It was a few months later, after I had severed all contact with Michael, that reports started to filter back to me from one of Michael’s closest confidantes that he was hooked on prescription medication and imbibing large quantities of them. It was getting much worse, this friend said, and it was destroying his life. Demerol and Xanax, among others, were mentioned. “Is there a quack doctor giving this stuff to him?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “The doctors around him seem okay. He seems to be getting his own supply; no one knows from where. Michael is injecting himself with the drugs intravenously.” “Well,” I said, noting that Michael and I had no interaction and I could therefore offer little assistance, “you guys better do something and save him before he completely self-destructs.”
Michael’s parents, Katherine and Joseph Jackson, were also concerned and invited me to their home in Encino, where they asked me to reinvolve myself in Michael’s life. Michael’s parents related to me that Michael had deteriorated significantly since I had last seen him. His state was bad enough for them to have attempted a family intervention to break the drugs’ hold on him. Michael’s brothers, a few weeks earlier, had arrived at Neverland unannounced to try to get him into rehab, where he had gone almost ten years earlier after admitting to an addiction to prescription drugs. Michael, however, had heard that they were coming and fled.
His parents were concerned, and I felt for them. But this just reinforced my decision. Not only was I sure that Michael would not listen to me, I knew next to nothing about helping people in this situation except to get them into rehab. Perhaps I could inspire Michael to make that decision, and his parents thought I could at least help. But I knew they were wrong. Michael had long since ceased taking my counsel. He found my advice too demanding. I was an irritant and was treated as such. Katherine, who was the anchor of Michael’s life and whom I knew from the long interview I had done with her for this book, and Joseph Jackson, who I was meeting for the first and only time, had much more sway with their son than I did, and it was imperative for them to save their son’s life by becoming available parents in his greatest hour of need. And if his own parents could not persuade him to get help, how could I?
Joseph Jackson also raised the subject of Michael’s management with me. He said he didn’t approve of the people running Michael’s career at present and that he wished to reinvolve himself in Michael’s management. I told him sternly, if respectfully, “Mr. Jackson, your son doesn’t need a manager right now. He needs a father. You should relate to him as the father he feels he never had.”
I left that meeting shaken. How tragic for Michael, and how similar this was all beginning to sound to Elvis, a fallen star, in terrible emotional and mental anguish, turning to drugs for relief, until they eventually destroyed him. Would Michael end up dead at an early age as well?
According to someone very close to Michael, the year before his arrest, Michael got clean. This person told me that Michael had, by himself, “gotten off the stuff. . . he’s completely clean.” I was incredulous. “He didn’t go for rehab?” I asked. “You’re saying he got himself clean on his own?” “Yup,” he said, “We’re really proud of him. He’s clean. I swear it’s true.” Well, that was good news.
I was therefore extremely troubled to hear, from the same person again, that shortly after the arrest Michael had gone back on “the same stuff. He’s delusional. That’s how he’s coping with the case. He’s out of it a lot of the time.”
“Have you tried to get him to stop?” I asked. “Yeah, I had a meeting with him. I told him I was positive he was back on the stuff. He denied it, but I know what he’s like when he takes that stuff. But he responded by sort of cutting me off from him. Now, I can’t get access to him.”
This, sadly, was a typical response to Michael hearing people criticize his behavior. He just shut them out. “Do the people around him know?” I asked. “I don’t see how they can’t,” he responded. “He’s drinking a lot of wine and mixing it with all this stuff.” This last comment especially surprised me, because, to my knowledge, Michael never drank alcohol. Indeed, even when he came to our home for the Sabbath meals, he would reject the tiny quantity of sacramental wine I offered him, telling me that he never drank “the Jesus juice.”
The fact that Michael Jackson had been taking large doses of prescription medication explained much of his erratic behavior. Why would the man who was so famously overprotective of his kids suddenly dangle his own new baby from a balcony in Berlin? Why would the man who was so famously reclusive agree to a British journalist virtually living with him for a tell-all television documentary? Michael always told me how much he hated the British press more than any other. He told me that “Whacko Jacko” had started in England. So why would he have allowed Martin Bashir to essentially live him for so many months? Indeed, Michael’s decision to grant full access to Bashir will forever remain the professional decision that most unraveled his life.
When I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley that preceded the trial, in which Michael accused the Santa Barbara police of locking him up for forty-five minutes in a feces-covered bathroom and roughing him up so badly that they dislocated his shoulder, it seemed so improbable that I suspected that Michael’s reality had been impaired.
Sure enough, twice in the interview they showed Michael stopping the interview to complain about how much his back hurt. The old opportunities (excuses) to take more prescription medication were back. I called my friend. “Did the police do all those things?” “No,” he said. “They were really nice to him. Michael is delusional.” Now this report may have been inaccurate, but I doubt it.
In 2004 I wrote in a public article, “If the people around him don’t save Michael from himself, Michael may be yet another superstar who dies young, God forbid, due to the quintessential celebrity-oriented diseases of drug and substance abuse. But a wall of silence around this problem, while it might protect Michael’s image, will do nothing to protect him.”
Attitudes Toward Women and Pornography
I expected that after the episode with his parents, my last major point of contact, Michael Jackson would be entirely absent from my life. But his deteriorating condition had strangely awakened within me much of my old affection for my former friend. Whether it was pity or nostalgia, I cannot quite say.
I have consistently said that I never saw Michael do anything that would lead me to believe that he molested children. But since his trial uncovered that Michael was apparently absorbing large quantities of pornography, I understood something that had previously puzzled me. Michael Jackson, in the time that I knew him, had no real relationships with women. And this hurt him terribly because it meant that he had few nurturing relationships in his life.
When I was around him, his inner circle consisted entirely of men. Indeed, with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, whom I never met and never saw in Michael’s company, Michael seemed highly suspicious of women. He would tell me that many women are interested in money and that some of his brother’s wives, whom he believed were motivated by greed, had torn the once close-knit bonds of the Jackson family asunder. To be sure, Michael loved and respected his mother, Katherine, immensely, and for good reason. A woman of great religious piety and principle, she was arguably the only truly positive influence in Michael’s life. But she, sadly, had little control over her son and Michael shunned her advice.
Men who constantly feed their minds with porn quickly lose respect for women. Pornography depicts women not only as sleazy and vulgar but as greedy and parasitical. The porn watcher never forgets that the women who are stripping for him are doing so for cash. He concludes, therefore, that there is nothing women aren’t prepared to do for money. Unlike men who at least have some standards, women are motivated entirely by greed.
With Michael, unfortunately, such toxic imagery actually started early, as our conversations revealed. It was Michael’s recollection that from a young age he had witnessed women stripping in nightclubs where the
Jackson 5 performed. Michael came to equate adult sexuality in general, and women in particular, as prurient, manipulative, and even unclean. It may also explain why Michael may have, as some have alleged, gravitated toward adolescent sexuality, which was so much more innocent by comparison.
No doubt the pornographic images of women he was consuming helped to solidify that impression. Indeed, Michael’s 2005 trial revolved around the question of whether the mother of his fifteen-year-old accuser was a gold digger who coached her children to lie about Michael to rip him off. The effects of pornography on the male psyche is something that I dealt with extensively in my book Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. But as it applies to Michael Jackson, these exploitative images could only have reinforced a preconceived notion that people in general, and women in particular, are out to use him and he’d better be wary.
King Solomon declared in Proverbs that “He who has found a woman has found goodness,” and Michael’s inability to have healthy attachments to women could only have contributed to his steady and sad decline.
Pedophilia Charges
Much of the world came to regard Michael as a pedophile. I never saw anything that would even remotely have me accept that conclusion. I never believed the allegations against him brought by the family of Gavin Arvizo. As I said, I was at Neverland with my family when the Arvizos arrived. Far from being too obsessed with Gavin, Michael disappointed me with his seeming lack of interest in the child, amid the occasional moving conversation trying to convince Gavin that he had no fear of looking bald from chemotherapy because he was a beautiful boy.
I will, however, confess to having been severely jolted by the testimony of Jordy Chandler’s mom, the mother of the first alleged victim, in Michael’s 2005 trial. It did seem from her testimony that Michael was erotically obsessed with her son. It is also possible, as I said earlier, that Michael was psychologically scarred by the damaging images of women performing striptease acts that he witnessed at such a young age at nightclubs, which may have led him to be turned off women in general and adult sexuality in particular. He may have come to associate adolescent sexuality with purity and innocence. But none of this is anything more than uncorroborated speculation. What is certainly unnerving is Michael’s multimillion dollar settlement with Jordy Chandler, even amid Michael’s constant protestations to me that he settled the case because his advisers forced him to for fear that a trial would destroy his career.
But while Michael may or may not be guilty of the accusations against him, he was certainly guilty of feeling that different rules applied to his relationship with kids, or worse, that there were no rules at all.
I thought often of those first days in Neverland after reading news accounts of Tom Sneddon’s opening statement in Michael’s trial in Santa Barbara. The chief prosecutor maintained that Michael Jackson invited his accuser and his family to his Neverland Valley Ranch in August 2000, and that the first night, at dinner, he asked the boy to ask his mom if he could spend the night in Michael’s bedroom. Later, according to Sneddon, together with his employee Frank Cascio, Michael showed the accuser and his brother pornographic photos off the Internet.
All this may be true, but when I first heard it, it sounded completely suspect. Michael was desperate to have someone of reputation vouch for him and serve as his mouthpiece. He wanted me to serve in that role and wanted to make a positive impression on me, and I even surmised that he had purposely invited the Arvizos to Neverland while we were there to show me how much he cared for children stricken with cancer. Would he really have begun showing the boy pornographic materials while I was staying there with my family? It is possible, but he would have to have been a complete fool to do so. But perhaps it was I who was the fool in overestimating what my opinion of Michael meant to him.
Frank Cascio, who remains one of my dear friends, was named as an unindicted coconspirator who allegedly participated in showing the kids pornography on that first night. (Frank told me after the trial was over, and subsequently stated in an ABC television interview, that pornographic images were pulled up on the computer, but they were pulled up by the boys, who were acting wildly.)
I know Frank well and he features prominently in this book because he served as Michael’s closest confidante and personal aide. No one was more devoted to Michael than Frank. I liked Frank very much and tried at the time and ever since to play a role as a mentor to him, feeling as I did that he was a young man, with good intentions, adrift in the chaotic and frenzied life of Michael Jackson. Frank was in his early twenties when I first met him, yet he was basically in charge of nearly every aspect of Michael’s life. I would regularly lecture him about the need to remain firmly connected to God, to go to church (he was from a Christian family), to put his own parents and siblings before his relationship with Michael, and to try and help protect Michael from himself.
One of my main points to Frank was to ensure that Michael was never alone with children, given the 1993 allegations, and Frank, caring deeply about Michael and being around him constantly, promised to always be present when Michael was with children. Perhaps that is why he was there that first night when Michael’s accuser and his brother were in Michael’s bedroom.
The idea, as later alleged in the trial, that Frank threatened the boy’s family with harm should they testify against Michael, was always improbable to impossible. Frank was always extremely well-mannered and went to great lengths to be the counterbalance to Michael’s narcissism. From my knowledge of Frank, he could not hurt a fly, and from the time I met him I endeavored to positively affect Frank, making sure that his life did not go down the tragic route that Michael’s did, being destroyed by the vacuous and unprincipled world of empty celebrity circles.
Frank, who came to run Michael’s career, was never malicious, and I never once saw him even lose his temper. He always behaved with maturity and impeccable manners. After the trial ended, Frank called me and offered something of an apology. He told me that he now appreciated how I tried to rehabilitate Michael when the three of us were close, regretted that he was too young to understand it at the time, and that later, after I departed, he gave Michael much the same advice that I had given him four years earlier.
Michael’s Death
I did not expect to be as saddened by Michael’s death as I turned out to be. Not that I am cold-hearted, but I lived in constant dread that his death was imminent. When I was close with Michael, there were just too many times that he walked out of a room with a doctor, after complaining that his foot or back or neck hurt him. There was no way that a body could survive so regular an assault. So after begging him to give up the poison and failing, I steeled myself against the inevitable by feeling angry and disillusioned.
Was Michael not the man who had squandered so many blessings? Was he not the friend who, after I had invested two years of my life into helping him rehabilitate his, treated me as if I were a nuisance because I dared to push him to fix his shattered existence? I would overcome my feelings of pity with a spirit of defiance. No, I would not cry. He hadn’t earned it.
But then the news of his death came and I was devastated. Michael was accused of pedophilia. But my children and his children were playmates. Yes, I made sure to supervise. But the children did not see him as a monster. Michael brought cartoon videos for his kids and my kids to watch. We sat in my living room laughing and joking. And the children remembered him and missed him.
Once, when my son Mendy was eight years old, he accompanied Michael and me to a kosher restaurant in Manhattan. Mendy tried to order. The waiter focused on the adults. Mendy felt ignored. He kept on repeating his order. Michael heard him. He interrupted the waiter. “Excuse me, but this child is trying to order. Can you please listen to him?” It was not something you’d expect from a superstar. They were supposed to be utterly self-absorbed, right?
I did not think I would cry when Michael died. It was only when I went back and listened to the many hours of our tap
ed conversations for this book that I peered once again into his soul. Hearing his voice, hearing him say, in his long drawn-out way, “Shmmuuulleeeey,” that did it. The tears flowed. Yes, I was angry at him. Truly. He threw away his life. He had lived recklessly and orphaned his children. He had medicated his various psychosomatic illnesses until his body could no longer tolerate the abuse. He had played the victim, blamed all his problems on others, and squandered his limitless gifts and God-given potential. But he touched me nonetheless.
He made me softer and gentler. He was highly imperfect and was perhaps guilty of serious, terrible sins for which there might not be any redemption. But God, was he tortured! And that is no excuse because you dare not visit your pain on an innocent party. And he would have to be held accountable for his actions. However, did that cancel out the good he tried to inspire in others?
He used to watch me tell my children I loved them. He did not approve. “Shmuley, when you tell your children you luuuvve them, you have to look in their eyes. They have to know that you mean it. You have to focus only on them. You can’t tell them and look somewhere else.” And ever since then, I peer into their eyes.
God, I miss you Michael. I always believed that one day we would reconcile. That one day you would call me and tell me that you regretted not heeding the simple advice to get your life together. That we would have Shabbat dinner together again and our kids would play as friends and we would all laugh. Alas, all we have left is the image. The dark, tragic, sad image of the King of Pop. The master of an empty Kingdom.
The Michael Jackson Tapes Page 7