“See, Louis, she hasn’t changed!” she exclaimed to her husband as soon as she saw me at the door.

     “Changed what?” I said. “Mildred, what are you talking about?”

     Mildred liked the boys’ old friends, had apparently assumed that since the Jackson family’s fortunes had changed so much, we had to have changed as people.

     Being treated differently by old friends and neighbors was only one of the adjustments that the boys and Joe and I had to make after the Jackson Five became famous. Getting used to the boys’ schedule was the biggest adjustment, for them and for me.

     MARLON: When we were trying to make it, life was hectic. Once we did make it, life was even more hectic.

     We’d come home from school and have a split-second to grab a bite. Then it was off to the studio. We’d record a song a day at Motown. If we were lucky, we got home early enough to do a bit of homework before we fell asleep. It was like this every weekday.

     Then on Saturday we rehearsed.

     TITO: I didn’t have a moment to reflect back then. Do you know when I got a moment? After the Victory tour in 1984. I can’t remember a day without “doing it” before then.

     When the boys weren’t recording or rehearsing, it seemed as if they were touring. Between 1969 and 1972, they toured throughout the United States, and in Europe, Africa, and Japan.

     So that they wouldn’t fall behind in their studies, they had a traveling tutor, Rose Fine. Before they would leap on a trip, the boys would get their assignments from the teachers; Mrs. Fine, too, would confer with each of their teachers so that she knew where each was in a particular subject area. Then when they were on the road she would have all five of them report to her hotel room first thing in the morning for two or three hours of study. Her room became a latter-day version of a one-room schoolhouse.

     To my pleasant surprise, the boys, who were all above-average students back in Indiana, made even higher grades in California. Much of the credit for that would have to go to Mrs. Fine, whose devotion to the boys knew no bounds. “I feel like I was their mother in another life,” she once told me, and, in fact, she acted like a second mother to them on the road. She accompanied them on their sight-seeing and shopping trips, and even tried to see to it that they went to bed at a reasonable hour. The boys loved her.

     I did, too. I only wished at the time that I could spend as much time with my sons as she did; even though I still had LaToya, Randy, and Janet at home with me, our house seemed empty without the boys. Some people might not like having relatives drop in on them for extended stays, but when our relatives started flocking to California in those early years I welcomed them with open arms. I wanted their company.

     I might not have felt so lonely if I had had neighbors with whom to build friendships. But in California, I soon learned, people tend to keep themselves. I didn’t even see kids riding their bikes down the street or chasing one another around, which I missed. They stayed on their own property, just like their parents. I remember thinking one day, My goodness, you might as well have built me a house in the middle of a cemetery.

     It was so hard for me making the adjustment from lively Jackson Street to a quiet L.A. neighborhood that I couldn’t stand staying at home. I had to get out each day, even if just to go to the park and read. When relatives were in town, I’d gladly show them the sights. I got to know every nook and cranny of Disneyland years before Michael.

     Even when the boys were in town, I might only get a glimpse of them each day because they kept such long hours in the studio. Their hectic schedule eventually forced an end to the Jackson family tradition that I cherished most: having dinner together.

     I did my best for a while to keep the tradition alive in L.A., cooking the usual big meal. But I got tired of throwing out the food when the boys’ sessions ran over-time, so one day I just stopped cooking dinner altogether.

     A second major challenge that the family had to face was adjusting to our new status as “public figures.” For the boys that meant dealing with fans not only at their concerts and at airports, but also literally whenever they poked their heads out their doors.

     TITO: Even back at the hotel after a show we weren’t out of the fans’ reach. Although we always had security people at each end of the hall, the girls would manage to bust through if they saw one of us leave our room to visit one of our brothers.

     The fans became a part of my life, too. From time to time, our doorbell would get a workout. I’d open the door and see as many as seven young fans at a time staring back at me.

     I’d always let them in, serve them drinks, and answer their questions. In my mind it was the polite thing to do. It was also the way my mother had raised me. (My mother practised what she preached to me. When a fan from New York tracked her down in Rutherford, Alabama, where she’d gone back to live with my stepfather, she allowed the fan to live with them for three months.)

     When Motown rented another house for us on Bowmont Drive in Beverly Hills, a less accessible address, I thought that I wouldn’t see as many fans. I was wrong. They’d hike up from Sunset Boulevard and camp outside our gate. Again I wouldn’t turn them away.

     Even after we moved into our own house in Encino I managed to keep an “open-door” policy for a while, even though my patience was finally wearing thin. The problem was that many of the fans would take advantage of my hospitality by sitting in our house for hours, figuring, I’m sure, that if they sat there long enough one of the boys would walk in the door. I was too polite to suggest to them, “Don’t you think you should go?”

     Finally, one of them would say, “Well, I guess we better leave.”

     But by then it would be midnight, and I’d be worried for their safety. “You can’t go out there by yourselves,” I’d say, and I’d wind up driving them all home.

     What are you doing? I finally asked myself one morning. These girls are never going to stop coming around if you keep letting them in and driving them home. From then on I did my best to ignore them.

     Still, I told myself at the time that I’d rather host sweet young fans in my house then be approached in public by rude strangers.

     Shortly after my photo got out for the first time, I was recognized at a Pic ‘n’ Save.

     “What are you doing shopping at a place like this?” a woman asked me.

     “The same thing you are,” I replied after I’d gotten over my momentary shock.

     I shied away from having my photograph taken after that, because I just felt more comfortable staying in the background. Even at the market when I spotted one or more of the boys on the cover of a fanzine, I would just quietly take the magazine and place it in the cart. Proud as I was of them, it wasn’t my way to nudge the person next to me and say, “Those are my boys.”

     I don’t want to give the impression that all of the changes that my children and I had to make in L.A. were difficult or traumatic ones. We had the happy task, for example, of adjusting to the fact that we had ample money for the first time in our lives.

     When the royalties finally started flowing in, and it became clear to us that our financial worries were over after twenty years of pinching pennies, I felt a huge sigh of relief. Just knowing that the money was there for our wants and needs made our lives so much easier.

     REBBIE: After I had my first child, Stacee, in 1971, my mother came out to Kentucky to visit. Personality-wise, she was the same. But what I noticed about her, and really liked, was the fact that her stature had changed. Now she could afford to dress nicely, to wear pretty jewelry. She had a new more sophisticated look.

     We all indulged in the purchase of new clothes. I bought a blue pant suit at a little boutique on Fairfax Avenue. The boys bought leather pants and jackets. We also had tailors come to the house to measure them for those denim-patch suits that were so popular at the time. Joe and the boys would wear them to their concerts, as well as to other performers’ shows. The suits were pretty sharp-looking at the time, but you look at them today and they seem awful.

     The only one of us who immediately made a large purchase was Jackie, who bought his first car: a 1970 Datsun 280Z. Since he was nineteen, he had Joe’s and my blessing. Of course, Tito and Jermaine wanted cars then, too, but Joe and I told them they would have to wait until they graduated from high school.

     So what did we do with our money? The majority of the income went into the boys’ individual savings accounts. Some of it went into “the pot,” a fund from which the boys could draw on when they got married and wanted to put a down payment on a house. The rest of it went to Joe as their manager, and to themselves in the form of a weekly allowance.

     Regarding the pooled funds, Joe and I didn’t want the money just to sit around in savings accounts, so we made a few investments on behalf of the family.

     One of our investments was in apartment houses. We bought two two-hundred-twelve-unit complexes in West Covina; and two in Tarzana, one with two-hundred-twelve units as well, the other with one hundred ninety-six. When we sold them in the late seventies, we realized a handsome profit.

     Another investment we decided to make was in a house for the family. After living for two years in the two homes that Motown had rented for us, we felt that it was time to leave our own place.

     At first, we limited our search to Hollywood; and idea of being close to Motown and the recording studios was appealing to us. But them we became attached to the idea of buying a hilltop home in Bel-Air with a view if the city.

     Our real estate agent push a particular Bel-Air home. To prove his claim that it was good to buy, he drove us into the San Fernando Valley one day, to a house in Encino that was for sale for about the same price: one hundred forty thousand dollars. The agent didn’t think the Encino house compared to the Bel-Air one because the Encino home was on flat land and didn’t have a view.

     But we happened to like the Encino house better. We loved the fact that it was situated on nearly two acres, with eighteen lemon, orange, and tangerine trees, and a place for the boys to play basketball.

     The house itself was attractive. It was a California ranch style, one story, with six bedrooms, a sunken den, and five bathrooms. We especially liked the glass-walled living room, which was bathed in light.

     That was the house we wound up buying. We moved into it on May 5, 1971, the day after my forty-first birthday.

     The children still had to share bedrooms: Jackie roomed with keyboards player Ronny Rancifer; Tito with drummer Johnny Jackson; Jermaine with Marlon; Michael with Randy; and LaToya with Janet.

     On Jermaine’s seventeenth birthday, a thirteen resident “moved in” -- Rosie, the boa constrictor. She was a gift from Jermaine’s girlfriend, Hazel Gordy, Berry Gordy’s daughter.

     This was one more adjustment I had to make in L.A.: the boys’ exotic new taste in pets. Although we’d had a couple of dogs, they weren’t content with dogs any more. They wanted snakes.

     Rosie became a favourite playmate of theirs. They’d walk around the house with her curled around their necks. They also liked to tease their friends by pretending to sic Rosie on them.

     I recall Johnny Jackson’s waking up in a start one night, screaming, “Mother, there’s something crawling on my stomach!” Sure enough, it was Rosie. A couple of the boys had taken her out of Jermaine’s aquarium that afternoon and had forgotten to return her. She’d been on the loose downstairs.

     Rosie lived but a couple of years. After she died, the boys bought a second boa constrictor. Like Rosie, he liked to sun himself in the trees in our backyard.

     “You don’t turn a snake loose like that!” I’d exclaim.

     “But he needs to get some exercise," they’d argue.

     Well, one day he got more exercise than the boys bargained for. When they went outside to look for him, he was gone

     I didn’t dare tell the neighbors.