Elizabeth and Michael

by Donald Bogle

  Following the taping of the special, Michael and Lisa Marie went to Neverland.

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  AFTER HAVING DATED for four months, Michael had a question for Lisa Marie, “What would you do if I asked you to marry me?” Of course, there would be a little stumbling block once Lisa answered yes. She was still married to someone else. That issue was soon resolved. On May 6, Lisa Marie’s husband Danny Keough flew with her to the Dominican Republic to finalize their divorce. They both quickly left the island. It all called to mind the arrival of Michael Wilding in Mexico to provide Elizabeth with a quick divorce so that she could quickly marry Mike Todd. On May 26, Lisa Marie returned to the Dominican Republic, where she and Michael were married by a judge in a secret ceremony without family or friends in attendance. For months, nothing about the Jackson-Presley nuptials was revealed to the press. When rumors floated about the marriage, there were denials. Like just about everyone else, Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla Presley, was left in the dark until a phone conversation with her daughter. With helicopters hovering over her home, Priscilla reportedly told her daughter that she was hearing strange news reports that Lisa Marie had married Jackson. She was ready to laugh the story off, thinking it was one more media fabrication. But when nothing was said on the other end of the phone, Priscilla realized the story was true. A distressed Priscilla reportedly feared Michael might be using her daughter to clean up his image after the molestation case. “Can’t you see what he’s up to? It’s so obvious,” she reportedly said.

  A friend of Priscilla’s, who saw her about a month after the wedding, commented: “She looked downright terrible. It was obvious she was very preoccupied.”

  Apparently, Michael also had not told Elizabeth about his plans to marry Lisa Marie. He waited until afterward—to call her. An upset Elizabeth reportedly asked a friend: “What has he done? What has he done?” This may have marked a shift in their relationship. But, still dealing with the aftermath of her hip replacement surgery, she also hadn’t much time to fret about it. She still had pain and problems walking. As it turned out, she would eventually have two more hip surgeries.

  • • •

  “Lisa Marie: I Married Michael: Call Me Mrs. Jackson” read the New York Post headline on August 2, 1994.

  Michael’s publicist Bob Jones, vice president of MJJ Productions, had faxed an announcement of the wedding to the Associated Press. The media swung into action with reports on the nuptials of the couple.

  At the time, the two were tucked away in a $110,000-a-month twelve-room duplex penthouse at Manhattan’s Trump Tower. “I am very much in love with Michael. I dedicate my life to being his wife,” Lisa told the press. For a young woman known for being tough-minded, even cynical, Lisa Marie’s proclamations about her love for Michael were unexpectedly giddy. “I’ve never seen her look so happy. They have fun together,” said Jerry Schilling, her former manager. “There was a lot of teasing, a lot of kidding around, like any other newlywed couple,” said Jackson’s family friend and former publicist Steve Manning.

  Initially, the Jackson family had no comment. But in a short time, they appeared to accept and like Lisa Marie, who spoke on the phone with Katherine and Janet. Part of the positive response may have been that she was Elvis’s daughter. The daughter of the King was surely a fit spouse/companion for the King of Pop. But part of their response was also due to Lisa Marie’s down-to-earth personality. Michael’s interests were her interests. Katherine’s reaction to Lisa Marie was vastly different from her feelings about Elizabeth. Michael seemed to want Lisa Marie to be friendly with some family members, but he had mostly kept Elizabeth to himself. The family may have also believed that finally with the marriage those rumors about Michael being gay were put to rest. But that was wishful thinking.

  In her August 4, 1994 column, Liz Smith asked: “And how long will it be before Elizabeth Taylor descends on New York personally to congratulate her dear friend? This would come on the heels of her joyful public statement wishing the newlyweds happiness—a statement much more effusive than the one issued by the bride’s mother.”

  Though Elizabeth’s feelings may not have been too different from Priscilla’s but for other reasons, this was a key moment in Michael’s life that she had to support.

  At her Bel Air home, Elizabeth hosted a dinner for Michael and Lisa Marie and friends, which no doubt pleased Michael. Elizabeth and Lisa Marie would still have differences, especially when Elizabeth was reported to have given Lisa Marie some marital advice: She should always look her best. “He’s into glamour, and you must be into it, too. And if you don’t like the jewelry he gives you, fake it; act like you do. And keep separate bedrooms to keep him guessing. Also find the right colors and wear the hell out of them.” Apparently, Lisa Marie later told Michael: “What era is she living in? No wonder she’s been divorced seven times!” “Now, Lisa,” Michael was reported to have told his wife. “Be nice.” Much of the public didn’t appear to take the marriage seriously—or to believe that Michael had any sexual interest in Lisa Marie. Some even suggested she should be careful of her children around him. But Presley maintained that theirs was a normal, healthy sex life, though she noted his eccentricities. He liked her to wear jewelry in bed. He didn’t want her to see him without his makeup.

  There were also nights when he struggled with insomnia. Sometimes he would wake her up to talk. He also moved around the room. Much of his behavior she found “endearing.” He also wanted her to have children. Part of her still wanted to save him. Part of her was mesmerized by him.

  “He was an incredible, an incredibly dynamic person,” she later said. “He had something so intoxicating about him, and when he was ready to share with you and be himself—I don’t know if I’ve ever been that intoxicated by anything. He was like a drug for me.” She enjoyed spending husband-and-wife time with him. But she also understood and accepted the demands of his career—though with Michael there rarely seemed to be a period of calm. Always some new issue had to be addressed. On June 20, 1995, his new album HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book I was released, amid controversy that the lyrics in the song “They Don’t Care About Us” were anti-Semitic. Michael denied the charges without appearing to have given the lyrics much thought.

  Before the public, Lisa appeared to take the constant media attention in stride, but the public glare could be blinding. Hovering over their marriage and Michael’s career were still the child molestation charges. At Neverland, Lisa Marie also saw up close his fascination with children. In time, rumors circulated that Michael had settled other cases involving children. She said she never saw any inappropriate conduct.

  When Michael and Lisa Marie were interviewed by Diane Sawyer for ABC’s Primetime in 1995, Michael was asked about the Jordan Chandler accusations. They were “lies, lies, lies.” But Michael did not discuss the monetary settlement of the case. “He’s been barred to discuss it,” said Lisa Marie. “The specific terms, and the specific amounts.” Still, a consequence of his “lies, lies, lies” comment was that Evan Chandler sued Michael again, this time for $60 million for violating the confidentiality agreement of the settlement. He also charged that the anti-Semitic lyrics in “They Don’t Care About Us” (which were later changed) had been aimed at Jordie and himself. The case was thrown out of court. Michael also told Sawyer: “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.” Lisa Marie appeared uneasy when Sawyer asked: “What’s a thirty-six-year-old man doing sleeping with a twelve-year-old boy, or a series of them?” Yet she rushed to his defense. “Let me just say 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 . . . you know? They jump in bed with him.”

  Still, despite her defense of Michael and despite the appearance of a lovey-dovey, happily-ever-after married couple, the marr
iage started to unravel in a very short time. “I loved taking care of him. It was one of the highest points in my life when things were going really well, and he and I were united. It was a very profound time of my life,” Lisa Marie said. With Lisa Marie, he had no trouble discussing the usual Jackson tropes: the loss of his childhood, the abusive father, the loving mother. But otherwise he obviously had problems opening up. “If he didn’t want you around, if you were going to make him confront something he didn’t want to confront, he could make you go away,” she said. “I think that was a train heading in a certain direction that no one could have stopped. I’ve had to really get my head around that in order to stop the pain.”

  Lisa Marie realized he couldn’t completely share himself. In this respect, he was the polar opposite of Elizabeth, who readily shared with her husbands and friends and her children. Her declaration, though—We told each other everything—leaves open a question: Was he able to share more with Elizabeth, his idealized mother figure, than with the woman who became his wife?

  • • •

  A crisis occurred not long after the Diane Sawyer interview. “We were really on shaky ground,” recalled Lisa Marie. He was also on drugs. She remembered the times she would pick him up from a doctor’s office and Michael “would not be coherent.” “I knew that that was, because of injections because they were painful and he would need certain things.” Other problems fractured the marriage, especially his mysterious absences. “There would be periods of time where I had no idea where he was—only by the press. He would just disappear.”

  For about six weeks before the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, she heard nothing from him. Then a month before the broadcast, she received calls from his people who stressed that it was important that she attend the ceremony. She agreed but only if she did not have to walk the red carpet. That would be fine, she was told. But that evening, she was led down the carpet. “I was pissed,” she said. “I just felt like I was being used.” Told that Michael would sing to her onstage while she sat in the audience, her anger grew. She glared at him as he performed onstage. “I remember my whole look was: ‘Don’t you come anywhere fucking near me—we haven’t spoken in a month.’ ” In the end, Michael did not come over to her. Later when they talked, he told her, “I saw the look on your face, and I knew that if I walked up to you, I didn’t know what you were going to do to me.”

  Later, her anger flared up again when he gave an interview to TV Guide in which he had said that she told him her father had had a nose job. “He was quoting me,” she said, “which was absolute bullshit. I think it justified something in his mind—they were asking him about his plastic surgery. I read that, and I threw it [the publication] across the kitchen.”

  It was also the drugs that led her to decide “to walk when I saw the drugs and the doctors walk in and they scared me and put me right back to what I went through with my father.” Interestingly, during the marriage, Lisa Marie maintained a $2.6 million apartment in a gated community with patrol guards in Hidden Hills, about ninety miles from Neverland. Perhaps it was her place of refuge when Michael disappeared or when she needed some space.

  The breaking point occurred in December 1995 when there was another crisis. While at a rehearsal for an HBO special in New York, Michael collapsed and was rushed to Beth Israel Medical Center. During a five-day stay, he suffered from dehydration, low blood pressure, exhaustion, and a virus. “I couldn’t really get a straight answer as to what was happening,” Lisa Marie later told Oprah Winfrey. But she believed he was on drugs. Visiting Michael at the hospital, Lisa Marie informed him that the marriage was over. “Once she makes up her mind, she doesn’t look back,” said a friend of hers. Yet oddly enough, the two later saw each other and sometimes spent time together. “I was still flying all over the world still with him,” she later said. She recalled that the two of them “spent four more years after we’d divorced getting back together and breaking up and talking about getting back together and breaking up.” But there would be no reconciliation.

  The press had a field day with the dissolution of the marriage. Why had it failed? What hope had there been in the first place? “Irreconcilable differences. Which means nothing and everything,” said Lisa’s lawyer John Coale. “They fell out of love. Anything she feels is going to remain private.”

  Michael appeared to have no second thoughts about her decision. Not long after leaving the hospital, he hopped on the Concorde to Paris, where he stayed at his usual haunt—the Sleeping Beauty suite at Euro Disney’s Disneyland Hotel.

  • • •

  Not much was heard from Elizabeth, often confined to her Bel Air home. A second hip replacement operation occurred in 1995. The rehabilitation was especially hard on her. For a time, she walked with a cane. “Elizabeth spent almost two years attempting to recover from these operations, procedures that were supposed to improve the quality of her life,” said Liz Smith. Her physicians eventually discovered that the second surgery had not gone well. One leg was shorter than the other. Advised to have a third operation to correct the problem, she refused to endure the physical agony again—that was, until her then-present agony left her no choice. With all the medical problems, she also saw her marriage to Larry Fortensky crumbling. On August 31, 1995, the New York Post ran a front-page story with the headline: “Splitsville For Liz: Taylor and 7th hubby separate.” Taylor informed columnist Liz Smith that she and Fortensky were separating but hoped to work things out. That didn’t happen; they later divorced. The month after the separation announcement, she entered St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica because of an irregular heartbeat. Then, in late September, as she hosted a barbecue at her home for family and friends—that included her son Christopher, several grandchildren, as well as writer Dominick Dunne, Mrs. Adnan Khashoggi, columnist Liz Smith, and others—she revealed that she would undergo the third hip operation in a few weeks. For the woman who had loved wearing spiked high heels, there was the realization ultimately that she would never walk again in the same way.

  Chapter 19

  * * *

  MICHAEL’S IMPATIENCE TO have children was thought to be a real problem for his marriage to Lisa Marie. She had not appeared to be in a rush. A story circulated that Michael, even before the marriage ended, had already found a solution to his fatherhood quest. That solution’s name was Debbie Rowe. For a hopped-up media eager for any wild story possible about Wacko Jacko, the saga of Michael and Debbie Rowe soon proved perfect.

  Friendly, feisty, bubbly, quick to use an expletive, Debbie Rowe was in some ways a child of Hollywood, at least psychologically. Born in 1958 in Spokane, Washington, she had been taken to live in Los Angeles by her mother after she and Debbie’s father divorced. Her father, who once served in the air force, was said to have gone to work in the Middle East, and contrary to some reports that her family didn’t have much money, other reports suggested that her father was financially quite comfortable. Graduating from Hollywood High School in 1977, Debbie was something of a good-natured rebel who was willing to break the rules to live as she saw fit. People remembered the way she rode through town on her Harley-Davidson or in a truck. If people didn’t like it or think it was ladylike, that was their problem. She raised eyebrows when she married a teacher from her high school in 1982. The couple moved to a condo in Van Nuys. In 1988, they separated and divorced. Afterward she worked as a nurse in the office of Michael’s dermatologist, Arnold Klein.

  Klein liked Debbie Rowe, who, in key respects, kept things moving in the office and was adept at dealing with patients. During a treatment at Klein’s office in the early 1980s, Michael got a taste of Rowe’s pleasantly blunt personality. “I go ‘Hi,’ ” Rowe recalled of her initial meeting with Jackson. “And he goes ‘Hi,’ and I said, ‘You know what? Nobody does what you do better, and nobody does what I do better. Let’s get this over with.’ ” Contrary to what most might have assumed, Debbie Rowe fit a pattern of the kind of women Michael favored, if he was to have an important re
lationship with them. Like Diana Ross, Elizabeth, and Lisa Marie, she was strong and direct. Michael also liked protective women, which indeed Debbie was. She was also understanding of his vulnerabilities and eccentricities—and, of course, she wanted to save him.

  As their friendship developed, Rowe and Michael had late-night phone calls with discussions about whatever interested them. Along with Klein, Rowe traveled on various world tours with Michael. Often he seemed surprised that, as one of Rowe’s friends said, she “used language like a trooper.” “I had a very ‘colorful’ language, and every time I went to say something,” said Rowe, “Michael would cut me off with words like ‘shoot’ and ‘fudge.’ He didn’t think it was necessary when other words would do.” But by now Michael was clearly accustomed to women with salty language.

  During the breakup of his marriage to Lisa Marie, Debbie comforted him. “I was trying to console him, because he was really upset,” Rowe recalled. Michael confessed his desire to have children. “He was upset because he really wanted to be a dad. I said, ‘So be a dad.’ He looked at me puzzled. That is when I looked at him and said, ‘Let me do this. I want to do this. You have been so good to me. You are such a great friend. Please let me do this. You need to be a dad, and I want you to be.’ ”