UNTOUCHABLE
Also by Randall Sullivan
The Price of Experience
LAbyrinth
The Miracle Detective
UNTOUCHABLE
The Strange Life and Tragic Death
of Michael Jackson
Randall Sullivan
Grove Press UK
First published in the United States of America in 2012 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Grove Press UK,
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Copyright ©Randall Sullivan, 2012
The moral right of Randall Sullivan to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
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permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.
The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify
any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 603 3
Export trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 597 5
Home trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 576 0
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For Elaine Veronica Sullivan
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One: East
Part Two: North
Part Three: west
Part Four: South
Part Five: Remains
Timeline
A Note on Sources
bibliography and chapter notes
Author’s Note
The inception of this book was an e-mail sent to me by Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, in late June 2009 that read, “Are you ready to drop everything and do the big Michael Jackson piece?” After thinking it over for twenty-four hours, I said yes, and flew to Los Angeles, where Michael had died just a few days earlier. During the next several weeks, and in the course of conversations with editors at Rolling Stone, I realized that most people thought they knew quite a lot about the life Michael Jackson had lived up until the time his criminal trial on charges of child molestation ended with an acquittal in June 2005, but that he seemed in their minds to have disappeared into some sort of twilight zone during the four years afterward, at least up until the time of the announcement of his “This Is It” shows at the O2 Arena in London during March 2009. So the idea became to provide an account of those last four years that would somehow also be the story of his life, with the details of his first forty-five years “brush stroked in,” as somebody—maybe it was me—put it.
By the time I realized that what had begun as a magazine article was turning into a book, I was committed to that structure and it still felt right to me. I knew, of course, that I would need more than brush strokes to tell the story of the first nine-tenths of Michael’s life in what purported to be a biography, but I still wanted the story of his final five years to be the crux of the work.
I began to imagine the structure of this book as a spyglass telescope, made of three sections, or tubes, that fitted over one another, and could be extended or retracted as needed. The first tube, the one closest to the eye, would contain the lens that examined those years after the criminal trial, when Michael was a kind of Flying Dutchman wandering the globe, his three children in tow, searching for a new home he never found. The second tube, a bit further from the eye, would need to be fitted, I thought, with the lens I used to study the circumstances that led to the criminal charges against him, including the Martin Bashir documentary, Living with Michael Jackson that ran on ABC, the raid on Neverland Ranch, his arrest, and his trial. Then I realized that this second tube would have to reach at least back to 2001, when his “30th Anniversary” concerts coincided with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Finally, I understood that the length of this second tube was really the twelve years between 1993 and 2005, when Michael’s life, and his public reputation, were gradually destroyed by two very public accusations of sexually abusing children.
The Michael Jackson who existed after August 1993 was a different Michael Jackson than the one who had existed before then, so the story of those years is key to understanding his life, and needed to be told in some considerable detail. I would have to research and write a chronicle of the two main events that bookended those years, the Jordan Chandler scandal that broke in 1993 and the criminal trial that took place in 2005, that both encompassed and eclipsed anything previously published.
The third and most distant tube would house the lens that provided my view of Michael’s life up to 1993, the first thirty-five years of his youth, his rise to fame, his reign as the King of Pop and his transformation into the person the tabloid media called “Wacko Jacko”—in other words, the story of Michael Jackson that most people thought they knew. It would be necessary to rely largely on the public record for this section that I would be telling as, essentially, backstory, but I would have the advantage of filtering this through the two other lenses of the telescope and thus through the sources that had helped me construct them, some of those being people whose relationships with Michael had lasted decades. Plus, circumstances had arranged themselves in such a way that I was provided with a level of access to the inner workings of the Jackson family in the post-Michael era that no writer had ever or was ever likely to be granted again, and that was a blessing.
This last development was concurrent with my realization that there was a yet a fourth piece to my telescope, and that this was the perspective of all that had taken place in the months and years after Michael’s death, the celebration of and the struggle for his legacy and his estate. This fourth piece I came to imagine as fitting snugly over the first tube and thus becoming the part that was pressed against my flesh, containing the concave eyepiece that created my telescope’s magnification.
So in a way, I told myself, I was writing four Michael Jackson biographies. I could even claim that the total was five biographies, or even six. Knowing that many people might wish for a more conventional account of Michael’s life, I created the timeline that I consider an essential aspect of this book, laying out the story of Michael Jackson in chronological fashion, from beginning to end. And then there are, of course, my chapter notes, which not only describe how I wrote the book, but how I sorted the mass of conflicting information about Michael Jackson to deliver what I hope will be a definitive chronicle.
So there you have it, as good a description as I can offer of what I’ve done, and why.
Prologue
For someone who so often professed his loneliness, Michael Jackson spent a remarkable amount of time avoiding people. He lived most of his life behind gates and walls or in surreptitious transitions from one hiding place to another. He wore disguises, broke off relationships, and changed telephone numbers constantly, but still paparazzi, process servers, delusional women, and desperate men pursued him wherever he went.
The saddest part of his situation, though, was that the people Michael took the greatest pains to elude were the members of his own family.
In the late summer of
2001, they were after him again. It was just two days before his scheduled departure for New York, where his “30th Anniversary” concerts were to be staged at Madison Square Garden on September 7 and September 10. Jackson’s friend and business partner Marc Schaffel, in collaboration with producer David Gest, had assembled a collection of performers who would stretch across the years since the recording of Michael’s first solo single, “Got to Be There,” in 1971. The gamut ran from Kenny Rogers to Usher, and included such disparate talents as Destiny’s Child, Ray Charles, Marc Anthony, Missy Elliot, Dionne Warwick, Yoko Ono, Gloria Estefan, Slash, and Whitney Houston. Samuel L. Jackson had agreed to serve as master of ceremonies, while Michael’s friends Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando were recruited to deliver televised speeches.
Michael wanted his family in New York as well; his brothers to perform a medley of hits from their days as the Jackson 5, while his parents sat in special box seats. The Jacksons, though, insisted that they should receive appearance fees. David Gest agreed to honorariums of $250,000 for family members, even those who would be there to watch the show rather than performing in it. Schaffel thought it was “pretty weird” to be paying Michael’s own family to attend his anniversary concert, especially the ones who weren’t even going to be onstage, but Marc advanced money to pay the Jacksons out of his own pocket. Just days before the first concert, though, Jermaine Jackson read an article that said his brother would be making as much as $10 million from the two concerts and convinced his parents that Michael should pay the three of them another $500,000 apiece. Jermaine and his father Joe actually drew up a contract and, with Katherine Jackson in tow, chased Michael around Southern California to try to get him to sign, threatening all the while not to show up in New York unless he did.
Michael took refuge for several days at Schaffel’s house in Calabasas, in the hill country at the far western edge of the San Fernando Valley. The day before their scheduled departure for New York, though, Michael said he needed to make a quick trip north to Neverland Ranch to collect some clothing and other personal items for the trip. He and his two young children, four-year-old Prince and three-year-old Paris, had barely set foot inside the main house at Neverland when the security guards alerted Michael that his parents Joe and Katherine, and his brother Jermaine, were at the main gate, saying they had some papers they needed Michael to sign and demanding to be admitted. Michael told the guards to tell his family he wasn’t at the ranch and to send them away. Joe Jackson, though, refused to budge. “I’m his father,” Joe told the guards. “I need to use the bathroom. His mother needs to use the bathroom. Let us in.”
Frantic, Michael phoned Schaffel and explained the situation. If they got through the gate, his family would hound him to sign this contract agreeing to pay each of them another $500,000. But still, he couldn’t keep his mother locked outside when she was pleading to just be allowed to use the bathroom, Michael told Schaffel. What he was going to do, he explained, was instruct the guards to tell his family again that Mr. Jackson was not on the premises, but to admit them to the property so that they could use the facilities.
As soon as Joe and Jermaine were through the main gate, though, they drove straight to the main house and pushed their way inside to search for Michael. “They literally ransacked the place,” Schaffel remembered.
Michael retreated with the kids to a hiding place that was concealed behind a secret door at the back of his bedroom closet and phoned Schaffel from there. He was in tears by then, literally whimpering into the phone as he asked Schaffel, “You see what they do to me? Do you understand now why I don’t want anything to do with my brothers, why I hide from them and refuse to answer their phone calls?”
“I’ve supported my brothers, supported them all,” Michael cried into the phone. “I’ve put their kids through school. But they still come after me, still wanting more. It never ends. And my father’s worse than they are.”
Michael choked up and couldn’t continue for a moment, Schaffel recalled, then sobbed, “The worst part, the part that kills me, is that I have to lie to my own mother.”
“Do you understand, Marc?” Michael asked. “Do you understand now why I am the way I am? How else could I be?”
PART ONE
EAST
1
On June 29, 2005, sixteen days after the not-guilty verdicts in his Santa Barbara County child molestation trial, Michael Jackson came to the end of a journey that had taken him across the country, above the Atlantic Ocean, over the Mediterranean Sea, and into the Persian Gulf, where his private jet landed at Bahrain International Airport in Manama, eight thousand miles from his former home in California. He had to go that far to get relief and even there it wouldn’t last long.
Those who met him on the tarmac were pleased to see that his appearance was markedly improved from the withered wraith he had become during the final stages of his criminal trial. “Near the end, he went days at a time without eating or sleeping,” remembered his lead defense attorney, Tom Mesereau. “He would call us in tears at three or four in the morning, worried about what would happen to his children if he was behind bars. In those last couple of weeks, his cheeks were sunken to the point that his bones looked right on the surface.” By the time he arrived in Manama, Michael had put on nearly ten pounds and looked like he could dance to the terminal if he had to. Bahrainis greeting him at the airport agreed he appeared far less strange in person than they had imagined from photographs. And the size of those hands, Allahu Akbar.
Mesereau had been among the crowd of people who gathered at Neverland on the afternoon of the verdict. Michael repeatedly thanked the attorney but seemed capable of little more than hugging his children and staring into space. Some observers described Michael during the trial as sinking gradually into a drug-induced delirium as he raved about the conspiracy against him but Mesereau insisted that it was only on this final day that he encountered a Michael Jackson who seemed “less than lucid.”
A handful of people knew how thin the star had been stretched by the jury’s deliberations. One was the comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory, part of the crowd that accompanied Jackson from the courthouse to the ranch on what everyone thought might be Michael’s last trip to Neverland. The gaunt, white-bearded Gregory had been in and out of Jackson’s life for years, but Michael was especially adamant about having Gregory present while he awaited and received the jury’s verdict. Later in the evening, after Mesereau and others had taken their leave, Michael asked him to come upstairs to his bedroom, Gregory recalled. Michael clung to him on the stairs, Gregory said, and he could feel the entertainer’s bones jabbing through his clothes. “Don’t leave me!” Michael had pleaded. “They’re trying to kill me!”
“Have you eaten?” Gregory asked. The comic purported to have been the one who taught Michael to fast, claiming he had coached Jackson through forty days without food. A person had to drink gallons of water to go so long without eating, Gregory had instructed him then, but Michael appeared to have forgotten that part of the regimen. “I can’t eat!” Michael answered. “They’re trying to poison me!”
“When was the last time you drank water?” Gregory asked.
“I haven’t,” Michael replied.
“You need to get out of here,” Gregory told him.
Within an hour, Gregory, along with a small security detail, escorted Jackson to Santa Barbara’s Marian Medical Center. Jackson was immediately put on an intravenous drip of fluids and sleeping medication. The doctors who treated him told Gregory that Michael would not have survived another day without medical attention. As his family prepared for his “victory celebration” party at a nearby casino, Michael himself lay in a hospital bed drifting in and out of consciousness, wondering at one point if he was in jail and at another if this was the hereafter. He was released from the hospital only after spending nearly twelve solid hours on an IV.
He made one more trip to Neverland to pack, then left the ranch for the last time. Mesereau had advised hi
s client to get out of Santa Barbara County as soon as possible and not to return. The district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department were obsessed with Michael Jackson’s destruction, Mesereau believed, and would be especially dangerous now, after being humiliated by the verdicts. “I told Michael that all it would take to open the door to another criminal charge was one child wandering onto the ranch,” Mesereau recalled.
Michael spent most of the week following his acquittal recuperating at his friend Deepak Chopra’s Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, between Los Angeles and San Diego. He was joined by his children and their African nanny Grace Rwaramba. Slim and attractive, with an orange-tinted Afro and large, round eyes so dark brown that they appeared black in anything other than direct sunlight, Rwaramba had been Jackson’s employee for almost twenty years. Now in her late thirties, she had fled a Uganda decimated by the murderous warlord Idi Amin right around the time she reached puberty and had spent her teens living and studying with the Catholic nuns at Connecticut’s Holy Name Academy. Among her classmates, Grace had been best known for her vast collection of Michael Jackson pictures, postcards, T-shirts, and gloves, and for her emotional proclamations of love for the King of Pop. In the 1985 Holy Name yearbook, each graduating senior was permitted a “prophecy.” Hers read: “Grace Rwaramba is married to Michael Jackson and has her own generation of the Jackson 5.”
It was incredible how close she’d come to living her high school dream. After earning a degree in business administration at Atlantic Union College, she met the family of Deepak Chopra, who personally introduced her to Michael and arranged for her to obtain a position on Jackson’s staff during the Dangerous tour. As personnel director, she had been tasked mainly with organizing insurance arrangements, but Grace moved steadily up the ranks at Neverland, becoming Michael’s most trusted employee. When Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. was born in 1997, Michael appointed her the infant’s nanny. She had taken charge of each of the next two children, Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson, born in 1998, and Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, born in 2001, growing so close to them that all three children called her Mom.
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