Michael Jackson, a twelve-year-old pretending to be ten, had become all but iconic in what seemed the blink of an eye. When he and his brothers flew back to visit Gary, it was for a ceremony at which the street where they once lived was renamed “Jackson 5 Boulevard.” That April, Michael had become the youngest person to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, with a headline that read, “Why does this eleven-year-old stay up past his bedtime?” He was four months from his thirteenth birthday, but the delayed onset of puberty helped the lie about his age remain viable. “Here you have the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and the Tempts and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum,” Ben Fong-Torres had gushed inside the magazine. The most memorable anecdote from Torres’s article was about Michael telling a concert audience that he could sing the blues because he knew all about them, then describing how his heart had been broken by a girl he met in the sandbox, only to see it all go downhill after “we toasted our love during milk break.”
He kept his cover by holding fast to the enthusiasms of childhood, far more excited about the premiere that September of a network cartoon show called The Jackson 5ive than he was about the cover of Rolling Stone. Even though the voice of the animated character named Michael Jackson was not his, “I woke up every Saturday morning” to watch, he would remember. “I felt so happy, you have no idea . . . I think I felt more special about that than the records and the concerts and everything.”
The Jackson 5 kicked off its first big national tour that October in Boston, where, even with a large security staff and a twelve-foot-high fence protecting them, the boys had to be pulled offstage before they were mobbed by an audience of young women who had gone completely berserk. At Cincinnati Gardens, thousands of girls who had been turned away when the concert sold out staged a near riot outside the stadium, while those who got inside the gates crammed the aisles and shrieked themselves into a near delirium, even as local disc jockeys took turns pleading for calm. Fourteen girls had to be carried outside unconscious after fainting. Girls collapsed in the aisles at every stop after that, and by the hundreds clamored and chanted afterward outside the Jacksons’ hotels.
Michael seemed to enjoy the attention at first, but his pleasure quickly diminished. Halfway through the tour, he didn’t want to leave the hotel except to perform, and what he seemed to love most about their stopovers were water balloon and shaving cream fights with his brothers. That stopped when first Jackie, then Tito, and then even Jermaine, grew more interested in the girls gathered at the stage door after a concert than they were in fun and games with their little brother.
When the Jackson 5 left the United States in October 1972 for a twelve-day European tour, they discovered that the white girls there were just as crazy for them as the black girls in America. A full-scale riot erupted in the streets of Amsterdam when it was announced that the Jacksons would perform only one night in the Dutch city. On their way to a command performance before Queen Elizabeth in London that would launch the tour, the boys were nearly crushed by the screaming mob of girls who awaited them at Heathrow Airport. Plugs of Tito’s Afro were ripped from his scalp within seconds of his stepping off the plane. The shrieking inside the terminal was so intense that it brought tears to Marlon’s eyes. The five brothers were swiftly separated by the surge of the crowd and had to scramble and shove their way separately to the limousine waiting at the curb outside. Michael, still not five feet tall, was nearly strangled by girls who grabbed opposite ends of the scarf he wore, and had to work the fingers of one hand up under the scarf to push it off his larynx, using the other hand to protect his eyes from the fingernails that clutched and slashed at him from every direction.
“Sheer pandemonium,” was how a release issued by the delighted executives at Motown described the scene. Their English fans barricaded the entrance to the Churchill Hotel, where the Jacksons were staying in London, and had to be dispersed by bobbies firing water cannons. The next day, a nine-year-old girl tried to force her way into Michael’s room at knifepoint. Dozens of other girls brandished knives at the police outside the hotel; one girl swung a sledgehammer to try to get inside. The Rolls-Royce limo that carried the group to their performance that evening was dented and scraped in dozens of places as it crawled through the swarm of young girls who scratched at the windows with their fingernails, smashing their faces against the glass. While the boys were performing inside the Talk of the Town nightclub, the limo was stripped to its frame and they had to ride back to their hotel in taxis.
The older Jackson brothers surveyed the mad scene that surrounded them with fear and wonder, but for Michael only the fear was real. He was a prepubescent boy standing four feet, ten inches tall and weighing less than eighty pounds—“round eyes, round dimples on a round face, under a round Afro,” was how Ben Fong-Torres had described him in Rolling Stone—who had no way of understanding the sexual frenzy he elicited from the young women who charged and clutched and clawed at him. “They were so big,” his mother Katherine would explain. “And he was so small.”
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In London, Michael had decided to turn the trip forced on him by Marc Schaffel into a three-week holiday for his children. Prince and Paris got a taste of their father’s London experience when they ventured from the Dorchester with him on October 7, to visit Abbey Road, the studio where the Beatles recorded the majority of their songs. A relatively small crowd of fans and photographers outside the hotel had done their best to create a mob scene, pushing up against Michael’s security team in a crush of clutching arms and contorted faces that terrified his kids. When they got to St. John’s Wood for a tour of the studio, Michael recalled recording “Say Say Say” here with Paul McCartney back in 1981, but the children were a lot more excited about their father’s promise to take them to see the movie Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
First, though, they would meet up with Michael’s old friend Mark Lester and his family to see the musical Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre. Almost forty years later, Lester was still best known to the world as the young actor who had played the title character in Oliver!, the musical that had won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture. Back in the days when he and his brothers were just beginning to become recognized as recording stars, Michael explained, he used to open teen magazines and see pictures of himself and Mark on opposite pages, as if facing off against one another, “the positive and the negative, the black and the white.” They had not actually gotten to know one another until late 1982, shortly before the release of Thriller, when Lester got a call from someone who said Michael Jackson would like to meet him, and arranged an introduction in a suite at the Montcalm Hotel in Park Lane. Lester had ceased acting as a young adult and was now almost completely obscure outside Gloucestershire, the county west of London where he worked as an osteopath and ran an acupuncture clinic in the spa town of Cheltenham. He and Michael, though, had remained in close contact for the past two decades and rarely went a year without seeing one another. Mark was godfather to all three of Michael’s children, as Michael was to at least two of Lester’s four kids—who had made multiple trips to California for stays at Neverland that were the envy of their schoolmates.
The Lester kids seemed as excited as ever about seeing Michael in London, but their father was distracted by the thought that he might be the biological father of at least one of Michael’s own children.
Back in 1997, while married to Debbie Rowe, Michael had asked Mark to donate sperm at a clinic in California. Lester had wondered ever since if his sperm had been used to impregnate Rowe with her daughter Paris, he said. And now, in London, he was struck by the “uncanny likeness” between seven-year-old Paris and his own eleven-year-old daughter Harriet. He chose not to press the subject, though, and accepted that living with doubts was the price one paid for a relationship with Michael Jackson.
Lester knew far better than most people how “traditional” Michael’s avowed value system was, but even he had been ta
ken aback by his friend’s reaction to Billy Elliot. The foul language was totally unacceptable, said Michael, and he would never have brought his children to see it if he had known how bad it was. At age forty-seven, Michael still refrained from cursing. While he no longer insisted that people not use swear words in his own presence, he demanded that they refrain when his children were around. He was a far better father than he was given credit for by the media, in Lester’s opinion, not only refusing to let his children be spoiled but dealing with them very firmly when he saw some sign that they thought they were above ordinary folk.
Still, the Jackson kids did have the run of an entire floor at the five-star Dorchester and were used to such special treatment as having Madame Tussaud’s wax museum closed to the public so that they could join their father on a private tour. They marveled at the figure of him twenty years younger, frozen in the middle of a dance step and outfitted in the sequined black suit, white V-neck T-shirt, and red-banded black fedora. When they went shopping at Harrods three days later, the kids were greeted by the store’s then-owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed, “Princess Diana’s father-in-law,” as Michael preferred to call the father of the boyfriend who died with Diana in the 1997 Paris car crash. Prince, Paris, and Blanket were allowed to sit with a crowd of regular people when they saw Wallace and Gromit but only after being ushered into the theater during the opening credits to seats that had been saved for them in the back row. Two days after that, they were loaded onto a private jet and flown back to Bahrain. For all the children knew, this was how everyone lived.
On the same day he left London, Jackson’s attorneys filed a countersuit against Marc Schaffel in Santa Monica, alleging that he had misappropriated funds, had failed to pay production costs for “What More Can I Give?” and had continued to represent himself as Michael Jackson’s business partner long after the relationship was “terminated.” The suit also accused Schaffel of keeping $250,000 worth of sculptures and paintings that belonged to Jackson.
The answer to Jackson’s court filing came swiftly and painfully. In November, Schaffel’s attorney Howard King provided Good Morning America with a recording of Michael Jackson that would paint him as an anti-Semite: “They suck—they’re like leeches. I’m so tired of it. [Recording artists] start out the most popular person in the world, make a lot of money, big house, cars, and everything, end up with—penniless. It is conspiracy. The Jews do it on purpose.”
It was an area of vulnerability for Michael and the entire Jackson family. He had been beset by allegations of anti-Semitism since 1995 upon the release of his album HIStory. The controversy was ignited by the lyrics of his song “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included the verse: “Jew me / sue me / everybody do me / Kick me, kike me / don’t you black or white me.” Even as he insisted the song was a protest against racism and ethnic discrimination, the Anti-Defamation League had mounted protests that forced Michael ultimately to add percussive sound effects that obscured the words “Jew” and “kike” in subsequent issues of the album.
Many in the entertainment industry had heard, as well, the stories of an anti-Semitism that ran rampant in the Jackson household; based largely on quotes attributed to her by her daughter La Toya (who later retracted these claims), Katherine Jackson had been accused in particular. Jermaine’s public conversion to Islam, combined with the family’s involvement with Louis Farrakhan and Michael’s move to the Middle East after leaving the United States, further cemented the impression of anti-Semitism many had.
Howard King admitted his doubt that Jackson truly disliked Jews: “I think at the end of the day Michael was pretty tolerant of everybody.” The attorney seemed only too happy, though, to see his legal adversary pilloried once again by the Anti-Defamation League, which on the morning after the “leeches” recording aired on Good Morning America demanded a public apology from Michael Jackson “to Jews everywhere.”
What it all meant, at a minimum, was that Michael would not be returning to the United States in the near future. By the middle of November, Sheikh Abdullah had invested more than $5 million in Michael Jackson. That included paying the entertainer’s numerous attorneys who were attending to assorted civil matters. Abdullah’s own attorney Ahmed al Khan was helping Jackson handle his negotiations with assorted major creditors. The sheikh had covered all the costs of Michael’s living and travel expenses since his arrival in Manama and had spent a substantial sum to arrange and coordinate recording sessions that linked Jackson with studios in Los Angeles. He provided his guest with the use of both a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes Maybach, and bought him jewelry, watches, and a statue made of solid gold.
Abdullah still seemed to believe it would all pay off. The Bahraini media swallowed Sheikh Abdullah’s latest press release whole, turning it into a series of rapturous stories about how, days after his arrival in the country, Michael Jackson had recorded Abdullah’s original composition “He Who Makes the Sky Gray.” The people of his country would be hearing the song “very, very soon,” according to the sheikh, who promised that “proceeds will go to relief efforts in different parts of the world to help victims of wars and natural disasters.” What he and Mikaeel would offer was “a song created in Bahrain,” Abdullah went on, “to show the world that this region is not about wars and conflicts.”
Jackson “thrilled the nation” when he traveled to Dubai with Abdullah in mid-November to attend the Dubai Desert Rally Awards, according to the November 14 edition of the Khaleej Times. Mikaeel had tried to be inconspicuous while he ate lunch with the managing director of the Dubai International Marine Club, Saeed Hareb, according to the newspaper, but those in attendance were beside themselves when he stepped forward to present the trophies to the winners in the Desert Rally’s automobile and motorcycle categories. “Reports have surfaced,” the newspaper account added, that Jackson had just paid $1.5 million for a lot at Bahrain’s man-made Amwaj Islands, where he planned to construct the palace that would replace Neverland Ranch as his primary residence.
The Persian Gulf’s pride in Jackson was torpedoed the very next day when the UAE’s largest afternoon daily, Evening Post, ran a banner front-page headline announcing that “Wacko Jacko” had been caught inside a ladies’ toilet at Dubai’s Ibn Battuta Mall. Jackson had been costumed in an abaya, the black full-length gown, face veil, and head covering traditionally worn by Arab women, when he ducked into the bathroom and removed his headdress to apply what the newspaper described as “much-needed” makeup. A woman emerging from a toilet stall squealed in horror at the sight of Jackson’s “mangled” face and began snapping photos of him with her cell phone. Shoppers at the mall heard shouts and screams, then saw Jackson’s bodyguards wrestling with the woman outside the bathroom as they forced her to hand over the cell phone. Jackson was then driven off with his bodyguards in a vehicle with blacked-out windows.
One day after the Post report, Arab newspapers were filled with demands that Jackson receive “appropriate punishment.” A Syrian housewife was quoted as saying, “This man shows his immoral character pretending to be a woman. He should be punished severely.” Jackson must go to jail, chimed in a Sudanese nurse who promptly changed that to “a place worse than jail, so that it would set an example.” A young Egyptian mother declared that Jackson had insulted not just Muslim women, but the entire Muslim world and demanded “stern action.”
The Al Khalifas responded by getting Michael out of the country. Rather than address the mall incident directly, though, Sheikh Abdullah explained to Jackson that his uncle, the king’s brother, was returning from overseas and would need the use of the home in which Michael and his children had been staying. Along with Grace, they were sent off to neighboring Oman, where a dinner had been arranged at the home of the U.S. ambassador. The traveling party had just checked into the Al Bustan Palace hotel when word came that Jackson’s longtime chief of security, Bill Bray, had died in Los Angeles. Bray, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer, had begun protecting Jackson when Michael wa
s the ten-year-old lead singer of the Jackson 5. In the years that followed, Bray became the fiercely protective father figure Michael yearned for, literally carrying the young singer through the shrieking, scratching crowds of young women that so terrified him as a preadolescent. A breach had opened between the two during the Bad tour, though, when Bray, in an attempt to secure his financial future, prevailed upon Jackson to sign a document that for a few weeks made the aging bodyguard the CEO of MJJ Productions, Michael’s principal business arm. Bray surrendered the title after Jackson realized what he had done, but for the first time doubts about Bill’s motives had been seeded in Michael’s mind.
Those seeds sprouted a year later when Bray became involved in the so-called “Moonie Fiasco.” A representative of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon named Kenneth Choi had been assigned to persuade Michael to join the other Jackson brothers in a series of concerts to be staged in Seoul, South Korea, under the auspices of the Segye Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies. Choi had gone to absurd lengths to make what he called “The Jackson Family Reunion Concerts” happen, spending money in prodigious amounts along the way. Michael’s parents, Katherine and Joseph, were flown twice to Korea, once with their oldest daughter Rebbie, and shown the most extravagant level of luxury that Seoul could provide. Michael’s manager Frank Dileo was offered two cashier’s checks totaling $1 million by Choi if he could convince Michael to participate in the concerts (and he was fired three days after he discussed the situation with Jackson). Joe and Katherine’s representative Jerome Howard got a new Mercedes as an incentive bonus to make the “Family Reunion” concerts happen. After complaining that “these are my boys, not Jerome’s,” Joe Jackson received a Rolls-Royce Corniche and $50,000 cash, while another $35,000 cash went to Katherine. Jermaine Jackson got a Range Rover for being (supposedly) the brother Michael trusted most, and the Moonies sent the star himself not only a new Rolls-Royce but also a truckload of artwork and $60,000 cash. He would receive $10 million if he performed at the four concerts, Choi promised Michael, in addition to his share of the $7.5 million that was to be split among the Jackson brothers. Eventually, the Koreans were buying expensive gifts for seemingly anyone who claimed to be able to influence Michael Jackson. The farce hit bottom when Bill Bray’s girlfriend persuaded Choi to hand over the keys to a 560 SEL Mercedes, simply for claiming she had Michael’s ear. Bray himself somehow came out of it all with $500,000, and when Michael heard about that, things were never the same between the two of them. Bray was not invited to live at Neverland when Michael moved to the ranch, and in 1995 his position with MJJ Productions was terminated.
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