Michael Jackson

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Rather than blame his frustration on his and Lisa’s lack of preparation for the event, Michael blamed it on the media saying that there was no way he could have had the ritual of his dreams, ‘because the press would have made it a fiasco.’ It was a shame, felt those who knew him and cared for him, that he kept missing out on a good and fulfilling life because of his celebrity, and that he continued to blame such intangibles as ‘the media’ for his grief over it. After all, even his friend Elizabeth Taylor managed to have big and wonderful wedding ceremonies along the way.

  Perhaps it’s a clue to their insecurity about what they were doing that Michael and Lisa didn’t warn their families and friends about the wedding, lest someone try to induce them to reverse their decision. It wasn’t a surprise, perhaps, that Michael didn’t confide in Katherine, Joseph or his siblings, considering his complex relationship with them. However, that he didn’t tell Elizabeth Taylor in advance was really startling – especially to her. When Michael finally telephoned Elizabeth from the Dominican Republic to give her the news, she was so distraught she spent the next day on the telephone with friends saying that she was, as she put it, ‘so worried about Michael, I don’t know what to do. I’m pulling my hair out over it! What has he done? What has he done?‘

  That night, Elizabeth was with friends at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. When a reporter asked her if she would confirm rumours of Michael’s marriage, she snapped at him, ‘I am not in the business of clarifying rumours. Now, be gone!’

  The fact that Lisa kept the news from her mother, Priscilla, to whom she is close, also spoke volumes. It would be almost a week before Lisa confirmed to her frantic mother that she had married Michael Jackson.

  Feeling strongly that Michael was exploiting her daughter and using her to rehabilitate his damaged image, Priscilla was not happy about the news. ‘Can’t you see what he’s up to?’ she asked her, according to what Lisa later recalled. ‘It’s so obvious.’

  Lisa disagreed. She felt that Michael truly loved her. He had said as much and she had no choice, she felt, but to take him for his word. ‘I can’t say what his intentions were with me, but I can say it was the most real thing I think he’s had,’ Lisa noted in the spring of 2003. ‘My mother was like, “Timing! Hello?” But I rebelled against my mom, of course, and tried really hard not to think like that, not to believe that.’

  ‘My God! Use your instincts,’ Priscilla admonished her. She could not believe her daughter would marry, of all people on the planet, Michael Jackson. ‘What does your gut tell you?’

  ‘It tells me that you should mind your own goddamn business,’ Lisa shot back. ‘It’s time for me to lead my own life and for you to stay out of it.’ Clearly she and Priscilla had issues that pre-dated her marriage to Michael. Also, her sexual chemistry with Michael was so intense, Lisa wasn’t about to give it up.

  ‘All I wanted at the time was to believe what he was telling me, and that was it. It was this whole psychodrama that was going on, and I really put my mother through it. She thought he was lying to me, using me.’

  Lisa’s ex-husband, Danny – still a trusted friend – was also unhappy about the union. He knew better than to drag her into a fight with her about it, though. However, he told her that he was concerned, about her and about their children. It seemed to him, as it did to everyone else in her life, that she had made a big mistake.

  Michael decided that he didn’t want to announce the marriage. He said he wanted them to have their privacy. However, Lisa disagreed. ‘The more we hide it, the more interest there will be in it,’ she argued. ‘Shouldn’t we just announce it so that the interest will die down?’ She didn’t know Michael very well, did she? Of course, what he really wanted to do was to create a big, worldwide controversy about his relationship with her; he just couldn’t help himself.

  His strategy worked. For the next two months, the press ran with headlines speculating as to whether or not Michael and Lisa had been married. Meanwhile, the two took a duplex apartment suite in Trump Tower in New York (directly below Donald Trump’s), while Michael began work on a new album.

  If Lisa thought she was famous before, she would discover an entirely new – and unwelcome – sort of celebrity, as Michael’s wife. One of his bodyguards remembered, ‘It was chaos with the media and fans suspecting the newlyweds were in the suite, but not able to confirm it. One morning, we were getting ready to leave, and Mike had to explain the strategy involved in getting them out of there. He didn’t want them seen together. For him, everything was a big drama. Nothing could just occur easily; it had to unfold with loads of bedlam and confusion. That’s just what he’s used to, and I think he thrives on it.’

  As Michael was putting on his hat and his surgical mask and his sunglasses and his makeup, he explained to Lisa, ‘See, first you leave, and they’ll take you downstairs in the back, and then – whoosh! – off you’ll go in the car with the smoky windows. Then, I will do the same. And we’ll meet up later, and nobody will be the wiser.’ He seemed delighted by the intrigue.

  ‘He was all ready to go, looking like Michael Jackson looks with the mask on his face and hat on top of his head,’ said the bodyguard. ‘She sized him up from head to toe and said, “Fuck, no. Screw this shit.” And she just got into the front elevator and went down to the lobby, alone. He started screaming, “Lisa! No! It’s dangerous out there! They’ll eat you alive!” Then, he turned to me and said, “Don’t just stand there you big idiot, follow her.” So, I raced down after her in another elevator. When I got there, she was gone. When I went back up and told Michael, he freaked out. “My poor wife! She’s been kidnapped,” he said, acting like the biggest drama queen, ever. “How will I live with myself? Call the police,” he shrieked. “No, call the FBI. No, call the CIA.” I said, “Look, man, she’s probably in a coffee shop somewhere eating a doughnut. Let me find her.” I did find her, an hour later, in a bar down the street, having a martini with some guy she’d just met, and it was ten in the morning. I thought to myself, What a match-up this is.’

  Finally, in July, Michael and Lisa announced that they’d been married the previous May.

  When I appeared on the United States news programme, Good Morning America to report on the news of Michael’s marriage, I joked that ‘the newlyweds are registered at Toys ’R’ Us.’ There was, I felt at the time, little choice but to remain light about the subject, the reaction to the news had been so cynical in America. After the show was broadcast, I received a telephone call from an irate Michael. ‘How could you say that?’ he demanded. ‘How can you make light of my marriage? I love Lisa. Why won’t people believe that? Why won’t people let me be happy?’

  ‘You have to understand that it does seem odd,’ I explained. ‘The marriage came out of nowhere. There are people who don’t believe it’s legitimate.’

  ‘You know what? I don’t care what people think,’ Michael said angrily. ‘She’s my wife, I love her.’

  I took the opportunity to ask Michael a few questions about the relationship. Did he and Lisa have a pre-nuptial agreement? ‘No way,’ he said. ‘What kind of marriage would that be?’

  Was Lisa pregnant, as had been reported? ‘No,’ he said, ‘but we want children and we will have children. But don’t rush me,’ he said, now giggling.

  There had been recent reports that Lisa had plastic surgery in a Los Angeles hospital, her breasts enlarged and liposuction on her hips, at Michael’s behest. It was preposterous, but I decided to ask him about it, anyway. ‘Ridiculous,’ he told me. ‘Just try telling Lisa Marie what to do. It would never happen. I would not be able to convince her to do anything. The truth,’ he said, ‘is that she had scar tissue removed from an appendectomy, and dermabrasion on her face to get rid of old acne scars.’

  He also volunteered an anecdote about giving her an engagement ring (after his telephone proposal, once they were in Los Angeles, together). ‘Lisa and I were in the living room [at Neverland] having a glass of wine,’ he said. �
�We had just finished watching All About Eve, starring the great Bette Davis. We both love that movie. I walked over to her, reached into my pocket and pulled out this huge, diamond ring. “So what do you think?” I asked her. “You wanna?” She screamed out, “Yes, yes, yes.” So, anyway, I gotta go,’ he concluded. ‘Just tell people to leave us alone, will you? We’re happy. That should be the end of it.’

  As it turned out, even though Lisa was in love with Michael, she – not he – was the one with certain goals she hoped to achieve as a result of the marriage; chief among them was the realization of her musical career. ‘Michael told Lisa that he would attempt to get her a record deal at Sony,’ says her friend, Monica Pastelle. ‘Yes, she loved him. She didn’t marry him because of the offer to help her career, but it was on the table as something he was going to work on for her.’

  For the next year, the newlyweds divided their time between Michael’s 27,000-acre ranch in Santa Ynez, California, and Lisa’s one-acre estate in Hidden Hills, a hundred miles away. Some thought Lisa and her two children would move into Neverland. No chance. She wanted to maintain her independence. Plus, her kids thought Michael was a little strange, especially five-year-old Danielle. No matter how hard he tried with her, Michael could never win over the girl. He was usually so good with children, but not with Danielle. She would take one look at him, squeal and run in the other direction. ‘What’d I do? What’d I do?’ Michael would ask. Therefore, whenever Lisa and her offspring went to stay at Neverland, she would tell her housekeeper, ‘Just pack our toothbrushes and a few comfortable pairs of walking shoes, ’cause I don’t think we’ll be staying very long.’

  Once she started living with him in their residences, Lisa was even more amazed at the degree to which Michael was emotionally repressed. Determined to ‘fix him’, she busily went about the work of peeling away layer after layer, as if he were an onion. However, it was difficult; the protective layers around him were thick and impenetrable. It had taken years for him to become who he was, and he wasn’t going to easily change. He didn’t want to become more communicative, as Lisa had insisted. He didn’t want to become more extroverted, either, as she had suggested.

  Most maddening to Lisa, her new husband continually blamed other people for problems that were clearly of his own making. Lisa, a Scientologist, maintained that she was the architect of her own life and had no one to blame but herself for the aspects of it that had not worked out for her. When her first marriage to Danny Keough ended, she didn’t blame the press or her fame, she blamed herself and later felt that she had made a critical mistake in ending it. She wished she could go back, but she couldn’t – so she moved forward and found a way to incorporate Danny into her life, as a best friend.

  ‘Lisa felt Michael was too much into playing the victim,’ said Monica Pastelle. ‘Maybe it was understandable, given all he’d been through in the last year. Their relationship became strained as she tried to prod him along, make him feel less sorry for himself, lift his spirits. She said he was like a young boy, angry at the world. She had no patience at all with the lost childhood routine. “Who hasn’t had a miserable childhood?” she would say. “Show me someone who loved every single second of their childhood, and I’ll show you a person who has deluded himself into believing such a thing.”’

  Going Public

  Michael and Lisa certainly didn’t make many television appearances, but the two that they did agree to do together are memorable. In September 1994, they made their first television appearance as husband and wife on the MTV Awards in New York, in front of two hundred and fifty million television viewers.

  Backstage, according to Lisa, Michael announced to her, ‘Now, check it out, girl. I’m going to kiss you when we get out there.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re not,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes I am,’ he said, smiling. He thought they were bantering, but Lisa wasn’t kidding.

  ‘No, Michael,’ she said. ‘That’s bullshit. Absolutely not. I don’t want to do it.’

  ‘Oh, sure you do,’ he remarked. ‘It’ll be great.’

  ‘I’m telling you, don’t you fucking do that, Michael,’ she warned him. ‘I’m serious.’

  About an hour later, they walked on to the stage to thunderous applause, holding hands. Lisa didn’t know when the kiss was going to happen, she would recall, but she knew he was going to do it because ‘by this time I realized that he does whatever he wants to do.’ She said that, as they walked out from the wings, she was squeezing his hand so hard, ‘I think I cut off the circulation.’

  ‘Just think, nobody thought this would last,’ Michael told the audience with a grin. He motioned to Lisa. Then, he embraced her and kissed her fully on the lips.

  ‘It looked awkward because I wanted out of my skin,’ Lisa said, years later. ‘I hated it. I felt used, like a prop,’ she said. ‘It was awful.’

  ‘Afterward, they had a huge fight about it,’ said Monica Pastelle. ‘Her whole thing was, “I told you no, and you just disregarded it.” But Michael thought it was great, a showstopper. He was all about the show, you know? What could they do that would cause headlines? That’s where his head was at. “But people will be talking about that kiss for decades,” he said. “Don’t you see? They’re gonna run that clip over and over.” Lisa was pissed off for days. “Don’t you fucking even come near me,” she told him.’

  That same week, Michael became annoyed by newspaper reports that suggested that if Elvis Presley were alive, he would not approve of the marriage. ‘I think we need to find out,’ he said. He suggested that he and Lisa have a seance to contact the King. He was serious. He told Lisa he had friends who could communicate with the deceased, and that they could make it possible for him and Lisa to talk to Elvis and ask his opinion of the union. Lisa thought the idea was tasteless. When Michael continued to push it, she lashed out at him. ‘I said no,’ she told him, angrily, ‘and if you stay on this particular road, they’re gonna need a medium to contact you in the great beyond, because I’m about to put you there, right now,’ Michael never mentioned the idea, again. ‘Jeez, it was just a suggestion,’ he said, later. ‘Can’t a guy even have a suggestion?’

  Nine months later, in June 1995, Michael and Lisa were interviewed on the American television programme Dateline by reporter Diane Sawyer.

  While it is true that Michael rarely grants television interviews (the last one had been in 1993 with Oprah Winfrey), one would have been hard-pressed to remember any time Lisa had ever been seen answering questions on television. Prior to this highly anticipated broadcast, only frozen images of her came to mind – photographs of a fragile blonde child with a droopy glare and sad, pouting expression reminiscent of her father’s. It was easy to imagine her as a poor little rich girl, victimized by her privileged, heavily scrutinized circumstances. That wasn’t really true of her as an adult, though. After years of therapy through Scientology, she had long ago come to terms with her celebrity. ‘My best trait is that I don’t put on a front for anybody,’ she observed. ‘I’m honest. Scientology has helped me a lot. It teaches you to stay what we call “clean”, to understand your feelings and not hold things in. Yeah, I’ve had a difficult life, in some ways,’ she allowed. ‘But I’ve gotten through it, and have done all right for myself.’

  On the night of the television interview, Lisa appeared to the world as a sophisticated, twenty-seven-year-old brunette, gorgeous and, it would seem, anyway, nobody’s victim.

  As the Jackson couple sat side by side, they fielded questions from Diane Sawyer about their private life. In talking about the allegations, Michael said, ‘I could never harm a child or anyone. It’s not in my heart. It’s not who I am and it’s not what I’m even interested in.’ Diane then asked, ‘What do you think should be done to someone who does that?’ Michael responded, ‘To someone who does that? What do I think should be done? Gee, I think they need help in some kind of way, you know?’

  He then explained why he decided to settle the Jordie Chandl
er case. ‘I talked to my lawyers and I said, “Can you guarantee me that justice will prevail?”’ Michael recalled, ‘And they said, “Michael, we cannot guarantee you what a judge or a jury will do.” With that, I was like catatonic. I was outraged, totally outraged. So I said, “I have got to do something to get out from under this nightmare, all these lies and all these people coming forward to get paid and these tabloid shows, just lies, lies, lies, lies.” So we got together and my advisers advised me. It was hands down, a unanimous decision to resolve the case.’

  Throughout his explanation, Diane had continually attempted to interrupt him to ask how much money he had spent on the settlement. Finally, a protective Lisa abruptly cut her off and said, ‘He’s been barred to discuss it.’

  Diane asked, ‘The specific terms of the agreement?’

  Lisa confirmed, ‘The specific terms, and the specific amounts.’

  It was going fairly well, until Diane Sawyer asked the loaded question to which no one ever has a good answer: ‘What is a thirty-six-year-old man doing sleeping with a twelve-year-old boy, or a series of them?’ Michael fumbled for a bit, giving his usual monologue about the innocence and purity of such behaviour, until Lisa, looking frustrated, decided to put the matter into perspective.

  ‘Let me just say,’ she began, ‘that I’ve seen these children. They don’t let him go to the bathroom without running in there with him. They won’t let him out of their sight. So when he jumps in the bed, I’m even out [of the bed], you know? They jump in the bed with him.’ Lisa – mother of two – was on the spot; her credibility was in question just by virtue of the fact that she was sitting there with her husband, on TV, trying to explain why it was okay for him to sleep with children who were not his own. She had to at least give it her best shot.