlers allegedly barred senior family members from visiting him, including his wife Katherine and oldest child Rebbie.
For four days, his sons and daughters were locked in heated discussions, unsure what was going on and pleading to see their father.
DailyMail.com later learned that following an emergency Jackson family meeting and desperate pleas to Jackson's manager, Charles Coupet, family members were finally granted access to the octogenarian last Tuesday night.
It is understood that he suffered from a form of dementia and had suffered several strokes in recent years.
'I will always love you! You gave us strength, you made us one of the most famous families in the world,' wrote his daughter LaToya on Wednesday.
'I am extremely appreciative of that, I will never forget our moments together and how you told me how much you cared. #RIP Joe Jackson.'
Katherine, daughters Rebbie and Joh'Vonnie and granddaughter Yashi Brown were among those who visited with Jackson in his final days.
At the same time, the Jackson family struggled to gain medical information about the dying man.
A source close to Joe's daughter Janet confirmed that she too had been denied access to see her father in recent days.
And Joe's other daughter Joh'Vonnie Jackson - the product of an extra-marital affair - had also been barred from seeing her dad despite being very close to him and living nearby in Vegas claimed the source.
Jackson's son Jermaine confirmed the odd situation when approached by DailyMail.com.
'No one knew what was going on - we shouldn't have to beg, plead, and argue to see our own father, especially at a time like this,' he said.
'We have been hurting.We were not being told where he was and couldn't get the full picture. Even from the doctor. My mother was worried sick.'
Jermaine, 63, added at the time: 'He's very very frail, he doesn't have long. The family needs to be by his bedside - that's our only intention in his final days.
'It's what any family would want, but some people around him think they know better...and they don't.'
Video courtesy of @LiamMcEwan
Family man: Jackson himself had given verbal instructions making clear he did not want visitors or family members to see him or his medical records in his final weeks (Jackson with his sons in 1970)
Tribute: Randy Jackson Jr remembered his grandfather with a social media post on Wednesday (above)
The way they were: Randy Jr also shared an image of Jackson and wife Katherine (above)
Jackson guided his children to unprecedented success as The Jackson 5 after his own attempt at stardom did not pan out with his band The Falcons.
Prior to that, Jackson had attempted to forge a career as a professional boxer after his 1949 wedding to Katherine.
He was born Fountain Hill, Arkansas just one year before The Great Depression to Samuel Jackson, a university professor who was the son of a slave.
He was the oldest of five children, and at the age of 12 moved to California with his father when his parents split.
His mother and other four siblings all moved to Chicago, with Jackson later joining them at the age of 18 when his father remarried.
That is when he began to pursue boxing, having dropped out of high school, and was briefly married to another woman before divorcing her and then pursuing a relationship with Katherine Scruse.
The two married soon after and he got a job at Inland Steel as a crane operator.
One year later, the couple had their first of 10 children, daughter Rebbie.
In was in the early 1960s that he began to create what would become the Jackson 5, which initially consisted of his three eldest sons: Jackie, Tito and Jermaine.
The boys were known as The Jackson Brothers and forced to spend most of their free time practicing as Jackson demanded perfection.
The group then became the Jackson 5 when Marlon and Michael joined a backup singers.
All that practice did pay off however, and the group found success on the road before drawing the attention of Gordon Keith, who released the group's first single in 1968 with Michael as the lead singer.
That was the beginning of the group's ascent, which all culminated with the boys being signed to Motown Records and the release of their first album, Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5.
The support of that A-list singing star catapulted the group, whose hits included ABC, I'll Be There and I Want You Back.
By that time the family was living in California, and after six years with Motown the boys signed an even more lucrative deal with Epic while Jackson began to send his three daughters Rebbie, Janet and LaToya out on the road to perform.
Janet's ascent began in 1982, and for the next two decades she was a fixture on the pop charts alongside her brother Michael, who had gone solo by that point.
At the same time, Jackson's reputation began to tarnish as details of his abhorrent behavior towards his children and extramarital affairs began to emerge.
It was also revealed that Katherine had filed for divorce in 1973 because of her husband's infidelity but later withdrew those papers.
One year later he welcomed his eleventh child, Joh'Vonnie, with his mistress Cheryl Terrell.
Jackson and Terrell went on to have a relationship for 25 years, and in 1982 Katherine once again filed fir divorce before once again deciding to opt out of the proceedings at the last second.
In 1993, Jackson suffered perhaps the most devastating blow of his life and career when Michael appeared on Oprah Winfrey's eponymous talk show and went into great detail about the emotional and physical abuse he endured during his youth.
That sit-down remains the most watched interview in television history, with 90 million people tuning in to hear the King of Pop speak openly for the first time in 14 years.
It would also be one of his last interviews, as he retreated from the public eye soon after in the wake of allegations that he had sexually molested young boys.
Jackson, despite his son's comments to Winfrey, stood by Michael's side throughout the trials that followed, often accompanying Michael to court.
In 2002 he was also inducted into the Rock and Hall of Fame as the Best Entertainment Manager of All Time.
Janet also paid tribute to her father just a few days ago at the Radio Disney Awards, where she was honored.
'My father, my incredible father drove me to be the best I can,' said Janet, who recently welcomed her first child last year, son Eissa Al Mana.
