Tanya Boyd, who was a good friend of Debbie’s, remembered, ‘She would obsess about Michael saying, “I’m going to talk to him about opening up more, he’s too inhibited.” She cared about him, would be up all night long on the phone with him. She said he was best on the telephone. “All of his defences break down when he doesn’t have to look at you, face to face,” she said. She felt that he was sweet and misunderstood and also a rebel.’ Echoing Lisa Marie’s sentiment about him, Debbie told Tanya. ‘If people knew him like I know him, they would not think he was so strange. He’s unique, kinky, actually. I like that in a guy.’
‘Some thought they’d end up together. When I asked Debbie if she was romantically interested in Michael, she became evasive. She ended up marrying someone else for a few years – divorced him [in 1990] because she said she felt trapped – but I believed she was interested in Michael.’
Over the years, Debbie and Michael continued their friendship, often confiding in one another about their unhappy marriages.
By 1995, Deborah Jean Rowe was thirty-six, about ten years older that Lisa Marie Presley. Born in 1958 in Spokane, Washington, to Gordon Rowe and Barbara Chilcutt, she had been relocated to Los Angeles by the time she was fifteen. At that time, her parents divorced, and her father left the United States for the Middle East. She graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977, and began working as an assistant to Arnold Klein. In 1982, she married Richard Edelman, then a thirty-year-old teacher at Hollywood High. They moved to a small apartment Van Nuys, California, where Edelman started a computer consulting business. Their marriage began to crumble in 1988; a year later they filed for bankruptcy with assets of forty thousand dollars and debt worth twice that much.
Debbie was truly an unusual character. When she was just a bit younger, she was a biker chick who enjoyed dressing up in black leather and roaring around Los Angeles at breakneck speeds. Mario Pikus, a friend of hers at the time and a fellow biker, recalled, ‘She had so many crashes that her powerful 2000cc machine was covered in dents. And she swore like a sailor. Everything she said was peppered with four-letter words. She was like one of the guys. She used to drink beer and tequila, and she had this habit of punching you in what was supposed to be a friendly gesture. After she had a few drinks, her friendly jabs could knock the wind out of you.
‘She never had any money, she was always broke. But one day, after a road trip, she said she had to stop by her parents’ place. I was stunned. It’s near Bruce Willis’s home in Malibu, and it makes his house look like a shack. It’s got to be worth four million dollars.’ Inside the home, Pikus (who is a professional artist) estimated that there might have been ten million dollars in paintings and sculptures. Debbie explained that her step-father was a real estate magnate. ‘They seemed to have a warm relationship, but it was clear that Debbie didn’t take any money from him. Her apartment, which cost her about seven hundred dollars a month, was a dark little place, kind of cheap and depressing. But it was a shrine to Michael Jackson. Every inch of wall space was taken up by posters and photographs of him. Lots of them were signed, ‘To Debbie – Love, Michael.’
It’s fascinating that Michael was able to have someone in his life like Debbie, a person about whom the public was completely unaware. It had been presumed by his fans – mosdy because of the way Michael complained about his lack of privacy – that if ever a woman became a part of his life in any meaningful way, the world would know about it, instantly. It would make headlines. However, somehow, Debbie was kept a secret from Michael’s fans and the press for more than a decade.
‘When he went into the rehab for the drug problem, Debbie was relieved,’ says Tanya Boyd. ‘She’d been so worried about him, never out of touch with him during any of the Jordie Chandler business. He may have been talking to Lisa on the telephone a lot, but he was also speaking to Debbie – though I suspect Lisa did not know about that. When he got out of the hospital [Charter], he started dating Lisa, but he never stopped seeing Debbie, either, even after he married Lisa.’
Lisa’s friend, Monica Pastelle, recalled, ‘Lisa once told me that she heard Michael was interested in a white nurse who worked for his dermatologist. She laughed it off. She thought he was probably trying to make her jealous, playing games. Still, she was interested enough to go to the doctor’s office and sneak a look at this generously proportioned blonde, blue-eyed nurse named Debbie. After she saw her, she said, “I’m not sure Michael would ever be interested in her. She’s not his type. He likes glamour. However, I think she’s into him. I think they’re, I don’t know, dating, or something. It’s crazy.”’
It turned out to be true. While he was with Lisa, Michael was seeing Debbie secretly, if only as a friend. When Lisa found out about it, she thought it odd that he would keep it from her. However, she suspected that he had many secrets and this one was probably the least noteworthy of them. She did some research and realized that Debbie was, as she put it in 2003, ‘a nurse who had a crush on him.’
Lisa called her ‘Nursey’, she didn’t seem concerned about her. One friend recalled, ‘One afternoon, in passing, she said, “So, Nursey called about ten times today looking for Michael. I finally had to tell her, please, he will call you back, okay? Jesus Christ!” I said, “Lisa, what is that about?” She said, “Oh, I don’t know. She’s got it bad for him, I guess. I have no idea what her thing is. I have enough trouble trying to figure out Michael. I’m not about to start trying to figure out his friends, too.” That was her feeling about Debbie Rowe. She didn’t think of her as a threat.’
Lisa Marie Confronts Michael in Hospital
When in September 1995 Michael and Lisa appeared together at the MTV Awards, she sat at his side looking pissed off and miserable. She was tired of arguing, tired of trying to save him from himself. She had recently called Katherine Jackson to ask what she thought she should do about Michael’s insistence that he continue to have young boys in his life. ‘I want to save this marriage, but I also want to save Michael,’ she said, according to what Katherine later recalled to a friend. ‘He’s just looking for trouble. What can I do? This whole thing is freaking me out.’
‘I don’t know what you can do, but I know what you can’t do: you can’t try to tell him what to do,’ Katherine advised her daughter-in-law. She told her what many people already knew: ‘Michael does what he wants to do.’ She also suggested that Lisa call Johnnie Cochran, saying that the attorney might be the one to address the issue with Michael. Lisa called Johnnie. ‘My God! It’s all so innocent, this business with kids,’ Johnnie told her. He suggested that if she wanted to save her marriage she would ‘have to let Michael be who Michael is.’
‘You think she could have hid it for just one night in front of the cameras,’ Michael later complained to his mother about Lisa’s glum appearance on the MTV Awards. ‘But, no, not her. She puts her feelings right out there, doesn’t she? She’s so open.’
‘But that’s what you liked about her,’ Katherine reminded him.
‘Yeah, but now it’s working against me,’ Michael observed.
Despite the fact that their marriage seemed in trouble, Michael was still pushing for Lisa to become pregnant. Whenever he brought up the subject of having children, though, Lisa acted as if it wasn’t a serious issue for them. ‘I mean it,’ he told her, according to a later recollection. ‘I’m very serious. I want us to have children. I don’t think you’re hearing me,’ he said.
However, Lisa had heard him loud and clear. She had two children with Danny Keough. She knew how much she loved them, could never live a single day without them. Projecting ahead, she wondered what would happen to the child they would have if the marriage ended. ‘When I imagined having a child with him,’ she confirmed in 2003, ‘all I could ever see was a custody battle nightmare.’ Also, after getting to know him better and watching his day-to-day interactions with people, she became convinced that he was too emotionally immature to raise a child. ‘I think he needs a parent,’ she told one confidan
te, ‘and maybe shouldn’t be one himself, yet.’ However, she wouldn’t tell him all of that, at the time. Instead, she just hoped he would give up on the idea, at least for the time being.
Also, by this time, the heated physical intimacy Lisa had enjoyed with Michael had cooled. It could have only lasted so long, without real communication between them. She decided to use their waning physical intimacy as an excuse. ‘I think we have to have sex in order for me to get pregnant,’ she told him, according to what she later recalled. ‘And you know what? I ain’t doin’ it.”
Michael wasn’t convinced that he and Lisa had to engage in sexual activity in order to have a family of their own. He wanted children; that was his chief goal and he had made it clear. The question, then, became how to achieve it. Finally, one day over breakfast he told her, ‘Look, my friend Debbie said she will get pregnant and have my baby. If you won’t do it, then she will. How about that?’
Lisa didn’t know how to take Michael’s statement. Was it a challenge? A threat? Or just a fact? It certainly wasn’t the kind of news most wives would welcome hearing from their husbands: if you don’t have my baby, my nurse will. She was amazed by the seriousness of his tone. Who would then raise this child? She and Michael? Debbie? Or, just Michael, alone? Life with Michael Jackson was getting a little weird for her, as if it hadn’t been weird enough up until that time. She met his direct gaze calmly. ‘No kidding?’ she remarked. ‘Well, cool, then. That’s fine with me,’ she said in a controlled tone. ‘Tell her to go ahead and do it.’
The weeks slipped into months. By the winter of 1995, Lisa and Michael weren’t even speaking, and not because Lisa didn’t want to communicate with him, but because she simply could not find him. She didn’t know his whereabouts, only that he was not at Neverland – and no one in his camp would give her any information. After spending about a week trying to find him, there was a floral delivery from him at her home in Hidden Hills: dozens of red roses with a card that read, ‘Love, Michael.’ Under the circumstances, the gesture made no sense. Exasperated, she threw the flowers into the trash.
At about this time, she was already furious with him because of a cover story in TV Guide during which he was quoted as saying that she told him Elvis once had a nose job. ‘He was quoting me, “Presley told me Elvis had a nose job,” which is absolute bullshit,’ she now recalls. ‘I read that and I threw it across the kitchen. “I told you what?”’
‘It was getting nasty,’ she recalled, ten years later. ‘I was ready to kill him, I swear to God.’
In December 1995, Michael finally returned to Neverland. Priscilla Presley decided to pay him a surprise visit to find out what was going on with her son-in-law. ‘When she arrived, she saw Michael in the living room playing with about a dozen babies, all crawling about, some laughing, some crying,’ recalled Monica Pastelle. ‘It was like a big nursery, with a grown man in the middle of it all, seeming in a state of bliss. Though nothing wrong was going on, she was flabbergasted. It was so unsettling, Priscilla left, immediately.’
Lisa was speechless when her mother confronted her about what she’d seen.
A week later, Michael went to New York to begin rehearsals for a concert at the Beacon Theater, ‘Michael Jackson – One Night Only’, which was scheduled to be broadcast on cable television to 250 million viewers on 9 December. On 6 December, he collapsed during a practice session and was hospitalized at New York’s Beth Israel North Hospital. His doctors said he was suffering from heart arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat prompted by severe dehydration, gastroenteritis and a chemical imbalance affecting his liver and kidneys. He also had a viral infection. Yet earlier in the day, he seemed fine. Marcel Marceau, who was going to make an appearance on the HBO programme during Michael’s performance of ‘Childhood’, had been at the rehearsal when Michael collapsed. ‘He was so full of energy, in absolutely wonderful condition,’ said the mime, who turned away for a moment during Michael’s practice session of ‘Black and White’ under the hot and blinding lights.
‘I heard silence,’ said the mime, ‘and everything stopped. I looked and he was on the floor.’
By the time medics appeared on the site, Michael’s heartbeat was irregular and his blood pressure low. He had on so much makeup, they had to check his pallor by the color of his chest when they lifted his shirt.
As soon as he was checked into the hospital, Michael’s press people telephoned Lisa in Los Angeles and, with frantic explanations, begged her to fly to her husband’s side. ‘Hell, no,’ was her response. ‘Screw him. I’m not going. Why should I?’
She wasn’t going to get out of it that easily, however. Michael’s collapse had made big news: ‘Jacko on his Backo’ screamed the front page of the New York Post. The hospital even set up a telephone number with daily, automatic message updates on his condition. The media had assembled in front of the hospital, waiting for his wife to arrive to be with him. His ‘people’ then badgered her ‘people’ about Michael’s image and how it would ‘look’ if his wife wasn’t at his side. After all, even Diana Ross had shown up. Finally – and surprisingly, to her friends, anyway – Lisa gave in. Arriving at the hospital the next day, wearing a black pea coat and sunglasses, she was whisked through a side entrance.
It’s possible that Michael really did want Lisa to be with him. However, when she got there he must have been sorry she’d agreed to the public relations manoeuvre. She showed up with fire in her eyes. When she walked into the room, the first thing that hit Lisa were all the framed posters of Shirley Temple as a child-star, Mickey Mouse and Topo Gigio, the strange, little puppet-mouse popular from the old Ed Sullivan Show in the 1950s and 1960s. When Lisa looked down at Michael, he appeared to be on his death bed; it seemed as if he had tubes coming out of every limb. He reminded her, she would later say, of the pathetic creature from E. T. at the end of the movie when the alien has taken a turn for the worst. As she stood there, ‘E.T.’ gazed up at her weakly and, mustering all his strength, managed to say, ‘Hi, Lisa. How are you?’
Lisa wasn’t moved. She didn’t care much about Michael’s health, not at that moment, anyway. She suspected that he wasn’t suffering from ‘exhaustion’ or ‘dehydration’. He had long ago confided in her about his panic attacks. According to those who know her well, she figured that he’d suffered another and, based on his destabilized condition, that it had been quite a jolt to his system. Surely, though, it wasn’t because of the upcoming concert, she speculated. He’d made many such appearances, why would this particular one cause such a reaction? The broadcast had actually now been postponed indefinitely, costing both Michael and HBO a fortune. (It would never happen.) Whatever was going on with him was serious. Now that Michael was a captive audience, she wanted to confront him. So where had he been? Why was he so anxious? Most importantly, where did she stand with him?
Michael usually tries to avoid confrontation. So, for his irate wife to barge into his safe, hospital haven was upsetting. His heart must have been thundering in his chest.
Making matters more tense was the fact that the Cascio brothers had just left the room five minutes earlier. Had Lisa seen them? It was difficult to tell; her face was that impassive. But it’s likely she wouldn’t even have recognized them now. Still, it was a close call.
Lisa closed the door behind her. She and Michael then engaged in a private and, judging from the shouting going on in the room – hers, not his – heated conversation. ‘I’m like a lion, I roar,’ she would say in 2003. ‘I won’t be a victim. I don’t sulk, I get angry. I go immediately into retaliation.
‘I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him,’ she recalled. ‘I started asking questions, and it was always a different story. He said I was causing trouble and stirring up problems. He told me, “You’re making my heart rate go up,” and asked me to leave. I said, “Good. I want out. This is insane, all of it.”’
When the door to Michael’s room opened, Lisa burst out as if shot from a cannon, past everyone in the hall and
straight to the elevator. ‘Mrs Jackson,’ exclaimed one of the doctors. ‘My goodness! Your husband cannot be upset like this. He’s much too fragile. If you’re going to do this, you’ll not be able to visit him.’
Lisa gave him a sharp look.
Michael’s mother, who had been pacing in the hallway, regarded her daughter-in-law intensely. She could not fathom that Lisa would fly all the way from Los Angeles to New York just to fight with her son. Janet, who had also rushed to be at her brother’s side, had just gone to the ladies’ room. As Lisa stood waiting for the elevator, Katherine walked up to her and exploded in stunned disbelief. ‘What is wrong with you, Lisa,’ she hissed. ‘You are so spoiled. I can’t believe that you would do this to Michael.’ At that moment, the elevator opened and Lisa got into it. She turned, faced Katherine and gave her a critical look. Luckily for Katherine, the elevator’s doors then slammed closed between them.
Lisa wanted to see Michael the next day. ‘Absolutely not,’ Michael’s handlers told her. There had been a meeting with Jackson family members and it was decided that Lisa was an antagonizing presence in Michael’s life, and that he should now be protected from her, at all costs. Furious, Lisa went back to Los Angeles.
Perhaps a clue to Michael’s behaviour – his distancing himself from Lisa and his subsequent, apparent panic attack – can be found in analysing a chain of events from late 1995. It would be many years later that Debbie Rowe would reveal that she became pregnant that December. Michael had certainly given Lisa fair warning that Debbie would have his baby if she wouldn’t do it. ‘Tell her to go ahead and do it,’ Lisa had said. If she was being sarcastic, perhaps Michael didn’t catch the mockery.
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