Michael Jackson (92 page)

‘Lisa didn’t understand how Michael could disregard her feelings,’ said James Cruse, who knew her well at the time. ‘It was
embarrassing for her to constantly defend his actions, always explaining that he was not a paedophile, he was misunderstood,
he was a child at heart and, blah, blah, blah… the same stuff you always hear about the guy. He didn’t seem to care that it
was hard on her. He just wanted to live his life the way he had always lived it. ‘What I do is none of your business,’ he
told her. That really set her off. ‘How can you say that? Of course it’s my business,’ she told him. ‘You’re my husband.
You ‘re
my business.”

‘Why are you so selfish?’ Lisa hollered at Michael one evening in front of staff members at Neverland. They had just finished
dinner and settled themselves in front of the fireplace, the blazing logs casting a warm glow over them. As they all talked,
Michael slipped into the conversation that he was considering a vacation to France with the Cascio brothers from New Jersey,
Eddie II and Frank. Lisa was stunned.

‘How did you get to be this way?’ she demanded, her eyes hard and condemning. ‘Do you care how that makes me look, you going
on vacation with two kids? Don’t you care about me, at all?’

‘Me? Selfish?’ Michael asked, seeming dismayed. ‘But look at the money I give to charities. Why, Lisa! I love all the little
children of the world.’

According to witnesses, Lisa stared at him, her mouth agape. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ she countered. She
was furious and getting more so by the second. ‘I’m talking about you and me, Michael. Not,
all the little children of the world
. In fact,’ she concluded, ‘you are the most selfish person I have ever known.’

Michael grimaced, as if struck in the stomach. Quick tears sprung to his eyes. No one had ever talked to him like that before,
not since Joseph, anyway.

‘Oh, what’s the use?’ Lisa asked, ignoring his hurt. ‘You don’t get it, do you? The little children of the world,’ she repeated,
angrily. ‘I can’t even believe you would say that to me.’

‘I got into this whole “I’m going to save you” thing,’ Lisa admitted in 2003. ‘I got some romantic idea in my head I could
save him and we could save the world. I thought all that stuff he was doing, philanthropy and the children thing and all of
that, was awesome. OK.
Hello
. I was delusionary.’

Later, when Michael recounted the incident to another associate, he said of his wife, ‘Man, she’s so mean to me. I’m like,
why are you being such a bitch to me? What’d I ever do to you?’

‘It’s too soon after your rehab, Mike,’ said the adviser. ‘This kind of conflict isn’t good for you. You should be working
on staying drug-free.’

‘Eddie and Frank and I have been friends for years,’ Michael said, not seeming to hear his friend’s remarks. He shook his
head in disbelief. ‘We’ve been all over the world together. It’s all innocent. Now, Lisa hates me because of it.’ He stopped,
as if hit by a bolt of lightning. ‘Oh my God, she hates me. It’s Katherine and Joseph all over again, isn’t it?’

‘Look, forget about those Cascio kids,’ offered the adviser. ‘Come on, Mike. You can see them, any time. Why mess things up
any more with your wife?’

‘Because I’m a grown man,’ Michael said as he rose to leave the room. ‘And I don’t need anyone’s permission to go on a vacation
with my good friends. That’s why.’

Michael did have his vacation in Paris with Eddie and Frank Cascio, in July 1995… and without Lisa.

In September 1995 rumours surfaced that Michael and Lisa Marie were ending their marriage, causing an international firestorm
of headlines. I managed to get Michael on the telephone for an interview for the Australian magazine,
Woman’s Day
, to check it out. ‘Let me just say this,’ he told me, impatiently: ‘No. No. No.
No
. These stories are damn lies made up by people who hope they’ll get lucky with one of them and hit it big.’

I asked if he wanted to further respond to reports that Lisa did not know about his vacation to Paris with the Cascio brothers.
‘Like I wouldn’t have told her?’ Michael asked. He sounded tense, stressed out. ‘Like she wouldn’t read about it anyway, or
see us photographed by every newspaper photographer in the world? Neither one of us could have a secret from the other, even
if we wanted to,’ he said. ‘We’re so happy,’ he added of his marriage. ‘We do it our way. I don’t know if it’s conventional.
My parents have been married for forty years. Is their marriage conventional? Were Lisa’s parents in a conventional marriage?
I don’t think so. I love being married, knowing that Lisa is there,’ he continued.’ She’s strong. She’s smart. She’s on my
side, listens to me, understands me, understands my world.’

The child molestation allegations came up, once again. There had been a report that the twenty-five-million-dollar settlement
would be paid to Jordie Chandler in instalments of $466,000 a year over forty years. It wasn’t accurate. However, the report
further indicated that Michael spends more than that amount on toys. ‘That’s not true, either,’ he confirmed. ‘I probably
don’t spend more than,’ he paused, as if calculating the figure in his head, ‘about a hundred and fifty thousand a year on
toys.’

Also at this time, Santa Barbara District Attorney, Tom Sneddon, was quoted in a
Vanity Fair
article as saying that the criminal investigation against Michael was not over. ‘It is in suspension,’ he said, ‘even if
the civil case has been settled with cash.’

‘What the heck does that mean?’ Michael asked, heatedly. ‘Either there is an investigation, or there isn’t one. It’s over.
Let it rest.’

During the course of our conversation, the subject of the photo session with the police came up. ‘Those photos did not match
[Jordie’s description],’ he told me. ‘How many times do I have to say this to you?
They did not match
. Now, I’m hanging up,’ he told me, ‘because you crossed the line with that question.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘One more thing: do you know that a writer says he found a videotape of you with some kid. Do you want to
respond to that, Michael?’

‘It’s not true,’ he said, sounding dismayed. ‘Even if I were the most deviant person in the world, why would I keep a tape
like that?’

In fact, Michael Jackson sued Victor Guitterez (author of a book about Jordie and Michael for private publication, called
Michael Jackson Was My Lover)
for claiming that such a videotape existed, and challenged him to produce it. Apparently, no such tape existed. Victor lost
the suit and ended up owing Michael almost three million dollars. He declared bankruptcy, moved to Chile, and hasn’t been
heard from since.

‘People will believe anything about me. I don’t care any more. Is that what you want to hear? Then, fine,’ he concluded, lashing
out at me. ‘In fact, why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and that I do a voodoo
dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter,’ he concluded, spitting our the word
reporter
. ‘But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, “I’m an alien from Mars and eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance every night
at midnight,” people would say, “Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is
nuts
. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.”’

Finally Michael said in a weary voice, ‘People don’t know what it’s like for me. No one knows, really. No one should judge
what I’ve done with my life,’ he concluded, ‘not unless they’ve been in my shoes every horrible day and every sleepless night.’

Michael first met Debbie Rowe in the early 1980s when he went to his dermatologist to complain of a skin condition. Panicked
because of the emergence of mysterious blotches, he was certain he had a deadly skin cancer. Ace Johnson, who worked as an
assistant for Joseph Jackson at the time, recalls, ‘That was when Mike was told he had Vitiligo. “Oh no,” he said, “I
am
a freak.” I distinctly remember him telling me that there was a white girl named Debbie in the doctor’s office, a nurse and
receptionist, who was helping him through the ordeal, always there for him.’

Dr Arnold Klein suggested to Michael that if he needed someone to talk to about his medical condition, he should call Debbie
any time, day or night. For a short while, Michael did telephone her daily to ask her medical questions, and cry on her shoulder.
They were soon good friends. ‘At the time, his brothers thought maybe this would be the beginning of a romance for Michael,
since all he talked about was Debbie,’ recalled Ace. ‘Jermaine said, “I want to meet this Debbie chick. Mike’s got it bad
for her.” Michael giggled and laughed, like a kid with a crush.’

Whenever Michael came to the office for treatment, Debbie would fuss over him. In reciprocation, whenever Michael released
a new CD he would send her an autographed copy. Debbie would hang his CD picture jackets on the walls of her office until,
one day, Arnold Klein asked her to remove them, saying that such a display of affection for a patient could be misconstrued.

Tanya Boyd, who was a good friend of Debbie’s, remembered, ‘She would obsess about Michael saying, “I’m going to talk to him
about opening up more, he’s too inhibited.” She cared about him, would be up all night long on the phone with him. She said
he was best on the telephone. “All of his defences break down when he doesn’t have to look at you, face to face,” she said.
She felt that he was sweet and misunderstood and also a rebel.’ Echoing Lisa Marie’s sentiment about him, Debbie told Tanya.
‘If people knew him like I know him, they would not think he was so strange. He’s unique, kinky, actually. I like that in
a guy.’

‘Some thought they’d end up together. When I asked Debbie if she was romantically interested in Michael, she became evasive.
She ended up marrying someone else for a few years – divorced him [in 1990] because she said she felt trapped – but I believed
she was interested in Michael.’

Over the years, Debbie and Michael continued their friendship, often confiding in one another about their unhappy marriages.

By 1995, Deborah Jean Rowe was thirty-six, about ten years older that Lisa Marie Presley. Born in 1958 in Spokane, Washington,
to Gordon Rowe and Barbara Chilcutt, she had been relocated to Los Angeles by the time she was fifteen. At that time, her
parents divorced, and her father left the United States for the Middle East. She graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977,
and began working as an assistant to Arnold Klein. In 1982, she married Richard Edelman, then a thirty-year-old teacher at
Hollywood High. They moved to a small apartment Van Nuys, California, where Edelman started a computer consulting business.
Their marriage began to crumble in 1988; a year later they filed for bankruptcy with assets of forty thousand dollars and
debt worth twice that much.

Debbie was truly an unusual character. When she was just a bit younger, she was a biker chick who enjoyed dressing up in black
leather and roaring around Los Angeles at breakneck speeds. Mario Pikus, a friend of hers at the time and a fellow biker,
recalled, ‘She had so many crashes that her powerful 2000cc machine was covered in dents. And she swore like a sailor. Everything
she said was peppered with four-letter words. She was like one of the guys. She used to drink beer and tequila, and she had
this habit of punching you in what was supposed to be a friendly gesture. After she had a few drinks, her friendly jabs could
knock the wind out of you.

‘She never had any money, she was always broke. But one day, after a road trip, she said she had to stop by her parents’ place.
I was stunned. It’s near Bruce Willis’s home in Malibu, and it makes his house look like a shack. It’s got to be worth four
million dollars.’ Inside the home, Pikus (who is a professional artist) estimated that there might have been ten million dollars
in paintings and sculptures. Debbie explained that her step-father was a real estate magnate. ‘They seemed to have a warm
relationship, but it was clear that Debbie didn’t take any money from him. Her apartment, which cost her about seven hundred
dollars a month, was a dark little place, kind of cheap and depressing. But it was a shrine to Michael Jackson. Every inch
of wall space was taken up by posters and photographs of him. Lots of them were signed, ‘To Debbie – Love, Michael.’