The Jackson family celebration of Judge Beckloff’s ruling placing custody of the children and control of the estate into the hands of their matriarch lasted less than seventy-two hours. On the morning of July 1, 2009, a certified copy of a document titled “Last Will of Michael Joseph Jackson” was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by two of the three executors named in the document, John Branca and John McClain, the latter a record company executive who had a long history with the Jackson clan. The signature on the will had been officially witnessed by McClain and Barry Siegel, the former Jackson accountant who was the third executor named in the document, as well as Trudy Green, who had been Michael’s manager at that time. A handwritten annotation stated that this had taken place in Los Angeles at 5 p.m. on July 7, 2002. According to Branca, who produced the document, Michael’s will had been sitting in the files of his law firm, Ziffren Brittenham, LLP, for the seven years since.
By the time the will and a related trust agreement arrived at the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Branca had already retained the services of two powerful and highly paid allies. One was Howard Weitzman, who during the years since he helped Johnnie Cochran persuade Michael Jackson to settle the Jordan Chandler case had become arguably the most influential attorney in Los Angeles. After establishing himself in the early 1980s as a top criminal defense lawyer, Weitzman had branched out into areas that included entertainment, intellectual property, family law, civil rights, antitrust, regulatory, and probate issues. He had represented every single one of the major movie studios and his long list of celebrity clients included the current governor of California. Weitzman was as well connected to the city’s political, financial, academic, media, and cultural power centers as anyone in LA, and as formidable a litigator as there was in the country.
Branca’s other top hire, Mike Sitrick, was less well known but even more feared. “The Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin” was how the Web site Gawker had recently described Sitrick, an ultra-expensive “crisis manager” whose career in media manipulation stretched from helping Exxon cope with the catastrophic Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound to advising the Roman Catholic archdiocese on how to defend itself against allegations that it had protected priests accused of sexually abusing children. In between, he had managed the assorted PR disasters of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, Michael Vick, and Rush Limbaugh. Sitrick’s skill at mounting counterattacks (or “smear campaigns” as people on the receiving end tended to call them) against those who criticized or accused his clients, however, was the main stuff of his legend. The man’s ability to produce a preemptive strike of news leaks, press releases, and blog posts that simultaneously destroyed an opponent’s reputation and shaped the public perception of a controversy before the local media so much as started to report the story had been dazzling and terrifying onlookers for two decades. People lived in terror of being placed on what Sitrick liked to call his “Wheel of Pain.” That Branca had put Weitzman and Sitrick on his payroll even before producing Jackson’s will was evidence of two things: one, Branca believed he was in for a public fight with the Jackson family; and two, he intended to win that fight.
The will itself was most striking to the national media for the way it addressed the subject of Debbie Rowe. The first two sentences of the document’s Article I read: “I am not married. My marriage to DEBORAH JEAN ROWE has been dissolved.” The last line of Article VI stated: “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my former wife, DEBORAH JEAN ROWE JACKSON.” Clearly, the intention was to ensure that Debbie didn’t get a dime—or custody of Michael’s kids. Katherine Jackson was emphatically designated as the children’s guardian, though if Katherine was unable to serve in that capacity Michael had named Diana Ross as the first alternate. Ross was reported to be in shock, telling friends she didn’t know any of the three children, hadn’t been in Michael’s life for years, and was well past the age where she wanted to take on the task of raising young children; she most definitely would not oppose Debbie Rowe’s bid for custody if it came to that.
How the money, property, copyrights, and trademarks would be divided was what most concerned the interested parties, and that was detailed in a separate document. According to the Michael Jackson Family Trust agreement that was submitted to the court by John Branca, 40 percent of Michael Jackson’s estate was to be held in the Michael Jackson Children’s Trust for Prince, Paris, and Blanket, then released to the three in steps as they reached the ages of thirty, thirty-five, and forty. Another 20 percent of the Family Trust would be assigned to various charities; the trust agreement seemed to permit Branca and McClain to choose which charities those were. The other 40 percent would be held by an entity called the Katherine Jackson Trust. Funds from that trust were to be used to support Mrs. Jackson, but there was no provision for Joe Jackson or for Michael’s siblings. The most notable thing about the trust agreement, though, was that it gave Branca (and McClain) “absolute discretion” to decide how the money from the Katherine Jackson Trust would be distributed. Knowing that the provision would send a shiver through the family, Branca arranged to meet with the Jacksons at Jermaine’s house on the day after the will was filed in court. Every member of the immediate family, other than Joe, had been in attendance, according to Branca, who insisted afterward that what he had to say was greeted with resounding approval. “They applauded three times when they were told who got the property,” he said.
Katherine Jackson remembered the meeting rather differently. According to her, the atmosphere had gone from quiet to glum. She personally was offended that John Branca never once said how sorry he was for her loss, nor expressed any sign that he mourned Michael’s passing. The man was cold, Mrs. Jackson thought, just as her son had described him. “My son had told me and the kids that he never wanted Branca to be any part of his business ever again,” Katherine Jackson said.
Branca himself professed to be astonished when Katherine Jackson’s attorneys filed a motion asking the court to give Michael’s mother control of her son’s wealth, based on “conflicts of interest” and “other factors” that compromised the ability of Branca and McClain to administer the estate. The deals with Sony and AEG were specifically referenced.
Katherine had already won a key concession from Judge Beckloff, who ruled that a provision in the will that would punish anyone who attempted to challenge the document with exclusion from the estate should not limit Mrs. Jackson’s ability to oppose the executors. Branca instructed Howard Weitzman to see if a deal could be reached that would avoid a hearing in open court. The prospects for that did not look good when Katherine Jackson’s attorneys responded by asking Judge Beckloff for the power to subpoena Branca and McClain in order to question them publicly about their involvements with AEG and Sony. Branca and his legal team countered by pressing the judge to move forward swiftly, alleging that this court battle was delaying an “urgent probe” into what had happened to millions of dollars in “missing” funds and properties that belonged to the Michael Jackson estate. Branca’s attorneys said they had reason to believe valuable items were already being offered for sale by members of the Jackson family. A rumor was circulating that these items included a computer hard drive filled with Michael Jackson songs, many of them duets recorded with big-name artists.
He would answer these requests, and more, Judge Beckloff told attorneys for both sides, at the hearing already scheduled for July 6, a court date that suddenly loomed as the decisive battle for control of the Michael Jackson estate.
By then it appeared obvious that the amount of money at stake would far exceed the $236.6 million estimate of Jackson’s net worth that Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio and Associates had made back in 2007. The chief of Platinum Rye, the world’s largest buyer of music and talent for corporations, would tell Forbes magazine that Jackson’s share of the Sony/ATV catalog alone was worth at least $750 million, considerably more than the accounting firm had valued it at back in 2007. Earnings of $80 million per year on Michael’s half of the catalog would be a reasonable expectation, Forbes reported. The burgeoning value of Michael’s music and image, though, were what lifted the potential size of his estate well above the billion-dollar mark. Demand for his records in the United States would remain strong week after week, making Michael Jackson the best-selling musical artist in the country for 2009, with 8.2 million albums sold. Sony sold 21 million copies of Michael’s albums worldwide in the first eight weeks after his death, and nearly this many again in the eight months after that. Thriller, which had remained the best-selling album ever internationally (with more than 100 million copies sold), was closing the gap between it and the best-selling United States album, the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, with 28 million copies shipped domestically, compared to 29 million for the latter album. Sony held a great deal of unreleased Michael Jackson material in its vaults but what the record company had was just a small portion of the work Michael had left behind. Dieter Wiesner and Marc Schaffel, who had probably gained greater access to Michael’s personal film and music archives than any other two people alive, agreed that there were at least a thousand songs and thousands of hours of film and videotape stored away in warehouses. The potential earnings from its exploitation were incalculable.
Neverland was now worth considerably more than the $22 million Tom Barrack had paid to save it from foreclosure, and the huge collection of valuables that were removed from the ranch and warehoused by Darren Julien had at least tripled in value, and might be worth ten times what they had been before. The day after Michael’s death, Julien’s had placed twenty-one items of Michael Jackson memorabilia purportedly belonging to David Gest on the block at a previously scheduled auction in Las Vegas. Prior to the event, the entire lot had been estimated to sell for $10,500. When the very first two items (a promotional display for a 1973 Jackson 5 album and an autographed copy of the Jackson 5 TV special Goin’ Back to Indiana) sold for $27,500, it became obvious that the take was going to be at least ten times what Julien’s had anticipated. By the end of the day, the take was nearly $1 million. On eBay, sellers were offering domain names like michaelthekingofpopjackson.com for $10 million. The pot of gold at the end of Michael Jackson’s rainbow was not only real, it was also apparently bottomless.
Branca was in court, but Katherine Jackson was not, when Judge Beckloff convened the hearing that would decide the disposition of the Michael Jackson estate. The introduction of the various attorneys involved took nearly as long as the oral arguments. Branca had surrounded himself with a team of high-priced legal talent. Howard Weitzman informed the court that he was working in association with Joel Katz and Vincent Chieffo of the megafirm Greenberg Traurig. The Atlanta-based Katz was the chairman of Greenberg Traurig’s global media and entertainment practice and perhaps the only music attorney in the country whose practice rivaled Branca’s. Chieffo, based in Los Angeles, was the cochairman of the firm’s national media and entertainment litigation group. Also present in court on behalf of Branca were three attorneys from Hoffman, Sabban & Watenmaker, a small but powerful LA firm that specialized in trusts and estates. One of the three, Jeryll S. Cohen, had been much in the news during the previous year when she helped Britney Spears’s father James Spears gain temporary control of the singer’s estate after the pop star was admitted several times to a psychiatric hospital.
Londell McMillan appeared as Katherine Jackson’s principal attorney. McMillan had simply showed up at the Hayvenhurst house immediately after Michael’s death, Mrs. Jackson would explain months later, insisting that her son would have wanted him to protect the family’s interest. “He just put himself there,” she recalled. At the July 6 court hearing, McMillan was accompanied by two other attorneys from the Los Angeles office of his law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf: John E. Schreiber and Dean Hansell. Also representing Katherine Jackson as her probate attorney was Burt Levitch, a partner at the Beverly Hills firm Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman. Present in court as well was Las Vegas criminal defense attorney David Chesnoff, best known for being partners with former Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman and for representing a huge roster of celebrities and organized crime figures. He was there as an observer, Chesnoff explained to the court, and as the representative of Michael Jackson’s brothers and sisters.
The last lawyer to identify himself to the judge was Joseph Zimring, a deputy in the California attorney general’s office who explained that his office was required to involve itself whenever unnamed charitable institutions could receive assets from an individual’s estate. The 20 percent of Michael Jackson’s estate that had been assigned to unnamed charities potentially totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.
When the hearing finally got under way, it was clear that there would be no real objection to the will itself. According to Branca, the original document had been drafted in 1997 by an attorney at his firm who specialized in wills and trusts. He had no personal involvement, Branca assured the court. All he knew was that Michael did not want a family member in control of his estate and did not feel obligated to take care of his brothers and sisters. The will had been rewritten and signed again in 2002 because of Blanket’s birth, Branca explained.
Though no one was publicly voicing doubts about the authenticity of the will, a number of people were privately asking rather pointed questions. One of these was why Branca and his law firm had retained an original copy of the will. At the time Branca was fired as Michael Jackson’s attorney in early 2003, he presumably had received a letter that explicitly requested the return of his client’s documents. Why hadn’t Branca turned over the will then? Others pointed out that Barry Siegel had removed himself as an executor of the estate after he was discharged as Michael Jackson’s accountant in 2003. This was the proper thing to have done, according to various interested parties, yet Branca had chosen to remain an executor of the will even after he was dismissed as Michael’s attorney.
The “complete and unfettered discretion” that the trust document gave Branca and McClain over Michael Jackson’s estate was particularly bothersome to the husband-and-wife probate attorney team of Andrew and Danielle Mayoras, authors of a serialized online analysis of the battle for control of the star’s fortune. “They have total power and control over Katherine Jackson,” Andy Mayoras explained. “This is unusual—because Michael Jackson’s affection and trust and support of his mother was publicly displayed in the past, plus she has his kids. This is not normal for an adult beneficiary.” Even more bothersome was the “exclusion clause” under which anyone who challenged the document risked being cut out of the estate. Since the only person named a heritor of the estate—besides Prince, Paris, and Blanket—was Katherine Jackson, the exclusion clause suggested that Michael had intentionally and specifically blocked his beloved mother from arguing that the will might be invalid.
Because the estate would not begin disbursing funds to Michael Jackson’s children until they reached the age of thirty and would not finish until the last child, Blanket, turned forty, Branca and McClain (each in his late fifties) would continue to be paid millions of dollars a year to administer the estate for decades to come, if they remained executors. Katherine Jackson almost certainly would not live to see even her oldest grandchild turn thirty. “When you look at the potential for the trustees to reprofit from Michael Jackson’s trust, you have to look at the trust with an extra-careful eye,” Danielle Mayoras said, “because the ones who are profiting significantly from the trust are the trustees.” Her husband complained that it was improper for Branca to be named as the executor and trustee of Michael Jackson’s estate in a will and trust agreement that had been prepared by his own law firm. “Because these are the docs that put John Branca in a position to earn so much money,” Andy Mayoras said, “as such, John Branca’s firm should not have been the one to prep these docs.” (Upon hearing of such complaints, Branca would retort through Howard Weitzman: “We are not aware of any ethical prohibition on an attorney both drafting a will and serving as an executor . . . To the contrary, California’s Probate Code expressly contemplates an attorney drafter serving as either a trustee or executor.”)
Tohme Tohme and several members of the Jackson family went so far as to question whether the will Branca had submitted to the court was actually signed by Michael Jackson, but none of them mounted a formal challenge. Concerned that Mrs. Jackson might forfeit the 40 percent of Michael’s estate that had been left to her, Katherine’s attorneys made no objection to the will, but did complain that the trust agreement gave John Branca—a man Michael Jackson had regularly professed to distrust—almost total control of the estate.
She would not have been so concerned, Mrs. Jackson was saying privately, if she believed John McClain was capable of providing a counterbalance to Branca. McClain, though, according to Branca’s attorneys, was suffering from some unidentified affliction that kept him housebound. Howard Weitzman described McClain in court as physically disabled but mentally sound. He was reportedly a diabetic who had suffered a stroke that impaired both his mobility and his speech, but this was never confirmed by evidence submitted to the court. For someone so prominent in the music industry, McClain had long maintained a remarkably low profile. A blade-thin black man who in 1990 cofounded Interscope Records with Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field, McClain had worked before that as an executive at A&M Records, where he helped launch Janet Jackson’s career.
McClain’s decades-long relationship with the Jackson family was complex. During the mid-eighties, Janet formally affirmed her break with Joe Jackson by hiring McClain away from A&M to work as her manager. At the time, Joe had accused McClain of deviously luring his daughter away from him. “I’ve worked hard for my family,” he said. “The problem comes, though, when others come in behind you and try to steal them away.” Few, however, doubted the wisdom of Janet’s decision when her next album, Control, turned into the breakthrough hit she so longed for, selling six million copies and establishing the youngest Jackson as a commercial force in the record industry. McClain, Control’s producer, was given enormous credit for the album’s success. One of those who admired what he’d done for Janet Jackson was her brother Michael, who soon hired McClain away to work for him, reportedly on the condition that he have nothing further to do with his sister’s career. Katherine Jackson was fond of McClain and told those around her that she believed he could be trusted. Joe Jackson doubted that, but like his estranged wife was far more concerned about Branca, who both he and Katherine believed would long outlive his coexecutor. “I told [Michael] all the time to watch John Branca, and that John Branca was no good,” Joe said.
Only Katherine had standing before Judge Beckloff, though. “Frankly, Mrs. Jackson is concerned about handing over the keys to the kingdom so quickly,” her attorney Schreiber told the judge at the July 6 hearing, making reference once again to “conflicts” that might affect John Branca’s ability to make decisions most favorable to the Michael Jackson estate. If anyone’s judgment was going to be clouded by conflicts, countered Paul Gordon Hoffman, it was Katherine Jackson, who would be more interested in spreading the wealth throughout her family than in building the fortune that Prince, Paris, and Blanket Jackson would eventually inherit.
After acknowledging that, “we’re getting off to a bit of a rocky start here,” Judge Beckloff ruled in favor of the executors named in the will. “Someone needs to be at the helm of the ship,” the judge explained, and for now that would be Mr. Branca—and Mr. McClain if he was able to assist.
Under the circumstances, Beckloff’s decision made sense. Weitzman and the other attorneys representing Branca in court had argued effectively that a singular level of knowledge and acumen would be required to sort through the mountain of debt and scores of lawsuits that Michael Jackson had left behind while at the same time managing the assets of his enormous—and enormously complicated—estate. Regardless of what enemies said about Branca’s character, few disputed that he was a brilliant lawyer and a masterful deal maker. In the years since he had helped Michael Jackson secure the ATV catalog, Branca’s negotiations of sales involving the copyrights of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana; Steven Tyler’s Aerosmith publishing catalog; Julian Lennon’s share of the Beatles’ royalties; Berry Gordy’s Jobete Music; and the catalog of the legendary Leiber and Stoller songwriting team each had established new precedents in the valuation of musical properties. Branca had helped Don Henley of the Eagles and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival regain copyrights and secure royalties they’d lost years earlier. The unprecedented deal he brokered that made Korn partners with the band’s record label, EMI, had become the industry standard. That Branca would put millions of dollars into his own pockets if permitted “unfettered” control of the Michael Jackson estate was a given, but it appeared reasonable to assume that the attorney would do this by “maximizing the estate,” as Weitzman put it.
In his ruling, Judge Beckloff not only removed Katherine Jackson as the administrator of her son’s estate, but also formally revoked his earlier order giving her power over her son’s possessions, meaning that Branca could demand the return of anything that had been removed from the Carolwood chateau. While Beckloff left Mrs. Jackson’s temporary custody of Prince, Paris, and Blanket Jackson in effect, the judge put off a decision about permanent custody until the end of the month, a ruling that was clearly intended to permit time for challenges.
The Jacksons recognized immediately how precarious their position had become. “Family attorney” Londell McMillan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Branca outside the courthouse pledging to work with the estate’s executors to ensure the futures of Michael’s children. “We have no reason to believe that this is going to turn into a nasty fight over millions of dollars,” McMillan told the assembled media.
For the moment, John Branca was no longer the Jacksons’ main concern. The greatest threat to their grasp on Michael’s fortune now, they knew, was Debbie Rowe.
One competing report after another about the parentage of Prince and Paris had surfaced during the days immediately following Michael’s death. Us Weekly published an article that identified Arnold Klein as the biological father of Prince and Paris, and suggested he would demand some say in deciding custody. Dr. Klein’s denials, made to ABC’s Good Morning America and on CNN’s Larry King Live, were at the very least equivocal. “I think, to the best of my knowledge, I am not the father,” Klein told King, then conceded a moment later that he had “once donated sperm” at Michael Jackson’s request. He would not take a DNA paternity test, Klein insisted on both programs: “It’s no one’s business,” he told King. Yet the doctor was quite willing to make suggestions that sounded vaguely like demands about the upbringing of the Jackson children. Debbie Rowe, their natural mother, should be involved in raising the two older kids, Klein said, and Grace Rwaramba should be included as well, since she was the caregiver all three of the children knew best. Within weeks, he would be dispatching an attorney to a courtroom filled with reporters with the demand that he be permitted to play a role in rearing Michael’s children, a request Judge Beckloff dismissed as “quite bizarre.”
Even as Klein’s comments were being batted about in the United States, Mark Lester was telling newspapers in the UK that he could very well be the father of Paris and might be Prince’s father as well. It was at Michael’s request that he had donated his sperm at the Harley clinic in London (where Jackson had undergone a number of cosmetic procedures), Lester said, back in early 1996, about eight months before Michael’s marriage to Debbie Rowe, and eleven months before the birth of Prince. It was to Paris, though, that he had always felt a “definite bonding,” Lester said. “I think there’s a definite possibility that she’s part of me,” he said. “Paris is very pale, with blue eyes,” the former child actor pointed out. “All my daughters, apart from my eldest, are fair with blue eyes.” When the Lester and Jackson families went on holiday together, he noted, people commented regularly upon how alike Paris and his daughter Harriet looked. He was only speaking out publicly, Lester said, because the Jackson family had cut him off from contact with all three children. “With Michael’s mother now their legal guardian, it’s like the kids are being isolated,” he complained. “I’m their godparent, and Michael was the godparent to all my four kids. Our two families spent a lot of time together, and had a lot of fun together. Now I’m not able to have any communication with the children. My repeated phone calls aren’t returned and e-mails go unanswered . . . I think it’s cruel that I’ve been excluded.” Uri Geller, who had been Jackson’s friend for years and remained friends with Lester, confirmed that Michael had mentioned to him when they were in New York together that “he wanted Mark to help him father a child for him.” Lester had offered to take a DNA test to settle the question of his paternity and Geller urged the Jackson family to allow it. “That would solve everything,” he observed.
The Jacksons, though, categorically refused to acknowledge that there was any question about who had fathered Prince, Paris, and Blanket. “These genetic lottery attempts aren’t going anywhere,” Londell McMillan told reporters. Jermaine and Tito Jackson each insisted, in separate interviews with British tabloids, that Michael was the biological father of all three children. “People say things just to get attention, but those are definitely Michael’s children,” Jermaine told the News of the World. “You can look at the kids and tell that they are Michael’s kids.” Tito echoed his brother in a paid interview with the Daily Mirror: “They are [Michael’s] children. Blanket is Michael’s, I can tell. Those eyes don’t lie. Them eyes are Michael’s all over again. I see a lot of Michael in him.” Prince and Paris were Michael’s offspring as well, Tito went on: “Yes, they are. Just because they look white doesn’t mean they are not his.”
The motivations for the Jacksons’ claims were obvious to many cynics. “What people don’t understand is how powerful those kids are,” Leo Terrell observed. “Those kids are the key, because the money goes wherever they go. And that means all the money, except what’s being given to charity. Believe me, all the players know that.
“The provisions of the will hold initial weight, but not long-term weight,” added Terrell, who had read the document closely. “Celebrity aside, no court is going to allow Michael Jackson to dictate from the grave who is the best parent for his kids. Will or no will, Debbie Rowe has the inside track, in front of Katherine Jackson.”
Biology was a trump card in California custody contests and it was obvious that the Jacksons had been advised of this by their attorneys. On July 2, four days before the court hearing at which control of the estate and guardianship of the children was to be decided, Debbie Rowe had told the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles that she would seek a restraining order to keep Joe Jackson away from the kids. “I want my children,” she told a reporter for the channel. “I am stepping up. I have to.” A friend of Rowe’s told Us Weekly that Debbie also planned to seek custody of Blanket, so that the children could stay together. Iris Finsilver, the attorney who had represented Rowe in her custody disputes with Michael Jackson, told the same magazine, “They are her children. She loves them and always has.”
A private viewing of Michael Jackson’s body for his family at Forest Lawn and a public memorial at the Staples Center were scheduled for July 7. At Forest Lawn, Jackson’s corpse had been prepared for its final public appearance by Karen Faye and Michael Bush, the makeup artist and costume designer who had been with him for years. The two spent nine hours blinking back tears and gagging on the reek of formaldehyde as they worked on the body as it lay next to the casket on a mortuary table. Faye applied a thick coat of the Lancome Dual Finish Powder that Michael had carried in a compact for years. Bush dressed his longtime client in a black tunic that was specially crafted for the occasion, draped with white pearls and accented by a gold belt that La Toya would liken to a boxing champion’s. The costume designer had also helped to lift the body into the coffin. “The work me and Karen did with Michael at Forest Lawn, that bonded us for life,” he would say later.
After the Jackson family had admired the work of Faye and Bush and said a private goodbye to Michael, his closed casket was transported to the Staples Center, the same venue where the final rehearsals for the “This Is It” concerts had been held, and where AEG would get its chance to put on a blockbuster Michael Jackson concert after all. The company had hired Ken Ehrlich and Kenny Ortega to work as the memorial’s producers in consultation with the Jackson family. The assembly of those who would speak or perform was inevitably fraught with opportunism and exaggeration. Brooke Shields was among those chosen to deliver a eulogy even though she had had no relationship with Michael during the previous quarter century and not much of one before that. Perhaps in anticipation of Debbie Rowe’s potential claim on both Michael’s children and his estate, the Jacksons were loading the deck with race cards, asking that Reverend Al Sharpton, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and the children of Martin Luther King Jr. all be invited to speak. Berry Gordy, whose only contact with the deceased in recent years had been through the attorneys handling the lawsuits they filed against one another, was on hand to describe Michael as “like a son to me.” By contrast, Marlon Jackson was genuinely affecting when he stood to say of his brother, “We will never understand what he endured . . . being judged, ridiculed. Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone.” Eleven-year-old Paris upstaged everyone who had appeared before her when she stepped to the microphone at the end of the event to make a short speech that the memorial’s producers insisted was unscripted and unplanned: “I just want to say that ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine. And I just want to say I love him so much.”
In all its false notes and true ones, the Michael Jackson memorial had been suffused with a sense of uplift, and it would be remembered as yet another demonstration that Michael was far more loved than hated. After only 8,750 pairs of tickets were awarded, at random, from among the 1.6 million members of the general public who applied for them, the City of Los Angeles had braced for what they feared might be a stampede of the perimeter its police department had set up around the Staples Center. Instead, the atmosphere that surrounded the event was hushed. The 31.1 million television viewers in the United States who had tuned in to Michael’s memorial made it the third-most-watched send-off in TV history, just behind the 33.2 million Americans who had watched Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997 and the 35.1 million who had seen Ronald Reagan’s burial in 2004.
Internet video streams that had not existed in 1997 and were nascent in 2004 attracted another 33 million views at the Web sites of the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) alone. Worldwide, the memorial collected the biggest television audience ever to watch a farewell to a public figure. More than 6.5 million British viewers had tuned in, which was still only about a third of the 18.7 million people who watched it in Brazil. Every one of Japan’s networks covered the service, and 7 million of that country’s viewers had tuned in to a live broadcast that was running simultaneously in Germany, France, and at least a dozen other countries. Politicians in Los Angeles who attempted a public objection to the estimated $1.4 million in costs associated with what one city councilman called a “private memorial for a celebrity singer” were quickly sent scurrying for cover when economists pointed out that the event had added at least several times that amount to the revenues of local businesses for three days, during which nearly every hotel room in the city was occupied.
Marlon Jackson’s hope that his brother would finally be left alone was, of course, futile. Michael Jackson’s death provided British tabloids with a freedom from their country’s restrictive libel laws that they had never enjoyed while he was alive and they intended to take full advantage. As debate raged within the family and among Jackson’s fans over the prospect of Michael’s interment at Neverland, the tabloid media rushed to fill the void of decision with round after round of ghoulish speculation. One British tab reported that Jackson had long been “interested in having his body frozen in the hope he could be brought back to life.” Because of the autopsy, however, “It is now too late for his wish to be granted as the freezing process—cryonics—must be initiated almost immediately after death.” Another tabloid reported that “Michael Jackson will live on as a ‘plastinated’ creature’” preserved by the controversial German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibition of human corpses had already shocked and fascinated more than 26 million visitors in cities around the world. The tabloid quoted von Hagens as declaring that, “An agreement is in place.” The doctor had spoken to representatives of the Jackson family months earlier, a spokesman explained, and it was agreed that Michael’s body would be plastinated and placed next to Bubbles, his late pet monkey, plastinated years ago and now on exhibit in the Body Worlds and the Mirror of Time exhibition at the O2 Arena.
On the day of Jackson’s public memorial, the coroner’s office released his death certificate. No cause for Michael’s demise was listed. That determination would likely take weeks, it was explained, while various toxicology tests were completed. The coroner’s office did for the first time acknowledge that it retained possession of Jackson’s brain—or at least part of it—for neuropathology tests, adding that it would return the organ to his family when the testing was finished.
The question of what would be done with Michael’s corpse continued to fill news columns, especially in the UK. What had kept so many Jackson fans at Neverland was, according to a London tabloid report on June 30, that Michael’s family had scheduled a “public viewing” of his body at the ranch. This was entirely untrue, but the Jacksons were feeling the pressure of an enormous fan base that was insisting Michael should be buried at Neverland. Many local residents in Los Olivos were already unnerved by the vigil that had been taking place outside the gates of the ranch since the day of Michael’s death. Two-lane Figueroa Mountain Road was bottlenecked by satellite news trucks, while vendors hawking T-shirts and spring water trailed hundreds of fans (and dozens of reporters) who appeared ready to camp out there “until it’s all over,” as one of them put it to the Los Angeles Times. The young clerks at the Corner Coffee House in Los Olivos enjoyed collecting business cards from journalists who had arrived from Germany, Belgium, Poland, and Venezuela, but most of the property owners in the community fretted about what the traffic and noise would do to their bucolic community if Neverland became Graceland West.
Jermaine Jackson and his father Joe were the two family members pushing hardest for a “shrine” at Neverland that would far exceed both the scale and appeal of the Elvis attraction in Tennessee. The creation of a private memorial park at the ranch would ensure a revenue stream that even Michael’s music catalog couldn’t match, Jermaine argued. Tohme Tohme had arranged for a helicopter to fly Jermaine to Santa Maria in order to make a direct appeal to local officials. All of the other Jackson brothers supported plans for a Michael Jackson memorial at Neverland, Tohme said. Tohme was also trying to negotiate an arrangement with Tom Barrack and Colony Capital, which still held the note on Neverland. Sensing an opportunity, Barrack ordered the work crews at the ranch to step up their pace. The main grounds were cleared and close to the condition in which Michael Jackson had left them within a few days of his death. The flower beds were “pristine,” as Fortune magazine had it, while the mansion, guesthouse, and movie theater were all thoroughly refurbished, with fresh candy placed at the concession stand.
Barrack himself began quietly working to persuade county authorities to permit a burial at the ranch but learned quickly that California state regulations about the disposal of human remains were quite restrictive. Graves on private property were disallowed if even a single neighbor objected, and the last thing a majority of the people in the Los Olivos area wanted was an international tourist destination with a 10,000-vehicle parking lot in their backyard.
Katherine Jackson was resisting the idea of a Neverland burial. As it dawned on her that she held all the real power in the Jackson family, Mrs. Jackson seemed to be finding the voice that had been shouted down by Joe for so many years, and her character was shining through. Michael had never gone back to the ranch after leaving it in 2005, his mother pointed out, and associated Santa Barbara County mostly with humiliation and pain. And the suggestion by his brothers that Michael’s body should be driven through the streets in an open coffin, so that mourners could throw flowers, just as they had for Princess Diana, was “ghoulish,” Katherine said. Rebbie and Janet, the next two most influential family members, agreed that Michael’s funeral should not turn into “the Jackson Four’s greatest performance,” as Frank Dileo described the brothers’ plan. The scales tipped further when Michael’s favorite nephew, Tito’s son Taj Jackson, phoned Katherine to say that putting his Uncle Mike at Neverland was the wrong thing to do. All the magic of the place had been destroyed for Michael after the police raid in 2003, Taj said, and Katherine agreed. Michael would be laid to rest somewhere else.
Even after Neverland was rejected, the family spent another two months deciding how and where to arrange Michael’s burial. As fans and family debated the subject, on the Internet and in the privacy of the Hayvenhurst compound, the subject of Michael’s spirituality percolated into a meandering yet intense undercurrent of the conversation. What was the fitting ceremony for someone who meant so many different things to so many different people? All three of the major monotheistic faiths made claims upon him, but Michael had not only worshiped as a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, he had also persistently dabbled in witchcraft, regularly retaining sorcerers and shamans whose rituals were rooted in the polytheistic Yoruba faith that originated in what is today Nigeria. Michael Jackson, his former confidant Uri Geller explained, “believed in it all,” from ghosts and séances to Jungian archetypes and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. His reach across all boundaries of belief had echoed especially loudly in the international response to his death. “For us, this is a very great loss,” a young Russian fan standing outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow had told the state news agency Novosti. “To us, he became a symbol of the spiritual world. It’s hard to convey how great a loss this is.” Some of his countless “spiritual advisors,” Deepak Chopra and Rabbi Boteach among them, saw it as tragic that, above all else, Michael believed in “magic,” and that enduring fame was the greatest proof of who possessed it. During his regular stays at Geller’s London home during the 1990s, Michael had insisted upon taking time each day to pray or meditate in the family room, where one of the main features was a large wooden sculpture of Elvis Presley holding a guitar. “Michael liked to sit near it,” Geller remembered. Perhaps his most enduring memory of Michael, Geller said, had come one day when he paused in the doorway after dimming the lights in the family room, so that he could observe his friend undetected. “I saw Michael lift up his right hand and hold Elvis Presley’s hand, with his head bowed,” Geller recalled. “That was how he prayed.”
It was Katherine Jackson, of course, who would have the final say about how and where the star was laid to rest, and Mrs. Jackson insisted that her son had remained a Christian. Little more than a week after Michael’s death, Katherine advised the family that Michael’s coffin would join those of the other great stars in the Great Mausoleum of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale not far north of the “Hollywood” sign. Mrs. Jackson had instructed Michael’s brother Randy to find a place where Michael’s grave would not be disturbed by either overzealous fans or paparazzi ghouls, and Randy had reported back that Forest Lawn was the one graveyard in all of Southern California where the security was sufficient to protect a celebrity corpse of even Michael Jackson’s stature. Keyed entries and armed guards preserved the peace amid the private sanctuaries of Forest Lawn’s three hundred acres.
Katherine decided her son should be encrypted in the Great Mausoleum, which was designed in the style of Genoa’s Campo Santo and used such similar elements as blind arches on the outer walls and a main entrance crowned by a Gothic tabernacle. Its marble replicas of Michelangelo’s The Pieta and Moses were full-scale and stunningly precise, but not nearly as impressive as the gigantic (thirty-feet-long-by-fifteen-feet-high) rendition of The Last Supper in which da Vinci’s masterpiece had been reproduced as a luminous stained-glass window.
Employing the Campo Santo’s building-within-a-building design, the Great Mausoleum was divided into various “terraces” where the tombs of the rich and famous were connected by seemingly endless marble corridors lined with burial drawers. Among the stars whose remains were interred within the Great Mausoleum were Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. W. C. Fields was there as well, and so was Michael’s old pal Red Skelton, who had befriended him after the Jackson 5 appeared on the comic’s television variety show. Out back, concealed by a hedge, was an exquisite flower bed where the cremated remains of Michael’s hero Walt Disney had been spread. An adjacent plaque read, “Ashes scattered in paradise.”
Upon John Branca’s consent, Michael’s mother had decided that his coffin should repose in the most impressive of the remaining crypts in the Great Mausoleum, at the end of the main hallway of Holly Terrace, in an area known as the Sanctuary of Ascension. Framed by three tall stained-glass windows that depicted the Ascension of Christ to Heaven and featuring a marvelously detailed free-standing marble sarcophagus, the Sanctuary of Ascension had remained empty for fifty years, due to its extraordinary cost (more than $600,000 for purchase and maintenance), and was said to be the last truly grand burial place in all of Forest Lawn.
Michael’s coffin would be a near duplicate of the one in which James Brown had been buried: a solid bronze, gold-plated, blue-velvet-lined “Promethean” model from the Batesville Casket Company. That was Katherine’s decision as well.
The King of Pop’s body would repose in that Batesville casket for more than nine weeks, however, while fans worldwide awaited his funeral and burial. As the Jacksons bickered amongst themselves over the implementation of various competing projects, Michael’s remains lay largely unattended in the Great Mausoleum’s main hall, directly beneath that magnificent stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper in the main entrance. Visitors were no longer welcome to view the work in a half-hourly unveiling. The tableau that met the eyes of those few who crept in to sneak a peek—mostly Forest Lawn employees—was at least as true to who Michael Jackson had been and to how he had lived as the Staples Center show that had been viewed by a worldwide audience of more than one billion. Michael had been lonely most of his life. Now, he was truly alone.
Before the end of July, the family’s fortunes seemed to have been secured by an unexpected deal with Debbie Rowe that gave Katherine permanent custody of Prince, Paris, and Blanket. After word spread that Debbie had hired Eric George, the son of California Supreme Court Justice Ronald George, as her attorney, the debate in the media was entirely between those who believed Rowe would attempt to gain custody of the kids through the courts and those who insisted she would wring an eight-figure settlement from the Jackson Family Trust with the threat of such legal action. Debbie did neither.
Marc Schaffel served as the “intermediary,” as he described it, in working out the agreement between Katherine Jackson and Debbie that settled the custody question. Convinced that John Branca still bore him enmity over the attorney’s firing in 2003, Schaffel recognized that he would need the Jackson family’s cooperation if he was going to salvage—and profit from—the projects he and Michael had developed together over the years, in particular the “What More Can I Give?” recordings. Demonstrating how effective he could be as a middleman was a way to win a seat at the table, Schaffel hoped. Beyond that, though, Marc was genuinely fond of Katherine Jackson and surprisingly protective of Debbie, given the things she had said about him during Michael’s criminal trial.
Schaffel’s relationship with Rowe had been renewed after Michael Jackson’s death by a TMZ report that included confidential footage from his 2003 interview with Debbie for the “rebuttal documentary” broadcast. The portions that had been held back from Fox included materials subject to a joint consent agreement between Schaffel and Rowe. This footage had been seized when the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office executed a search warrant on Schaffel’s home in Calabasas. All of that material was returned after Michael Jackson’s criminal trial acquittal but somehow TMZ obtained copies and used the portion of the tapes in which Rowe spoke about using sedatives herself. In the interview, Debbie had stated that she used drugs to deal with stage fright, but the TMZ broadcast had tied her remarks to Michael’s apparent death by drug overdose.
Schaffel and Rowe joined in a demand that the confidential outtakes be removed from TMZ’s report. According to Howard King, TMZ at first replied that it had obtained the footage from a British TV station, then admitted that it had come from the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, and finally rescinded both claims, insisting its source was confidential and that the inclusion of the Rowe interview in its report fell under “fair use” provisions of the law. Schaffel, joined by Rowe, filed a lawsuit against TMZ that claimed the outtakes had “an estimated value of potentially millions of dollars, the exact amount of which shall be proved at trial,” as King’s moving papers put it.
Having secured his relationship with Rowe, Schaffel set about persuading Debbie and Katherine Jackson to meet privately without first informing their attorneys. The two got together for a preliminary conversation on July 10, and several other meetings followed. “Debbie’s lawyer found out afterward and he was really cool with it,” Schaffel recalled. “Katherine’s lawyer, though, wasn’t too happy.” The upshot of the meetings had been an agreement that included no financial payments to Rowe and regular visits with the children. Debbie’s only absolute condition was that Joe Jackson be allowed very little contact with the children, none of it unsupervised. Joe had already made a number of unnerving public comments about the potential show business careers of Michael’s children. “I keep watching Paris. She . . . wants to do something,” Joe told ABC News, then added, “And as far as I can see, well, they say Blanket, he can really dance.” Debbie’s custody agreement with Katherine mandated Joe to sign a separate document promising that he would stay away from the kids except during family gatherings. “It keeps him completely out of the picture,” Schaffel said.
The custody agreement between Debbie and Katherine had also solidified Grace Rwaramba’s position in the Hayvenhurst household. “Debbie has no problem with the kids living there with Katherine and Grace,” Schaffel explained. “But if Grace left, things might change.” The complications of the situation’s shifting dynamics were rapidly apparent. In mid-July 2009, La Toya Jackson told reporters that she had “a lot of questions about Grace” and in fact was “highly suspicious” of the ex-nanny’s motives. Soon after this, the National Enquirer reported that Rebbie Jackson and Rwaramba had actually come to blows during a dispute that resulted from Grace’s criticisms of Katherine’s parenting style. “Not exactly accurate,” Schaffel said. “I mean, it was mostly Rebbie. Even Katherine pushed Rebbie back a little. Katherine and Grace are fine with each other. I think Grace knows that Katherine is really a great person. But she’s up there in age, and trying to make sure everybody is taken care of has really taken a toll on her. She needs to be in a situation where she can take it a little bit easier. The kids do, too.”
Rebbie had so far been Katherine Jackson’s main support in rearing the three children, actually sleeping on a cot next to Blanket’s bed for the first few nights after the boy arrived at the Hayvenhurst estate and said he was scared to sleep alone. Some did not see the oldest Jackson sister’s motives as entirely pure. “Rebbie tried to jump in at the beginning, because she thought she was gonna take the kids,” said one family advisor. “Rebbie’s got this deadbeat husband, and one of her first comments, right after Michael died, was, ‘Well, the kids should move with me to Vegas and the estate should buy me a mansion to raise them in.’” What alienated Prince and Paris, the advisor said, was that Rebbie had been so insistent about indoctrinating the children with her religious beliefs. “Rebbie’s like a born-again Jehovah’s Witness,” he said. “I mean, really off the edge. And she was trying to push this on the kids. And the kids just said, ‘We don’t want this.’ So at one point Katherine had to say, ‘I appreciate your help, Rebbie, but I’ll handle it.’”
The three children were coping with life at Hayvenhurst in very different ways. Prince had withdrawn into a private world, rarely speaking except to answer questions, and then only in monosyllables. He was losing himself for hours on end playing video games on his PlayStation, something he had never been permitted to do while his father was alive. “No one could really tell what was going on with him,” said the advisor. Paris appeared to make a much smoother transition. She was a sociable girl who didn’t mind being alone when she was pursuing her favorite activities: reading and painting. Paris had turned her bedroom into an homage to “Daddy,” rejecting Katherine’s suggestion that she decorate with pictures of flowers and ballerinas and instead covering the walls with photographs and drawings of her father. “I always want to be able to see him,” Katherine quoted the girl as saying. Blanket continued to cry at night and to wander about during the day wearing a lost expression for the first week or so after arriving at the Hayvenhurst compound, but seemed to slowly relax as he drew closer to his grandmother.
When the Jacksons invited Grace to join the children at the Hayvenhurst estate, some reasonably appraised it as a calculated move on at least two fronts. First, ensconcing Grace in the Hayvenhurst compound would further cement the family’s claim that they offered the most stable and familiar environment for the three children. Secondly, all the Jacksons knew that there were tabloids that would be happy to hand over a small fortune for a tell-all about Michael and his family and that no one had more to tell than Grace. Keeping her close to them was clearly in the family’s best interest.
Schaffel, who had helped negotiate the rapprochement between Grace and Katherine, insisted that Michael’s mother’s motives were pure. “All Katherine wants is what’s best for those kids,” he said. “And that’s the reason she brought Grace back, to provide them with a sense of continuity. Say whatever you want about Katherine and Grace, but they both love Michael’s children.”
Soon after settling in at the family compound, though, Grace discovered what Katherine Jackson already knew: The biggest obstacle to creating a healthy environment for Michael’s children was Hayvenhurst itself. As many as twenty people at a time were sleeping under the roof of the mansion, and even the home’s 11,000 square feet weren’t enough to comfortably contain them all. In addition to Prince, Paris, and Blanket, Jermaine’s two youngest children, thirteen-year-old Jaafar and nine-year-old Jermajesty, were in residence, along with their two older half-siblings (fathered by Randy Jackson) Genevieve, twenty, and Randy Jr., eighteen. The mother of all four children was Alejandra Oaziaza, a forty-year-old Colombian woman who had been married to and divorced from both Randy and Jermaine, giving birth along the way to two children by each Jackson brother. That Alejandra’s kids referred to Jermaine, the second Jackson brother she married, as “Uncle Daddy” had been a source of great amusement for Michael Jackson.
Also living in the estate’s main house was seventeen-year-old Donte Jackson, whose parentage was unclear. The original explanation for Donte’s presence was that he was Alejandra’s son by Randy. This was dismissed by people who pointed out that the child had been born less than eight months after Alejandra gave birth to Randy Jr. and that no one had ever heard Donte address Randy as his father. There had also been rumors for years that Donte’s biological father was actually Joe Jackson. Joe had in fact fathered at least four and perhaps as many as six children out of wedlock, according to Jackson family insiders. “When I was traveling with Michael, there were always these strangers coming up to him and acting like they were related,” Schaffel recalled. “And Michael would say, ‘Oh, that’s my half-brother’ that Joe had fathered with some other woman. I remember there was this Thai or Filipina maid Joe had gotten pregnant, and a bunch of other women.” The Sun reported that Donte was the product of a “brief fling” between Michael Jackson and a “mystery woman” who might be Alejandra. Schaffel was certain this was not the case. “Michael used to joke that Alejandra had slept with all of the brothers except him,” Schaffel recalled. “He said she was trying to work her way up to him.”
The twenty-five-year-old “Norwegian rapper” Omer Bhatti, who was known as “Monkey” among the Jackson family, also called Hayvenhurst home, though how exactly he had been included in the household wasn’t clear even to those, like Schaffel, who had ready access. “Omer sort of tried to go along with this tabloid story that Michael was his father, but nobody bought it, so he eventually gave up,” Schaffel said. “But Katherine let him stick around. I don’t know why.” Katherine was genuinely fond of the young man, one of her advisors said, and determined to look out for him.
Even after Grace Rwaramba moved onto the estate, a Nation of Islam woman named “Sister Rose,” the nanny Michael hired while living in the Carolwood chateau, also remained in the house. Michael’s brothers Jermaine and Randy spent nights at the Hayvenhurst estate, as did La Toya, while other Jackson siblings visited from time to time and often left their children there. Besides Grace and Sister Rose, there was a number of live-in staff.
What just about everyone who knew the inside story agreed upon was that Alejandra Oaziaza had been the epicenter of turmoil within the Hayvenhurst estate for years. The South American beauty had been bewitching various Jackson men since first becoming involved with Randy when she was sixteen. After more than twenty years in residence at Hayvenhurst, the woman Prince, Paris, and Blanket called their aunt seemed to specialize in serving as a disruptive force.
“What really started up the problems at the house,” Schaffel said, “was Alejandra undermining everything that Grace did, because Alejandra was looking at Michael’s kids as her meal ticket. Alejandra was basically trying to instill in the children that she was the next best thing to their mother. Any time Grace would say, ‘Do your homework. Don’t watch TV. Go to bed,’ Alejandra would say, ‘Oh, stay up as late as you want. Don’t listen to Grace. She’s not your family, I am. She’s just hired help.’ And Alejandra’s cool, right? She’ll basically let them stay up all night, eat ice cream, cruise the Internet, whatever they want.”
Michael had refused to allow his children to go online, and was quite restrictive about what they could watch on television as well. “He made them read,” recalled Tohme Tohme. “I never saw them when they didn’t have a book in their hands. They were reading constantly. Michael wouldn’t let them go on the computer or any of that. Always a book.”
“The kids were brought up to be very well mannered,” Schaffel said. “They always said hello, good-bye, please, thank you, you’re welcome, because that was what Michael taught them. But when they went to live at Hayvenhurst, their world changed dramatically. They had the Internet there, and all the kids had computers. The kids got on the computer, their parents got on the computer. It was just the way things were. And so with Alejandra’s permission or encouragement they started reading shit about Debbie, and about Michael being a pedophile, and they had never been exposed to any of this information before.”
Among the worst effects on Prince, Paris, and Blanket of what Alejandra (and the Internet) had done, Schaffel said, was how difficult it became for the kids to develop a relationship with their biological mother. “The kids didn’t want anything to do with Debbie, even though Debbie really wanted to get to know them. It was very painful for her.”
Katherine Jackson said she had no idea what to do. “She didn’t want to cut the Internet off at the house because there was Genevieve and the other kids, Donte and Randy Jr., and they claimed they needed the Internet for their schools and their lives,” Schaffel explained. “And meanwhile Michael’s kids are watching the rude and nasty way that Alejandra’s two youngest kids, Jaafar and Jermajesty, are treating Grace. They were always swearing at her and saying, ‘You’re the hired help.’ And Prince and Paris started giving her a little lip themselves. Then whenever she laid the law down, Alejandra would undercut her. So it wasn’t very long before Grace was saying that she didn’t know how long she could stay at Hayvenhurst with Alejandra in the house. What it all boiled down to was that Katherine started realizing she was going to have to find another house where she could raise Michael’s kids separately.”
Nothing quite revealed how the Jackson family functioned—or dysfunctioned—as the announcement that Michael’s funeral, scheduled to take place on his fifty-first birthday, was being postponed. Ken Sunshine delivered the news but gave no reason for the delay. Joe Jackson told reporters only that the family “had things we need to take care of first.” What he didn’t say was that those things involved appearances by family members at various events where they had been promised hefty fees. Joe himself was scheduled to spend the morning of Michael’s birthday with La Toya at the Nokia Theater in Times Square in New York, where they would greet fans at a $25-per-ticket “birthday celebration” for Michael called “Long Live the King!” Joe would then immediately jet to Las Vegas to appear with Robin Leach at the installation of the Brenden Theaters “Celebrity Star” at the Palms.
The funeral finally took place on the evening of September 3, 2009, a date of no special distinction other than that no one in the Jackson family had any paying gigs to attend. Raging wildfires in the Angeles National Forest lit the northern horizon and turned the sky into a startling, spooky frieze of smoky vermilion. From a distance, the entire affair created a scene that might have been an outtake from the “Thriller” video. It seemed appropriate that the fleet of Rolls-Royces delivering the Jackson family to Forest Lawn should all be Phantom models.
A motorcade of more than twenty long black vehicles had made the trip from the Hayvenhurst estate to Glendale. Those who emerged from the assorted limousines and made their way toward the Great Mausoleum included Lisa Marie Presley, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, Chris Tucker, Macaulay Culkin and his actress girlfriend Mila Kunis, Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and federally indicted home run champion Barry Bonds. The most notable guest of all was seventy-seven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, who had scorned the public “hoopla” of the Staples Center memorial but arrived early at Forest Lawn, pushed in a wheelchair that was positioned at the end of one row before most of the other guests arrived. Joe Jackson came separately as well, but took a seat in the front row next to his estranged wife and alongside his sons, who showed up dressed in black tuxedos brightened by red ties and pocket handkerchiefs, accented by the same single silver glove that each of them had worn at the public memorial. The most notable absences were Stevie Wonder, who had stayed away so as not to be “a distraction,” and Debbie Rowe, who had received an invitation but remained at home.
Owing to the suffocating heat of an evening on which the temperature didn’t drop below ninety degrees until well after sunset, the service itself was to be conducted in a garden space just outside the Great Mausoleum, from which Michael’s gold-plated casket was carried to the specially built stage, then adorned with and surrounded by enormous bouquets of white lilies and white roses. Two large painted portraits of the star, both from Thriller Time, flanked the stage.
The funeral’s opening prayer was delivered not by a Jehovah’s Witness but by Pastor Lucious Smith of Pasadena’s Friendship Baptist Church, who began by reading Ecclesiastes 3:7. “A time to tear and a time to mend; a time to keep silent and a time to speak.” Gladys Knight’s performance of the gospel hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” moved most to tears, while Clifton Davis delivered a heart-stopping rendition of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Lisa Marie wept throughout and seemed in some way conjoined to Katherine as mourners in chief. His death had transformed Lisa Marie’s attitude toward Michael in ways that seemed at once predictable and surprising. The last time Michael had called her, in 2005, shortly after his acquittal on the criminal charges against him, “He asked if I still loved him,” Lisa Marie would tell Oprah Winfrey a year later. Michael said “he wanted to tell me that I was right about a lot of the people around him, that it had panned out to be exactly what he and I had talked about years ago,” Lisa Marie recalled. Michael “was trying to throw a line out to see if I would bite emotionally, and I wouldn’t,” she said. To his question about whether she still loved him, “I told him I was indifferent,” Lisa Marie remembered, “and he didn’t like that word, and he cried.” But still, for some reason she had sobbed all during the day of Michael’s death, Lisa Marie told Winfrey, even before she heard the news: “I was in England and I don’t know why but it was the strangest day of my life . . . I was trying to work and I came home and I was literally cutting my food, eating my dinner, crying. And I wanted to go upstairs and watch something mindless on TV and stop crying. I looked at my husband and said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t stop,’ and then an hour later the call came and I heard.” She was still crying more than two months later. She had spent the time since Michael’s death “trying to gain clarity,” Lisa Marie would tell Winfrey, “because at some point I pushed it away and I just had to move on with my life and when that happened it was like a tidal wave brought it all back.”
When Elizabeth Taylor rose from her wheelchair to speak, the choke in her voice gave the simple words a complex power: “We shouldn’t have to be here. It shouldn’t have happened! He shouldn’t have passed away.” Joe rambled on about the people who had tried to “cheat” Michael and warned that he and the rest of the family would find those responsible for his son’s death and make them pay, but Michael’s father’s thinly disguised avarice was forgotten moments later when a young man who had scar tissue for features stood to speak.
David Rothenberg had become a public figure back in 1983 when, as a six-year-old boy, he was the victim of a crime that shocked Southern California to a depth that few other events of the eighties would reach. David’s monstrous father Charles Rothenberg, seeking revenge against his ex-wife during a bitter custody dispute, had doused his son with kerosene and set him afire as the boy lay sleeping in a hotel room bed. David survived, but third-degree burns covered more than 90 percent of his body, leaving him so horribly scarred that no amount of plastic surgery could give him a face.
Protected by his mother from the pitying looks of adults who shuddered involuntarily the first time they saw him, the boy still glimpsed the terrified expressions on the faces of children he met outside burn wards. He had just turned seven and was still cycling in and out of surgery when he was first invited to visit Michael Jackson at home, David Rothenberg recalled, at the height of Michael’s Thriller success. Michael looked him in the eye and hugged him on that occasion, and every time they met afterward, the young man recalled. He had visited Neverland Ranch many times over the years, and if he was certain of anything in this world, it was that Michael Jackson would never hurt a child. “Michael was always there for me,” David Rothenberg finished. “Through everything, he never let me go.”
Michael’s own three children sat in front-row seats throughout the service. Before it began, they had been permitted to approach the casket together and lay a golden crown at its head. By the end, Prince and Paris were so spent that they fell asleep against each other’s shoulders in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce. Blanket, though, remained awake and continued to sob as the children were driven back out onto the street.
The mourners were gone by the time Michael’s casket was carried back to Holly Terrace and installed in the Sanctuary of Ascension, where it would remain, Forest Lawn had promised the family, as long as the building stood.
On August 27, 2009, one week before Michael Jackson’s funeral, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office had officially ruled his death a homicide.
“Acute propofol intoxication with benzodiazepine effect,” was the cause cited in the coroner’s report, which listed the drugs in Jackson’s system as “propofol, lorazepam, midazolam, diazepam, lidocaine, and ephedrine.” The implicit indictment of such reckless polypharmacy was about as clear an indication as could be offered that Dr. Conrad Murray was going to be charged with responsibility for Michael’s death.
LAPD Chief William Bratton had told reporters as early as July 9 that his detectives were investigating a possible homicide but would have to wait for the coroner’s toxicology reports. A finding that the benzos in his system had contributed to Michael Jackson’s death would certainly complicate matters. The Los Angeles Times quoted a senior law enforcement official as saying that even if the coroner ruled that Jackson’s death had been a homicide, it was possible no charges would be filed, given the entertainer’s well-documented history of drug abuse. If the coroner ruled that propofol was what had killed Mr. Jackson, the Times source added, then Murray and any other doctor involved in providing or administering the drug could very well face involuntary manslaughter charges.
In addition to the independent investigation being conducted by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, at least seven state, local, federal, and foreign agencies were working with LAPD detectives. That the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had been called in was not simply the result of DEA “expertise,” but also because the agency had the power to operate across jurisdictional boundaries. News that the police departments in Las Vegas and Houston were cooperating in the investigation of Conrad Murray was no surprise, but word came that the New York police department, the Dade County sheriff’s department in Florida, Scotland Yard in London, and Interpol were also involved. California State attorney general Jerry Brown told reporters that his office was mining its computer database for information about prescription drugs that had been provided to Michael through various doctors and pharmacies under any number of aliases. A team of physicians had also been assembled through the medical board of California to make a determination about whether Conrad Murray and/or other doctors had been guilty of negligence in their treatment of Michael Jackson, a finding that would have to be reached in order to sustain a manslaughter prosecution in the case.
As early as July 4, the Los Angeles Times had reported that investigators were “focusing on at least five doctors who prescribed drugs to Michael Jackson.” None of those physicians was named, but it didn’t require inside sources to know that one of them was Arnold Klein. Among the first search warrants executed by the DEA was one that ordered the Mickey Fine Pharmacy to turn over “all records, reports, documents, files, inventories, and written information” in connection to its distribution of controlled substances. The raid on Mickey Fine appeared to have been targeted primarily at the dermatologist whose offices were just upstairs, and any doubt was removed when Los Angeles County assistant chief coroner Ed Winter showed up at Dr. Klein’s door to serve a subpoena demanding information about medical files in his possession.
Klein had been answering tough questions since the afternoon of Jackson’s death, when Debbie Rowe called the doctor and, according to Jason Pfeiffer, “started screaming at him. I heard her say, ‘What did you give him?’ And Klein said, ‘I wasn’t there. I haven’t given him Demerol for a couple days.’”
Ed Winter would say he had become interested in Dr. Klein when he examined the more than thirty vials and packages of medications that had been recovered from Michael Jackson’s master suite at the Carolwood chateau. “We located prescription slips in the names of Omar Arnold, Peter Madhonie, and other names,” Winter recalled. “These were specifically from Klein.” Winter promptly filed a subpoena for Dr. Klein’s medical records, and by the time the coroner’s investigator visited Klein’s offices in mid-July reporters were already chasing the story.
In public, Klein seemed self-assured as ever, initiating a media offensive the moment his name began to be raised in connection to the criminal investigation. Though unwilling to reveal much about the prescriptions of Demerol and Dilaudid he had written for Michael Jackson over the years, and refusing to say a word about the twenty-seven occasions on which he had self-prescribed controlled substances between the time of Jackson’s return to the United States from Ireland in 2008 and his death in 2009, Klein wanted to make it clear that he had never prescribed propofol for Michael or anyone else. “I didn’t give him the crap they’re talking about,” he snapped at an interviewer on ABC’s Good Morning America. “How am I going to prescribe Diprivan when I don’t understand how to use it.” Klein’s claim seemed convincing when he added that whoever hadprovided and administered propofol to Michael should be treated as a criminal: “It becomes nothing more than manslaughter, or something worse than that.”
By August, Klein was just one of at least a dozen physicians who were either flinching from or responding to stories that they had provided Michael Jackson with controlled substances. Subpoenas had been served to obtain the medical records of not only Arnold Klein, but also of Mark Tadrissi, the dentist who had acknowledged giving Michael and his son Blanket propofol; Dr. David Adams, a Las Vegas physician who reportedly admitted to the LAPD that he gave Michael Jackson propofol before Conrad Murray did; and Dr. David Slavit, who had conducted the independent medical examination of Michael for AEG. Assistant Chief Coroner Winter arrived unannounced at Dr. Larry Koplin’s clinic in Beverly Hills with a search warrant shortly after his first visit to Arnold Klein’s shop just down the street, demanding to examine the records of a nurse who had worked as an anesthetist in Koplin’s office during the time Michael Jackson was his patient. Winter also visited Dr. Randy Rosen at the Spalding Pain Medical Clinic in Beverly Hills, a high-end outpatient surgery center where Arnold Klein had reportedly required the services of the clinic’s anesthesiologists while he performed an assortment of cosmetic procedures, including, perhaps, some on Michael Jackson. The Spalding Pain Medical Clinic was also, it turned out, where Debbie Rowe had given birth to Paris Jackson in 1998. Knowing that he might be visited next, Dr. Allan Metzger sent forth his celebrity attorney Harland Braun to tell reporters that while his client “did give Mr. Jackson a prescription for a mild sleeping pill in 2009, because Michael was complaining of not sleeping,” Dr. Metzger “turned Michael Jackson down” when the entertainer asked for propofol. The doctor had not seen Mr. Jackson since an April 2009 visit to Michael’s home, Braun added, which was the occasion “when he said no to Michael’s request for Diprivan.” Even without a search warrant served upon him, Dr. Metzger was cooperating fully with authorities, the attorney added: “We have turned over all of Dr. Metzger’s records to the LAPD.”
Alex Farshchian, on the other hand, was resorting to a duck-and-cover strategy, refusing even to admit that he was one of the doctors being targeted by the investigation into Michael Jackson’s death. Plenty of other people, though, were talking to investigators about allegations that the Miami doctor had “overprescribed” antianxiety drugs to Jackson at a time when Michael was downing as many as forty Xanax pills a day. LAPD detectives confided in off-the-record interviews that they were convinced Farshchian had supplied Jackson with Demerol over a period of years.
Even as Farshchian kept silent, a number of other doctors who were not implicated in the investigation chose to be proactive with the media and to make it clear that they were not among Michael Jackson’s enablers. Tokyo-based physician Eugene Aksenoff, who had treated both Michael and his children during their visits to the city, told the Japan Times that he had steadfastly refused Michael’s requests for stimulants (though he said nothing about any requests for sleeping medications) and hypothesized that Michael’s overuse of skin-whitening medications had contributed to the symptoms that plagued him in later years, including his insomnia. Deepak Chopra, who had been licensed as an internist and endocrinologist long before he became a celebrity self-help guru, was outspoken in criticizing the doctors who had fed Michael’s drug habit. “We put drug pushers in jail, but give licenses to doctors who do the same thing,” Chopra said in one of many interviews. “I know personally that they write multiple prescriptions and they even use false names . . . This cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their codependent relationships with addicted celebrities, must be stopped.”
Physicians and pharmacists weren’t the only ones sweating the investigation into Michael Jackson’s drug history. At least two dozen former and current employees or entourage members were suspected of having in some way facilitated Jackson’s procurement of controlled substances, mostly by letting him use their names on prescriptions and/or picking up the drugs at various pharmacies in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Miami. Whether people like his ranch managers Joe Marcus and Jesus Salas had deniability was unclear, and the same might be said of Frank Cascio, whose real name and his alias Frank Tyson had both been used on prescriptions. The names of at least two of Michael’s employees at the time of his death, Kai Chase and Michael Amir Williams, were listed among the “aka’s” in the search warrants served on Conrad Murray’s home and office, as were Paul Farance, Bryan Singleton, Jimmy Nicholas, Roselyn Muhammad, Faheem Muhammad, Fernand Diaz, and Peter Madonie. The name of Michael’s oldest son, Prince, as well those of the long-dead novelist Jack London and the legendary 1930s cabaret performer Josephine Baker were also listed on search warrants as among those Jackson was suspected of using to get prescription drugs during the last months of his life. Items seized in the raid on Conrad Murray’s office included a CD inscribed “Omar Arnold,” the name Michael had used for years on his drug prescriptions. Even those like Joey Jeszeck who had cooperated with authorities and described Michael’s drug use freely back in 2003 and 2004 were being forced to submit to further questioning from various law enforcement agencies, with the threat of prosecution if they failed to disclose all they knew.
Dr. Murray, though, continued to be the primary target. On August 28, 2009, the day after the coroner’s report officially ruling that Michael Jackson’s death had been a homicide, the LAPD announced that it was referring the case to prosecutors who would decide whether to file criminal charges. Murray was left to twist in the wind for weeks afterward while the media speculated endlessly about the strength of the case. Jackson’s history of drug abuse, which had long predated Murray’s presence in his life, was mitigating but not exculpatory. Of far greater concern to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was that the LAPD had not secured the Carolwood chateau in the days after Michael’s death, permitting Jackson family members to reportedly remove not only the cash secreted under the rugs but entire truckloads of other property, which was certain to raise chain-of-custody issues at a criminal trial. Among the missing items was Michael’s personal computer.
Murray remained free on his own recognizance and was living in Houston that November when he made his first public comments in connection to the case to the fellow members of his Galilee Missionary Baptist Church. “I know what trouble is,” the doctor told them, then attempted to paint himself as a well-intentioned physician who was being made into a scapegoat: “I, with my compassion, was only trying to help my fellow man. But it appears I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He had not been convicted of any crime, and was still licensed to practice medicine, Murray reminded the parishioners; he would continue to see patients at his clinic in the Acres Homes area. His attorney Chernoff explained why, in a statement issued that same day: “Because of deteriorating financial conditions and prompting by many of his beloved patients . . . Dr. Murray plans to attend to patients in both Las Vegas and Houston. His decision to first return to practice in Houston was made because of the greater need these low-income patients have for his services and the prohibitive cost of reopening his clinic in Las Vegas.”
The effect in Los Angeles was stepped-up pressure on authorities to initiate a process that would, at the least, strip Murray of his medical license. In January 2010, as leaks out of the DA’s office suggested charges were imminent, Chernoff posted a statement on his Web site announcing that his office was “negotiating with the district attorney’s office the surrender of Dr. Murray.” On February 8, 2010, Murray was officially charged with involuntary manslaughter, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of four years in state prison. After a plea of not guilty was entered at his arraignment, the district attorney’s office revealed that it would use the public forum of a preliminary hearing rather than the private setting of a grand jury proceeding to bring Dr. Murray to trial.
The Jackson family had long since decided that Conrad Murray wouldn’t be the only one to pay. It had taken the Jacksons little time to come to a collective recognition that claims of “foul play” were not necessarily their best hope for profiting from Michael’s death. The suggestion that Tohme Tohme was the ringleader of the “cabal” who were behind it all was undercut by the family’s gradual realization that Tohme had not been around during the last weeks of Michael’s life. While Murray was the primary target of law enforcement, a civil lawsuit against the doctor was unlikely to yield any payday at all, given the number of creditors who had already filed claims on the man’s rapidly diminishing assets. As the summer of 2009 drew toward an end, the vague outline of a legal strategy was emerging from the family’s garbled insinuations. Joe Jackson began to suggest that Michael had been “driven” to his death by people intent upon exploiting his talent, and reminded reporters that AEG, not his son, was Dr. Conrad Murray’s employer. As if picking up on a cue, La Toya Jackson confided to a British reporter that Paris Jackson believed her father had been pushed to a breaking point by the producers of the “This Is It” shows: “She said, ‘No, you don’t understand. They kept working him and Daddy didn’t want that, but they worked him constantly.’ I felt so bad.”
The family had watched with obvious discontent as it dawned on them that, rather than being stuck with the $30 million in losses reported in the media in the days after Michael’s death, AEG was likely to make a substantial profit from the “This Is It” deal. A coroner’s finding of death by drug overdose might make it difficult for AEG to collect insurance payouts to recoup the estimated $25 million it had invested in preparations for the London shows, but the company shrewdly offered ticket holders for the O2 Arena shows the choice between a full refund and a special “souvenir” ticket that featured a three-dimensional image of Michael Jackson. As many as half of the nearly one million people given this option had chosen the souvenir ticket, meaning that AEG could keep nearly 50 percent of the $85 million it had collected. The high-definition video footage of Michael’s rehearsals for the “This Is It” shows held in an AEG vault at the Staples Center set off a bidding frenzy among Hollywood studios when it was offered up as the raw material of a motion picture. Sony put up a bid of $50 million right out of the gate. AEG was also said to be considering a televised tribute concert at the O2 that would incorporate the staging and the choreography of the “This Is It” shows, a spectacle that could run for weeks or even months and produce millions more in profits.
Patrick Allocco and AllGood Entertainment were now locked in a legal battle with the Jackson estate, demanding $300 million that the company argued should be paid out of profits from the planned “This Is It” movie and out of revenues from the Sony/ATV catalog. AllGood’s claim that Frank Dileo, representing himself as Michael Jackson’s manager, had made a written promise that Jackson would tour for the company created some potentially complex problems. Dileo hadn’t been Michael’s manager at the time of the AllGood agreement, according to the Jackson estate, which was currently paying Dileo for supposedly serving as the entertainer’s manager during the run-up to the O2 shows—a deal that had been negotiated entirely by Tohme Tohme, whom the estate wasn’t paying at all. Also named as a defendant in the AllGood lawsuit was AEG Live, which continued to be in business with the Jackson estate and was keeping Dileo tucked comfortably under its wing, knowing he might be needed as a witness in the separate lawsuits the company anticipated would be filed against it by both Tohme and the Jackson family. In the end, the fact that the AllGood contract was so badly written, and that the company had failed to make the initial binder payment promised in that agreement, rendered all other issues moot, and the case was dismissed in federal court on a motion for summary judgment made by Howard Weitzman.
It would not be so easy, though, for AEG and the estate to free themselves from claims by the Jackson family and Tohme Tohme. AEG had seen the Jacksons coming almost from the start, and recognized that the family was using both Michael Jackson’s enormous fan base and the media to develop a PR case against the company. “It’s easy to make us look like corporate villains who took advantage of Michael Jackson,” Randy Phillips complained to Fortune magazine in October 2009. “It’s quite the opposite—we were the people who empowered Michael Jackson and gave him his dream back.” Key witnesses Frank Dileo and Kenny Ortega were clearly allied with AEG. Each man had made multiple public comments about how fit and ready Michael Jackson appeared to be in the final days and weeks of his rehearsals for the O2 shows. “I saw a guy that wanted to perform,” Dileo told ABC. “But he wanted to do it right. And he was strong enough. He was working out every day. If he wasn’t healthy, if there was something wrong, I would have stopped him. There was nothing to stop.” Recalling that final “great week” of rehearsals, Ortega recalled a Michael Jackson who “couldn’t wait to get to London,” and described Michael’s death as “an accident”: “I don’t think that everybody contributed to his life in the most positive way,” Ortega allowed in one interview, “but I don’t think you can hold those people responsible. Michael was a fifty-year-old man. A father. A professional. A businessman.” With Dileo already in their pocket, AEG and the estate had seemingly secured Ortega as well by endorsing him as the director of the This Is It film being made from the rehearsal footage.
The This Is It film itself presented a Michael Jackson to the world who was, as always, different things to different people. Many reviewers and fans agreed with the Wrap.com description of the star as “a surprisingly spry and energetic presence, bounding around the stage and exhorting the backup dancers and musicians to give their all—a far cry from the Howard Hughes–like figure withering away in his final days that had been portrayed in the tabloids.” Others who knew Michael personally, though, said that it pained them to see how diminished he had looked in the film. “He was doing the very same things he had done on the HIStory tour,” complained Dieter Wiesner. “I could see in his eyes how sad that made Michael, to be doing the same thing all over again, only not so well.” Tohme Tohme said that he had seen a Michael who was shockingly more gaunt and fragile-looking than the entertainer he had traveled to London with in March 2009. “In the film he was dancing mostly with his hands, he could barely move his lower body,” Tohme said. “He was not the same Michael I saw in March and April.”
Remarks such as that might have made Tohme an excellent witness for the Jacksons in a claim against AEG, but Michael’s former manager was far from disposed toward the family, still convinced that Joe and Katherine had conspired with Dileo and Leonard Rowe against him, and that by doing so had contributed to their son’s death. “If I am there, no way will this Dr. Murray be in that house,” Tohme said. “I would never have let Michael lose so much weight. I would not have let that happen to him. He would still be alive if those people hadn’t separated him from me.”
Tohme’s adversarial relationship with the Michael Jackson estate, and with the estate’s three general counsels—John Branca, Howard Weitzman, and Joel Katz—had also hardened as the end of 2009 approached. Branca and his legal team were backing Frank Dileo’s claim that he had been Michael Jackson’s manager “in life and in death.” It was widely reported that the estate was putting Dileo up at the Beverly Hilton and paying him some undisclosed sum of money for services that were not detailed in public records.
Tohme felt betrayed that Randy Phillips now seemed to be going along with the story that Dileo was Michael Jackson’s manager. Without Phillips, there was no way that Frank Dileo would have been credited as a producer on the This Is It movie, Tohme knew. “I alone made the This Is It deal,” he said. “Randy knows that. He has said so in public. And yet Dileo is the one who receives credit and money for the movie.” Tohme was unsettled by his belated discovery that Phillips had given Dileo an office at AEG during the last weeks of Michael Jackson’s life, and even more disturbed to learn that AEG was still taking care of Dileo in an assortment of ways, even using the company’s cars and chauffeurs to carry Frank to various music industry events, including the Grammy Awards ceremony. Phillips had told various media outlets, including Rolling Stone magazine, that Tohme remained Michael’s manager right up to the end. It was Randy, Tohme pointed out, who had insisted he should be the one to join Jermaine Jackson at UCLA in announcing Michael’s death. That day, Phillips introduced Tohme to people as Michael Jackson’s manager, but in his dealings with Branca and the estate, Phillips was reportedly not so sure. Under pressure from AEG’s attorneys not to comment, Phillips would only say of the dispute over who managed Michael Jackson that “There was a great deal of confusion, some of it created by Michael himself.”