Everything you always wanted to know about Michael, Janet and LaToya: mother of Jackson family tells all - excerpt from Katherine Jackson's 'My Family, The Jacksons' - Cover Story

Ebony, Oct, 1990 by Katherine Jackson

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Michael, Janet and LaToya

LATOYA nude in Playboy?

I was shocked when I heard the rumor. My daughter may have been different from her eight brothers and sisters in some ways - she was the moodiest of my kids, for example - but in terms of her dress and manners, she'd been so conservative that she'd once dropped a friend who had begun wearing low-cut tops and skirts with slits in them. "She looks disgusting, like a hooker," LaToya remarked at the time. "I don't want any part of her."

But the longer I thought about the Playboy rumor, the more I feared that it was true. The LaToya I saw in early 1989 was not the LaToya I thought I knew.

I couldn't help but recall her 1988 engagement at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, when she danced for the first time ever in a sexy, suggestive way. Watching her from the audience, I was surprised and, I admit, a little taken aback.

"Jack told me that I had to change my image if I want to make it in the business," LaToya said when I questioned her about her new show.

"Jack" was Jack Gordon, her smooth-talking manager. Her transformation had begun at the same time that he entered her life in 1987 with an offer for her to host a music video show that he had in the works. At the time LaToya was a confirmed homebody and mama's girl...

She was the kind of little girl who a grandmother would love... When you'd clean her up, LaToya would sit on the couch like a little lady...

Janet by contrast, was a tomboy. By the age of 2 she had the nickname "squirrel" because she loved to climb on the furniture and on the boys' bunkbeds...

Janet had been on the plump side for years. Michael, who can be a merciless teaser, had nicknamed her "Dunk" - for donkey.

I had a hard time getting Janet to wear dresses to kindergarden; she always wanted to wear jeans. To this day, she dresses like a tomboy. She'll show up at the house in army boots, blue jeans with patches in them, an oversized T-shirt and her hair stuffed in a cap.

"Janet," I'll say, "wear some earrings or put on some lipstick. People are going to mistake you for a guy..."

[Jack] Gordon's music video show never materialized, but he remained on the scene, showering LaToya with flowers and gifts.

Gordon begged my husband, Joe, LaToya's manager, to allow him to co-manage her; he claimed that he had ideas for how to revitalize her stalled recording career. He kept pestering Joe until Joe finally asked LaToya, "Is this what you want?" She said it was, so her father agreed to share management responsibilities with Gordon.

The next thing I knew, Gordon had my homebody of a daughter traveling the world. No sooner would they return from business in Japan than she'd announce, "Oh, I have a photo shoot to do in Austria," and she and Gordon would be on the next flight out of Los Angeles. While a part of me was happy that she was getting out into the world at long last and meeting new people, her turnabout was so sudden and dramatic that it left me confused.

It wasn't until later, when I saw Jack Gordon for what he was ... that I understood his strategy in booking LaToya in far-flung corners of the globe. He was attempting to distance my naive, trusting daughter from her family, literally and figuratively, so that he could become the dominating influence in her life.

The public learned just how successful Gordon had been in tearing LaToya away from the family when, in March of 1988, People magazine reported that LaToya had moved to New York City with Gordon and cut her professional ties with Joe. "Jack's a salesman," LaToya was quoted as saying. "He throws a good pitch and he delivers. Anyway he's doing better than my father." Adding a sensational touch was Jack Gordon's own parting "pitch" to Joe: "I love Joe like poison."

Even though LaToya continued to talk to me almost daily on the telephone, our relationship deteriorated also. It seemed like LaToya had been taking lessons in the Big Lie from Gordon.

I had raised my children to always tell the truth, so I was disappointed in her for indignantly denying to me that she had decided to write a competing, "tell-all" book about the Jackson family, even after I heard that Gordon had taken her around from publisher to publisher in New York.

"No, mother, I'm not doing a book; I don't know how these rumors get started," she said again a few weeks later, after I learned that she had signed a book deal for more money that my son Michael had received for his autobiography, Moonwalk

This exchange was repeated several more times after I was informed of "ugly family secrets" that Jack Gordon had circulated, including the Biggest Lie of them all: that LaToya had been molested by Joe when she was 8 years old. When I confronted Gordon about this outrageous charge he claimed that Rebbie, not LaToya, had told him.

"That's not true!" Rebbie gasped when I checked with her. Michael was furious. "Mother," he exclaimed, "how can he lie like that!" The obvious answer: so Jack Gordon could create interest in LaToya's book, and make more money for himself.