IT WAS a life of platinum records and an iron fist.

Patriarch of the Jackson family, Joe Jackson, has died at 89 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

According to the New York Post, La Toya Jackson was the first of the Jacksons to speak out on the passing of their patriarch, Joe Jackson.

“I will always love you,” La Toya, 62, tweeted on Wednesday.

“You gave us strength, you made us one of the most famous families in the world,” she added. “I am extremely appreciative of that, I will never forget our moments together and how you told me how much you cared. #RIP Joe Jackson.”

La Toya had a strained relationship with her father, accusing him of abusing her as a child in her 1991 memoir.

In her tweet, La Toya included a YouTube link to a 2013 scene from Life with La Toya, in which Joe joins her for a business lunch, where they discussed the 2009 death of Michael Jackson — and in which La Toya calls Joe “dad” for the first time in decades.

The news of Joe’s death comes after Jermaine Jackson told press last week that the family was having a difficult time visiting him or getting information about his condition.

“No one knew what was going on — we shouldn’t have to beg, plead and argue to see our own father, especially at a time like this,” he said at the time.

“We have been hurting. We were not being told where he was and couldn’t get the full picture. Even from the doctor. My mother was worried sick.”

Days after the interview was published, TMZ reported that the family, including Joe’s wife and the couple’s children and grandchildren, were then allowed to visit him at the hospital.

Jackson had not been in good health for some time. The talent manager suffered numerous health problems in recent years, including several strokes in 2013.

In 2015, he was hospitalised for a stroke and suffered three heart attacks, after which he had a pacemaker installed.

In July 2016, TMZ reported that he was hospitalised for a high fever, though the cause was undisclosed.

Two years later, he was hospitalised after a car crash near his Las Vegas home.

A LIFE OF CONTRADICTIONS

Jackson’s relationship with his famous family has been checkered at best.

He fathered 11 children — 10 with estranged wife Katherine and one, daughter Joh’Vonnie, with Cheryl Terrell.

In the 1960s and ’70s, he used a combination of business savvy, musical genius and allegedly abusive parenting to turn his five sons — Jermaine, Jackie, Tito, Marlon and Michael — into the legendary Jackson 5, giving Michael a springboard to eventually become the King of Pop.

His children frequently recalled beatings at their father’s hand, which Jackson didn’t deny, telling Oprah Winfrey that his whippings, for which he used a switch and a belt, “kept [them] out of jail and kept them right.”

In 2014, a family insider told the New York Post that Jackson was “no longer a part of the family.”

Jackson himself even said in a sad missive on his website in 2014 that when he suffered four strokes in 2013 and was in the hospital recovering, “only two people in my family travelled all the way to see me”. They were his granddaughter Brandi and daughter Janet.

Janet actually spoke warmly of her father as recently as the Radio Disney Music Awards this month, in which she told the audience: “My mother nourished me with the most extravagant love imaginable, my father, my incredible father, drove me to be the best that I can. My siblings set an incredibly high standard for artistic excellence.”

The sibling who set the bar highest, of course, was Michael Jackson, who died of a propofol overdose in 2009.

However, Michael frequently alleged that the Jackson family patriarch physically abused him, famously telling Oprah Winfrey that the sight of his father made him throw up.

Sources close to the family speculated that the King of Pop’s extensive plastic surgery was a desperate effort to eliminate any resemblance he bore to his father.

Jackson was reportedly left out of Michael’s will entirely.

“I taught them to be tough,” Jackson told the New York Post of raising his sons with corporal punishment.

“We raised them in a tough neighbourhood, where other kids were in gangs and getting into drugs. I didn’t want them to be soft.”

Michael wasn’t the only of Jackson’s children with whom he had a poor relationship.

His daughter La Toya shockingly revealed in her memoir that her father beat his children and molested her and sister Rebbie.

“When your father gets out of bed with your mother and gets into bed with his daughter and you hear the mother saying, ‘No, Joe, not tonight. Let her rest. Leave her alone, she’s tired,’ that makes you crazy,” La Toya wrote.

However, at the time of the book’s release, Rebbie denied that her father raped her, but said he touched her inappropriately.

Jackson denied the allegations of sexual abuse.

Despite the controversies and tragedies the Jacksons suffered through the years, the patriarch remained adamant that he had no regrets about anything in his life.