Music: The Jackson Five at Home

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Jackie is 20, Tito 17, Jermaine 16, Marlon 14. They sing some, and play guitar. Michael, the lead singer, is twelve. They are brothers, and taken together they add up to the Jackson Five, a group that in hardly more than a year-has become the biggest thing to hit Pop Capitalism since the advent of the Beatles. They had four hit singles in 1970, two more already this year, four albums, with all ten releases selling in the millions, and one (I'll Be There) already well over 4,000,000. Teen-age girls besiege their home for autographs and sometimes faint when they sing. They have their own magazine, a quarterly in which fans can revel in a whole issue devoted entirely to the Jackson Five and read things like "Michael's Love Letter to You." Stores now bulge with Jackson Five decals, stickers and sweaters. A Jackson Five hair spray and a Jackson Five watch are planned, as well as a television cartoon about their lives. Despite this commercial hoopla, the group manages to be one of the best soul bands in the country. It is also part of the most likable and natural family ever to survive the pressures of teen-age stardom. So Correspondent Timothy Tyler discovered on a recent visit to the Jackson Five in Los Angeles:

First of all, they are really the Jackson twelve or 13, depending on whether you count Sister Maureen, who lives in Kentucky. There are the parents, Joe and Katherine, and Cousins Johnny Jackson and Ronnie Rancifer, who play drums and piano respectively, Sisters Janett, 4, and Latoya, 15, and Little Brother Randy, 8, who is getting ready to join the group.

They all live together in a massive twelve-room stucco-modern house on a large lot guarded by an electric gate out in Los Angeles' sprawling San Fernando Valley. The place is mammoth, flanked by a guesthouse, playhouse and servants' quarters. But there are only six bedrooms so that Michael—culture hero though he is—has to triple up with Randy and Marlon, and the other brothers are forced to share too.

The Jackson fortress wraps itself around a pool; it has walkways and plants growing all around; there is a basketball half court, badminton court, an archery range and, inside, a pool table in a sunken rec room and a den that looks like a cross between a motel lobby and the foyer of a Sunset Boulevard record company. The walls are plastered with platinum records (each signifying $2,000,000 in sales) and various other trophies the boys have picked up. For furniture, there is a bar, a stereo with big speakers and leatherette couches.

The place is almost totally impersonal, the fiercest personality around being without a doubt Lobo, a German shepherd trained to eat anything, black or white, that's squeaky and carries an autograph book. The family's closest friends have to wait outside in their cars in the parking lot and call up to the window, "Is Lobo O.K.?" The kids hold the raging beast down, inside the house, until a split-second before the visitor comes in the front door. Then Lobo is allowed to rush out the back door, a tornado of bristles and snarls, in a vain (hopefully) attempt to race around the establishment and up the front steps in time to rip the pants off whoever is going in the front door.