Michael Jackson

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  ‘I think so, too,’ Elizabeth concurred. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had my run-ins with him, too,’ Michael admitted. He sounded lethargic, drugged. He said that while he admired Anthony, he still felt that his idea to present Wade Robson and Brett Barnes to the public wasn’t a good one. He felt that the investigator should have checked with him first before exploiting the youngsters. ‘And it really pisses me off that guy tries to tell me what to do,’ Michael said, ‘like I work for him instead of the other way around. And, also,’ he concluded, ‘I think he scares the public, he’s that intimidating. John Branca, now he’s a good spokesman.’ Indeed, after having let him go so unceremoniously, Michael had recently asked John to return to the fold. He knew he could always count on him and, of course, he was right: Branca was back and loyal as ever.

  After that conversation, Michael wrote a detailed memo to Howard Weitzman explaining why he believed he and John should take over as his spokesmen. He told him that he trusted them, they were believable, and had the respect of the legal profession – unlike Anthony Pellicano who he now felt was perceived as being a man on the edge, a rebel. ‘If Anthony worked for Motown,’ Michael observed, ‘he’d be someone Berry would keep behind the scenes. Having him out there speaking for me now is almost like having Joseph out there. He’s intimidating. Right now, we don’t need that.’

  Michael Proposes to Lisa Marie

  It was difficult to imagine how things could get much worse for Michael Jackson in the fall of 1993. In just a matter of months he had, without a doubt, experienced the ‘swift and sudden fall from grace’, he would later write about in his self-revealing song, ‘Stranger in Moscow’.

  Certainly, no one had counted on Michael becoming addicted to drugs, thereby raising the stakes in terms of the precarious nature of his future and well-being. Yet, anxious, unable to sleep and, he said, in pain because of dental work and a recent surgery to his scalp (a consequence of the burn he suffered during that Pepsi commercial), Michael began taking more of the painkillers, Percodan, Demerol and codeine, as well as tranquillizers Valium, Xanax and Ativan. Such dependence was uncharted terrain for him. In the past, he had made an effort to not over-medicate during recovery from plastic surgeries, explaining to doctors that he wanted to remain ‘sharp’ for the purpose of making sound business and career decisions. However, with all that was going on in his life at this time, Michael no longer cared to be quite so focused. In fact, he wanted to forget, escape. It didn’t take long before he was completely dependent on the drugs. It happened so quickly that his team in the United States didn’t even realize what was going on with Michael, until it was too late to do anything about it.

  Everyone was stunned to learn that Michael had a problem with drugs. Of course, Elizabeth Taylor understood and had empathy for his plight. She’d been there, with her own, well-publicized battles. Lisa Marie Presley was also sympathetic; she, too, was a recovering addict.

  ‘When I was a teenager, I was completely out of control,’ she told me. ‘I started doing drugs when I was fourteen. I had been spinning for quite some time, years, when I finally hit bottom. That was when I found myself on a seventy-two-hour bender of cocaine, sedatives, pot and drinking, all at the same time. I woke up and there were all of these people, friends of mine, passed out on the floor. My coke dealer was in the room trying to sell me more stuff. I just said, ‘That’s it. Everybody get the fuck out.’ I don’t know why I got addicted, I just know that I was going to die if I didn’t get help. Finally, my mother and I decided I would go to the Scientology Center in Hollywood for detoxification. It saved my life.’

  When Michael telephoned Lisa from overseas in September 1993, he was high, incoherent and delusional. Alarmed, Lisa attempted to convince Michael to do as she had once done, enter a rehabilitation centre. For Lisa, the quest to pull a drug-addled superstar back from the edge had great significance. She had shared with friends earlier the guilt she had suffered as a child, seeing her father falling into his own bottomless pit of addiction. She was still married to Danny Keough, but unhappily. She was restless and felt that she had no real purpose; she wanted more than motherhood, she said. Michael’s dilemma seemed to provide an outlet for her. ‘Absolutely, I felt that I had a responsibility to save him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the psychology of it and what it had to do with my father. I only know what I felt.’

  There was one major obstacle that lay before Lisa if she was going to help quiet the demons haunting Michael: access. It was well known that Jackson had done a very thorough job of insulating himself from the outside world. Often, he would start casual relationships with people, many of whom were certain that their relationship would grow, only to find that Michael had left them behind. Calls would go unanswered, sometimes letters would be returned, unread. Lisa had heard of Michael’s reputation for tossing aside new-found ‘soul mates’, and saw this pattern as a liability if she was going to complete her task of rebuilding his crumbling life. She would have to proceed with caution.

  In her frequent telephone calls to him, Lisa maintained that Michael could not go on much longer with his personal life and career in such disarray. He was immobilized by uncertainty and a sense of hopelessness, which had contributed to his addiction. She suggested to him the idea others in his camp had begun to secretly discuss: that Michael end his misery with a cash settlement to Evan Chandler. Michael was, predictably, against the idea. A man who’d been building an image for himself since the time most children were building tree houses, Michael cared deeply about what people thought of him. Even if the image he had fostered over the years was, arguably, not the best one for him, it was the result of a great deal of strategizing on his part, and on that of his handlers. ‘He felt that this thing of him being wacky and weird and crazy worked for him,’ Lisa recalled, ‘and maybe for a time, it did. I don’t know. I was always against it. I always thought he was bigger, better, than the image. I always thought the image did him an injustice.’

  One thing was certain: by 1993 Michael was lonelier than he’d ever before been, and that was really saying something. He had to face the fact that his career, his most enduring passion, was in jeopardy, a possible fatality either of an unlawful, immoral love affair with a minor or of poor judgement in having aligned himself so stubbornly with the wrong people and at the wrong time. If he wouldn’t settle with money, Lisa suggested rehab at the very least. She cared deeply about him, she told him, and she wanted to be sure he knew it.

  One night, while abroad, Michael found himself, as he often would, feeling trapped in a plush hotel suite, alone with the constant drone of a chanting crowd below his room. After a string of phone calls from lawyers and publicists, Michael decided to calm himself by calling the one person who could somehow help him forget that his career hung in the balance: Lisa.

  She had certainly been persistent in her pursuit of him. She left telephone numbers for a house she was renting in Canoga Park, California.

  She also left the number of the new three-acre estate which she had just purchased and was getting ready to occupy on Long Valley Road in Hidden Hills (an exclusive gate-guarded equestrian community in Calabasas, California, where she still lives, today).

  Then, just to be sure, she left the number where she could be reached in Clearwater, Florida, where she was planning to spend time at the Scientology retreat. She even sent him party balloons with messages attached. Somehow, she could always put a smile on his face, even if it was just her raspy voice proclaiming, ‘Oh, fuck them!’ He found her in Canoga Park.

  Michael valued Lisa’s settling effect on him, so much so that during his phone conversation, he posed a question that surprised both of them. ‘If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?’ Was this a joke? A hypothetical? Or was it a dare for Lisa to take him seriously? If it was a dare, Lisa was just the woman to take it – even though she was still married to Danny Keough. Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘I would do it.’ Michael didn’t say a word, at
first. He then said, ‘Hold on, I have to use the bathroom.’

  When he finally did speak into the phone again, he was speaking to his new fiancée. ‘My love for you is real,’ Michael told Lisa. ‘Please believe me.’ Michael didn’t realize, however, that whether or not Michael loved her wasn’t the real issue for Lisa. His proposal served a greater purpose. It would give her access, she hoped, to enter his secret world. Then, from the inside, she would begin to put the pieces of this broken man together, and this time she would not fail.

  ‘You’ll all be fired’

  By the time Michael Jackson’s tour took him to Mexico City, on 24 October 1993, there was talk of a pending warrant for a police strip search of his body. This seemed odd, almost unthinkable. Making matters worse, the Los Angeles Police Department had seized medical records from the offices of two of Jackson’s physicians, Beverly Hills dermatologist, Arnie Kleins and Santa Monica plastic surgeon, Stephen Hoefflin. ‘What do they want my medical records for?’ a bewildered Michael asked one of his team members in a longdistance telephone call. ‘They can’t do that, can they?’

  ‘Hell, yeah, man, they can do that,’ confirmed the associate. ‘They think they can do anything they want to do. When the rest of the troops get down there, you’d better whip them into shape. Things are bad here, Mike.’

  The records were needed to verify aspects of Jordie’s testimony. Did the authorities really think such documents would still be in place? All of Michael’s medical records from both doctors were long gone by the time the police arrived to take them. * Still, one can only imagine the stress for a person as pathologically private as Michael Jackson, to know that the police were trying to locate his confidential medical records.

  The heat was on. The investigation would not let up, that much was clear.

  At this same time, the police raided Michael’s Hayvenhurst estate in Encino. When the Jacksons went to Phoenix for the funeral of Joseph’s father, the police used the opportunity to inspect the estate and look for evidence there. A locksmith helped them gain entrance.

  The officers seized books, magazines, photos, tapes and anything else they thought might be interesting – including Katherine’s high blood pressure pills. They also found a videotape called Chicks, which promised to be valuable evidence since the slang word ‘chicks’ is sometimes used by paedophiles when referring to young boys. When the cops got back to the police station, the first thing they did was review the tape. Much to their frustration, what they saw was a video about… chicks, as in birds.

  The ‘troops’ to which Michael’s adviser had referred were those Jackson team members on their way to Mexico City: attorneys John Branca, Howard Weitzman, Bert Fields, as well as Dr Arnold Klein (to deal with a skin condition brought on by Jackson’s anxiety) and Elizabeth Taylor. They hoped to convince Michael to return to the States. The longer he stayed away the guiltier he looked to his fans. Lisa Marie Presley also hoped to go on the trip.

  For the last few years, Elizabeth had been trying to convince Michael to open himself up to a romantic relationship. However, when it began to happen with Lisa, she suddenly felt left out. ‘She has a deep insecurity about other women, especially younger women,’ says a friend of Michael’s. ‘I spent a great deal of time in her company and saw for myself the competitive way she dealt with Lisa.’

  One of Jackson’s associates was with Elizabeth and Lisa during a meeting. Both were sitting in the adviser’s office, discussing their concern about Michael. Elizabeth looked grand in a black, turtleneck sweater and matching skirt, her hair in a bouffant style. Her eyes, the world’s most famous violet pair, were concealed by large sunglasses, which she even wore indoors. By contrast, Lisa looked like a punk rocker in torn denim slacks, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. (‘I can understand if she doesn’t want to be a star like her father,’ Elizabeth said of Lisa, later. ‘However, one would think she would at least want to dress like one.’)

  ‘I think we should get him into rehab,’ Lisa said, speaking of the beleaguered Michael. ‘Fly to be at his side. Do whatever it takes.’

  Liz gave Lisa an icy stare. ‘It’s taken care of, dear,’ she said. ‘I’ve been rescuing Michael for years.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s the problem,’ Lisa countered. ‘Maybe he needs to grow up, do things on his own – ’

  Elizabeth cut her off. ‘Or maybe not, dear,’ she said. With her tone sickeningly sweet, she made her point: Lisa was an interloper. Perhaps she realized she’d acted rudely, because Elizabeth then apologized and blamed her attitude on the stress of the times.

  Still, Lisa was chagrined and felt that Elizabeth had treated her as if she was one of Michael’s groupies, rather than a trusted friend. She decided not to go to Mexico City because, as she later explained, she didn’t want to make things worse for Michael. However, from that point onward, Lisa considered Elizabeth to be, as she put it, ‘opposing counsel’.

  Shortly after the arrival of the Jackson contingent, a shouting match erupted between Bert Fields and Michael’s loyal head of security, Bill Bray (who had known and worked for Michael since the star was about twelve years old). The protective Bray accused Fields of mishandling the case. In front of witnesses, he screamed at the attorney, ‘You’re blowing the whole damn thing! Mike is gonna end up in jail. What is going on?’

  One witness said, ‘Elizabeth agreed with Bill that the attorneys weren’t being aggressive enough. It was as if they were waiting for time to pass to see what would happen next. ‘You need to get out there and start deposing these people,’ she said. ‘There are liars all over the place, and they need to be revealed for who they are… all these housekeepers and maids and butlers. I know good help is hard to find, Michael,’ she said turning to him, ‘but where did you find these people? Look at how they turned on you.’ Michael sat staring at her with his mouth open. ‘My maid turned on me?’ he said. ‘Not my sweet Blanca?’ he asked, sounding pretty dumb. [He was referring to his maid, Blanca Francia.]

  ‘Where she once felt that Michael was capable of taking charge, she could see that he was now in bad shape. He was so drugged out, he couldn’t handle anything. “I think now that he can’t make important decisions,” she said. “Look at him! What do you expect of him? I’ve been there,” she said, referring to her own drug use, “and I know he can’t make any decisions right now. We have to help this boy. Enough is enough.”

  ‘She was angry at just about everyone in Michael’s camp. Michael was so affected by Elizabeth’s outburst, he collapsed into racking sobs. “What am I going do?” he asked. “If you people can’t figure this goddamn thing out, how can I?” Elizabeth went over and embraced him. “We’re fighting, Michael, but it’s because we love you,” she said, almost as if she was talking to a child whose parents were divorcing. It was touching. “And I’ll be goddamned if you have to suffer another second over this bullshit. We will work it out. I promise you.’”

  Michael pulled away from Elizabeth. ‘I want you people to fix this thing, now,’ he said, addressing everyone in the room. ‘I’m serious,’ he added. ‘My life will not end this way. You’ll all be out – fired before that happens.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Elizabeth, clapping her hands. ‘That’s telling ’em, Michael. Right out on their asses!’ Then, after a beat, she added, ‘Just to be clear, you don’t mean me too, now do you, dear?’

  He couldn’t help himself; Michael burst into laughter, as did everyone on his team.

  After that day’s discussions, it was decided that attorney Johnnie Cochran, well respected in Los Angeles’ black and legal communities, would be added to the legal team. Elizabeth had said that she wanted her own attorney, Neal Papiano, to join the team. However, she eventually agreed with Branca and Weitzman that Cochran (who would later successfully defend O. J. Simpson of charges that he had murdered his wife and a friend of hers) was the man for the job. Johnnie would have one job and only one job: to settle ‘this goddamn thing’ with money. There would be no tr
ial, it was agreed. Michael would not, could not survive it. He was now too emotionally devastated to present a strong image for himself on the witness stand. Whatever it would cost, it was decided, he would have to pay it. If the public construed any financial settlement as an indication of guilt, it was decided, there was nothing anyone could do about it. ‘He will just have to say he didn’t do it, as he has been saying, and that’s going to have to be the denial that lasts through the ages,’ said one of the attorneys. ‘The thing for us to do now is to save the man’s life, not worry about the superstar’s image.’

  Chaos and Rehab

  On 12 November 1993, looking thin, tired and haggard, Michael Jackson performed what would turn out to be the final show of his Dangerous tour at El Estadio del Azteca in Mexico City. The rest of the engagements were cancelled.

  Apparently, Michael’s mental state had truly disintegrated while in Mexico City; the damage to his $12,000-a-week, five-room suite on the forty-second floor of the Hotel Presidente was evidence of his serious abuse of drugs. After he checked out, the hotel staff was stunned to discover that the carpets in the living room and in Michael’s bedrooms were stained with vomit. There were deep dents and cracks in the plaster of the living-room wall, as if someone had either banged his head, or his fists, against it. There was enough rubbish in the room to fill two large, trash bags. There were scribblings on the walls (‘I love you. I love you.’), and even on the fabric of some of the furniture. Chewing gum was squashed into the carpet, everywhere.

  After the final show, Michael, Elizabeth and Larry boarded an MGM Grand 727 jet, chartered for the occasion by Elizabeth, to London. When they arrived at Heathrow Airport, bodyguard Steve Tarling met them at the tarmac. All three had on dark glasses and long coats with hoods covering their heads, as if on some kind of espionage mission. Michael seemed drugged as he walked to the waiting van, held up on one side by a cloaked Elizabeth and on the other by her husband. ‘He looked like a transvestite who’d had the same makeup on for a couple of weeks,’ recalled Tarling. ‘What shocked me most was the tip of his nose, which was like an open cut when it congeals into a scab. It looked awfully painful.’