“Michael was a good person, of that I’m certain,” Tom Mesereau said shortly after the star’s death. “He was one of the most sensitive and kindest people I’ve ever encountered. He really wanted what was best for everyone. He wanted people to do well. And he was remarkable with children and the elderly, one of the most considerate, if not the most considerate people I’ve ever met in that regard.”
Kenny Ortega said that if you had been there to see what it was like to be on tour with Michael in the 1980s, before those allegations about him first made by the Chandler boy, if you had seen him hurrying to visit one orphanage or children’s hospital ward after another between performances, in city after city, all over the world, you would have understood that the accusations against him simply could not be true. He had spent months at a stretch in constant contact with Michael Jackson, over a period of more than two decades, Ortega noted, and in all that time, “I’ve never seen Michael do anything to embarrass, harm, insult, or hurt anyone, ever.”
What was perhaps most remarkable about Michael Jackson—more remarkable even than his tremendous talent—was that the overwhelming testimony to his goodness, to his sensitivity and kindness and generosity and resilience, could be so completely convincing and yet not cancel out the voices of those who gave the world reasons to wonder what lay underneath, or alongside, that goodness. The conundrum was as perplexing as any in the history of celebrity. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt about what Michael had or had not done would never be possible. Questions would remain. He didn’t have to live with them anymore, but those he had left behind did.
“Please tell the world my son was not a pedophile,” Katherine Jackson told me in the spring of 2011. “He was not and people need to know that about him.” I could only say that I didn’t believe Michael was a child molester.
Later I thought that perhaps it was a pity Mrs. Jackson had decided her son should not be interred at Neverland Ranch. What her decision had cost was more than a pilgrimage site for the fans or a row of ticket booths for the estate. The greater loss, it seemed to me, was that within the main house at Neverland existed the most fitting of all possible crypts for the King of Pop, the one perfect place in the world to contemplate the abiding mystery of Michael Jackson.
This hidden space was a custom feature of the main house that the dozens of deputies who swarmed the ranch back in November 2003 had almost overlooked. Behind a screen of stage uniforms in the back of a closet in the master bedroom was a trapdoor that opened onto a narrow carpeted stairwell lined with rag dolls, descending to a tiny eight-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle that seemed like a small child’s bedroom. There were toys and games stacked on shelves. The walls were decorated with photographs of diapered babies. A large stuffed doll with big eyes and red hair reclined at the head of the single bed, leaning against pillowcases imprinted with the face of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan—the one with Bobby Driscoll’s features—and the word “Neverland.” A Mickey Mouse telephone sat on the nightstand, next to a framed photograph of Macaulay Culkin signed, “Don’t leave me in the house alone.”
This, according to the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, was where Michael Jackson brought boys to sexually molest them. There was some basis for believing it might be true. The three deadbolt locks on that trapdoor, for instance. Michael wanted his privacy when he came down those carpeted stairs to the room with baby pictures on the walls, obviously. But for what? Those who arrested and prosecuted Jackson have yet to explain how it was that, out of the hundreds of boys who spent the night with him at Neverland Ranch, only two (or three, if Jason Francia is counted) ever accused him of sexual molestation, and that in each case the circumstances of those charges was at least as suspicious as anything Michael ever did or said. The detectives and the district attorneys haven’t explained, either, how it could be that even those accusers never claimed Michael took them to the secret room to abuse them.
Marc Schaffel had purchased the photographs of the little boys in diapers that hung on the walls of Michael’s most private place. It had started after Michael saw a poster-size photograph of a little blue-eyed blond boy in a diaper on the ceiling of a store they visited together, Schaffel recalled, and sent him back to buy the picture, whatever it cost. He remembered being instructed also to locate and obtain a book that featured naked toddlers done up as cherubs, Marc said. Schaffel admitted he had no idea whether such images stirred sexual feelings in Michael, but it was in this secret room where Michael had hidden from his father, his mother, and his brother Jermaine back in 2001, when they were trying to get him to the sign the contract promising them another $500,000 for showing up at thirtieth anniversary concerts. Prince and Paris had been with Michael on that occasion, noted Schaffel, who found it impossible to believe his friend would have brought his own children to a room where he had sexually molested others.
Alternate theories deserve consideration. One legitimate possibility was that the secret room was where Michael Jackson came to join those babies on the wall, to be one among them, not necessarily wearing a diaper or sucking on a milk bottle (though such notions couldn’t be simply dismissed in Michael’s case), but to travel back in time as far as it was possible to go, to that point where he could imagine being born again as the child he had so long yearned to be, the one who had grown up on the other side of the window, not in the studio, but on the playground.
Michael himself had been trying to tell people something like this for the last thirty years of his life. “One of my favorite pastimes is being with children—talking to them, playing games with them in the grass,” he told an interviewer from Melody Maker shortly after the release of Off the Wall. “They’re one of the main reasons I do what I do. They know everything that people are trying to find out—they know so many secrets—but it’s hard for them to get it out. I can recognize them and learn from it.”
Ultimately, no one could be certain of the truth. Admitting that, though, did not change the fact that the tiny hidden room behind the closet and down the stairs was the best spot on the planet to acknowledge a truth: Of all the answers one might offer to the central question hanging over the memory of Michael Jackson, the one best supported by the evidence was that he had died as a fifty-year-old virgin, never having had sexual intercourse with any man, woman, or child, in a special state of loneliness that was a large part of what made him so unique as an artist and so unhappy as a human being. In that room, a person could choose to mourn for the Michael Jackson who had lived his last fifteen years convinced that he had been found guilty in the court of public opinion, and to permit him the presumption of an innocence he spent his whole life trying to reclaim.
In that room it would be possible, perhaps, even to grant him the wish that he isn’t sleeping alone tonight.