Michael Jackson

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  When Michael was unhappy with a person, that person was usually ousted from his world. Many important people had shown up in his life and then been banished from it over the years. Some of them, like John Branca, had considered themselves long-time friends of Michael’s, but such status did not save them from being terminated. If Michael could let go of John after more than ten years, where then did Evan Chandler stand after just a few weeks? Michael stopped returning Evan’s telephone calls when Evan became a problem in his life. If he could have fired him, or had someone else do the job, he would have done it.

  However, Michael had seriously underestimated Evan. He wasn’t an employee who could be easily dismissed. Rather, he was the father of the boy upon whom Michael had fixated, for whatever reason. He wasn’t about to allow Michael to cut him out of his life, and out of his friendship with Jordie, especially since he wasn’t sure he even trusted him. There was something not right about Michael’s friendship with Jordie, he decided, and he was going to set it straight if, for no other reason, than to prove to Michael Jackson that he couldn’t get away with it.

  Dirty Minds

  In June 1993, Jordie Chandler was scheduled to graduate from junior high school’s seventh grade. For months, he had anticipated the students’ party that would commemorate the milestone for them. Though Jordie had always been a popular student and had many friends, lately he seemed not to be in communication with many of them. He had become so antisocial since meeting Michael Jackson, his parents were concerned. However, the fact that he was still enthusiastic about going to the end-of-the-year dance did suggest to Evan and June that their son was still a normal teenager.

  However, when Jordie walked into his mother’s bedroom to announce that he had decided not to attend the school function and wanted, instead, to spend the evening with Michael Jackson, she was worried. He had more fun with Michael than he did with his school chums, he told June, and if he could have it his way he would just as soon be with Michael. June, according to her later recollection, tried to convince Jordie that he should not abandon friends his own age for Michael. It was possible, she told him, to cultivate relationships with his school friends as well as with Michael. ‘You don’t have to choose one over the other,’ she said. However, Jordie didn’t see it that way; as far as he was concerned, his fellow students didn’t understand him the way Michael did and, worse, he said, they were unkind to others because they had been ‘conditioned’ to hate, just like adults. June was at a loss. Hearing her son parrot Michael’s philosophy was disconcerting. ‘You’d better talk to your dad about it,’ she suggested.

  Evan Chandler’s position about Jordie’s decision was absolute. ‘Over my dead body,’ he told him, angrily. ‘You can not spend all of your time with Michael Jackson. I won’t allow it. Enough is enough.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stop me,’ Jordie said, defiantly. ‘I’ll do what I want to do.’

  Evan, as he would later recall it, had begun to think that Michael was gay and that perhaps Jordie might be, as well. There was no other explanation, he thought, to such obsession. Whatever was going on, though, he felt that he needed to reconnect with his son. If the two could better communicate, he might then be able to figure out the problem. ‘I’m sick about all of this,’ he told Jordie. ‘We love you so much. Why have you turned your back on us? You can have Michael in your life,’ he concluded, ‘but you can also have us, and everyone else.’

  When Evan went to embrace his son, Jordie was stiff and unaffectionate. Jordie didn’t want to hear what Evan had to say and didn’t want to engage with him on any level. Evan would later say that he felt then that he was losing his son to another man, and that he became more determined than ever to stop that from happening. He had no recourse but to lay down the law: ‘You’re going to that damn dance, Jordie. You are not spending the night with Michael Jackson.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said the youngster. ‘You never liked Michael,’ he said, as he stormed off. ‘You acted like you did. Michael told me that’s what was going on, and he was right.’

  In the end, Jordie did not attend the school dance. He spent the night with Michael.

  Though Michael Jackson may not have intended to do so, his presence in Jordie’s life had caused a terrible turmoil for the youngster, as well as for his parents, Evan and June, and even his stepfather, Dave Schwartz. The emergence of Michael into their lives had thrown everything into wild disarray, pitting the three adults against one another, and then Jordie against all of them, resulting in distrust and frustration for all. Without effective communication, it was inevitable that there would continue to be serious problems at home for Jordie.

  Was Michael aware of his part in what was happening to Jordie’s family? One of his advisers recalls a conversation with him about Jordie, which took place while the two were sitting in a golf cart on the Neverland acreage, star-gazing. ‘You know, maybe you should just leave Jordie alone,’ suggested Michael’s adviser.

  ‘Nope,’ Michael said succinctly, recalled his adviser.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What can I say?’ Michael asked. His expression was serene as he stared into the infinite space.

  ‘But look at all of the chaos your friendship with him is causing Jordie,’ observed the adviser. ‘Don’t you think you should back off?’ the adviser asked, still pushing.

  Michael became angry; he could go from calm to fury in seconds. ‘Look, I’m not the one causing problems,’ he said. ‘It’s Jordie’s parents. They can’t accept that my relationship with him is innocent. They have dirty minds. There is nothing sexual going on. Why can’t people just get that?’

  ‘But, Mike…’

  Michael rose and walked away before the conversation could be finished.

  If what those who know him best say is true, that Michael is a child at heart, there’s definitely a flip side to such immaturity: he acts like a spoiled little kid when he can’t have his way. He is often unable to see any point of view other than his own.

  On 7 July 1993 Evan Chandler struck a damaging blow to Michael’s friendship with Jordie and also, as it would happen, to his own relationship with his ex-wife, June, when he filed for a modification of her custody agreement. The documents petitioned the courts to forbid Jordie from going anywhere near Michael, and from visiting him at any of his homes, or anywhere else. Evan requested that Jordie receive psychiatric help to determine the full extent of Michael’s influence on him. He also accused June of ‘nurturing’ the relationship between Jordie and Michael, which he viewed as unhealthy, ‘because, according to what I know, she [June] receives expensive gifts, cash and vacations from Jackson’.

  In the affidavit, Evan declared that he had discovered that Michael ‘routinely spent the night with my son and they slept in the same bed. I then asked him directly if he was having sex with my son. Jackson refused to give me a straight answer. He rather told me that he would continue sleeping with my son and that he thought it was “cosmic” and that he and Jordie were made to be together.’

  Michael was hurt and, of course, angry. He was also still unwilling to consider the option of sacrificing his own wants and needs in order to allow Jordie some space to reconnect with his parents. Rather, he viewed the adults in Jordie’s life as validation of his personal philosophy that grown-ups cannot be trusted, are certain to act in irrational ways and can be counted on to sink to the lowest, most base behaviour. If Evan had Jordie’s best interest at heart, Michael reasoned, surely he would allow such a loving friendship to continue without questioning it and assuming the worst about it. Plus, the heart wants what it wants – and Michael Jackson wanted to be with Jordie Chandler.

  The Secret Tape Recording

  Now that Evan Chandler had filed such damaging court papers against June, there was no way she could trust him. June’s estranged husband, Dave, agreed with her that Evan was a threat. Would he take his claims against June further by claiming that she had been an unfit parent by allowing Jordie’s relationship with M
ichael to continue? Would he try to obtain complete custody of Jordie?

  On 2 July 1993, Evan and Dave met at Rent-A-Wreck to discuss what was going on in the family. During the meeting, Evan made it clear that he wanted Michael’s reign over Jordie’s life to come to an end, and that he was about to start taking action to see to it that it happened. He asked for Dave’s assistance. However, Dave made it clear that he did not agree with Evan and did not wish to interfere with Jordie’s relationship with Michael. June had been monitoring the situation, he said, and he wasn’t going to second-guess her. If he did so, he argued, he would risk a deeper wedge in his marriage to her, and he would probably alienate Jordie, as well.

  Over the next week, Evan continued to be a problem. Michael, June and Jordie did not trust him and wanted as little to do with him as possible. They had not returned his telephone calls; it had been almost a month since Evan spoke to Jordie. Now, Evan was pushing for a meeting with the three of them. He knew that June and Jordie intended to accompany Michael on his upcoming tour, and that they would be gone for five months. He didn’t want them to go, felt it was unsafe for Jordie. He called June and left a message on her answering machine during which he insisted that she, Jordie and Michael meet with him on 9 July.

  Dave called Evan to ask him what it was he hoped to accomplish by demanding such a meeting. ‘You’re not going to get anywhere that way,’ he told him.

  ‘Listen, you dumb ass,’ Evan told him. ‘I’m worried about my kid. I want him with me, now. I don’t know what’s going on with you people and Michael Jackson, but I don’t like it.’

  The two men then argued for about an hour, hurling insults at one another.

  Perhaps in order to learn what Evan had in mind, Dave decided to secretly tape-record a telephone conversation with him. An hour after their argument, he called Evan, again.

  During that 8 July conversation, transcripts of which were later filed with the Los Angeles County Court House, Evan said that he was angry because Michael had stopped telephoning him and no longer wanted a friendly relationship with him. ‘There was no reason why he had to stop calling me,’ Evan told Dave. He added that he’d recently had a long conversation with Michael and told him ‘exactly what I want out of the relationship with him.’ (He didn’t say during the conversation with Dave, however, what it was he wanted from Michael.) He also maintained that, in his view, Michael was spending too much time with Jordie, and that something was ‘not right about it’. He was furious with June, he said, who had told him to ‘fuck’ himself, when he tried to discuss Michael with her. When pressed, Evan said that he believed Michael Jackson had ‘broken up the family’ and that Jordie had been ‘seduced by this guy’s money and power’. He didn’t say, during the conversation, that he suspected Michael might also be having sex with Jordie. However, he did allow that he had hired an attorney to start looking into the matter, his friend, Barry Rothman.

  As it happened, Barry had been in Evan’s dental chair one day for work when Evan began to confide in him about certain changes in Jordie’s personality. He became so emotional when recounting recent events, he began to cry. There was a wall between him and his son, he told the attorney, and he simply didn’t know how to scale it, or tear it down. He was losing Jordie, he said. As the two discussed the matter, Barry recalls Evan saying that he had begun to believe that Michael and Jordie’s relationship may have become sexual. If that was the case, Barry Rothman suggested, perhaps Evan might need an attorney. They agreed to trade services, dental for legal.

  ‘I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find,’ Evan told Dave, speaking of Barry Rothman who had, in the past represented Little Richard, the Who, the Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne. ‘All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can,’ Evan continued. ‘He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s smart, and he’s hungry for publicity. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy [Barry Rothman] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. I’ve given him full authority to do that.

  ‘Jackson is an evil guy,’ Evan continued, sounding fired up. ‘He is worse than that, and I have the evidence to prove it. If I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son] and Michael’s career will be over.’

  Evan and Dave then discussed June’s plans to take Jordie on Michael’s Dangerous tour in the fall. ‘Well, they may think so,’ Evan said, ‘but they’re not going anywhere.’

  Clearly baiting him for more information, Dave asked Evan how his plan might help Jordie. Evan’s response was disconcerting. ‘That’s irrelevant to me,’ he said. ‘The bottom line is, yes, his mother is harming him, and Michael is harming him. I can prove that, and I will prove that. It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get the information I got, and you know I don’t have that kind of money. I’m willing to go down financially. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want. It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together.

  ‘I believe Jordie is already irreparably harmed,’ Evan continued. ‘The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. This man is going to be humiliated beyond belief,’ Evan concluded. ‘You will not believe what’s going to happen to him. Beyond his worst nightmares. He will not sell one more record. The facts are so overwhelming, everyone will be destroyed in the process.’

  Did Evan Chandler know he was being tape-recorded? Did he also suspect the recording might one day be played for Michael Jackson? Was he being melodramatic and intimidating just for the sake of scaring Michael off? Or, did he really plan to ruin him? Only he knows what was in his head at this time… and he hasn’t said.

  The day after Evan Chandler’s inflammatory comments about Michael Jackson were tape-recorded by Dave Schwartz, Evan hoped to have the family conference he had long sought to discuss Jordie. However, no one showed up at the meeting. Now, he was more infuriated than ever. Finally, he got June on the telephone. According to June’s former attorney, Michael Freeman, Evan reiterated his concerns that something improper might be going on between Jordie and Michael. June said that Evan was ‘full of baloney’. Moreover, she told him that she and Jordie still intended to go on tour with Michael, and that Evan would ‘just have to get used to the idea’.

  Michael Freeman recalled, ‘Evan then said that he was going to go to the media. Right away, we thought, Why would he do that? If he really believed Jordie was being abused, why would he not go to the police instead of the press?’

  That same day, June and Dave decided to meet with Michael to tell him there might be trouble ahead where Evan was concerned. However, Michael didn’t take them seriously. ‘Oh, this kind of stuff happens to me all the time,’ he told them. ‘People are always trying to get money out of me. I’ll have my people work it out. Don’t worry about it.’ However, when they played Michael the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan, Michael became anxious. ‘He sounded so angry,’ Michael told me of Evan Chandler in an interview months later. ‘I knew then and there that it was extortion. He said it right on the tape. So what I did then,’ Michael told me, ‘was turn it over to Bert [Fields] and [private investigator] Anthony [Pellicano] and I decided to try to forget about it.’

  ‘Were you angry?’ I asked Michael.

  ‘No,’ Michael told me. ‘I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, so why would I be angry?’

  ‘Because you believed you hadn’t done anything wrong, yet you were being accused of a horrible crime?’ I offered.

  ‘I don’t think like that,’ Michael said, bluntly. ‘I don’t live in fear.’ In retrospect, it seems that Michael may have been feigning nonchalance with me, perhaps because I was in my reporter’s role and he was saying what he felt was appropriate for an interview. Later, one of his closest advisers told me tha
t he truly was angry when he heard the tape of Evan. ‘He said, “After I’ve been good to him and his family, he says these terrible things about me? After I took his family around the world, after I bought them presents, after I let them into my life, allowed them into my home? Tell him Michael Jackson said he can go to hell.”’ That was his reaction.

  ‘I asked him if it was true, or not. Was something going on with him and Jordie? “Of course not,” he said. “It’s absolutely ludicrous, and it’s not even the point. Tell Evan that Michael Jackson said go to hell. That’s the point.”’

  On 9 July 1993, June and Dave Schwartz met with Michael Jackson’s investigator, Anthony Pellicano, in his Sunset Boulevard office to play for them the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan Chandler.

  A tough, no-nonsense kind of personality, Anthony could be intimidating, always getting his way and representing his clients fiercely. Interestingly, he got his start in 1977 by finding the bones of Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, Mike Todd, under a pile of leaves. Todd’s corpse had been stolen from an Illinois cemetery by mobsters looking for a ten-carat diamond ring, a gift from Elizabeth which they thought had been buried with the deceased.

  Today, Anthony’s career is in tatters. In November 2002, he was arrested following a probe into allegations that he had hired a man to threaten a Los Angeles Times reporter researching a story about a Mafia extortion plot targeting actor Steven Seagal.

  Michael’s attorney, Bertram (Bert) Fields, was also present. Fields is, today, still one of the most daunting and influential attorneys in show business with a client list that has included some of the biggest names in show business from The Beatles to Tom Cruise to John Travolta. He’s never lost a trial in which he was lead attorney. He was determined to represent Michael in as aggressive a manner as possible, especially after he heard the audio tape June and Dave brought with them. ‘I was concerned,’ Bert recalled. ‘It sounded bad. It sounded like extortion.’