The Michael Jackson Tapes

by Shmuley Boteach

  Michael returned to New York in January and we got into gear for the several major events we’d scheduled for February and March to launch Heal the Kids.

  The first, on Valentine’s Day at Carnegie Hall, was a large event where Michael and I invited leading childrearing experts, as well as personalities such as Johnnie Cochran, Judith Regan, and Dr. Drew Pinsky, to discuss how the romantic love between husband and wife should lead to the building of a stable family with children being nourished from the foundational devotion of loving parents. Then, less than a month later, on March 6th, we gave a major address together at the main debating chamber of the Oxford Union at Oxford University, where so many luminaries had spoken before him. The speech was largely on the theme of forgiveness and the importance of children refraining from judging their parents. I had written it for Michael based on our interviews for this book and his own thoughts about his desire to change and heal.

  When people first heard that Michael was going to give a lecture at Oxford they laughed. But he received a standing ovation from over a thousand enthralled students and it was extremely well-received in the press. I worked harder writing that speech than almost anything I had ever written because I so badly wanted the world to see Michael in a positive light. Interestingly an excerpt from the speech was used in the opening to Ian Halperin’s bestseller, Unmasked.

  To my mind, his words can almost be seen as Michael’s and my hope and wish for the new direction in his life. I had decided that the lecture should focus largely on the theme of children refraining from judging their parents so that Michael himself would seek to purge himself of all the unhealthy anger he harbored toward his father. If the broken parent-child bond was to be rebuilt, it could not be done against a backdrop of bitterness, disappointment, and recrimination. Children would have to learn how to put themselves in their parents’ shoes, empathize with the challenges they faced as people and as parents, and try and understand why they made the bad mistakes they did as parents.

  I told Michael that he would have to embody the lesson by not just preaching it but living it. He would have to reconcile with his father, with whom he had a famously tortured relationship. Michael had on many public occasions criticized his father and I had told him it was inappropriate. He owed his father gratitude rather than hostility, in accordance with the Fifth Commandment, in which God had commanded him to honor his father. Even if he didn’t always feel love for him, he still had to honor him.

  On the way down to Oxford, while we were just hours away from the lecture, I told Michael that the time had come. His lecture would be meaningless if he did not call his father before the event and tell him that he loved him and that he should never have judged him. That, because he hadn’t lived his father’s life, he couldn’t possibly understand why his father did the things he did. He took a cell phone and called his father and reached him in Las Vegas.

  Several of us in the car bore witness to Michael telling his father, perhaps for the first time, that he loved him and that his speech at Oxford that night would be all about him and how he now recognizes that he had no right to judge him. Michael always called his father Joseph, rather than Dad. When his father first answered the phone, Michael said, “I’m giving a speech at Oxford University tonight. And it’s about you.” His father immediately said, “Uh oh!” And Michael corrected his misconception. “No, it’s nothing bad. It’s to tell the world that I love you.”

  Michael’s speech conveyed an important message of healing:You probably weren’t surprised to hear that I did not have an idyllic childhood. The strain and tension that exists in my relationship with my father is well documented. My father is a tough man, and he pushed my brothers and me hard, from the earliest age, to be the best performers we could be.

  He had great difficulty showing affection. He never really told me he loved me. And he never really complimented me either. If I did a great show, he would tell me it was a good show. And if I did an okay show, he told me it was a lousy show. He seemed intent above all else on making us a commercial success. And at that he was more than adept. My father was a managerial genius and my brothers and I owe our professional success in no small measure to the forceful way that he pushed us. He trained me as a showman and, under his guidance, I couldn’t miss a step.

  But what I really wanted was a Dad. I wanted a father who showed me love. And my father never did that. He never said, “I love you,” whilst looking me straight in the eye, he never played a game with me, he never gave me a piggyback ride, he never threw a pillow at me.

  But I remember once when I was about four years old there was a little carnival and he picked me up and put me on a pony. It was a tiny gesture, probably something he forgot five minutes later. But because of that one moment, I have this special place in my heart for him. Because that’s how kids are. The little things mean so much to them, and for me, that one moment meant everything. I only experienced it that one time but it made me really feel a lot differently about him and the world.

  But now I am a father myself, and one day I was thinking about my own children, Prince and Paris, and how I wanted them to think of me when they grow up. To be sure, I would like them to remember how I always wanted them with me wherever I went, how I always tried to put them before everything, including my albums and my concerts.

  But there are also challenges in their lives. Because my kids are stalked by paparazzi, they can’t always go to a park or a movie with me. So, what if they grow older and resent me and how my choices affected their youth? Why weren’t we given an average childhood, like all the other kids, they might ask?

  And at that moment, I pray that my children will give me the benefit of the doubt. That they will say, “Our Daddy did the best he could given the unique circumstances that he faced. He may not have been perfect, but he was a warm and decent man who tried to give us all the love in the world.”

  I hope that they will always focus on the positive things, on the sacrifices I willingly made for them, and not criticize the sacrifices circumstances may have forced upon them or the errors I have made and will certainly continue to make in raising them. For we have all been someone’s child and we know that despite the very best of plans and efforts mistakes will always occur. That is just being human.

  And when I think about this, of how I hope that my children will not judge me unfavorably, and will forgive me my shortcomings, I am forced to think of my own father, and despite the part of me that denied it for years I have to admit that he must have loved me. He did love me, and I know that.

  There were little things that showed it. When I was a kid I had a real sweet tooth—we all did. My favorite food was glazed donuts, and my father knew that. So, every few weeks I would come downstairs in the morning and there on the kitchen counter was a bag of glazed donuts—no note, no explanation—just the donuts. It was like Santa Claus. Sometimes I would think about staying up late at night so I could see him leave them there but, just like with Santa Claus, I didn’t want to ruin the magic, for fear that he would never do it again. My father had to leave them stealthily at night so no one might catch him with his guard down. He was scared of human emotion, he didn’t understand it or know how to deal with it. But he did know donuts.

  And when I allow the floodgates to open up, there are other memories that come rushing back, memories of other tiny gestures, however incomplete, that showed that he did what he could.

  So tonight, rather than focusing on what my father didn’t do, I want to focus on all the things he did do, and on his own personal challenges. I want to stop judging him.

  I have started reflecting on the fact that my father grew up in the South, in a very poor family. He came of age during the Depression, and his own father, who struggled to feed his children, showed little affection toward his family and raised my father and his siblings with an iron fist. Who could have imagined what it was like to grow up a poor black man in the South, robbed of dignity, bereft of hope, struggling to become a man in a
world that saw my father as subordinate. I was the first black artist to be played on MTV and I remember how big a deal it was even then. And that was in the 1980s!

  My father moved to Indiana and had a large family of his own, working long hours in the steel mills, work that kills the lungs and humbles the spirit, all to support his family. Is it any wonder that he found it difficult to expose his feelings? Is it any mystery that he hardened his heart, that he raised the emotional ramparts? What other choice does a man have when his life is a struggle just to get by? And most of all, is it any wonder why he pushed his sons so hard to succeed as performers so that they could be saved from what he knew to be a life of indignity and poverty? I have begun to see that even my father’s harshness was a kind of love, an imperfect love, to be sure, but love nonetheless. He pushed me because he loved me. Because he wanted no man to ever look down at his offspring.

  And now, with time, rather than bitterness I feel blessing. In the place of anger, I have found absolution. And in the place of revenge, I have found reconciliation. And my initial fury has slowly given way to forgiveness.

  Almost a decade ago, I founded a charity called Heal the World. The title was something I felt inside me. Little did I know, as Shmuley later pointed out, that those two words form the cornerstone of Old-Testament prophecy. Do I really believe that we can heal this world that is riddled with war and hate and genocide even today? And do I really think that we can heal our children, the same children who can enter their schools with guns and hatred and shoot down their classmates like they did at Columbine; our children who can beat a defenseless toddler to death like the tragic story of Jamie Bulger [murdered in England by two ten-year-olds]? Of course I do, or I wouldn’t be here tonight. But it all begins with forgiveness. Because to heal the world we first have to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within each and every one of us.

  As an adult, and as a parent, I realize that I cannot be a whole human being, nor a parent capable of fully committed, unconditional love until I put to rest the ghosts of my own childhood.

  And that’s what I’m asking all of us to do tonight. Live up to the Fifth of the Ten Commandments. Honor your parents by not judging them. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Understand that they had their own struggles, their own pains, their own traumas, and still did the best that they could.

  That is why I want to forgive my father, and to stop judging him. I want to forgive him because I want a father and this is the only one that I’ve got. I want the weight of my past lifted from my shoulders, and I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past.

  Shmuley and I, who are launching this initiative tonight, are members of the Black and Jewish communities, both of which have confronted horrors and atrocities throughout our histories. How do our communities forgive the horrors done to us without forgetting them altogether? By remembering. We pass along our stories. But we also rise above those stories. In a world filled with hate, we still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we still dare to believe.

  To all of you tonight who feel let down by your parents, I ask you to let down your disappointment. To all of you tonight who feel cheated by your fathers or mothers, I ask you not to cheat yourself further. And to all of you tonight who feel like telling their parents they can go to hell, I ask you tonight to extend your hand to them instead.

  For in the exchange of pain the accounts are never balanced. Vengeance cannot bring restitution. By forgiving our parents, we are not denying that they may have wronged us. We are not whitewashing their sins or creating saints of sinners. But harboring resentment against your parents will never give you the love you so crave. Getting even will not make our lives better. Perpetual pain, perpetual suffering, the cycle never ends. There is a Bakongo proverb that says, “To take revenge is to sacrifice oneself.” And friends, our generation has sacrificed and suffered enough.

  Rather, I am asking you, I am asking myself, to give our parents the gift of unconditional love so that they too may learn how to love from us, their children. So that love will finally be restored to a desolate and lonely world. Shmuley once mentioned to me an ancient Biblical prophecy which says that the time would come when “the hearts of the parents would be restored through the hearts of their children.” My friends, we are those children.

  Mahatma Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Tonight, be strong. Beyond being strong, rise to the greatest challenge of all: to restore that broken covenant by teaching our parents how to love. We must all overcome whatever crippling effects our childhoods may have had on our lives, and in the words of Jesse Jackson, forgive each other, redeem each other, and move on.

  With the world press extolling his speech at Oxford and with his life making strides toward normalcy, things were looking up. Michael came with me to synagogue and regularly attended Shabbat dinner. He seemed directed and content. He listened to what was being planned and what the purpose was, and he’d agree.

  There were also simple times when I witnessed Michael’s extremely moving acts of humility and kindness. A neighborhood friend asked me if he could bring his thirty-something brother with Down syndrome to meet Michael. Michael was one of his idols and the brother could even do the moon walk. Michael was focused on finishing his album but told me he could do a short meeting. The man arrived and sang some of Michael’s songs for us, did the moon walk, and in general imitated Michael on stage. Michael could not have been kinder to this special man with special needs.

  After the man departed with his family I thanked Michael for his kindness. “You did a very beautiful thing today,” I said. “I am truly grateful.”

  “No Shmuley,” he replied. “You did me a favor by bringing him. I so enjoyed his company. I’m jealous of him.”

  “Why would you say that, Michael?”

  “Because he will never grow up. He will remain forever young and innocent. I envy him.”

  There were many stories like these, special acts of kindness granted by a soft and gentle human being who had a soft and gentle heart.

  The End of Our Relationship

  As Michael become more motivated, energetic, and visible, those who had written him off suddenly started showing up again. You could see them saying to themselves: He’s going places again. People who had been at their wits ends with his lack of productivity were ready to start making things happen. Managers and producers whom he had not heard from in quite a while were now visiting him in his hotel suite. The direct result was that my influence with Michael was now waning and he was slipping—missing meetings, not keeping regular hours, not showing his commitment, cringing and sinking into himself if I asked him about something to do with advancing our project to prioritize kids in the lives of parents. There was a growing tension between us. He started to disregard my advice to stay the course of the program we had devised on his birthday. And rather than being supported, I was being undermined by the people around him who accused me of diminishing Michael’s star power.

  I heard later that Michael had been introduced to concert promoter David Guest (best known for marrying Liza Minelli and the messy lawsuits that followed) on a trip to meet Shirley Temple Black. David started saying to Michael that they should do a concert together to mark his thirtieth year as a performer. Michael was afraid to tell me because he knew I would oppose the idea until he’d found a sense of spiritual renewal. I’d tell him: Don’t go back half-baked. It killed you the first time; don’t do it the second time.

  Of course I knew some meetings were going on, but what I didn’t know, and learned a few months later from Michael’s parents at their home in Encino, was that some in Michael’s professional team had started telling Michael that I was demystifying him and making him too available. The attitude was that
the rabbi is well-intentioned, but he is cheapening your brand by getting you to do free lectures at places like universities when your real place is in front of hundreds of thousands of paying fans in stadiums.

  During this time the British journalist Martin Bashir had his office call me as an intermediary about a possible documentary on Michael because one of the producers he worked with knew me from my years as rabbi at Oxford University. I told Michael it would be a disastrous mistake. “Don’t even think of doing this documentary,” I warned. “First, your life is not yet ready to be opened to scrutiny. Second, you don’t need to be more famous and invite cameras into your life. You need to heal and to become more credible.”

  I didn’t even bother calling Bashir’s people back and thought the project was dead. Two years later, our mutual friend Uri Geller would persuade Michael to do the Bashir project, which would be aired in 2003 under the title Living with Michael Jackson. It would prove to be one of the single greatest catastrophes ever to befall him. Michael’s comments about “sleeping with children” would be seen by millions worldwide and would lead directly to his arrest on charges of child molestation.

  Uri and I remain good friends and I know he cared for Michael deeply. I never would have met Michael if it weren’t for Uri. And it was for this reason that I made a point of showing constant gratitude by including Uri in everything that Michael and I did together, including and especially our trip to the UK for the Oxford lecture, where Uri joined Michael and me on the stage at the Oxford Union. I honored Uri’s request to bring Michael to Uri’s wedding as best man, and as Uri’s rabbi I myself was honored to be asked to perform the wedding. Uri is one of the warmest and most loving people I know. But even with the best of intentions, his arranging for Michael to do the Bashir documentary was tragically misguided and catastrophic.