Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (30 page)

Behind the scenes, Ray Charles’s life was as dramatic as his genius. There were two marriages, first to Eileen Williams from 1951 to 1952 and then to Della Howard from 1955 to 1977. From 1950 through 1987 he fathered twelve children by nine different women, including three by his wife Della. It’s said that at a family lunch in 2002, Ray presented each of his children with a tax-free check for $1 million.

In
1965
Ray was arrested for a third time for heroin possession. He’d reportedly been addicted to heroin since the mid to late
1950
s, and in lieu of serving jail time after the arrest, he checked himself into a rehab clinic in Los Angeles and, by all accounts, emerged free of his addiction. It was during his year on parole in
1966
that his hit single “Cryin’ Time” was released.

On April 30, 2004, Ray made his final public appearance, when he was honored by having his Los Angeles music studio dedicated as a historic landmark. Less than two months later, on June 10, 2004, at 11:35
a.m.,
Ray Charles died of liver cancer at his Beverly Hills, California, home, surrounded by family and friends, including his longtime partner Norma Pinella. His body was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. At the time of his death he was survived by his twelve children, twenty-one grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

From Francine

Ray regained his eyesight the instant he entered the tunnel, and a huge crowd gathered to greet him when he arrived Home, led by his brother, George, and his mother.
It was an especially ecstatic reunion—imagine your first sights after decades of blindness being faces you’ve longed to see, with the exquisite beauty of Home all around you.
And everyone who witnessed it commented on the fact that Ray’s tears when he arrived were tears of pure joy, devoid of surprise or relief.
While he never made an issue of his faith throughout his lifetime, he always knew with unwavering certainty where he was going when his body died and how much he had to look forward to when he resumed his life on the Other Side.
He says it was that certainty that allowed him to make the most of his time on earth. Never fearing what came next, he was able to focus on every moment he lived, often to the point of indulgence, willfulness, and potential self-destruction, he admits, but he’s unique in having returned Home with no feeling of having left unfinished business behind.

It was during his time at the Scanning Machine that he recalled all his past lives, both here and on earth, with complete clarity and recognized the extent to which music has always been essential to his spirit;
he spent three incarnations as a classical composer and musician and one as an accomplished opera singer in Prague.
His lifetime as Ray Charles was his way of influencing other musicians, present and future, as so many historically influenced him along the path of his soul, filling him so completely with creativity, freedom, innovation, passion, and discipline that not even the onset of blindness would discourage him.

He performs here at Home in thrilling concerts with other singers and musicians who are old friends from here and from past incarnations.
He continues to “pay it forward,” as you put it, by being one of our most prolific composers.
He’s begun infusing his compositions to a young boy, a musical prodigy.
The boy is currently eleven years old, his first or last name is Martin, and he lives in the Macon, Georgia, area.
He’s already being recognized for his talent as a singer and guitarist.
By the time he’s in his mid-teens he’ll be writing “Ray Charles songs” without knowing where they came from, and four of those songs will be successfully recorded by the time he’s twenty-five.

Ray is involved in developing something to do with advancements in computer software that involve composing and transcribing music in Braille, and he is also part of a team of researchers who are exploring the use of stem cells in reversing blindness and diseases of the eye.
His primary residence is on the cliffs above what corresponds to the place on earth you call Big Sur.
He is always surrounded by a large group of friends with whom he loves playing music, chess, and soccer.

His greatest regret is that he didn’t say “no” more often, particularly when it came to heroin.
He remembers that when he got involved with drugs, he thought he was simply indulging in the freedom of being able to do anything he pleased, but now he looks back at his addiction as “just another form of slavery.”

And he wants Willie Nelson to know that he never heard “Georgia on My Mind”
“sung prettier” than when Willie sang it at his memorial service.
His incarnation as Ray Charles will be his last.

Michael Jackson

A
ccording to
Guinness World Records,
Michael Jackson is the “most successful entertainer of all time.” He was inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He won fifteen Grammy Awards and twenty-six American Music Awards, including “Artist of the Century,” was one of the bestselling recording artists in history, and, through his own efforts and donations, raised more than $300 million for charity. In his brilliant, controversial, and occasionally bizarre time on earth, Michael Jackson became a legend.

Michael Joseph Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana, on August
29, 1958
. He was the eighth of Joe and Katherine Jackson’s ten children. When Michael was eight years old he and his brother Marlon began singing lead vocals with the family band originally formed by Jermaine, Jackie, and Tito, a band that evolved from the Jackson Brothers into the Jackson Five.

The young singers were signed with Motown Records from 1968 until 1975, then moved to CBS/Epic Records, where they renamed themselves the Jacksons. Michael was the group’s lead singer and songwriter by then, and he was also cast in the role of the Scarecrow in the 1978 film
The Wiz,
where he first worked with the renowned Quincy Jones, who arranged the score. Jones and Michael subsequently coproduced Michael’s massively successful solo album
Off the Wall
in
1979
, and it was also in
1979
that Michael broke his nose and required the first of a highly publicized and often bewildering series of rhinoplasties.

In 1982 Michael’s second Epic Records album,
Thriller,
was released. Almost thirty years later it remains the bestselling album in the history of the recording industry. And his utterly mesmerizing live performance on
1983
’s
Motown
25
special with the rest of the Jackson Five, witnessed by forty-seven million viewers around the world, confirmed his status as an international superstar, one known for his single sequined glove, his haunting, crystal clear voice, and his signature “moonwalk” dance move.

It was during the filming of a Pepsi Cola commercial in 1984 that, due to some mishandled pyrotechnics, Michael’s hair was accidentally set on fire, causing second-degree burns and, some believe, the real beginning of addictions to plastic surgery and prescription medications that would plague him for the rest of his life. Unfairly underpublicized was the fact that he donated his entire $1.5 million court settlement with Pepsi to what is now known as the Michael Jackson Burn Center at the Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, California.

While Michael’s brilliant recording career continued, his health and his behavior became increasing concerns as the mid-1980s passed into the 1990s. He was diagnosed with vitiligo, which caused blotches of light skin on his body, and the treatments lightened his skin in general, triggering rumors that he was going through a deliberate bleaching process. He was also diagnosed with lupus; his gauntness triggered rumors of anorexia; his dramatically changing facial structure suggested an ongoing series of plastic surgeries, which he denied to the public; and he’d become increasingly introverted and androgynous by the time he bought the 2700-acre Neverland Ranch, his home, zoo, and theme park, near Santa Barbara, California, in 1988. The tabloids seemed to report every bizarre detail of his life without mentioning his almost unprecedented charitable donations, which included millions of dollars to the Heal the World Foundation, which he created to provide food, housing, and medical care to underprivileged children.

In
1993
Michael Jackson was accused of sexually abusing a thir
teen-year-old boy. He denied the accusations, the boy and his father settled out of court for a reported $
22
million, and the investigation into possible criminal charges was closed due to a lack of evidence. Michael never recovered psychologically or emotionally from the embarrassment and the worldwide sensation the allegations caused in the press.

In 1994 he married Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, a marriage that lasted less than two years and was thought by many to be nothing more than an effort to rehabilitate his image. Michael’s second marriage, in 1996, was to a nurse named Debbie Rowe, with whom he had two children—Michael Joseph Jr., nicknamed Prince, and Paris-Michael Katherine. They were divorced in 1999, and Debbie Rowe relinquished full custody of the children to Michael. In 2002 Michael’s third child was born. He never revealed the identity of the mother and said that the boy—Prince Michael Jackson II, nicknamed Blanket—was the result of artificial insemination.

More accusations of sexual child abuse in 2004 led to an explosive, media-frenzied five-month trial in 2005 that resulted in an acquittal on all charges. Physically and emotionally exhausted from the long ordeal, Michael left the country with his children, spending more than a year on the island of Bahrain at the invitation of Sheikh Abdullah. He returned to the United States at the end of 2006 to attend the funeral of the “godfather of soul,” James Brown.

An avalanche of financial problems began in 2005, only some of which were solved with his letting go of Neverland Ranch. He started planning a comeback, and in March 2009 he announced that he would begin his first major concert tour in more than a decade, called “This Is It,” starting in London on July 13, 2009. Ticket sales were unprecedented, with all fifty scheduled concerts sold out in a matter of days, and Michael immediately began rehearsing in Los Angeles for what would undoubtedly have been a historic return to the stage.

On June 25, 2009, less than three weeks before his opening night in London, Michael Jackson died of a drug-induced heart attack after collapsing at his rented home in Los Angeles. He was fifty years old. The cause of death is listed as “homicide,” and the doctor administering treatment to him on the morning he died has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and is awaiting trial. As a final tribute to the singer, dancer, songwriter, philanthropist, humanitarian, and man unlike any other before or since, more than thirty million people in the United States alone watched Michael Jackson’s televised funeral.

From Francine

We’ve never seen a spirit more ecstatic to be Home than Michael was when he arrived.
While he would never have deliberately taken his own life, he’d been ready to be here for quite some time and to be free of a body that was increasingly painful, addicted, and prone to exhaustion.
His extraordinary talent combined with a unique emotional fragility created a lifetime in which he was greatly admired, but never felt appropriate and truly didn’t understand why he was perceived as odd.

He was met by a tall, ample woman with a sweet round face, but she had to wait to greet him because of the enormous crowd of his beloved animals of all kinds who were there to welcome him.
Immediately after this ecstatic reunion Michael did something that’s very rare here—he ignored the Scanning Machine and Orientation most rearrivals find helpful in their transition and instead gave a thrilling series of sixteen concerts joined by dozens of transcended musicians, singers, and dancers.
He then returned to the life that brings him great joy: entertaining, giving dance instruction, and living among countless animals.
He frequently visits his children and his mother on earth.
No parent has ever loved his children more, he wants them to know he’s watching over them and very proud of them, and he wants the estate he left for them to be fiercely protected on their behalf.

He has nothing to say to or about his father, but he loves the rest of his family and strongly urges his brothers to please tour again as a tribute to him. “Peacefully,” he adds with a smile.

His emotional fragility left him more comfortable with children than with other adults, but he is emphatic, from the Other Side, where there is no deceit, no defensiveness, and nothing to lose, that never did he molest or inappropriately touch a child, ever in his life, nor did such a thing ever enter his mind.
The mere accusation was a wound that caused him pain until his last day on earth.

By the way, Michael’s visage at Home in his happy, healthy thirty-year-old body is exactly how he looked before he began his plastic surgeries and skin treatments.

And finally, a word to Elizabeth Taylor, his most cherished friend on earth. He knows your souls are connected from three past lives together, including two in which you were brother and sister.

Audrey Hepburn

T
he essence of grace and femininity throughout her acting career, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, the future Audrey Hepburn (only a very, very distant relative of actress Katharine Hepburn, by the way), was born on May 4, 1929, in Ixelles, Belgium, the only child of British banker Joseph Ruston and his second wife, Dutch aristocrat Baroness Ella van Heemstra. Not long after she was born, her father included his grandmother’s surname, Hepburn, so that she was raised Audrey Hepburn-Ruston. Audrey was a British citizen despite her birth in Belgium, and she was educated in England during her early childhood. Joseph Ruston, a Nazi sympathizer, left his family in 1935, an event Audrey always referred to as the most traumatic experience of her life. (She managed to locate him decades later, and while there was never a total reconciliation, she supported him financially until he died in 1980.)