PART FOUR
It came as no surprise to the clerks at Santa Monica’s Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore that, in the autumn of 2008, they were among the first to learn Michael Jackson was once again living in Los Angeles. For most other people in the city, though, Jackson’s intellectual curiosity had always been the least appreciated of his qualities. He kept over ten thousand books at Neverland and had read most of them. The owners of Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard and Dutton’s in Brentwood had been selling to him by the box load for years. Michael was a quiet shopper who lingered longest in the poetry section but had a special affection for the all-embracing philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the nineteenth-century transcendentalists. He was extensively read in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the great psychoanalysts, whose work he was able to discuss with a sophistication that astonished acquaintances over the years.
Many in the media were amused by descriptions of the infamous Last Supper painting that hung over his bed at Neverland, a depiction of him sitting at the center of a long table flanked by Walt Disney on one side and Albert Einstein on the other, with Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti” was right up there with Tchaikovsky’s “Danse des petits cygnes” in Michael’s book, and Little Richard did his own dancing) spread out beside them. Very few knew that Michael had studied the biographies of each of these “inspirational heroes” and could recount their life stories in extraordinary detail. He had been fascinated for decades with celebrities who died young, and professed amazement as early as the mid-eighties that it was “the same things over and over again”—meaning drugs and sex—that had brought the lives of these stars to an early, tragic end.
Michael’s multitasking attempts to learn and grow amid even the most chaotic circumstances touched and perplexed any number of people who came into his life. He peppered with numerous questions nearly everyone he met who boasted expertise in any area of human endeavor. Michael studied the field of medicine intently, and, with the help of Arnold Klein, among other doctors, had arranged to observe numerous surgeries at the UCLA Medical Center. Jackson and Marlon Brando, another omnivore, spent much of their time together comparing notes about the various scientific concepts and technologies they were studying. Deepak Chopra, who had encountered Michael for the first time backstage in Bucharest during the Bad tour, recalled, “He would be swarmed by crowds at the airport, perform an exhausting show for three hours, then sit backstage afterward drinking bottled water, glancing over some Sufi poetry as I walked into the room.”
Gregory Peck had met Michael a decade earlier when, one afternoon, Jackson called him up and asked if he could stop by for a visit. Peck was stunned that Michael had memorized every line of dialogue from To Kill a Mockingbird and asked cogent, thoughtful questions about the film. The friendship that developed from this meeting was as enduring as it was surprising. Jackson and Peck (who had bought a working cattle ranch in northern Santa Barbara County back in the late fifties, when he was working on a movie called The Bravados) regularly went horseback riding together at Neverland Ranch and carried on conversations that lasted for hours. Michael was among the few people with whom Peck would discuss the 1975 suicide of his eldest son, Jonathan, and the first “Blanket” Michael ever met was the Pecks’ dog. In December 2002, when the balcony-dangling incident with his own Blanket from the balcony of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin made Michael into an international pariah, Gregory Peck and his wife, Veronique, wrote an “Open Letter of Support” that was posted on Jackson’s Web site.
When Gregory Peck died in his sleep at the age of eighty-seven in June 2003, Jackson created a minor scandal by arriving twenty minutes late (and dressed in a bright red jacket) to the actor’s funeral in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. What most of those who chided him for attempting to upstage the most beloved of Hollywood’s stars didn’t know was that Michael had come to the Pecks’ home in Bel Air the day after Greg’s death to help his widow plan the memorial service.
Veronique Peck, still elegant in her seventies, was on Michael’s arm the evening of October 29, 2008, when he made the public appearance that announced his return to Los Angeles. The occasion was a Halloween party hosted by Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines and her actor husband, Adrian Pasdar. Thinking he was an impersonator, the DJ at the party began to play “Thriller” when Michael walked into the huge room. Several people approached to say that his was absolutely the best Michael Jackson costume they’d ever seen, only to stop frozen in midsentence when they realized it was Michael Jackson. Maines would later tell shock-jock Howard Stern that Michael’s eldest son was perhaps “the most well-adjusted” and “self-assured” child she’d ever met. She wasn’t quite so complimentary toward the boy’s father, who not only had failed to introduce himself after arriving at her home but also allowed his bodyguards to keep her away when she made the effort to meet him. “I think maybe he’s stuck in time as a child,” she told Stern. “I felt like maybe he’s a child. He’s got lots of handlers.”
Michael wasn’t wearing a mask on the evening of Maines’s party, but he had been three weeks earlier, when he and his children were photographed leaving a comic book store on Melrose Avenue, each of the kids costumed as a Halloween character. The story that accompanied the photograph in London’s Daily Mail (which remained interested in each and every Wacko Jacko sighting) described him as looking “scarier than ever in a surgical mask, giant black sunglasses, and a hooded jumper.”
Tohme was furious: “I told him, ‘No mask, Michael. Not again, ever, please. Remember who you are.’”
The newly minted manager, though, was learning quickly that who Michael Jackson was would mean fielding an unceasing swirl of false reports, scandalous claims, and vindictive rumors, whether he wore a mask or not. In Las Vegas, columnist Norm Clarke had just come out with a story that Jackson had turned down the opportunity to perform at the opening of Steve Wynn’s new $2.2 billion Encore Tower “and everybody thought it was because Michael was sick or on drugs,” Tohme recalled. The rumors that Jackson was seriously ill had been fueled by a claim made in Britain’s Sunby Ian Halperin, who was claiming that “sources” had informed him the star’s fading health had left him nearly blind in one eye and in need of a lung transplant that he “may be too weak to go through with.” The absurd story had gained traction so quickly that Tohme had been forced to grant theNew York Daily News an interview in which he declared it “a total fabrication.” Just a couple of months earlier, the Wall Street Journal had published an article stating that Jackson was “holed up” in the “rural Nevada compound” of Pahrump, a dusty little census-created community on the edge of the Mojave Desert that was best known for its discount brothels. “Michael had never been near the place,” a baffled Tohme would say. “And this is the Wall Street Journal.” The appearance of the Pahrump story had coincided with the resurfacing of Jack Wishna, who was playing a particularly unattractive version of the spurned suitor as he told the National Enquirer that reports Michael Jackson was about to mount a series of comeback concerts at Tom Barrack’s hotels were wishful thinking. “Sadly, Michael’s incapable of keeping promises, because he hasn’t got the will to even show up anywhere, much less get himself into shape for a world-class performance,” Wishna told the Enquirer. “He might drop by to wave at guests, or do a dance on top of a limo, but a long term show? That dream will never come true, I’m afraid.”
The only good thing about all the stories coming out of Nevada was that they seemed to make Michael increasingly content to stay in Southern California, Tohme said. By the middle of November, Jackson was telling his manager that he wanted to start looking at houses in Bel Air. Tohme was delighted, until he discovered that the first home to capture his client’s imagination was the most expensive on the entire LA market, a lavish estate that had just been built at the top of Bel Air’s most exclusive street, Nimes Road, by the former owner of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Mohamed Hadid. “Le Belvedere,” Hadid called his mansion, a 48,000-square-foot palace that offered 280-degree views and was barricaded by a thousand-foot-long, 36-foot-high wall made of stones imported from Jerusalem. The 2.2-acre grounds were breathtaking, heavy with specimen plantings that surrounded a “swan lake” and an infinity pool, all set against the property’s majestic vistas. Among the home’s many interior amenities, Michael’s favorite was a sixty-seat home theater that was set up in the style of an opera house. Hadid had just put the place on the market for $85 million and Michael was trying to convince both the owner and his manager that he could afford it. “I told him, ‘Michael, it’s too much. It’s not worth it,’” Tohme recalled. Hadid refused when Tohme asked if his client could rent Le Belvedere, but said he would allow Jackson to spend the night in the house with his children “in order to feel the place.” It was agreed that Hadid and his son would vacate the property on Thanksgiving morning to spend that day and night in Santa Barbara. Tohme and his wife prepared a feast, then transported it, along with their own children, Michael, and Michael’s children to Le Belvedere, where they all dined together. “We stayed late, then left Michael and his children and returned home,” Tohme recalled. “The next morning I went and picked up Michael and his children and took them back to the Hotel Bel-Air. On the way Michael said he didn’t want Hadid’s house. He said he heard some bad voice there. Michael was a very spiritual guy, and he was guided by that in his decisions.”
Over the next few days, Tohme convinced Michael that renting a home was the right move, at least until they returned from London after the O2 shows. With the help of a real estate broker friend named Joyce Essex, Tohme located an estate on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, a neighborhood that—with Beverly Hills on one side and Bel Air on the other—formed the fabled “Platinum Triangle.” The property’s 17,171-square-foot, three-story, French chateau–style mansion belonged to Christian Audigier’s senior partner in his Ed Hardy stores: Hubert Guez. Designed by Richard Landry, LA’s reigning architect to the ultrarich, the home was situated on 1.25 acres enclosed by walls and gates, with a breathtaking slate-patioed pool. There were seven bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, twelve fireplaces, a gourmet kitchen, a wine cellar, a theater and family rooms, a huge curving staircase, and a wood-paneled library that Michael adored the moment he saw it. He was also pleased that the house had formerly been the Los Angeles home of Sean Connery—Sir Sean Connery. Before being pulled off the market the property had been advertised at a price of $38 million. Quite a few people snickered, naturally, when Tohme Tohme said that Michael had moved into the Carolwood chateau, which was being rented for $100,000 per month, “to save money.” But that was less than it cost to live full-time at the Hotel Bel-Air. Anyway, AEG was paying the bill, though Michael tended to forget that the cost was being subtracted from his future earnings. The chateau was actually a rather modest spread for this particular neighborhood, which encompassed Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion and the monstrous 57,000-square-foot, 123-room palace that TV producer Aaron Spelling had built after tearing down Bing Crosby’s lovely old house on South Mapleton Drive.
What most who knew him wondered was whether Michael’s move into the Holmby Hills mansion was a break from the past or a return to it. Much of his personal history was nearby. Gregory Peck’s place and Berry Gordy’s mansion were over the hill on the other side of Beverly Glen Drive. The house in which Jackson’s former wife Lisa Marie Presley had grown up could be found just around the corner on Monovale Drive. The Hayvenhurst compound, where Michael had lived even longer than at Neverland, was a ten-minute drive from Carolwood when traffic was light. And the Guez chateau was much closer than that to the intersection in Beverly Hills where the Jeep Michael was driving one day in May 1992 had broken down, at Wilshire and Lindley, a location that for Jackson was loaded with more bad memories and dark juju than just about any other spot on the planet. It was the point, really, at which he had come to the beginning of his end.
An arresting sight it must have been on that sunny afternoon when thirty-three-year-old Michael Jackson, wearing a black turban fitted with a veil and large black sunglasses, stood in the right lane of Wilshire Boulevard, kicking the tires of his stalled Jeep. It must have sounded pretty strange to Mel Green, who took a phone call from his wife telling him whom she had just seen stranded in traffic. Sensing a moment of opportunity, Green sped to the rescue, then phoned Dave Schwartz, his boss at Rent-A-Wreck, a used-cars-for-hire agency situated about a mile away in West Los Angeles. He would be arriving within minutes, in the company of a very special guest, Green told Schwartz. “You sure it’s not some impersonator?” the boss asked. Green seemed pretty certain, so Schwartz phoned his wife June and told her to get over to the shop and to bring their six-year daughter Lily and June’s twelve-year-old son from a previous marriage, Jordan Chandler.
Jordie was a beautiful kid (a fact that would be employed against Jackson later) with caramel-colored skin, dark eyes, perfect white teeth, and flawless features. June Chandler Schwartz, born June Wong, was herself an exotic Eurasian with a hint of African blood, full lips, and lustrous black hair. At Rent-A-Wreck, she told Michael that Jordie was a big fan of his, had in fact sent him a drawing in 1984 after his hair caught fire filming that Pepsi commercial, then handed Michael a business card on which she’d written the family’s home phone number.
In the weeks that followed, Michael began calling Jordie, as he had called many other boys over the years, and the two became phone friends. According to June, Jackson invited her son to visit him at his condo in Westwood—“the Hideout”—but she was unable to take him. Michael left on a three-month promotional tour a short time later (accompanied by two other boys, an eleven-year-old Australian named Brett Barnes and nine-year-old Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis of Bavaria) but still found time to call Jordan Chandler on a regular basis. According to Jordie, Michael described the wonders of Neverland, “a place where boys have rights,” and promised to have him there soon as a guest. The pledge was kept when Michael returned from his tour; Jordie, June, and half-sister Lily visited Neverland a number of times in late 1992 and early 1993. On the family’s first visit, Jordie and Lily were treated to an after-hours shopping spree at Toys “R” Us in which the kids piled more than $10,000 worth of merchandise into their shopping carts. The next evening, Jordie would say, he and Michael took a ride together on the Neverland Ferris wheel, which stopped when their gondola was at the apex of its revolution.
“Do you know how much time I spend up here alone?” Michael asked the boy, sweeping his arms across the sea of lights beneath them. “I have all this, yet I have nothing.”
“You have us now,” Jordie replied, and slipped his arm around Michael’s shoulder.
“My new little family,” Michael said, and smiled, according to the boy’s account.
Michael invited Jordie, June, and Lily back to Neverland the next weekend, and arrived personally at their front door in a limousine on Friday afternoon to take them to the ranch from Los Angeles. When he climbed into the limo, Jordie would say, he found Brett Barnes already inside, sitting on Michael’s lap. Michael spoke mostly to Brett during the ride, according to Jordie and his mother, and when they arrived at Neverland instructed his staff to take the Australian boy’s things to his own bedroom. Jordie, like his mother and half-sister, slept in a guest room. When Michael invited the family to join him on a trip to Las Vegas, though, that all changed, according to both Jordie and his mother. He and Michael watched The Exorcist together, Jordie said, and he was so frightened that he sought comfort in Michael’s bed that night. “There was no physical contact” on that occasion, according to Jordie’s sworn statement, but his mom was upset when she saw that the boy’s own bed hadn’t been slept in, questioned him about it, then warned her son, “Never do that again.”
Jordie told Michael what his mother had said and, according to June, Jackson came to her wearing an injured expression. “How could you think I would hurt Jordie?” he asked. During the conversation that followed, June claimed later, Michael explained his theory that children were sexually innocent and remained that way until they were “conditioned” by adults to develop prurient thoughts. What he wanted for Jordie, Michael said, was that the boy remain “pure,” free of the contamination with which adult society would try to ruin him. The very next day, Michael presented June with a $12,000 ruby-and-diamond bracelet from Cartier. “It’s nothing,” Michael told her, according to June. “I just love you.”
After that, Jordie and Michael slept in the same bed every night they spent together. Michael was as innocent as a young child himself, June told her husband and friends: “I really don’t think he has a devious bone in his body.” Her ex-husband, Jordie’s father Evan Chandler, expressed doubts, but seemed to have been swiftly won over by Michael’s sweet personality and extraordinary generosity.
Evan, though, was a man of complex motives. He had been born in the Bronx in 1944 as Evan Robert Charmatz, and dutifully but unhappily followed his father and brothers into the field of dentistry, opening a practice in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1973. Within the next few years he changed his last name to Chandler (he thought Charmatz “too Jewish-sounding”), married June Wong, whom he regularly introduced as “an ex-model,” and moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to establish a career as a screenwriter.
Chandler supported his family in the meantime by working at the Crenshaw Family Dental Center, a clinic catering to low-income patients on the edge of South Central Los Angeles. He got into trouble with the California Board of Dental Examiners in December 1978 for performing restoration work on sixteen of a single patient’s teeth during one visit. An investigation of the work resulted in a judgment by the board that Chandler was guilty of “gross ignorance and/or inefficiency,” and a ruling that his license be revoked. After an appeal, the revocation was reduced to a ninety-day suspension, plus thirty months of probation.
Chandler dealt with his suspension by moving back to New York to write a screenplay but was unable to sell it. By 1980, the year Jordie was born, the family had returned to Los Angeles, where Evan worked at a series of dentistry jobs and complained that each one made him more miserable than the last. Over the next few years, his marriage deteriorated, in large part, June claimed, because Evan couldn’t control his violent temper. After their divorce in 1985, June Chandler was awarded full custody of their son and $500 per month in child support.
By 1990, both Jordie’s mother and father had remarried, June to Dave Schwartz, Lily’s father, and Evan to a corporate attorney named Nathalie who bore him two sons. Evan had a successful dentistry practice in Beverly Hills by then, but in 1991 found himself once again in trouble due to claims of carelessness or incompetence. A model he was contracted to do restoration work for had suffered severe damage to her teeth and sued him for negligence. Chandler claimed the woman had signed a consent form accepting the risks involved in the procedures he’d undertaken, but he was unable to produce it when subpoenaed, telling the court that the document had been stolen from the trunk of his Jaguar. Eventually the suit was settled out of court.
In 1993, right around the time his son Jordie met Michael Jackson, Evan finally found some success in Hollywood when one of his scripts was rewritten by Mel Brooks and turned into the film Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A lucrative career as a screenwriter did not result, however, and Evan soon fell behind on his child support payments; eventually his debt to June approached $70,000, with interest. June would claim that her ex-husband had been largely an absentee father to Jordie, rarely spending time with his son until Michael Jackson appeared. Evan’s brother Raymond disagreed. Evan tried to be a good dad, Ray insisted, and before Michael Jackson came into their lives, “Everybody liked everybody and the kids all played together, even though there were divorces.”
There are conflicting accounts of what took place after Evan and Michael got to know each other. Michael’s story—or at least the story his representatives put together for him—was told most authoritatively in an article for GQ magazine written by journalist Mary A. Fischer in close collaboration with Anthony Pellicano, the private investigator who was working for Jackson attorney Bert Fields and handling most of the early contacts with the Chandler family. Evan’s brother Raymond (who would also change his name from Charmatz to Chandler) called Fischer “a dupe” and Pellicano “a thug,” claiming that the two had combined to terribly “distort the picture” of Evan’s behavior and Michael’s as well. In police interviews and court testimony, June Wong Chandler Schwartz told yet another version of the story, one that disagreed in numerous ways with both Evan Chandler’s account and Michael Jackson’s. What Jordie Chandler himself said happened would eventually be laid out in interviews with psychiatrists and police officers.
Not in dispute is that early in the relationship between Michael and Jordie, Evan began to invite the two to spend time together at his home in Brentwood. “They hung out together, they talked about movies, about writing screenplays together, about writing songs together,” said Ray Chandler. “Evan readily admitted that he fell under Michael’s spell. He thought Michael was a highly intelligent, well-read, well-rounded guy. He liked Michael and he was excited about Michael and he really believed that he and Michael were going to do great work together and be friends forever.” The Fischer/Pellicano account was that Evan pitched story ideas to Michael and suggested that Michael could pay him by building an addition onto the house, one that would create enough space to give them all more privacy. When zoning restrictions prevented that, according to Fischer and Pellicano, Evan proposed that Jackson simply build him a newer, larger home. Michael, Pellicano told Fischer, shrugged off that idea. Ray Chandler, though, said it was Michael who proposed to either build a new wing on the house, or to build a new house entirely, so that they could all live together.
What’s known for certain is that in June 1993, Michael flew Jordie and June to Monaco with him to attend the World Music Awards. Photographs of the lovely woman and the beautiful boy seated with Jackson at the ceremony were published worldwide amid much speculation that June might be Michael’s new girlfriend and Jordie his future stepson. “Michael’s New Adopted Family” read the headline in the National Enquirer. “Evan began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out,” June’s former attorney Michael Freeman would tell Fischer.
Evan invited Michael to spend five days at his house and allowed him to sleep in the same room with Jordie and his five-year-old half-brother Nikki. It was during this stay, Evan would say later, that he began to develop suspicions about Jackson’s possible sexual misconduct. He never saw either Jordie or Michael without their clothes on, Chandler would admit, but he walked into the room one day and saw the two spooning on the bed with Michael’s hand near Jordie’s crotch. Evan called to tell his brother what he had seen, and in the same conversation told Ray that June intended to take Jordie with her on Michael’s Dangerous tour.
By the end of June 1993, Evan Chandler was increasingly vocal and volatile about his “concerns.” According to Evan, he finally confronted Michael, saying, “You and Jordie are having sex, aren’t you? Just be a man and fucking admit it.” Evan admitted that he was impressed by how well Michael maintained his composure, calmly replying, “That’s preposterous. It never happened.” Michael immediately cut off all contact with the man.
By early July, Evan was making it clear that he intended to challenge June’s custody of Jordie. He discussed “the situation” in a phone call to Dave Schwartz that his ex-wife’s new husband tape-recorded. The only publicly available transcript of that conversation is the one Anthony Pellicano provided to Mary A. Fischer, and it casts Evan Chandler in a very dim light.
The Pellicano/Fischer transcript had Jordie’s father beginning the conversation with seemingly sincere expressions of concern for his son and of fury at both Jackson and June, whom he described (to her current husband) as “cold and heartless.” He had tried to talk to June about his worries, Evan complained, but she replied by telling him, “Go fuck yourself.” Chandler’s tone changed, though, becoming almost whiny, as he shifted the conversation to his estrangement from Michael Jackson. “I had a good communication with Michael,” Chandler told Schwartz. “We were friends. I liked him and I respected him and everything else, for what he is. There was no reason why he had to stop calling me. I sat in the room one day and talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship.”
He had “been rehearsed” about what to say and not to say when he spoke to Jackson, Chandler told Schwartz, which was why he never mentioned the subject of money. Schwartz asked what Michael had done that so upset him. “He broke up the family,” Chandler replied. “Jordie has been seduced by this guy’s power and money.” Each of the men confessed their failure to properly father Jordie, then suddenly Chandler confided that he was preparing to take action against Jackson. “It’s already set,” he said. “There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I’ve paid them to do it. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it.”
Ray Chandler said that Pellicano, through Fischer, had selectively sampled the tape recording of the conversation to falsely create the impression that Evan was talking about a “win” that would put some enormous sum in his pocket. Anyone who listened closely to the entire tape, Ray said, would recognize that Evan was talking about getting custody of his son, not money from Michael Jackson.
What most made people doubt Ray Chandler’s explanation was that the “guy” who had “rehearsed” Evan was Barry K. Rothman, a Century City attorney whom his client described to Dave Schwartz as “the nastiest son of a bitch I could find.”
Many people in Los Angeles would have said that description was too generous. Rothman had once been a music lawyer of some note who negotiated contracts for the Rolling Stones, Little Richard, and the Who. Gold and platinum records decorated his office walls. He had a general practice these days and, Rothman’s ex-wife once told her own attorney that Rothman made so many enemies over the years that she was amazed somebody hadn’t killed him by now. Rothman was canny, though, and had layered his life with protections against the long line of people who despised him and the even longer line of people who claimed he owed them money. Many of the latter were former employees. Rothman had lots of those, because he went through office workers at an astounding rate, notorious both for verbally abusing the women he hired and for failing to pay their salaries. He’d taken to hiring temps as receptionists who usually lasted a couple of weeks before he ran them out of the office, cursing them as idiots as they fled from his presence in tears. The woman who was working as his legal secretary that summer, Geraldine Hughes, would characterize him as “a real life demon straight out of the pits of hell.”
An investigator involved in one of the many lawsuits filed against Rothman called him “a professional deadbeat.” When he fell behind on alimony and child support payments to his ex-wife, she threatened to attach his assets. When her attorney tried to put a lien on Rothman’s home in Sherman Oaks after a year of nonpayment, it was discovered that the deed had been transferred to a Panamanian shell corporation called Tinoa Operations. He’d had $200,000 of Tinoa’s cash robbed from a safe in his house, Rothman would claim, and had to make good on the loss by signing over the deed on his home. Only when the most prized of his possessions, a Rolls-Royce Corniche (with the license plate “BKR 1”), was towed away did Rothman pay his ex-wife what he owed her.
Documents from other cases filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court demonstrated that Rothman was operating behind a complex network of foreign bank accounts and shell companies (Tinoa Operations among them), several with the same address as a Chinese restaurant on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Twenty lawsuits, multiple complaints to the state Labor Commission, and at least three disciplinary actions by the State Bar of California had been initiated against Rothman, but he managed time after time to avoid serious consequences. A year before Evan Chandler came to him, Rothman had been suspended for a year by the bar association for blatantly ignoring conflict-of-interest rules in a case involving a woman he had been representing in child support and custody proceedings. Rothman managed to have the suspension reduced to probation, then promptly had his law firm file for bankruptcy. When creditors demanded to know how a man who drove a Rolls-Royce could claim no assets, Rothman produced papers showing that the title to the car had been transferred to a subsidiary of Tinoa Operations.
So, as Pellicano explained to Fischer, Evan Chandler recognized Rothman at once as the perfect partner in his scheme to take down Michael Jackson. The truth, Ray Chandler countered, was that Rothman had been one of Evan’s dental patients, and had offered to help him out—for free—when he expressed concern about June’s plan to take Jordie on a world tour with Michael Jackson.
What Evan said about Rothman during his tape-recorded conversation with Dave Schwartz , though, was, “All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can. He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s very smart, and he’s hungry for the publicity.” Chandler spoke as if he hadn’t yet decided to unleash Rothman, but was leaning in that direction: “If I go through with this, I win big time. There’s no way I lose. I’ve checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of Jordie] and Michael’s career will be over.”
“Does that help Jordie?” Schwartz asked.
“That’s irrelevant to me,” Chandler replied. “It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want.”
Tensions between Chandler and his ex-wife came to a head at a middle school graduation ceremony where June dismissed Evan’s allegations against Jackson, then informed him that she still intended to take Jordie out of school in the fall so that the two of them could join Michael on his Dangerous tour. “Michael was very good at sizing people up,” a member of the Chandler family would observe later. “He looked for a family where some level of disconnect between the parents created a vulnerability that he could exploit. In this case, he saw that June was not in a marriage that she enjoyed. Dave held the purse strings. She wanted independence from that. She was not a woman who wanted to get up in the morning and go to work. A life of luxury and travel was what she dreamed of, and Michael offered her that.”
When Evan began to spew threats, June told Michael, who then went to Bert Fields for help. Fields, who had completed the negotiations of Jackson’s epic Sony contract that were begun by John Branca, brought in Pellicano, who listened to the tape of the conversation between Evan Chandler and Dave Schwartz and “knew it was about extortion,” as he told Fischer. That same day, Pellicano went to the Hideout in Westwood, where Jordie and Lily were visiting. He asked the boy a series of “pointed questions,” Pellicano would say, that included “Has Michael ever touched you?” and “Have you ever seen Michael naked in bed?” Jordie looked him in the eye and answered no to each such query, according to Pellicano.
Two days later, though, on July 11, Chandler moved forward with his “plan” by persuading June that Jordie needed some major dental work, then convincing her to let him have his son for an afternoon to get it done. The next day, according to Pellicano, Evan Chandler refused to return Jordie to his mother unless she put her signature on a document prepared by Rothman promising that she would not take Jordie out of Los Angeles County. Evan kept Jordie with him even after June signed the document, though, and on July 14, Rothman placed a phone call to a Beverly Hills psychiatrist named Mathis Abrams and presented what he called “a hypothetical situation” involving a thirteen-year-old boy and an adult celebrity. The next day, Dr. Abrams sent Rothman a two-page letter stating that “reasonable suspicion would exist that sexual abuse may have occurred” and that if this were not a hypothetical situation he would be compelled to report the matter to the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services. On July 27, Rothman instructed Geraldine Hughes to type up a set of instructions for Evan Chandler explaining how to report child abuse to the authorities without exposing himself to liability.
A deeply religious young black woman who happened to be a Michael Jackson fan, Hughes was at once alarmed and suspicious about the “the incredible level of secrecy” her employer was imposing on his contacts with Evan Chandler and began to keep a written record of what she saw and heard. Chandler phoned the office as many as five times a day, Hughes observed, and each time Rothman retreated to his “Fort Knox of an office” to make sure that no one could listen in on the conversation. Even meetings with his associate attorneys were suspended so that Rothman could take calls from Chandler in private. It seemed “odd” to her, Hughes noted, that afterward there were never any memos to file. When Chandler came into the office, Hughes said, he always met with Rothman behind locked doors and no notes were made of their conversations. Curiosity overcame her one afternoon when Chandler showed up late at the office in an emotional state and was immediately pulled by Rothman into the conference room. She stepped to the door of the conference room to try to hear what was being said, Hughes would admit, but the two men inside kept their voices low except for a single loud outburst by Rothman in which he shouted, “We have to stick to the plan . . . we cannot deviate from the plan!”
Rothman did not accompany Chandler when Evan showed up with Jordie for a meeting with Jackson and Pellicano at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. According to Pellicano, Evan Chandler first gave Michael a hug, then pulled the letter from Dr. Abrams out of his pocket and began to read it aloud. At the point where his father began to quote the references to child molestation, Pellicano said, Jordie hung his head, then looked up at Michael with an expression of surprise. The meeting ended with Evan pointing his finger at Michael and telling him, “I’m going to ruin you.” Pellicano came to Rothman’s office that evening for a second meeting, at which (according to the private investigator) the attorney presented his client’s demand for $20 million. Pellicano said that after he walked out in disgust, the demand was reduced to a payment of $5 million for four screenplay deals. According to Ray Chandler, the idea that Michael Jackson should pay off with a screenplay deal was Pellicano’s, not Evan’s, and his brother had been so incensed by the suggestion that he nearly came to blows with the private investigator.
By Pellicano’s account, he returned to Rothman’s office on August 13, to make an offer—$350,000 for a single screenplay deal if this whole thing went away. Rothman answered that it was three screenplays or nothing, according to Pellicano, who claimed he had phoned back later to say one screenplay deal for $350,000, take it or leave it. Geraldine Hughes recalled that Chandler’s disappointment was apparent. “I almost had a $20 million deal,” the secretary heard him tell Rothman.
Sometime between the August 13 meeting and a custody hearing scheduled for August 17 (at which the judge would almost certainly order Jordie returned to his mother), Evan Chandler took his son to see Mark Torbiner, the dental anesthesiologist who had introduced him to Barry Rothman in 1991. In Chandler’s presence, Torbiner administered a dose of the so-called “truth serum” sodium Amytal to the boy, who, under questioning by his father, said Michael had touched his penis. At that point, it may not have mattered that most psychiatrists would agree that sodium Amytal is no truth serum (studies going back to 1952 show that it can be used to implant false memories), because all Dr. Mathis Abrams had to hear was that Jordie had made an accusation. Abrams heard that and plenty more from the boy in a three-hour session the next day, including descriptions of masturbation, kissing, nipple tweaking, and oral sex. As required by law, the psychiatrist immediately reported the accusations to a social worker at the Department of Children’s Services, who then phoned the police. Learning that a criminal investigation had been initiated, the judge hearing the custody case between Evan and June delayed his ruling. Though she didn’t yet know it, June had lost her son.
Five days after Abrams phoned the social worker and the social worker phoned the police, a freelance reporter in Burbank was tipped off that warrants had been issued allowing officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit and deputies from the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office to enter both Neverland Ranch and the condo in Westwood to search for evidence that would support child sex abuse charges against Michael Jackson. The freelancer sold the story to the local NBC affiliate, which broke the news at four the next afternoon and set off a global media frenzy. Most papers redacted the boy’s name but they all printed Michael’s.
The pressure of it all—perhaps supplemented by simple greed—persuaded June and her husband Dave to change stories and switch sides. On August 18, when LAPD officers first interviewed her, June said she did not believe Michael had done anything inappropriate with her son. She began to waver, though, a few days later, when two LAPD officers told her that Michael Jackson was a perfect fit for “the classic profile of a pedophile.” By September the Schwartzes were running scared, fearful that Evan Chandler and Barry Rothman would try to take custody of Jordie by claiming that June had been a neglectful parent. In October, the couple threw in with Evan Chandler and his impending lawsuit. June’s attorney, Michael Freeman, told Mary Fischer that he resigned immediately in disgust. “The whole thing was such a mess,” he would explain. “I felt uncomfortable with Evan. He isn’t a genuine person, and I sensed he wasn’t playing things straight.”
On the advice of Bert Fields, supported by the strong opinion of Anthony Pellicano, Michael Jackson agreed in late August to the filing of extortion charges against Chandler and Rothman. Both men promptly hired high-priced criminal defense attorneys (Rothman’s was future O. J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro) and began to sweat their exposure. According to Geraldine Hughes, Evan Chandler and his son spent one night sleeping in the conference room at Rothman’s law firm to hide from the media and the next day she heard Chandler shout at the attorney, “It’s my ass that’s on the line and in danger of going to prison.” Evan Chandler became completely paranoid after being punched in the face by a man (apparently a Jackson fan) who ambushed him outside his dental office. Chandler occasionally brought his son to the office with him, Hughes would recall, and “I understood why Michael Jackson was fond of the boy. He was very fun-loving, warm-spirited, and cute.” Jordie was much more relaxed than Evan, Hughes noted, and actually “was the one who kept calming and consoling his father, who was a nervous wreck. It appeared as if the boy was protecting his father instead of vice versa.”
Although the extortion charges were never seriously investigated (police in Los Angeles had already committed themselves to proving Jackson guilty), they did force Rothman to resign as Chandler’s attorney. Gloria Allred was briefly retained and did what she does best—hold a news conference. “I’m ready and willing to go forward with the trial,” she told the media, but then withdrew from the case without explanation just a couple of days later. Soon after, Larry Feldman agreed to become the Chandlers’ attorney.
Feldman was, arguably, the most successful civil attorney in Southern California, a former head of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association who was said to have won more multimillion-dollar cases than any lawyer in the county. Since graduating number one in his class from Loyola Law School in the late sixties, he’d risen to senior partner in a firm that employed more than six hundred attorneys in offices spread out from New York to Shanghai. The man was a stone-cold killer in the courtroom and perhaps the worst person in LA to have against you. On September 14, 1993, Feldman filed a $30 million lawsuit against Michael Jackson that accused the star of “1.) sexual battery; 2.) battery; 3.) seduction; 4.) willful misconduct; 5.) intentional infliction of emotional distress; 6.) fraud; and 7.) negligence.”
Recognizing what he was up against and expecting criminal charges to be filed against Jackson any day, Bert Fields (who was primarily an entertainment lawyer) brought in his own high-profile trial attorney, Howard Weitzman, best known for helping auto magnate John DeLorean beat a federal case back in the early eighties that had at one point looked ironclad. Almost from the moment Weitzman became involved in the Jackson case, though, according to Fields and Pellicano, he began to push for a settlement. They resisted furiously, said Fields and Pellicano, convinced that the case against Michael was weak, even with Larry Feldman as the attorney prosecuting it.
Jackson was at that point in no position to make any good decisions. He had been in the midst of the Asian leg of the Dangerous tour when the Chandler allegations surfaced, already suffering from a variety of minor injuries incurred during his punishing schedule, and almost completely unable to sleep. Within days of learning what Jordie had reportedly said about him, Michael began mixing painkillers, antianxiety medications, and sleeping pills in combinations and doses that swiftly became a serious threat to his health. Jackson was unable to provide the deposition Feldman was demanding, according to one of Bert Fields’s associates, because he was glassy-eyed, slurring his speech, could hardly stay awake, had difficulty even lifting a glass of water, and was unable to maintain focus for more than a few seconds at a time.
On November 12, 1993, Michael arrived in London in the company of Elizabeth Taylor to be examined by Dr. Beauchamp Colclough, who promptly arranged for Jackson’s admission to an eight-week drug rehabilitation program. Eighteen vials of medications were found in Michael’s suitcase when he checked into a clinic where he had booked the entire fourth floor. Doctors put him on a Valium IV to wean him off the painkillers and his management company canceled the remainder of the Dangerous tour, at a cost to Jackson of at least $10 million.
Feldman responded by filing a motion for trial preference that would force the case into court within 120 days, a request typically granted when a plaintiff is under the age of fourteen. He also filed to compel the deposition of Michael Jackson. The court granted both of Feldman’s motions on November 23, and set a trial date in March 1994. During the hearing, Bert Fields, in an attempt to delay the civil suit, argued before a courtroom filled with reporters that a criminal indictment of Jackson seemed imminent, and that, of course, the criminal case should be tried before the civil one was heard. Howard Weitzman immediately told the media that Fields “misspoke himself,” and the simmering tensions between the two boiled over. The next day, Fields and Pellicano resigned from the case.
Amid the chaos and mounting pressure, Weitzman recruited Johnnie Cochran to the defense team. Cochran and Weitzman agreed that the judge’s 120-day trial ruling had been a “devastating” blow to the Jackson side, according to Carl Douglas, the top associate in Cochran’s law office. “It pushed us to settle,” Douglas recalled. An additional benefit of the 120- day ruling, according to Feldman, was that he had been able to use it to persuade the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to “let us take the lead in prosecuting the case. That put the defense in the position of having to defend the civil case knowing that a criminal case was behind it.”
Feldman also vigorously opposed the defense request for a gag order, ensuring that the media would have full access to each of his highly detailed court filings. The defense lawyers felt increasingly harried by a tabloid media that continued to report only what made Jackson look guilty. “The British press was relentless,” Douglas remembered. A woman who had been working as Jackson’s maid at Neverland was quoted as saying that she had been sent to Michael’s bedroom at Neverland with several others to gather up all his makeup, eyeliner, lipstick, creams, and gels, then crate them up, along with stacks of magazines and photographs, including one of Macaulay Culkin in his underwear. “My job was to hide all the bottles of women’s perfumes,” she explained. “Michael used only female fragrances, not male, and I guess someone thought that might look bad.”
After Pellicano acknowledged in an interview that Jackson had spent at least thirty nights sleeping (innocently, the PI said) in Jordie’s tiny bedroom at the Chandler house, a document was leaked to the media in which police investigators reported that Jordan had told them that Michael engaged in oral sex and mutual masturbation with him in both of his parents’ homes, at the Hideout, in Monaco, and at Disneyland Paris. Evan Chandler portrayed himself as a father desperate to protect his son, who was being victimized by Jackson’s defenders: His life had been threatened, a dead rat had been left in his mailbox, and his office had been ransacked, Chandler said. A statement from Jordie taken by a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy was published that included: “Jordan stated that Jackson told him that if Jordan ever told anyone about the molests, Jordan would be placed in juvenile hall and both Jordan and Jackson would be in trouble. Jordan said that Jackson told him he did this with other boys; however, Jackson said that ‘he didn’t go as far with them.’” “Peter Pan or Pervert?” read a headline in the New York Post.
As 1993 drew to a close, Weitzman and Cochran huddled with John Branca, who had been replaced by Bert Fields three years earlier but had been brought back aboard as Jackson’s general counsel. All three men maintained that they believed Michael was innocent of the charges against him yet were inclined to advise him to settle the case. Branca worried that Michael might not be capable of withstanding a trial that could last six months. Cochran’s concern was the racial divide that had opened wide in the wake of the Rodney King debacle and the Los Angeles riots in April 1992. Ethnic animosities might work against Michael if the case was tried in largely white Santa Barbara County, Cochran fretted, and even if the trial was held in Los Angeles County, Hispanics might resent Jackson for his money and blacks might dislike him for trying to be white. The kicker was that a settlement could forestall the criminal case if it prevented Jordan Chandler from testifying against Michael. “We wanted to do all we could to avoid the possibility that there would be a criminal filing,” Carl Douglas admitted.
Cochran’s long relationship with Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti (during the early 1980s the two had worked together on the district attorney team that investigated shootings involving police officers) enabled him to secure a promise that Jackson could return from London to Neverland without fear of arrest. As he emerged from the cocoon of rehab and began to make his way back to California during early December 1993, Michael was stunned by the immense media coverage the accusations against him were receiving. In the UK, the Daily Mirror set up a “Spot the Jacko” contest in which readers could win a trip to Disney World if they correctly predicted where Jackson would show up next, while another paper reported that the entertainer was at a European clinic receiving a course of cosmetic surgeries that would render him unrecognizable. In the United States, Geraldo Rivera convened a mock trial with a jury composed of audience members to consider criminal charges against Jackson that hadn’t even been filed. Michael’s own sister La Toya offered to provide proof that he was a pedophile for a fee of $500,000 and a bidding war erupted among tabloids in both the United States and the UK before editors on both sides of the Atlantic realized that La Toya had nothing to sell.
The final blow that broke his will to fight was the warrant served on Jackson shortly after his return to the United States that permitted police to conduct a strip search of his body, giving officers from both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties the right to photograph and videotape “his penis, anus, hips, buttocks and any other part of his body.” Failure to comply, the warrant stated, would be used in court as an implied admission of guilt. On December 20, 1993, at Neverland Ranch, Jackson was forced to stand naked on a raised platform for twenty-five minutes while his lower body was photographed from every conceivable angle, so that resulting prints could be compared to Jordie’s description of Michael’s genitalia. Michael nearly fainted several times and perhaps only got through “the most humiliating ordeal of my life” by keeping Arnold Klein in the room with him. In the end, the exercise proved to be a wash. While the several vitiligo splotches on Jackson’s buttocks and the one on his penis were an approximate match to what Jordie described, Michael was not, as the boy had said, circumcised.
Larry Feldman stepped up the pace of his court filings, submitting one motion after another that demanded depositions of the defendant. “Each time Michael Jackson used the Fifth Amendment, we took the opportunity to be very specific about what he was not answering,” Feldman remembered. “We described in detail why we were entitled to the photos of his genitalia. It almost didn’t matter whether we won or lost—we were getting even.”
Cochran, the lawyer Jackson most trusted, made the crucial decision to advise Michael that he should just pay these people and walk away. His insurance company wanted him to be done with this almost as much as he did, Cochran told Michael, and was prepared to write the check for their share of the cost. When Larry Feldman submitted a motion to the court in Los Angeles asking for the right to examine Jackson’s finances, Michael told his attorneys, “I want this over.”
Cochran and Feldman, who were quite familiar with one another (Feldman had represented Cochran as his attorney in a number of “personal matters”), arranged to conduct their settlement conference under the supervision of three retired LA County judges. Cochran and Weitzman regarded the photographs of Michael Jackson’s genitalia as “the purple gorilla sitting in the room,” recalled Carl Douglas, and were desperate to keep them out of Larry Feldman’s hands. Fully aware of this, Feldman negotiated ferociously. “The numbers being discussed seemed fantastic,” remembered Douglas, who believed that the turning point of the settlement conference came when one of the three retired judges observed that, “It’s not about how much this case is worth. It’s about how much it’s worth to Michael Jackson.”
On January 25, 1994, the day before Jackson’s scheduled deposition by Larry Feldman, Douglas was assigned to carry the settlement papers to the bungalow at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas where Michael was staying, and witness his signature on an agreement that would cost him more than $20 million, including a $15.3 million annuity for Jordan Chandler, $1.5 million apiece for Evan Chandler and June Chandler Schwartz, and more than $3 million in fees for Feldman and his law firm. The media was informed that same day.
Tom Mesereau would say that settling the Jordan Chandler case on such terms was “the worst decision Michael ever made.” Most of the media and the public took the news that Jackson had paid so many millions to the Chandler family as an implicit admission of guilt, even after he had made his emotional public statement of denial: “I am not guilty of these allegations. But if I am guilty of anything, it is of giving all that I have to help children all over the world. It is of loving children of all ages and races. It is of gaining sheer joy from seeing children with their innocent and smiling faces. It is of enjoying through them the childhood that I missed.” Within a matter of weeks, Pepsi had canceled its endorsement contract and all of Michael’s film projects fell through. The theme song he had recorded for the movie Addams Family Values was dropped from the soundtrack, the development of a line of his and hers fragrances bearing his name was abandoned, and plans for a Jackson-themed Captain EO attraction at Disneyland were scrapped.
Neither the Chandler case nor the Chandler story went away. Grand juries were convened by the district attorneys in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties during the spring of 1994 to hear evidence that Michael Jackson was a pedophile. Frustrated by the refusal of Jordan Chandler to appear before either grand jury, prosecutors dispatched police to find at least one other boy who would corroborate Jordie’s sworn statement. Jackson and his attorneys waited out proceedings that dragged on for months while nearly two hundred witnesses testified and stacks of evidence were presented, including the description of Jackson’s genitalia given by Jordie that was laid out next to the photographs of Michael’s lower body.
Grand juries are generally a formality in California; nearly all such deliberations end in indictments. Only prosecutors can present evidence, and they are required to demonstrate no more than a “reasonable likelihood” that a crime has been committed. Yet in the summer of 1994, both grand juries refused to indict Michael Jackson. “There was no real evidence,” a police officer involved in the investigation admitted to the Los Angeles Times.
Damaging allegations against Jackson continued to surface in the media (Hard Copy correspondent Diane Dimond was making something like a life’s work of that project) but Michael was buoyed by polls that showed the majority of the public didn’t believe the charges made against him by the Chandlers. He was determined to move on with his life and rehabilitate his image. Michael might have taken any number of different approaches to this task, ranging from going back into the studio to disappearing from public view. What he chose was to marry the daughter of the greatest pop icon of all time.
Lisa Marie Presley was nine years younger than Michael Jackson but already the mother of two children by her first husband, whom she had met when she joined the Church of Scientology. Lisa Marie had grown up as Elvis Presley’s pampered daughter in Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tennesee, until her parents divorced when she was three. She then moved back and forth between Tennessee and her mother Priscilla’s home in Beverly Hills, which became the girl’s full-time residence after Elvis died in 1977, when Lisa Marie was just ten.
Though she cut a demo in 1992, Lisa Marie had turned down the offer of a recording contract, put off by an executive at Sony who had told her she would “have to crawl before you walk,” and could not realistically expect the production or promotion support of an established star. It was not long after this that their mutual friend, the painter and sculptor Brett Livingstone Strong, suggested that Lisa get together with Michael Jackson to explore putting out a record on Michael’s new Nation Records label.
Lisa Marie was “taking courses” at Scientology’s headquarters (or “Flag Land Base” as members of the church call it) in Clearwater, Florida, during early 1993 when Strong phoned her to suggest that putting out a record produced by Michael Jackson would give her the launch she hoped for. Lisa was excited by the idea, Strong recalled, but Michael was dismissive: “She can’t sing.” Strong insisted she could. “Get her to send me a tape,” Michael told him. Lisa said she would bring Michael a tape in person, and arranged to play it for him at Strong’s home in Pacific Palisades.
She and Michael had actually met once before, in October 1974, when Lisa was six and Michael was sixteen, backstage at the Sahara Tahoe, where the Jacksons were performing one of the last concerts of a nearly year-long world tour. Neither remembered that brief encounter and believed they were saying hello for the first time when Lisa showed up at Strong’s house in January 1993 with her Scientologist husband, bass player Danny Keough, and a demo tape that persuaded Michael the young woman did, indeed, have some potential as a singer. He wasn’t so impressed that he wanted to take the time to work with Elvis’s daughter, though, at least not at that moment. Lisa, however, began calling Strong constantly, as the artist recalled it, to see if he could arrange another meeting with Michael. All Strong could get for Lisa Marie was a meeting with the head of Nation Records; Michael himself never showed.
Lisa eventually became resigned to the fact that nothing was going to happen at Michael’s company, said Strong, who persisted anyway in playing matchmaker—at least at the professional level. On February 1, 1993, the artist arrived at the huge birthday party Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla Presley, was throwing for her at the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park north of Los Angeles loaded with wrapped presents, among them an art book and a framed photograph of her introduction to Michael Jackson in Strong’s living room. Strong had written the inscription in the book, but allowed Lisa to believe it was Michael’s handwriting and that the book and the photograph were Michael’s gifts to her. Lisa again began to express interest in meeting with Michael, and her interest now seemed as much personal as professional. In March 1993 Strong suggested that Michael escort Lisa Marie to the Academy Awards ceremony, just as he had Madonna the year before. Michael refused, saying he was not about to date a married woman. By the late spring of 1993, when Lisa inquired about Michael it was with “the passion of a woman who fell in love,” according to Strong. “And Michael wasn’t interested at all.”
Sometime before late June of that year, though, when Michael would launch the European leg of his Dangerous tour, Michael himself arranged a face-to-face meeting between the two of them, Lisa Marie said. “He immediately went into this whole explanation of what he knew people thought of him, and what the truth was,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone in 2003. “He sat me down and said, ‘Listen, I’m not gay,’” Lisa Marie explained to Diane Sawyer that same year. “‘I know you think this, I know you think that,’ and he started cursing and started, you know, being a normal person. And I was like, ‘Wow!’” What most struck her, Lisa would say in another interview, was that Michael spoke in a normal masculine voice and used the word “fuck.”
She had no idea that her feelings for Michael were developing against the backdrop of the emerging Jordan Chander scandal. “I just want to say he’s not stupid, he didn’t get where he was because he’s stupid,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone almost ten years later. “It’s unfortunate that not a lot of people know who he really is. He doesn’t let anybody see it. And he has some idea about how he should represent himself in the public, which he thinks works for him, which is the sort of meek victim, meek-quiet thing that he does, which is not like he really is. So, he doesn’t let a lot of people see that. When he wanted to lock into you, or intrigue you, or capture you, or, you know, whatever he wants to do with you, he can do it. He is very capable of doing that.” She swooned at the thought that Michael was being real with her in a way he couldn’t be with other people, as Lisa Marie told it. “So I get caught up in that, I’m pulled in right away,” she would tell Sawyer. “Like, ‘Wow, you’re so misunderstood. Oh my God, you’re this guy.’ I fell into this whole, ‘You poor, sweet misunderstood thing.’”
Those feelings intensified when the lawsuit on Jordan Chandler’s behalf was filed in September 1993. “That whole shit hit the fan,” Lisa Marie would recall in her 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, “and he was quick to call me and tell me what his side of the story was, so it looked like an extortion situation. I believed him, because he was so convincing. I don’t know . . . I just believed everything he said, for some reason.” After that first conversation, Michael began to spend hours with Lisa Marie on the phone nearly every day, sharing his distress and seeking her advice. “I believed he didn’t do anything wrong, and that he was wrongly accused and, yes, I started falling for him,” she would tell Diane Sawyer in 1995. “I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it.” Maybe it had something to do with her father, Lisa Marie would acknowledge years later; she still wasn’t sure.
During the last months of 1993 and in early 1994, Michael was showering Lisa Marie with flowers and gifts, saying that without her and Liz Taylor, he might have killed himself to escape the horror of what was happening to him. Lisa Marie confided in her childhood friend Myrna Smith about the developing relationship, but Smith recoiled, finding the whole thing both suspicious and ridiculous. “I can only guess what his motives were,” Smith would tell author Suzanne Finstad, “and I could only tell you what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me he was.”
Michael settled the Chandler lawsuit in January 1994, but was still under investigation by two grand juries and remained the object of an unstinting media investigation. Whether the goal was to remake his image or to create something that resembled a normal life, or both, he began to tell the people around him he was longing for family and children. During one of their phone conversations in April 1994, according to Lisa Marie, Michael asked, “If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?” She answered “I would do it.”
On April 29, 1994, Lisa Marie announced her separation from Danny Keough. Barely more than two weeks later, on May 14, 1994, Michael and Lisa Marie exchanged marriage vows at a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic in May 1994 at which no family or friends were present. Priscilla Presley was indignant and publicly accused Michael of using her daughter to repair his public image: “It’s so obvious.”
There were others, though, who believed the relationship was genuine. Donald Trump purported to be one of them. Michael hadn’t been too convincing at the beginning, Trump admitted. Michael told him over dinner one evening that he had a new girlfriend, Trump recalled, and “I congratulated him and asked, ‘Who is it?’ He was very shy and looked down into his napkin, then put the napkin over his face and said, ‘Trump, Trump, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m so embarrassed.’” Later, Trump invited the couple for a stay at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The couple stayed in separate bedrooms, which also did not encourage anyone to believe that this couple was enjoying any sort of romance. One afternoon, though, he happened to see the two of them walking the grounds of the estate, Trump said, Lisa Marie wearing a form-fitting black silk dress and Michael in a sharply tailored black suit with a scarlet dress shirt and black tie. Suddenly Michael dropped to one knee and kissed Lisa Marie’s hand, Trump remembered. She pulled him to his feet and they kissed, staring into one another’s eyes. Then Michael pulled a small box from his vest pocket and when Lisa opened it she found a string of pearls. “For awhile, those two were really getting it on,” Trump would insist several years later.
Few others believed it. Among those who scoffed at the notion of a love affair was the man who had performed the couple’s marriage ceremony. “Michael looked like a little boy lost,” Judge Hugo Francisco Alvarez said a few weeks after the wedding. “He stared at the floor throughout the ceremony and when I pronounced him and Lisa Marie man and wife, he was reluctant to kiss her. There were no tears of happiness, no joy, no laughter. The ceremony had a somber tone. It was bizarre. I never heard him say he loved Lisa Marie.”
The president of the Elvis Presley Fan Club in California, Terry Marcos, responded to news of the marriage by blurting, “Oh God, no! Are you serious?” Michael Jackson was “not even a man as far as I’m concerned,” Marcos said.
Michael had tried repeatedly over the years to satisfy the fans who wanted him to have a real girlfriend, and the mother who wanted him to find a wife. Both Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal, whom Michael continued to describe as the loves of his life, acknowledged that he never made the slightest sexual advance toward them. Lisa Marie, though, was spreading a very different story. With her apparent encouragement, one of Lisa Marie’s friends, Monica Pastelle, told a reporter that his new wife had described Michael as “very hot” in bed, albeit a bit kinky, given to dressing up in women’s clothes and “role playing” during their sexual encounters. Lisa Marie appeared wearing only a towel around her waist in the video for his song “You Are Not Alone,” and kissed him with apparent passion onscreen. In one of the few statements she ever made to the media about their relationship during that time, Lisa Marie described it as “a married couple’s life . . . that was sexually active.”
Michael’s longtime PR chief Bob Jones, though, would call the marriage “nothing more than a publicity stunt. Michael had no desire for a woman,” Jones would say shortly after his firing ten years later. “Not the natural desires that heterosexual men have, anyway.” The odd thing was, though, that Lisa Marie seemed to sincerely care for Michael and to want the marriage to work, said Jones, who admired the young woman. “Lisa Marie was so down to earth,” he said, yet remained “a tremendous supporter and believer” in Michael, even when it was obvious to him and everyone else, Jones said, that the feelings didn’t run both ways.
Lisa Marie became hurt and angry when Michael began to disappear without warning, often for weeks at a time. She had no idea where he might be, his wife said, other than what she read in the press. As early as December 1994, London tabloids began reporting that Michael planned to file for divorce after complaining that his wife was “invading his space.” By that point, Lisa Marie was spending almost no time at Neverland and when Michael came to stay at her house in the San Fernando Valley’s Hidden Hills enclave, he always brought kids with him. “He would join them running around the house and creating havoc,” Jones recalled. “They were out of control and she couldn’t say a word.”
According to Jones, Lisa Marie was becoming increasingly annoyed by the efforts Michael made to convince her he was worth just as much as the Elvis Presley estate she had inherited and to either impress or threaten her with a relationship to Princess Diana that did not actually exist. And she was more and more offended by what her husband told the press. In a September 1994 interview with London’s Daily Mirror, Michael offered an entirely invented story about his marriage proposal, saying it had taken place when he and Lisa Marie were drinking wine in the living room at Neverland: “We had just finished watching All About Eve, starring Bette Davis. We both love that movie. I just walked over to her, reached into my pocket and pulled out this huge diamond ring. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked her. ‘You want?’ She screamed out, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’” The voices of those who said he was just using her began to penetrate Lisa Marie’s defenses. She became truly angry, and a little disgusted, when she read Michael’s interview with TV Guide and saw that he had said, “Lisa Marie told me Elvis had a nose job.” It was “absolute bullshit,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone: “I think it justified something in his mind—they were asking him about his plastic surgery. I read that, and I threw it across the kitchen. ‘I told you what?’”
Friends would say that the marriage began to truly sour shortly after Lisa Marie and Michael were interviewed by Diane Sawyer in June 1995. Lisa Marie watched the ABC interview afterward and was shocked and hurt by the moment when Michael had reached behind her to hold two fingers over the crown of her head, making devil horns. A month after the Sawyer interview aired, Lisa Marie left with her ex-husband Danny Keough and their children for a two-week vacation at Hawaii’s Mauna Lani Bay resort, and tabloid reports described them as acting like a young couple in love, kissing and cuddling on the beach. A young waitress at one of the resort’s restaurants told a reporter, “If they’re divorced, then maybe all couples should split! They were just totally in love.” Lisa Marie would tell Oprah Winfrey years later that, “I was very torn up because I broke up my family. I left my husband for Michael. I was having a hard time trying to process that.”
By the end of their first year of marriage, Elvis’s daughter seemed to be tiring of the whole charade. Monica Pastelle, the same friend who had spread the story that Lisa Marie said Michael was “very hot” in bed was now telling people that Elvis’s daughter had become fed up with the hours and hours her husband spent in the bathroom applying and removing various cosmetics. She had never seen Michael when he wasn’t wearing makeup, Lisa Marie complained; if they slept in the same bed, she’d find his pillow smeared with it in the morning.
In August 1995, the Daily Mirror reported that Lisa Marie was about to file for divorce. Lisa Marie denied the story, but she and Michael were separated. The two of them hadn’t seen one another in nearly a month when Bob Jones and other Jackson representatives began calling her in September to say it was important that she show up at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in New York, where Michael was going to open the show with a twenty-minute long medley. She finally consented, Lisa Marie said, on the condition that she didn’t have to walk the red carpet with Michael. Michael’s people agreed, but when they delivered her to Radio City Music Hall on the evening of the event, she was dropped off right at the red carpet, where her estranged husband was waiting. “I was pissed. I just felt like I was being used at that point,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone. It got worse when Michael said he was going to sing to her, and that he had a surprise for her. “He says, ‘I’m gonna kiss you,’” Lisa Marie would recall in her interview with Playboy. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Do we have to? That’s bullshit.’ On the way there I kept saying, ‘Do we have to?’ I squeezed his hand so hard that I cut off the circulation. He wouldn’t tell me when it was going to happen.” It happened onstage, with a worldwide television audience watching. “And they said it wouldn’t last,” Michael said into the camera, then locked lips with Lisa Marie in one of the most awkward kisses ever caught on camera. “It looked awkward because I wanted out of my skin,” Lisa Marie would tell Playboy. Afterward, “I remember my whole look was, ‘Don’t you come anywhere fucking near me,’” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone, and Michael got the message. After his performance, “he didn’t come over,” Lisa Marie remembered. “I talked to him later and he said, ‘I saw the look on your face and I knew that if I walked up to you, I didn’t know what you were going to do to me.’”
Bob Jones would say he realized how little Lisa Marie truly mattered to Michael when the star collapsed onstage while rehearsing for an HBO special in December 1995 and was taken to the hospital. Michael was excited by the arrival of Diana Ross at the hospital (where his room was decorated with posters of Shirley Temple and Mickey Mouse) and welcomed his mother Katherine as well. But “Bill Bray had to talk him into letting his wife, Lisa Marie, visit,” the publicist remembered. “Bill had to explain to Michael that the media would crucify him if he turned his own wife away.” When she arrived at the hospital, Lisa Marie said, she was confused by the conflicting accounts of her husband’s condition. “Every day there was a different report,” she would explain to Oprah Winfrey. “I couldn’t tell what was happening. Dehydration, low blood pressure, exhaustion, a virus . . . we were all a little bit in the dark.” Eventually, “There was a bit of a showdown in the hospital,” Lisa Marie would tell Playboy. “When I started asking too many questions about what was wrong, he asked me to leave. This is the real story. He said, ‘You’re causing trouble.’ The doctors wanted me to go. I freaked out, because it was all too familiar. When he got out, I called him and said, ‘I want out.’”
Michael had insisted from the beginning of their marriage that he wanted Lisa Marie to bear his child. Increasingly inclined to suspect that having a baby who was Elvis’s grandson was part of Michael’s motivation, Lisa Marie dreaded what she imagined would be a “custody battle nightmare” in the not too distant future, and refused to abide by Michael’s plans for impregnating her. One morning over breakfast he told her that the nurse in Arnie Klein’s office, “my friend Debbie,” had offered to have his baby if Lisa Marie wouldn’t. “Tell her to go ahead and do it,” was Lisa Marie’s level reply. The two separated for good shortly thereafter, but when Lisa Marie learned that Debbie Rowe was being artificially inseminated she made a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation. “Lisa Marie Presley actually had a thing for Michael Jackson, and for a time she wanted him back,” Bob Jones would recall. “She not only would seek assistance from his family in trying to reunite with Michael, but Lisa Marie also often called me and Johnnie Cochran asking for help in her quest to get back her husband.” When it was announced in late 1996 that Debbie Rowe was pregnant, though, Lisa Marie’s “quest” ended.
Michael made slight pretense that he and Debbie were living “a married couple’s life.” He did, though, continue to either tease or try to please his fans with the illusion that he had healthy heterosexual appetites. Michael encouraged his fans to pass around the rumor that one of the boys who was often seen in his company during the late nineties, Omer Bhatti, was his “love child.” The evidence collected to support this story included the fact that the entire Bhatti family had lived at Neverland for a time, and that Omer (who had begun performing a Michael Jackson tribute act that toured worldwide when he was still a preteen) began to appear regularly in public and onstage with Michael after about 1996. The boy, fans posted among themselves, was the product of a one-night stand Michael had with Omer’s Norwegian mother, Pia. Look how dark the kid’s skin is, more than one believer suggested. What those fans overlooked was that Pia’s husband was a Pakistani named Riz Bhatti whose own complexion easily explained his son’s. The Bhattis were very close to Michael, though. Many believed, with good reason, that Pia Bhatti was the biological mother of Michael’s son Blanket. How the child had been conceived, and who the father might be, remained a matter of pure speculation. The only certainty was that the conception of Michael’s youngest child had not occurred, as he liked to put it, “in the natural way.”
Jackson repeated his determination to leave behind the Jordan Chandler scandal throughout the last years of the twentieth century. It would never happen. He might refuse to discuss the Chandler allegations following his interview with Diane Sawyer, but they would follow him everywhere he went, permanently tarnishing his image in the United States. After his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley ended, he left America more and more often, and was almost perpetually on the move. When he was in his home country, he spent at least as much time in New York, Florida, and Las Vegas as he did at Neverland Ranch, and a lot of time in Los Angeles. His HIStory tour set attendance records in Europe and Asia, but didn’t make a single stop in the mainland United States—American fans had to be content with two concerts in Hawaii. And yet, as he prepared to take a last stab at the recovery of all he had lost, Michael was not simply returning to the country of his birth, but to the very city where, fifteen years earlier, it had all been taken from him.