Her relationship with their father was more muddled. Over the years, Grace had developed a certain “be careful what you wish for” cynicism about Michael that strained her devotion to him. The only person on his staff who ever dared to criticize or challenge him, she had been dismissed several times but each time had been brought back almost immediately, mainly because the children cried for her. Tabloid and Internet reports of Michael and Grace’s impending marriage regularly surfaced, but a rarely mentioned obstacle was that Grace was already married to someone named Stacy Adair. She had wed Adair in what was described as “a ceremony of convenience” (presumably to protect Rwaramba from problems with the immigration authorities) in Las Vegas in 1995. Adding to the confusion was that those who spent time around Michael characterized Grace in ways that were wildly contradictory. Chopra invariably referred to her as “a lovely young woman” and said she was “devoted” to Michael and his children. Others reported that she was principally dedicated to the power she wielded as Michael’s “gatekeeper” and spent much of her energy attempting to insulate him from anyone who might attempt direct contact.
Though she had grown up as one of fifteen children in the Ugandan village of Ishaka, Grace had spent most of her adult life living in either fabulous mansions or the presidential suites of five-star hotels, developing an outsized sense of entitlement along the way. “The most powerful nanny in the universe,” was how Time magazine described her, because of the sway she held over Michael’s children. Tom Mesereau acknowledged that Grace’s self-importance was a contributing factor to his subsequent resignation as Michael’s general counsel. “I got really, really tired of dealing with her,” he said. Many reports linked Grace to the Nation of Islam but in truth she had undertaken a course of Bible study during Michael’s criminal trial and was said to have joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the only public comment she made during Michael’s criminal trial, Grace replied to a question about who was behind the molestation charges by answering, “Satan, the devil.” Jackson’s spiritual advisor among the Witnesses, Firpo Carr, said he heard her described as “this woman in the background with all of this power, flexing her muscles,” but that in his personal encounters with Grace he had found her to be “one of the most humble people I’ve ever met.”
That mixture of modesty and might was regularly tested in her dealings with Michael, whom she often treated like the fourth of her juvenile charges. When Michael finally gave in to her demands to get his own cell phone, he lost the device within a day, and went back to telling people to call Grace’s number if they wanted to speak with him. He and the nanny regularly bickered over Michael’s wasteful spending. Nearly all the revenue from Michael’s catalog holdings, record sales, and song royalties was going directly to his enormous debt payments. Yet even as he lived hand-to-mouth, Michael continued to insist on booking the most expensive hotel suite in every city they visited. When there was no money to pay the bills, they stayed with one of the many “friends” the star had around the world who offered hospitality. Michael possessed so little grasp of his finances that he had whatever checks came his way deposited into Grace’s bank account, then asked that she dole cash out to him as needed. He grew peeved or suspicious whenever she told him the money was gone.
On June 17, four days after his acquittal, Jackson’s passport and the $300,000 bond he had posted to meet his $3 million bail were returned to him by Judge Rodney Melville, who had presided over the trial. Two days later, without advising even those who were closest to him, Jackson flew with his children and their nanny aboard a private jet to Paris, then traveled by limousine to the Hotel de Crillon, part of the magnificent palace complex at the foot of the Champs-Elysées. The $300,000 he had pocketed upon his release from bail would cover the cost of ten days at this pinnacle of privilege. Lodging in a presidential suite at the Crillon was almost impossible to obtain on short notice, committed as such accommodations were to the various heads of state and high-ranking government officials who typically occupied them, but for Michael Jackson the Crillon’s management had been willing to make adjustments. During these ten days he could not only rest and continue to recover, but also give himself something that he had been denied in recent months—the trappings of royal status. He was still the King of Pop, something more than a mere celebrity, a personage of such importance that he could have the Crillon’s fabulous Leonard Bernstein Suite, where his children could frolic on the famous wraparound terrace with its spectacular views of the City of Lights while he tickled the keys of the maestro’s piano.
A single item of good news encouraged him: Mediabase, which monitored airplay for the radio and recording industries, reported that spins of Michael’s records had tripled in the first two days after the “not guilty” verdict in Santa Barbara County.
Peace and privacy were promised in Bahrain. Upon arrival at the airport in the capital city, Jackson and his children were transported directly to the staggering palace of their host, Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the thirty-year-old, second son of the king of Bahrain. For most of the past decade, Abdullah had been not only the governor of Bahrain’s southern province but also the hardest rocking oil sheikh in the entire Middle East. A devotee of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley, the portly Abdullah kept a second home in the Kensington section of London, where he was known for riding around on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, often in flowing robes, occasionally with a guitar strapped to his back. An aspiring songwriter whose family wealth and Islamic faith had imbued him with a sense of transcendent possibility, the sheikh’s plan was to revive Jackson’s career (and launch his own) through 2 Seas Records, a music label the two would own as partners. Abdullah’s palace was fitted with the finest recording studio in the entire kingdom and Michael would have full use of it for as long as he liked, just as the sheikh had assured him during a series of phone calls between Manama and Neverland Ranch during the criminal trial.
The Bahraini prince demonstrated his seriousness during those months of the trial with ample financial largess. Introduced to the entertainer through Jackson’s brother Jermaine, who converted to Islam in 1989, Sheikh Abdullah from the first had lent more than a sympathetic ear to Jackson’s woeful tale of legal bills that were eating him alive. “He would say, ‘What can I do for my brother? What can I give the children?’” recalled Grace Rwaramba. In March 2005, just as the prosecution began to present its case at the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, local utilities had threatened to shut off service at Neverland unless the cash-starved singer paid his overdue bills. Abdullah, who had never met Michael face-to-face, responded by immediately wiring $35,000 in cash to her personal checking account, Rwaramba recalled. She was “flabbergasted,” but the sheikh merely apologized for the paltry amount, promising “next time it will be more.” A month later, Michael asked for $1 million, Rwaramba said, and “it blew my mind” when Abdullah sent exactly that amount. By the first day of summer, Abdullah had promised to pay the $2.2 million in legal bills Jackson would accumulate by the end of his criminal trial if the singer took up residence in Manama.
Sheikh Abdullah was aching to show off his prize, yet insisted that the media hold Jackson’s presence in Bahrain as a sort of open secret for nearly two months. Various publications reported that Jackson was in the country as a guest of the prince, but added only that, according to the royal family, “Michael wants to lead a normal life and does not want to be hounded by the media.” The sheikh and his famous guest did not venture out in public together until they traveled to the emirate of Dubai on August 20, and even then they did not make themselves available to reporters until another week had passed.
One Middle Eastern story after another celebrated how “happy and healthy” Jackson appeared in the photographs taken at his first public appearance since the trial, in Dubai on August 27, 2005, two days before his forty-seventh birthday. Dressed in an electric-blue shirt and a black fedora, Michael smiled tentatively but sweetly as he and the jowly, droopy-eyed Abdull
ah posed with the legendary Arab rally driving champion, Mohammed bin Sulayem, while cameras clicked and rolled all around them.
The photo session took place in the corporate offices of Nakheel Properties, the megadeveloper responsible for several of the projects that had transformed Dubai into the world capital of architectural adventurism. Luxury real estate and appointment shopping were what drove the local economy these days and Michael had contributed his part earlier in the week when he ventured out in disguise and behind blackout windows to the absurdly opulent two-story retail complex known locally as “The Boulevard.” When the photo session finished, Nakheel executives took Michael and Abdullah on a boat tour of the Dubai shore, skimming over iridescent blue waters alongside the white shell and coral beaches that had once been the tiny emirate’s main attraction. From the water, Jackson could see each of the skyscrapers that sprouted from Dubai’s fabled sands like petrodollar silos. The Jumeirah Emirates Towers were the twelfth and the twenty-ninth tallest buildings on the planet, he was told, but mere scratching posts compared to the Dubai Tower, where construction had begun almost a year earlier and which, at 2,684 feet, would be the tallest man-made structure on earth by the time of its completion in 2009.
The destination of that afternoon’s cruise was the emirate’s ultimate engineering feat, the Palm Islands, where more than a billion tons of rock and sand were being used to create a residential community of artificial islands, each in the shape of a palm tree topped by a crescent. Here a world of make believe was being brought to life on a scale that would make even Neverland Ranch seem quaint by comparison. While Michael once again assured all present that he was serious about settling down in Dubai, Abdullah delighted the trailing reporters with his announcement that “Mikaeel” planned to build a grand mosque here in his “new home,” dedicated to English-language instruction in the principles of Islam.
Jackson had not actually become a Muslim, but was “on the verge of converting to Islam,” according to the Arab-Israeli newspaper Panorama. The story would soon be picked up by CBS News, then seized upon by New York Sun columnist Daniel Pipes, who observed that “it fits into a recurring and important African-American pattern.” That Jackson appeared to welcome being addressed in Bahrain by the name of Allah’s great angel, Mikaeel, gave the conversion claim credence in the minds of those who did not know that during his criminal trial the entertainer had several times escorted his children to services at the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and was permitting his mother Katherine to instruct all three kids in church doctrine.
Mikaeel would keep his religious ambivalence to himself while dwelling in the Middle East, and especially when he returned with Abdullah to Manama for a public greeting by the sheikh’s father, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. After His Majesty and Mikaeel withdrew behind closed doors, the king’s staff announced to waiting reporters that Mr. Jackson had just acquired a “luxury palace” in Manama and was donating “a huge amount of money” for a second mosque to be built in Bahrain’s capital city.
The palace was being rented by the royal family, though, and the millions Jackson had “donated” for the two mosques were an empty pledge. The entertainer would live on Abdullah’s dole throughout his stays in Manama and Dubai but even the oil sheikh’s pockets weren’t deep enough to fill the hole that Jackson was in. The vast assortment of problems—legal, financial, personal, and professional—that had chased him to the Persian Gulf were not only following Jackson, but stacking up against his narrow back.
Two weeks before he celebrated his birthday in Dubai, Jackson had been fined $10,000 by a district court judge in New Orleans for his failure to appear at a hearing prompted by a particularly specious sex abuse accusation. A thirty-nine-year-old man named Joseph Bartucci was claiming that, while watching coverage of the trial in California, he had recovered the suppressed memory of an assault on him that had taken place twenty-one years earlier, during the 1984 World’s Fair. According to Bartucci’s complaint, he had been “lured” into Jackson’s limousine and taken on a nine-day ride to California in which he was forced to consume “mood altering drugs” while Jackson performed oral sex on him, cut him with a razor, and stabbed him in the chest with a steel wire. Bartucci could offer not one piece of evidence to support his allegations, while Jackson’s attorneys had provided irrefutable proof that their client was in the company of President and First Lady Ronald and Nancy Reagan during some of the days when Bartucci claimed to be his captive. Yet Judge Eldon Fallon allowed the case to go forward even when it was revealed that Bartucci was an admitted bigamist who had been party to eighteen separate civil suits and criminal complaints during the past seventeen years, and was arrested for stalking a woman in 1996. Infuriated that his attorneys in New Orleans had run up a $47,000 bill without obtaining the dismissal of a fabricated lawsuit, Jackson fired them while he prepared for the trip to the Persian Gulf, then simply turned his back on the Louisiana litigation. Now Judge Fallon was demanding that Jackson show cause why he should not be held in contempt and a default judgment entered against him. Jackson would have to answer, even if he did so from halfway around the world.
It was but one legal predicament among many. During the past twelve years, Jackson had paid out almost $100 million in settlements and attorney’s fees to deal with the scores of court filings, both frivolous and not, against him, and dozens remained pending. Of all these claims, by far the most expensive—in every sense of the word—had resulted in the payment of more than $18 million to the family of a thirteen-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler back in 1994. According to Mesereau, Michael had come to realize that making a deal with the Chandlers was “the worst mistake of his life.” It was the size of the settlement that convinced much of the public and many in the media that Jackson was, more likely than not, a child molester. What sort of innocent man, people asked, would pay that kind of money to a false accuser? “Someone desperate to get on with his life,” answered Mesereau. “Michael had no idea how people would interpret his decision to try to make the whole thing go away.” The consequences of that decision had multiplied exponentially as one lawsuit after another was filed against him, with various grifters lining up for their piece of the entertainer’s rapidly shrinking fortune.
On September 23, 2005, Michael flew to London with Abdullah, Grace Rwaramba, and the children, booking an entire floor at the Dorchester Hotel. It was his standard operating procedure when traveling, he explained to the sheikh, who was footing the bill. Jackson made the trip to deal with what was perhaps the most piercing of all the legal claims currently pending against him: a lawsuit filed in November 2004, in the midst of his criminal trial, by Jackson’s former business partner and erstwhile “dear friend” Marc Schaffel.
The thirty-five-year-old Schaffel had emerged as a public figure in late 2001, when he suddenly became the most visible among a crowd of advisors jockeying for position around Jackson, mainly because he had been charged with assembling a choir of superstars to sing with Michael on a charity single titled “What More Can I Give?” The song had originally been inspired by a meeting with South African president Nelson Mandela but was subsequently intended to benefit Kosovar refugees. Then, in the wake of the September 11 atrocities, “What More Can I Give?” was hastily rewritten with the intention to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. The evolving project had turned into an almost perfect example of how and why virtually everything that in recent years had been initiated from within what the media liked to call “the Jackson camp” was destined to end in a fiasco of finger-pointing and litigation.
Schaffel had been popping up in Jackson’s life since August 1984. Just eighteen back then, Schaffel was a freelance cameraman for ABC television, which sent him to Detroit to shoot footage of the Jackson 5’s Victory tour. Schaffel arrived at the Pontiac Silverdome late and was mortified when the Jacksons’ security detail denied him permission to join the rest of the media i
n front of the main stage. “They put me in a room backstage to wait,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there feeling really stupid when I hear the door open. I assume it’s one of the people that’s going to usher me outside, but in walks Michael, who closes the door, and it’s just the two of us.” Jackson took one look at the enormous camera sitting next to Schaffel and stepped over to inspect it more closely. “This was back in the time when they were switching from film to video, and I had one of the first ENG cameras around,” the thickly built Schaffel explained. “It was a huge thing with a separate flash for video, and Michael was fascinated by it. He asked, ‘Can I look at your camera?’ and I was like, ‘This can’t be real.’ He asked, ‘Can I pick it up?’ and I said sure, but I was a little concerned, because this was one big-ass camera, very heavy. But he just reached over and lifted the camera up like it was made of cardboard. I was amazed by his strength.” As Jackson began to fiddle with the camera’s lens, Schaffel could hear people shouting “Michael!” outside the door, calling out to the star that he needed to make a costume change. “I don’t think Michael even heard them,” Schaffel said. “Finally, he says, ‘We have another show to do here. Can I call you later and use the camera, try it out?’ I said sure, and gave him my number, thinking I’d never hear back. But the next day I get a call asking if I can come by the hotel where the Jacksons were staying. Michael was that interested.”
The two ran into each other again in the mid-1990s at a fund-raiser for the AIDS research foundation amfAR in Beverly Hills. “Michael points to me and says, ‘You were the guy with the camera,’” Schaffel remembered. “He didn’t know my name, but he knew my face.” He and Jackson didn’t have their first real conversation, though, until the year 2000, when they met at the home of the famous dermatologist they shared, Arnold Klein, a friend of Schaffel’s who became a significant figure in Michael’s life over the years, involved in aspects of the entertainer’s life that ranged from financial management to the conception of his two oldest children. “Michael was staying at Klein’s home after a procedure,” Schaffel remembered. “He used to stay at Arnie’s house quite a bit.” The two spent most of that evening in conversation. “Michael testified later that he liked Marc’s enthusiasm and ideas,” Schaffel’s attorney Howard King would recall. “He especially liked that these ideas didn’t involve singing and dancing. Michael was intent on finding a way to make money that did not involve being onstage or in a studio.”
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