Michael Jackson (84 page)

Though some secretly felt the matter might actually be settled given a little time and a lot of cash, others in the: Jackson
camp weren’t as optimistic. According to a person familiar with the case, Elizabeth telephoned Michael to tell him that ‘things
do not look good back here.’ She said, ‘You’ve got to take action.’ Michael asked for details, telling her not to ‘hold anything
back’. She said, ‘All hell is breaking loose.’

Recalled one of Michael’s representatives, ‘Miss Taylor and I were on speaker phone with Michael. Michael was crying, asking,
“What should I do? What can I do?” She became impatient. “Michael, you mustn’t substitute my judgement for your own,” she
said. “You need to stop freaking out. You need to take charge of your life.”’

In August 1994, Michael would tell me, ‘I swear to you, I didn’t know how bad things were. If I had known, maybe things would
have been handled differently.’ It does seem, in retrospect, that he knew more than he said he did, and was actually just
in a state of denial about it.

Elizabeth told him that, in her view, no one was handling matters for him in the States in a way that would benefit him. ‘I
think they need to be kicking ass, and they’re not,’ she said. ‘Then
you
be the one kicking ass, Elizabeth,’ Michael said. At that, I cringed,’ recounted the adviser. ‘All we needed to make things
worse was Elizabeth Taylor handling the defence. Much to my chagrin, and that of others on Michael’s team, Miss Taylor offered
to hold strategy meetings at her home two or three times a week, and then report back to Michael what had been said, and by
whom.’

In the next few weeks, Elizabeth Taylor hosted many conferences at her house with about ten of Michael’s team and was often
critical of those handling Michael’s public relations, though not so much his legal defence. Some on Michael’s team did not
want to attend the Elizabeth Taylor summits, protesting that for a movie star to have such control over his career was ridiculous.
They dubbed her ‘Queen of the Defence’. In truth, she wasn’t spearheading any legal tactics, as much as providing a forum
for attorneys, publicists and other strategists to brainstorm so she could then keep Michael apprised of their view points.
Of course, some of Michael’s staff did not wish to attend Elizabeth’s meetings for fear of a negative report being sent back
to the boss.

During one meeting, Elizabeth said, ‘I’m afraid he will never sell another record again if we can’t get this goddamned ridiculousness
straightened out. I think we have to make sure there’s something left for Michael after this is resolved.’

‘He just might be in jail after this goddamned ridiculousness is resolved,’ muttered one of Michael’s advisers.

Elizabeth looked down and scribbled on her legal pad. She then looked back at the adviser. ‘I just made a note to remember
to tell Michael you said that,’ she told him.

He lowered his head, duly chastised.

Anthony Pellicano simply refused to attend the Taylor meetings. ‘What are you, kidding me?’ he asked when asked why he wasn’t
present. ‘I’m fucking busy. I’m out here working for Michael. I don’t have time for tea with movie stars.’

Elizabeth was unhappy with Anthony, anyway. ‘He’s not a team player,’ she said. ‘We can’t keep track of him. He does his own
thing in his own way, and we don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t like it. He makes me nervous.’

During another of her home meetings, Elizabeth, Sandy Gallin (Michael’s manager at the time) and Howard Weitzman telephoned
Michael overseas to discuss the matter of Anthony. According to a witness, all three were on ‘speaker phone’, talking to Michael.

‘Look, Mike, maybe he has to go,’ Howard said of Pellicano. ‘I like the guy, but I’m not sure about him, any more…’

‘I think so, too,’ Elizabeth concurred. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, I’ve had my run-ins with him, too,’ Michael admitted. He sounded lethargic, drugged. He said that while he admired
Anthony, he still felt that his idea to present Wade Robson and Brett Barnes to the public wasn’t a good one. He felt that
the investigator should have checked with him first before exploiting the youngsters. ‘And it really pisses me off that guy
tries to tell
me
what to do,’ Michael said, ‘like I work for him instead of the other way around. And, also,’ he concluded, ‘I think he scares
the public, he’s that intimidating. John Branca, now
he’s
a good spokesman.’ Indeed, after having let him go so unceremoniously, Michael had recently asked John to return to the fold.
He knew he could always count on him and, of course, he was right: Branca was back and loyal as ever.

After that conversation, Michael wrote a detailed memo to Howard Weitzman explaining why he believed he and John should take
over as his spokesmen. He told him that he trusted them, they were believable, and had the respect of the legal profession – unlike
Anthony Pellicano who he now felt was perceived as being a man on the edge, a rebel. ‘If Anthony worked for Motown,’ Michael
observed, ‘he’d be someone Berry would keep behind the scenes. Having him out there speaking for me now is almost like having
Joseph out there. He’s intimidating. Right now, we don’t need that.’

It was difficult to imagine how things could get much worse for Michael Jackson in the fall of 1993. In just a matter of months
he had, without a doubt, experienced the ‘swift and sudden fall from grace’, he would later write about in his self-revealing
song, ‘Stranger in Moscow’.

Certainly, no one had counted on Michael becoming addicted to drugs, thereby raising the stakes in terms of the precarious
nature of his future and well-being. Yet, anxious, unable to sleep and, he said, in pain because of dental work and a recent
surgery to his scalp (a consequence of the burn he suffered during that Pepsi commercial), Michael began taking more of the
painkillers, Percodan, Demerol and codeine, as well as tranquillizers Valium, Xanax and Ativan. Such dependence was uncharted
terrain for him. In the past, he had made an effort to not over-medicate during recovery from plastic surgeries, explaining
to doctors that he wanted to remain ‘sharp’ for the purpose of making sound business and career decisions. However, with all
that was going on in his life at this time, Michael no longer cared to be quite so focused. In fact, he wanted to forget,
escape. It didn’t take long before he was completely dependent on the drugs. It happened so quickly that his team in the United
States didn’t even realize what was going on with Michael, until it was too late to do anything about it.

Everyone was stunned to learn that Michael had a problem with drugs. Of course, Elizabeth Taylor understood and had empathy
for his plight. She’d been there, with her own, well-publicized battles. Lisa Marie Presley was also sympathetic; she, too,
was a recovering addict.

‘When I was a teenager, I was completely out of control,’ she told me. ‘I started doing drugs when I was fourteen. I had been
spinning for quite some time, years, when I finally hit bottom. That was when I found myself on a seventy-two-hour bender
of cocaine, sedatives, pot and drinking, all at the same time. I woke up and there were all of these people, friends of mine,
passed out on the floor. My coke dealer was in the room trying to sell me more stuff. I just said, ‘That’s it. Everybody get
the fuck out.’ I don’t know why I got addicted, I just know that I was going to die if I didn’t get help. Finally, my mother
and I decided I would go to the Scientology Center in Hollywood for detoxification. It saved my life.’

When Michael telephoned Lisa from overseas in September 1993, he was high, incoherent and delusional. Alarmed, Lisa attempted
to convince Michael to do as she had once done, enter a rehabilitation centre. For Lisa, the quest to pull a drug-addled superstar
back from the edge had great significance. She had shared with friends earlier the guilt she had suffered as a child, seeing
her father falling into his own bottomless pit of addiction. She was still married to Danny Keough, but unhappily. She was
restless and felt that she had no real purpose; she wanted more than motherhood, she said. Michael’s dilemma seemed to provide
an outlet for her. ‘Absolutely, I felt that I had a
responsibility
to save him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the psychology of it and what it had to do with my father. I only know what I felt.’

There was one major obstacle that lay before Lisa if she was going to help quiet the demons haunting Michael: access. It was
well known that Jackson had done a very thorough job of insulating himself from the outside world. Often, he would start casual
relationships with people, many of whom were certain that their relationship would grow, only to find that Michael had left
them behind. Calls would go unanswered, sometimes letters would be returned, unread. Lisa had heard of Michael’s reputation
for tossing aside new-found ‘soul mates’, and saw this pattern as a liability if she was going to complete her task of rebuilding
his crumbling life. She would have to proceed with caution.

In her frequent telephone calls to him, Lisa maintained that Michael could not go on much longer with his personal life and
career in such disarray. He was immobilized by uncertainty and a sense of hopelessness, which had contributed to his addiction.
She suggested to him the idea others in his camp had begun to secretly discuss: that Michael end his misery with a cash settlement
to Evan Chandler. Michael was, predictably, against the idea. A man who’d been building an image for himself since the time
most children were building tree houses, Michael cared deeply about what people thought of him. Even if the image he had fostered
over the years was, arguably, not the best one for him, it
was
the result of a great deal of strategizing on his part, and on that of his handlers. ‘He felt that this thing of him being
wacky and weird and crazy worked for him,’ Lisa recalled, ‘and maybe for a time, it did. I don’t know. I was always against
it. I always thought he was bigger, better, than the image. I always thought the image did him an injustice.’

One thing was certain: by 1993 Michael was lonelier than he’d ever before been, and that was really saying something. He had
to face the fact that his career, his most enduring passion, was in jeopardy, a possible fatality either of an unlawful, immoral
love affair with a minor or of poor judgement in having aligned himself so stubbornly with the wrong people and at the wrong
time. If he wouldn’t settle with money, Lisa suggested rehab at the very least. She cared deeply about him, she told him,
and she wanted to be sure he knew it.

One night, while abroad, Michael found himself, as he often would, feeling trapped in a plush hotel suite, alone with the
constant drone of a chanting crowd below his room. After a string of phone calls from lawyers and publicists, Michael decided
to calm himself by calling the one person who could somehow help him forget that his career hung in the balance: Lisa.

She had certainly been persistent in her pursuit of him. She left telephone numbers for a house she was renting in Canoga
Park, California.

She also left the number of the new three-acre estate which she had just purchased and was getting ready to occupy on Long
Valley Road in Hidden Hills (an exclusive gate-guarded equestrian community in Calabasas, California, where she still lives,
today).

Then, just to be sure, she left the number where she could be reached in Clearwater, Florida, where she was planning to spend
time at the Scientology retreat. She even sent him party balloons with messages attached. Somehow, she could always put a
smile on his face, even if it was just her raspy voice proclaiming, ‘Oh, fuck them!’ He found her in Canoga Park.

Michael valued Lisa’s settling effect on him, so much so that during his phone conversation, he posed a question that surprised
both of them. ‘If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?’ Was this a joke? A hypothetical? Or was it a dare for Lisa to
take him seriously? If it was a dare, Lisa was just the woman to take it – even though she was still married to Danny Keough.
Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘I would do it.’ Michael didn’t say a word, at first. He then said, ‘Hold on, I have
to use the bathroom.’

When he finally did speak into the phone again, he was speaking to his new fiancée. ‘My love for you is real,’ Michael told
Lisa. ‘Please believe me.’ Michael didn’t realize, however, that whether or not Michael loved her wasn’t the
real
issue for Lisa. His proposal served a greater purpose. It would give her access, she hoped, to enter his secret world. Then,
from the inside, she would begin to put the pieces of this broken man together, and this time she would not fail.