Janet Jackson, in ripped jeans, T-shirt and white socks, breezes down the stairs of her Mailbu Beach home despite a leg muscle injury she suffered in dance rehearsals a few days earlier. She is warm and gracious as she responds to curiosity about the wall-wall-ceiling, framed shark fossil that guards the foyer. When a museum couldn't come up with the purchase price, she explains, the archaeologists agreed to let her buy the 65 million-year-old wonder.
The unique artifact is just one of the surprises that surface during a visit to Jackson's home - tastefully accented with sea shells, cacti and African art - along with an expensive stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. During a revealing interview on her balcony overlooking the ocean, the pop star talks about her disgust with racism, the need for racial pride and her "responsibility" to give back to the Black community. She also talks about her brother Michael's skin discoloration, sister LaToya's estrangement from the family, and her own painful experiences. This frank talk - coupled with her sexy new image and gritty debut movie role - introduces a new attitude, a new day and a new woman.
Though she is modest about her accomplishments - with a $40 million Virgin Records contract, she is the highest-paid female in pop music - Jackson, now 27, exudes the confidence that comes with maturity, experience, fame and success.
"I don't believe in luck," she says, shaking her head decisively when asked to explain the source of her success. "It's persistence, hard work, and not forgetting your dream - and going after it. It's about still having hunger in your heart."
Hunger? What could Janet Jackson possibly hunger for?
She laughs. "There are a couple of things actually. I just want to break my brother's records. But he's so far beyond . . . geesh! I always try to give a 150 percent of everything I do.
I'm very competitive; that's how we were raised, really," she says nonchalantly. "It comes from my father as well as my mother. She's very competitive. She loves Scrabble, and she seldom loses. I play every once in a while, but when I do play, I play to win . . . . At the same time, you can't lose sight of loving what you do, and enjoying it. Even though it's hard work, I enjoy it."
References to family are sprinkled throughout Jackson's conversation. "What makes me happy is being with my family, all of us together, We always have a lot of fun," she says, adding that she has more than 20 nieces and nephews. Because of their busy lives and careers, they do not all get together as much as they would like, but they are supportive of each other. "Family is No. 1, and we know that," she says.
LaToya Jackson
Jackson says that she grew up in a loving home and that her parents, Joseph and Katherine Jackson, were strict disciplinarians. But she denies that they were abusive, as was alleged by sister LaToya Jackson in her book. "That's just a bunch of crap," Janet says of LaToya's charges that their father sexually and physically abused her. "Yes, our parents were strict, they did whip us. But my parents never mentally or sexually abused us."
Janet emphasizes that she and all of her brothers and sisters have reached out to LaToya, that her mother even flew to New York to see LaToya after the family heard about her problems, but LaToya refused to see Mrs. Jackson and ignored Janet's attempts to contact her.
And then, says Janet, LaToya suddenly showed up and created a scene at the Minneapolis recording studio where Janet was working on her new hit album, Janet., with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. "It was one big, huge mess," recalls Janet, emphasizing that her sister had ignored her calls for four years prior to that. "I felt it was like she wanted more to write about and thrive upon. So that was the reason she came to Minneapolis and caused this big commotion, hoping that something would happen. And it just so happens that two later she was on [The] Howard Stern [Show] talking about how we saw each other in Minneapolis, yet she said I was the one yelling and raving and cursing and screaming, and it was just totally the opposite.
"It's all an attention thing, and I think this guy who is with her [husband Jack Gordon] has brainwashed her and made her like this," says Jackson. "He keeps her away from the family, and now he's brainwashed her so much she keeps herself away from us.
"But more than any other crap that she's said about me, and all the lies and stuff, what really hurts me is what she has done to my mother.. After what happened in Minneapolis I remember calling home and I was crying," she recalls. "I said, 'Mother, please, don't ever try to reach LaToya again. Let her come to you. Because I don't ever want you to go through what I went through.' And I just couldn't stop crying on the phone. Yes, she's my sister, but I didn't give birth to her. My mother's been hurt enough."
Janet says she was a tomboy growing up and enjoyed a closer relationship with her brothers than with LaToya, who is 10 years older. "LaToya was always trying to persuade mother to get me in charm school because I was such a tomboy," she recalls, laughing. And, says Janet, LaToya was so "prissy" as a youngster that she felt uncomfortable for her siblings to even see her in pajamas. "That's why it really shocked us when she did the Playboy thing, for her to show her body the way she did. That's what really shocked us."
"The person who is there today is not the person I knew we lived at home," she says of LaToya. "So, I'm just waiting for that person to come back."
Jermaine Jackson
She also says her brother Jermaine should not have criticized Michael in his 1991 single, "Word To The Badd." "To me there is no excuse for what he did and I told him that I didn't like the record," she says, referring to an encounter in the backyard of her parents' house. "I told him it wasn't the right thing to do, that we weren't raised like that. Mother always said if you have a problem with someone, you don't hold it inside; you go to that person and work it out, especially if it's a family member. It's not the public's business." She reflects for a moment. "I think he regrets he did it now. Sometimes you make mistakes in life and you learn from them."
Concerning another family issue, Jackson goes on to say she felt a burden had been lifted from her shoulders when her brother Michael finally revealed that a skin pigmentation disease is the cause of his skin's discoloration. "I knew, and I knew that my mother knew," she says. "He said, 'Jan, please don't tell anybody.' I didn't even know if my other brothers and sisters knew. I truly didn't, but I was not about to tell them."
Jackson goes on to reveal how much it "irked" her when people would ask, "Why does you brother want to be White?" She says: "I got so sick of that because my brother is extremely intelligent and he's extremely talented and he's very, very smart. And I felt that people were thinking that he felt to be so talented or so smart he had to be acting White in order to get where he is. But I'm so happy he talked about it because he's not like that at all. And he's very proud of his race and who he is."
But does she really feel competitive with the incomparable Michael Jackson, Mr. Moonwalk himself, her big brother?
"yes," she says assertively, "but it is a friendly competition because he is my brother, and it just so happens that my brother has broken the Bee Gees record for the biggest selling album of all time . . . . If it were someone else, I'd still want to break the record. We talk on the phone all the time, and he knows I want to break his records. But I'm really proud of him. He inspires me a great deal."
And is he proud of his baby sister?
"Yeah, he said he was," she says modestly, looking down at the grilled peppers, tomatoes and corn that Alfredo, her chef, has set before her on the glass table. He pours her a large glass of berry mineral water before disappearing.
Jackson continues to explain that she considers her competition to be not just her brother Michael, but anyone and everyone who performs dance music. "Like I said before, I'm very competitive. If someone is at No. 1 and I'm at No. 2, then I want the No. 1 spot. But I feel there is enough room for everyone. Everyone. I really do. Enough room for Whitney, for myself, for my brother, for everyone."
Though she has been in show business her whole life, Jackson's recording career really took flight with the release of her third album, Control, in 1986. That was followed by another blockbuster, Rhythm Nation 1814, in 1989. Sales topped 8 million for each. Now, with the instant success of janet., Jackson perfects the triple hit. And critics and fans alike praise her sexy, earth portrayal of Justice in John Singleton's Poetic Justice.
While enjoying her grilled vegetables, Jackson explains that she stopped eating meat when she was 10. "At that time everyone in my family stopped." she says, "That's when Michael became a true vegetarian. Only vegetables. It's been a year since I stopped eating chicken."
Jackson is slim and petite, her skin taut, her muscles toned. Just shy of 5 feet 4 inches, she weighs 110 pounds. It's hard to imagine that she once battled the bulge. "My grandmother used to say, 'Leave her alone, that's only baby fat,'" she recalls those years. "But it was never baby fat; fat is what it was. Just fat. Yeah, I was heavy at one time. Just look at the video of When I Think Of You (1986). That's the biggest I've ever been. I weighed a lot."
When Jackson is shown the janet. compact disc cover, on which her slim waist with sexy navel hovers provocatively above unzipped jeans, she smiles demurely. "A couple of [media] people said it could not have been my stomach before. I work out six days a week, for an hour and 40 minutes, every day. And I go straight from workouts to rehearsal and work out again for six or seven hours. You cannot help but be in shape."
Jackson is interrupted by her three dogs barking as they welcome home her longtime companion, René Elizondo, who directed the That's The Way Love Goes video. Elizondo, 30, a slim, attractive man who had a cameo role in Poetic Justice, warmly greets Jackson.
Jackson and Elizondo have been "best friends" for 11 years, since they met when she was 16. "We were just like this," she says, intertwining two slender brown fingers. "When I first met him I was going through so much, and I would call him, and I would cry on the phone . . . . And he was going through some stuff, too, with his girlfriend. We were best friends. Then, when I was about 20, it was the strangest thing when we started being attracted to each other. I felt like I was sinning somehow or something. It might sound strange, but we were such good friends. But I think those are the best relationships, when you are friends first."
Is marriage on the horizon?
"Nope. No time soon at all," she says.
Though it is a subject she clearly does not care to discuss, Jackson acknowledges that her brief marriage to James DeBarge in 1984 when she was 18, was the most painful period of her life. This obviously is the personal trauma that Elizondo helped her endure.
"I went through a lot, from age 15˝ to about 19 years," she says. [During this time, Jackson also released her first two albums to less than critical acclaim.] "I was very young. I used to hurt so badly that I'd ask God why, what have I done to deserve any of this? I feel not He was preparing me for this, for the future. That's the way I see it."
These early experiences gave Jackson the confidence to ignore the naysayers who said an entertainer with her privileged background could never convincingly portray Justice. The character is a South Central L.A. hair stylist who grapples with the emotional trauma of losing her mother to suicide and her boyfriend to gang violence by writing poetry.
Jackson says she wanted to do the film, rather than a musical or comedy, because she understands Justice's pain. "She experiences love and pain in much the same why I feel I have in my life," she says of the character. "No matter how wealthy you are and no matter how poor you are, love is love and pain is pain. It's still that same feeling.
"I have experienced a great deal of pain in my life, beyond what anyone can imagine," she says. "It's made me a much stronger person. That was God's way of doing it. Yes, I am a much stronger person today than I was even a few years ago. As I go along I become much stronger."
And sexier.
On the compact disc, many are surprised to discover Janet Jackson, the sex goddess. The video for her single, "If," portrays sexual fantasy, lust and voyeurism. At times she wondered if the racy tone would be too much for her fans, and her mother, whom she persuaded not to attend the video's taping. "It's nothing nasty or dirty, but it's very sexy," says Jackson. "During taping I kept saying, 'Oh, my god, I'm glad my mother is not here.'"
Jackson says she decided on a more sensual tone for the recording while filming Poetic Justice. "The film changed me a great deal," she says. "It opened me up more, in that sense, to not being as shy . . . . There is no way you can be quiet around John [Singleton], Tupac [Shakur], Regina [King] and Joe [Torry]," she says, referring to the director and co-stars. "The movie made me open up a great deal. First it was Fame that introduced me to this 'new world.' We were so sheltered growing up, and out parents were really strict. So it was the first time I got a chance to see what it's really like out there."
She says the sensuality expressed on janet. simply reflects "my feelings, what's happened in my life, and some of it reflects things that have happened in the lives of friends. But they're all things that we have all experienced at one point or another."
Racism is another fact of life that Jackson has experienced firsthand. And it, like the reality of sick children, makes her angry. "Racism is an awful thing. It is horrible," she says, recalling an incident in which she and Elizondo made what was to be a quick stop at a Beverly Hills store only to be dismayed when sales clerks stood around ignoring them. That is until one of them recognized her. "I was so mad," she recalls with disgust. "And I go, 'So now you are going to be all phony with me. But yet, I know you treat my people like this.'
"And a lot of times, too, because I'm a woman, and I'm young, on top of it, being a Black woman, a lot people don't want to follow your directions," she says forcefully, referring to tense encounters with directors and producers. "The more fame you get, the easier it gets, but still they feel that by being young you don't you know what you are talking about. And on top of that, you are a woman and you are Black. That really gets me mad. I have to put them in their place at that point."
Yet, a confrontational, my-way-or-no-way attitude is not Janet Jackson's style. "No, I feel that you can get more done with a smile and a kind word, and in the end, no one hates the other one," she says. "Everybody is still having a great time, work is still getting done. But there are times when people really push you and try to walk over you, and I think that's when you have to put your foot down, and I do at those times."
Jackson emphasizes that rap music plays a great role in instilling racial pride in young Blacks like herself who attend schools that teach nothing about Black history or contributions other than slavery. "I was never taught that we were kings and queens of this beautiful continent. Never!" she says. "That's why I credit rap so much for teaching kids to instill pride. They've helped to enlighten the Caucasian kids as well as other races that we were [kings and queens] before slavery . . . ."
When asked what advice she has for her millions of fans, she fixes her stare on the water. "Knowledge is the key to success, and that's very important for the children to know," she says. "Get a good education. That's the key."She says making Poetic Justice helped fortify her sense of Blackness, but the greatest influence was Maya Angelou's poetry. She says she was still in a poetic frame of mind when she wrote "New Agenda" for her new album.
"A lot of people harp on 'this is what they did to us' and 'they did that to us,' talking about the White man.," says Jackson. "OK, fine. We know everything that has happened to us. It's time to move on; that's the past. How are we going to make this world better for us? What are we going to do to help make our children better? That's what my 'New Agenda' is all about - instilling pride in our women. And Maya Angelou inspired me a great deal."
In addition, Jackson says she admires her brothers ("Michael moreso because we were so close growing up") and Dorothy Dandridge, the actress who died in 1965 of an overdose of an antidepressant. One day she hopes to portray Dandridge in a film. "She did go through a lot in her life; she had a lot of pain," says Jackson. "I can relate to her."
When the conversation again turns to her family, Jackson says the most valuable lesson she learned from her parents is this: "Always follow your heart, and never forget where you came from. Always extend your hand to help others."
She elaborates, explaining that it's "my duty" to help others. "I feel that this is my responsibility, my duty," she says. "God has given us a great gift, and that is life, and what you do with it, that life, is your gift to Him, and I just feel that part of my job is helping children."
When Jackson is not working, she says she spends time with her family and "hanging out" with friends either at her house or dancing at clubs. She also enjoys vacations in the West Indies, where she can relax on the beach. "I love the island music," she says. But work is on the agenda right now, for her concert tour will kick off in October in the U.S. before heading to Europe and Asia.
The sun has set and a full moon is shimmering on the ocean beneath the balcony. "I love it," she says dreamily. "It's so beautiful."
And so is life for a very grown-up Janet Jackson.
By Lynn Norment
