The Years 1987 to 1989
In a list of the best-selling books of the day in America, published in the Los Angeles Times, Moon Walk ranked first. And in a list published in the New York Times, it had taken second place, which allowed it to reach the top of the list in the second week of its presence among the best-sellers.
These two lists of best-selling books are considered the most important lists in the publishing and printing industry.
Within a few months, it was announced that more than four hundred and fifty thousand copies of Moon Walk had been sold in fourteen countries around the world.
Michael dedicated this book to one of the people who had always been like a idol to him. ”Fred Astaire, a great and old actor.“
In Moon Walk, Michael speaks without any cover about his adolescence, his family, his first love, plastic surgery, his entirely exceptional career, and the strange and unfair rumors that have always surrounded his field of work.
In this book, he writes about his childhood:
”What I remember from my childhood is mostly work, even though I loved reading. I wasn’t forced by my parents to go on stage like Judy Garland. I did it because I enjoyed it, and for me it was an innate ability—like breathing. I did it because I had been made to. Not by my parents or my family. But by my inner self, which lived in the world of music.
Sometimes when I returned home from school, I only had enough time to put my books down and get ready to go to the studio. Sometimes I read until the end of the night—until it was time for me to sleep. On the other side of the street, across from the Motown studio, there was a park. I remember watching the children playing in the park; I just stared at them. In my mind, I couldn’t imagine such freedom and a carefree life for myself. And above all, I wished that I too had such freedom, that I could free myself from problems and be like those kids. We were doing very well in our work, but we worked as much as people who were twice our age.
As the leader of the group, I felt more than the others that I couldn’t even take one night off. I remember that after spending the whole day in bed because of illness, I performed on stage at night. In such moments, focusing on the performance became difficult, but I had memorized all the things that I and my brothers had to do on stage so well that I could do them even in my sleep.
Talent is something God gives to a person, but my father showed us how to grow it. We performed for him, and he would find fault with us. If you messed up, you got beaten. Sometimes with a belt, and sometimes with a whip. My father really made it hard for us—really hard. Marlon was the one who always got into trouble during rehearsals. But I got beaten more for things that happened outside rehearsal time. My father hit me so much and made me so angry that I decided to take revenge for all those beatings. I would take my shoes off my feet and throw them at him, or fight him with my fists. That’s why I got beaten more than my brothers. I fought back, and my father beat me severely in return. My mother says that when I was even smaller, I did the same thing, but I don’t remember anything. I remember that to escape my father, I would hide under the tables, and that made him even angrier. We had a very unstable relationship with each other.
My father has always been a secret to me, and he knows that himself. One of the things I’ve always regretted the most is that I was never able to build a close relationship with him. Over the years, he had built a wall around himself, and when he finished his work with the group, he realized that it was difficult for him to relate to us..... Up to today, I’m very grateful to him for the fact that, unlike many parents, he didn’t keep the money we earned for himself. Imagine stealing from your own children. My father never did such a thing to us. But I still don’t know him, and that is sad for a boy who is thirsty to know his father. He is still a mysterious man to me, and maybe he always will be...
I don’t know what my brothers and I were expecting, but nightclubs were something else. We performed among bad comedians, drunk people, and women who did striptease on stage. And I had been raised under religious beliefs. My mother was worried that I would spend my time with the wrong people and become familiar with things that I should learn about only a few years later.
Luck for us first meant something when we were given a full show. We performed five nights and six nights a week. And if my father could, he would take us to somewhere outside the city to perform on the seventh night as well. We worked very hard. But the crowds in the cafés weren’t bad for us.
We performed in cafés where, at that time, female striptease dancers also worked. I was used to standing in the corners of the stage in one of these clubs in Chicago and watching one of the striptease dancers named Mary Rose. At that time, I was nine or ten years old. The girl would take her clothes off and throw them into the crowd. And the men would pick them up and shout. My brothers and I watched all these events, memorized them, and my father didn’t care. We were exposed to many things that were repeated again and again.
Later, when we performed at the Apollo Theater in New York, I saw something that truly affected me, because I had never thought that such a thing could exist. Up to then, I had seen a few women who did striptease; but that night, a girl with very beautiful eyelashes and long hair came on stage and performed her act. She had an incredible performance. Suddenly, at the end of the show, she took off her wig, pulled out a big pair of oranges from inside her underwear, and it turned out that the girl was a man. That event affected me. I was still a child, and I couldn’t even imagine something like that. I looked toward the audience. They liked the show and cheered with joy and strongly. I was only a child, standing in the corner of the stage, watching all these things. As I said, I was really impressed. As a child, I learned a lesson from it. More than anything else. Maybe that incident freed my mind to focus on other aspects of life in adulthood.“
Michael writes about being surrounded by his fans: ”They don’t mean any harm, but I believe that being surrounded like that can hurt you. You feel like you’re being suffocated or torn apart. Thousands of hands grab at you. One of the girls twists your wrist while another is trying to remove your watch from your hand. They grab your hair and pull it hard, and the pain burns you like fire. You fall to the ground and get very bad scratches. I still have signs of some of those scratches on my skin, and I can remember which city each of them was created on my skin. It’s important to protect your eyes with your hands, because during these emotional frenzies, the girls might forget that their nails are long.“
In this book, Michael writes about his rise to fame and rumors:
”When I first became famous, I was still a chubby little boy with a round, chubby face. The roundness of my face stayed with me for years afterward, until I changed my diet and stopped eating red meat, chicken, pork, fish, and other fattening things. I only wanted to look better, live better, and live healthier. Gradually I lost weight, and my face became the way it is now. And the newspapers accused me of changing my appearance with plastic surgery. Aside from the surgery on my nose—which I freely admitted I had done, like many readers and film stars. They would choose one of my old photos from my adolescence or high school days and compare it with one of my new photos. In the old photo, my face was round and chubby, and I had African hair, and the lighting in the photo was very bad. The new photo showed the face of a much older, more mature person. My hairstyle had changed, and I had also had my nose operated on. Also, the lighting in the photos had improved over time. Such comparisons really aren’t fair.