by Joe Bensam
A few days later Michael called Jordie, and discovering a mutual interest in video games, invited him over to his “hideout” - the apartment he secretly owned as a place to get away from everyone. But Jordie was busy with schoolwork, and Michael was about to go on tour promoting his new album, Dangerous. So they spoke only on the phone for some time, becoming firm friends in the process. However, Michael was not short of company on tour. He was accompanied by an 11-year old Australian boy, Brett Barnes, and nine-year old Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis.
In February 1993, Michael appeared on the Oprah show for one of the most famous TV interviews ever. The interview was arranged to prop up Michael’s increasingly-probematic public image, and to battle against the Wacko Jacko rumors that were now spiralling out of control. Michael flatly denied that he had had more than two cosmetic surgery procedures, and when asked if he was a virgin, he confirmed that he was a “old-fashioned gentleman.”
The Queen of television interviews the King of Pop
Elizabeth Taylor appeared briefly to confirm that Michael was “the least weird person” she knew. Later, Michael would send her a $250,000 diamond necklace to thank her for this support. Taylor had supported Michael in many different ways over the years, with the depth of her affection closely paralleling the value of the expensive gifts he sent her. At one time, Michael had decided that would like to be known by some kind of title, in the same way that Elvis was known as ‘The King.’ His publicist christened him ‘The King of Pop,’ and in return for a suitably generous gift, Elizabeth Taylor crowned him with this title in an award ceremony. The name stuck, and Michael felt it was $250,000 well spent.
Shortly after the Oprah interview, Michael invited Jordie, June and Jordie’s sister Lily to Neverland, and with Michael splashed all over every news broadcast, they could hardly refuse to meet the man of the moment. They arrived at Neverland and were astonished at what they saw. Even Walt Disney, one of Michael’s heroes, would have been hard pressed to come up with such an extravagant wonderland - and even more hard pressed to pay for it all. The house was enormous and opulent beyond measure, decorated in an obscenely expensive manner. And for a child, it was a fairy tale come true. Free candy dispensers offered every kind of confection a child could imagine, while the grounds boasted an entire private zoo - complete with elephants, giraffes, lions and alligators. There were pictures of children all round the house, and a vast network of loudspeakers broadcast Disney music around the property. The dozens of staff who took care of the property were required to be happy and smiling at all times, with instant dismissal following if they were not.
It was hardly surprising that Jackie described Michael as a Man-child...and now this Man-child had his own fairy tale universe to live in - and friends to share it with. The Chandlers spent the day with Michael exploring this magical land and watching movies. Later they went to a toy shop which was kept open for them after hours, where Michael told the kids they could have anything they wanted. They managed to rack up a bill of over ten thousand dollars, but Michael just beamed.
As the weeks went by, the Chandlers spent more and more time at Neverland and Michael’s hideout, often with Brett Barnes also in tow. As he got to know them better, they saw a side of him that the general public and even his closest aides did not see. In March, Michael was honored with a Soul Train award for the Dangerous album. He was supposed to perform on the show, but as the date approached, he neglected to prepare and rehearse. He couldn’t be bothered to do all that work when he had new young friends to play with.
On the night of the awards, Michael showed up on crutches, saying he had hurt his leg during rehearsals. He sang Remember The Time sitting in a chair, while a troupe of dancers performed around him. When he arrived home later, however, he threw the crutches away in front of his new friends, exclaiming: ‘It’s a miracle! I can walk! I can walk!’
On Friday, April 2, the Chandlers were invited to Neverland to sleep over. As if things weren’t strange enough already, they seemed to be getting stranger still. Michael had positioned two huge mannequins of Indian guards outside his bedroom door to keep ghosts away, and had installed a huge, golden throne in front of the fireplace in his room. That night, June and Lily slept in the guest quarters next to the main house. Jordie slept in Michael’s room. June was a little worried about this development, but she managed to reassure herself that it would be OK. After all, this was Michael Jackson, right...there wasn’t anything odd about him, was there?
If June was able to comfort herself about the relationship initially, this became a little harder as time went on. Although the three Chandlers would be invited over, it was clear that Michael wanted to spend time with Jordie, and the two females were just inconvenient extras. The two males would spend a lot of time together, often whispering secrets and giggling. One time as they were parting, June heard Michael say to Jordie, ‘don’t forget the wishes!’
She pressed Jordie to find out what the wishes were. He was reluctant to explain, but after being badgered he told her that Michael wanted him to repeat the wishes three times a day until they came true. The wishes were:
1.No wenches, bitches, heifers or ho’s
2. Never give up your bliss.
3. Live with me in Neverland forever.
4. No conditioning.
5. Never grow up.
6. Be better than best friends.
***
While June was becoming a little worried about the nature of the relationship, Jordie’s real father, Evan Chandler, was becoming alarmed. In order to get a better idea of what was going on, he struck up a friendship with Michael through Jordie.
Initially, he felt that June was right - the relationship was an innocent friendship which might seem strange to the outside world, but which made perfect sense in the child-like world of Michael Jackson. But as time went on, his view began to change. He noticed that Michael would gaze lovingly into Jordie’s eyes as if they were passionately in love. He would follow Jordie round the house like a pet dog following its master. The situation progressed from being odd to becoming sinister. When he realized that Michael and Jordie were sharing a bed at night, he finally exploded.
‘Are you having sex with my son?’ he asked.
‘I can’t believe you would ask me that,’ came the reply.
However, Michael neither confirmed nor denied the allegation. As Evan continued to pile on the pressure, Michael began to distance himself from Evan and Jordie in order to avoid the confrontations. Soon he stopped returning their calls.
Evan was a dentist, so when Jordie needed a tooth removed, it was naturally Evan who took care of the matter. But that’s not all he did. Instead of using a regular dental anaesthetic, he arranged for a colleague to administer Sodium Amytal, also known as “the truth serum.” The idea was to get the truth from Jodie about his relationship with Michael Jackson. However, Sodium Amytal is at best an unreliable drug, known for creating false memories and making the patient susceptible to suggestion. Evan asked Evan if Michael had ever touched his penis.
In a confused and muddled voice, Evan said yes, he had. After that, things moved quickly. Evan was furious, but also not blind to the financial possibilities. Soon his lawyers were in touch with Michael’s lawyers. They wanted $20 million to settle the matter and to pay for the damage they perceived had been done to Jordie. Michael, however, refused to co-operate. He was adamant that he had done nothing wrong, and believed that the Chandlers were just trying to extort money from him. When negotiations broke down, Evan took Jordie to see a psychiatrist. The session lasted three hours, and during this time Jordie recounted multiple incidents of masturbation and oral sex with Michael over a period of many weeks.
When the interview was over, the psychiatrist had no option but to report the interview to the authorities, and the law machine kicked into action. In August 1993, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit began investigating a certain Michael Joseph Jackson.
; Michael’s life would never be the same again.
His team acted quickly. The second leg of the Dangerous tour was due to begin soon in Bangkok. But Michael was slipped out of the country early, enabling to evade the arrest that would have inevitably followed. He made it just in time. The next day, dozens of police officers descended on Neverland to sweep the place for evidence. There wasn’t much to find, even with 2700 acres to search. Michael’s team and staff had done a great job of “cleansing” the house in the hours before the police arrived. What they did have was a detailed description of Michael’s intimate body parts, as detailed by Jordie Chandler in police interviews.
Michael at home in Neverland
He had written: ‘Michael is circumcised. He has short pubic hair. His testicles are marked with pink and brown marks. Like a cow, not white but pink colour. He has brown patches on ass, on his left glut.’
The police wanted to know if Jordie’s description was accurate. But to find out, they would have to wait until the end of the international tour. Michael finally arrived home at Neverland in December 1993, and it wasn’t long before he was served with a warrant for strip search. The order specified that police could examine all of his anatomy ‘including his penis, anus, hips, buttocks and any other part of his body.’ If he didn’t co-operate, he would be arrested, and the search would be conducted in jail.
Michael freaked out. For such a private and reclusive person, this was as close to torture as you can possibly get within the legal system. On 20 December, an entire army of police, doctors and attorneys arrived at Neverland. They all waited in the parlour for Michael to appear, and he finally did so wearing only a bath robe. He couldn’t take it. He started shouting at the police officers, and then fled the room, screaming ‘get these bitches out of here.’
Finally he calmed down, and the photo session began. Michael seemed out of it, as if he was high on drugs. He was asked to stand on a platform in the middle of the room and remove his robe.
‘Please don’t make me do this,’ he said. ‘This is terrible. Don’t make me.’
Michael finally took off the robe...revealing that he was wearing a bathing suit.
The police advised him that he would have to take it off. He did.
Underneath he wore boxer shorts. With tears in his eyes, he removed these and stood naked before the assembled group. The police and doctors did not spare him any blushes.
‘Is the subject circumcised?’ was the first question. It was clear that he was not. Jordie was obviously wrong on this point, but he was right about Michael having short pubic hair, patchy skin on his buttocks and marks on his testicles.
‘I then took several photographs of Jackson’s penis,’ the police photographer said later. ‘First the right side, then the left. When I was photographing the left side, the D.A.’s doctor told Michael Jackson to lift up his penis. He didn’t want to, so there was a lot of discussion about that. Finally he did it. Then, he angrily jumped off the platform. ‘That’s it,’ Jackson said. ‘That’s enough.’ He put on his robe and ran out of the room.’
But the police weren’t done yet, and Michael’s lawyers had to coax him back into the room. It took 15 minutes, and the police could hear an argument that sounded like parents arguing with a difficult teenager. Finally, they heard footsteps stomping down the hall, and Michael sulked back into the parlour. He took his anger out on the photographers.
‘When this whole thing is done, I want pictures of you!’
As if he wasn’t in enough trouble already, things got worse for Michael when his sister LaToya turned against him and the rest of the family. LaToya, of course, had never shared directly in the fame and fortune that her brothers and Janet had enjoyed, and so she had never enjoyed a serious independent financial income. To make matters worse, she had married (apparently against her will) Jack Gordon, a businessman who was not only a very unsavoury businessman, but also a very violent and controlling husband. Gordon became her manager, and led her through a sequence of bizarre deals designed to exploit her connections with the Jacksons.
Apart from her astonishing appearance in Playboy (which went down just great with the Jehovah’s Witnesses), she started selling stories to the tabloids, under duress from Gordon. As news of the child molestation case spread, she cashed in on the publicity with a remarkable public statement:
‘Michael is my brother and I love him very much, but I cannot and will not be a silent collaborator in his crimes against young children. If I remain silent, then that means I feel the guilt and humiliation that these children are feeling, and I think it is very wrong. Forget about the superstar, forget about the icon. If he was any other 35 year old man who was sleeping with little boys, you wouldn’t like this guy. I am a victim myself. When parents abuse their children, the children go on to be abusers themselves. Do you know how many children are going to psychiatrists because of Michael? So many, many children.’
It is clear now that this statement was prepared by Jack Gordon, and had everything to do with selling more stories to newspapers, and nothing to do with anything that LaToya knew of Michael’s private life. In fact, since meeting Gordon, LaToya had had very little contact with the Jackson family at all, practically being exiled by Gordon. But at the time, this statement from within the family did enormous damage to Michael’s already frail reputation.
Michael was understandably furious at this extra knife being stabbed into his side, but there was little he could do except protest his innocence. He did exactly that in a special broadcast from Neverland shown by CNN. A tearful Michael, who no longer looked like the King of Pop, said:
‘I ask all of you to wait and hear the truth before you condemn me. Don’t treat me like a criminal, because I am innocent. I have been forced to submit to a dehumanizing and humiliating examination by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department earlier this week. They served a search warrant on me which allowed them to view and photograph my body, including my penis, my buttocks, my lower torso, thighs and any other areas they wanted. They were supposedly looking for any discoloration, spotting blotches or other evidence of a skin color disorder called Vitiligo, which I have previously spoken about. It was the most humiliating ordeal of my life, one that no person should ever have to suffer. And even after experiencing the indignity of this search, the parties involved were still not satisfied and wanted to take even more pictures. It was a nightmare, a horrifying nightmare. But if this is what I have to endure to prove my innocence, my complete innocence, so be it. Don’t treat me like a criminal, because I am innocent.’
Things did not look great for the world’s most famous entertainer .Yet after spending two million dollars on the investigation, and after interviewing over 30 of Michael’s young friends and over 200 witnesses in total, the prosecutors could find no other witness to back up Jordie’s story. All they had was one witness, Jordie himself, from a family which had already tried to get Michael to pay them $20 million, and who had made his original statement whilst under the influence of drugs.
Overall, if the case had gone to trial, Michael would have had a more than fair chance of success. But thing never got that far. Michael was sick of the publicity and the harassment, and on his lawyers’ advice, he agreed to pay around $20 million to settlte the matter once and for all. This decision did take the pressure off, but it certainly did not make the problem go away. On the contrary, the payout implied that he was guilty and was using his money to buy the Chandlers’ silence. Certainly, it was a decision that he would come to bitterly regret in years to come.
***
While all of this drama was unfolding in Michael’s life, a parallel and equally surprising story was running in parallel.
Michael with Lisa Marie Presley
At a party in February 1993, Michael was re-introduced to the daughter of Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie. They had met briefly many years before, but had not seen each other for a very long time. At this party, they started chattin
g, and found that they had a lot in common. Both had suffered under the problems of international fame from a young age, and both had lived in wealthy but restrictive isolation - Lisa Marie at Elvis’s Memphis home, Graceland, and Michael at Neverland. Even so, it is hard to imagine how a relationship could develop between them. After all, Michael had never shown any sexual interest in women, and as an attractive and wealthy blonde, you would think that Lisa Marie would be unlikely to choose the effeminate and eccentric Michael as a romantic partner.
A cynic might observe that they both had very practical reasons for cementing their friendship. Lisa Marie was hoping to build a singing career based on her Presley background, and Michael clearly had the connections to make that happen for her, plus the profile to propel her to stardom.
Equally, Michael loved to have famous people in his life, and the prospect of a connection with Elvis’ daughter would be enough to turn him straight, even if was as a gay as a Maypole. Then there was the matter of the Elvis back catalog (although Elvis did not write his own songs), which would fit very nicely into his growing music empire. Plus there was the $300 million fortune which she inherited. Although few people were aware of it at the time, Michael’s finances were a mire of debt and default, due his vast and uncontrolled expenditures. A few extra hundred million dollars could come in very handy.
Whatever the reasons, their friendship blossomed into what appears to have been a genuine, if unlikely, romance. Lisa Marie saw a side to Michael’s personality that few experienced - funny, down to earth, and full of practical jokes. As the Jordie Chandler affair unfolded, Michael was dating Lisa Marie on and off, despite the minor inconvenience that she was still technically married. As the child molestation allegations became public, Lisa Marie stood by him, and Michael depended on her for support, calling her frequently as the toured the world.