Jackson's insensitive father and brothers called him 'Big Nose'.

'He thought he was ugly.'

Most of his unhappiness was focused on his nose. For a long time he talked of having cosmetic surgery. His motive was not, as many people surmised, to look more like his idol, Diana Ross.

It was so that he would look less like his father, the man who had so mistreated him and whose strong, broad-nosed face he saw looking back at him from the mirror.

Jackson was too afraid to go ahead with surgery until 1979, when, aged 21, the decision was made for him. He tripped during a dance routine and broke his nose. When he looked in the mirror after the operation to repair it, he liked what he saw.

Two years later, he had a second operation. A dangerous pattern was starting to emerge. Three years later, he had another and, in 1986, a fourth nose job.

He told an associate that the 'greatest joy I ever had was in knowing I had a choice about my face'.

SHOOT: Jackson lacked an inner parent who could discern right from wrong, practical from impractical, appropriate from inappropriate. It's not his fault though, his family taught him to sing and dance, rather than to be a functional human being.

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk For a while, this strategy of selfpromotion was brilliantly successful as Jackson convinced himself that he could manipulate his image and control how he was portrayed. Throughout the Eighties, he dreamt up bizarre stunts and stories that were leaked to the Press. One favourite ploy was to use outlandish disguises on conspicuously extravagant shopping trips. Once, he popped into a Los Angeles chemist's in an Afro wig and dark glasses, and asked to buy a sex toy. It was hardly a surprise when the story made all the newspapers. He also told the world that he slept in an oxygen chamber that would enable him to live to be 150. It was a complete fiction, but word of Michael's latest wacky exploit spread round the globe, helping to sell more records on the way. But the danger of this drive for self-promotion was that it became open season for any invented story. Reports appeared that he had seen John Lennon's ghost and was speaking chimp language to his pet ape Bubbles.