Michael Jackson (94 page)

When the door to Michael’s room opened, Lisa burst out as if shot from a cannon, past everyone in the hall and straight to
the elevator. ‘Mrs Jackson,’ exclaimed one of the doctors. ‘My goodness! Your husband cannot be upset like this. He’s much
too fragile. If you’re going to do this, you’ll not be able to visit him.’

Lisa gave him a sharp look.

Michael’s mother, who had been pacing in the hallway, regarded her daughter-in-law intensely. She could not fathom that Lisa
would fly all the way from Los Angeles to New York just to fight with her son. Janet, who had also rushed to be at her brother’s
side, had just gone to the ladies’ room. As Lisa stood waiting for the elevator, Katherine walked up to her and exploded in
stunned disbelief. ‘What is
wrong
with you, Lisa,’ she hissed. ‘You are so
spoiled
. I can’t believe that you would do this to Michael.’ At that moment, the elevator opened and Lisa got into it. She turned,
faced Katherine and gave her a critical look. Luckily for Katherine, the elevator’s doors then slammed closed between them.

Lisa wanted to see Michael the next day. ‘Absolutely not,’ Michael’s handlers told her. There had been a meeting with Jackson
family members and it was decided that Lisa was an antagonizing presence in Michael’s life, and that he should now be protected
from her, at all costs. Furious, Lisa went back to Los Angeles.

Perhaps a clue to Michael’s behaviour – his distancing himself from Lisa and his subsequent, apparent panic attack – can be found
in analysing a chain of events from late 1995. It would be many years later that Debbie Rowe would reveal that she became
pregnant that December. Michael had certainly given Lisa fair warning that Debbie would have his baby if she wouldn’t do it.
‘Tell her to go ahead and do it,’ Lisa had said. If she was being sarcastic, perhaps Michael didn’t catch the mockery.

Did Lisa know about the pregnancy? ‘I don’t think Debbie even knew yet,’ observed Monica Pastelle. ‘I think by the time Michael
was on his back in the hospital, she was only a couple of weeks’ pregnant. As for Lisa, if she had known, do you think Michael
would have been still drawing breath when she left that hospital room?’

It certainly appears either that Michael was a fast worker when he realized his marriage was in trouble or that he had a master
plan to father a child, once and for all, which did not involve his wife. Some have said that Michael and Debbie were intimate.
Others have said Debbie is ‘not his type’ and insist that they underwent the process of artificial insemination shortly before
Michael ended up in the hospital. Since no one who knows them well enough to be privy to such information wants to discuss
it, Debbie’s pregnancy remains one of Michael’s most sensitive secrets. ‘I can only tell you that I did not discuss it with
him,’ said one of his advisers. ‘I did not want any more information about any of it.’

When Michael was released from the hospital after a week, he went off to Euro-Disney in France to recuperate. He must have
had at least a half-dozen children with him, judging from photographs taken on his vacation.

On 18 January 1996, I appeared on CNN to announce that Lisa Marie Presley had filed for divorce from Michael Jackson. In her
petition, she noted the ‘Date of Separation’ as 10 December 1995, just after she saw Michael in the hospital. ‘This person
is one of the biggest entertainers out there,’ Lisa told
Newsweek
in 2003. ‘He is not stupid. He’s very charming when he wants to be, and when you go into his world you step into this whole
other realm. I could tell you all about the craziness – all these things that were odd, different, evil or not cool – but it still
took me two and a half years to get my head out of it.’

In March 1996, Debbie Rowe suffered a miscarriage. ‘I was just devastated,’ she has said. ‘I thought I would never be able
to have a baby, and I really wanted to have his. Michael was there to console me the whole time.’

It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that Debbie’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage – as well as her very existence in Michael’s
life – had still escaped public scrutiny. It seems incredible that someone of Michael’s celebrity status could be married to
one woman and planning a baby with another… and no one in the media would catch on to any of it. How, one wonders, did he
manage it? ‘Carefully,’ responded someone in Michael’s camp, only half-kidding. ‘Very carefully.’ Or, perhaps not very well
at all, it could be argued… if, in fact, he had a panic attack over it.

Michael’s divorce from Lisa was finalized on 20 August 1996. As part of the settlement, Lisa received ten per cent of royalties
from Jackson’s
HIStory
album. According to the agreement, she was allowed to write a tell-all book about her marriage, if she ever chose to do so;
she did not sign a so-called ‘confidentiality agreement’. At the time, though, Lisa just wanted to get on with her life and
career. She said that she had great regard for Michael and refused to speak critically of him. She knew that he wasn’t entirely
venal… she just didn’t know, at this point, what to think of him. So, she chose to preserve her dignity by keeping sacred
their private life together. Seven years later, though, in the spring of 2003, Lisa began to discuss her frustration as Michael’s
wife during promotion of her long-anticipated debut album,
To Whom It May Concern
, on Capitol Records.

Michael was deeply conflicted by the end of his marriage to Lisa, his heart flooded with despair. Never before had he connected
with a woman, or maybe even another person, on the level that he had with her. She had been there when he most needed her,
during the dark days of allegations and drug abuse. ‘She’s like a force of nature,’ he said of her, ‘always there for me.
I don’t know how I’ll be without her.’

He also had a strong sexual connection to her, and that had been a first for him. Previously, he hadn’t been able to open
himself up, feel uninhibited and truly, physically intimate with anyone. However, for some reason, he was able to let himself
go with Lisa. Who knows why? It’s easy to be sceptical of Michael’s relationship with her, but doing so risks ignoring his
obvious humanity. Despite the plastic surgeries and maddening friendships with boys, and all of the rest of the eccentric
behaviour that goes into making Michael Jackson such a strange individual, he is still a human being with emotions, feelings
and a beating heart – and, somehow, Lisa Marie Presley was the one to truly touch it, to truly affect him. ‘I’m afraid it will
never happen for me, again,’ he said at the time. ‘I’m scared to death that it’s over for me, now.’ Indeed, it was difficult
for him to let it go.

Michael spent a couple of weeks lamenting what had occurred with Lisa. ‘Lisa said that the part of him that is critical of
himself – the beaten child part of him – really kicked in after the divorce was finalized,’ said Monica Pastelle. ‘He wanted to
call and talk to his best friend, her. He didn’t want to let go. She needed space, though. She really needed time away from
him. She felt that he had really screwed with her mind, and she got sick and her body started breaking down after the divorce.
She poured her life into him. Now, she needed to reclaim it for herself. He had a hard time with that.’

In the end, Michael Jackson had no choice but to go on alone. He was a survivor, he told himself. He had music to work on,
career commitments – a huge, world tour coming up with a show that, as always, demanded his complete focus. Besides, he and
Lisa had different goals in life. He wanted to raise children; she already had two, and had made it clear that she didn’t
want any more with him. Michael wasn’t used to waiting for other people to catch up with him and with his goals. When Debbie
Rowe said she would have his baby, he jumped at the opportunity. With glacial determination replacing his despondency, he
was ready to push onward. That had always been his way; at the age of thirty-eight, he wasn’t going to change.

In September 1996, Michael embarked on a new worldwide concert schedule, the
HIStory
tour, the first leg of which began in Prague, Czech Republic, and would not end until Honolulu, Hawaii, at Aloha Stadium
in January 1997. The second leg would begin in Bremen, Germany, in May 1997 and end in Durban, South Africa, in October 1997.
During the tour, Michael would perform eighty-two concerts in fifty-eight cities to over 4.5 million fans. It was a gruelling
schedule. All told, the
HIStory
tour visited five continents and thirty-five countries.

A month after the tour began, and just a few months after his divorce was finalized, Michael made headlines again with another
bombshell revelation: a woman was carrying his baby. Debbie Rowe was five months’ pregnant, which meant she and Michael had
been working on a baby while he was still technically married to Lisa. Debbie later explained, ‘I said, “You deserve to be
a father. Let me do this for you. Let me have your baby.” He was surprised, but he said, “Yes. Let’s do it.”’

Debbie’s existence in Michael’s life – and her pregnancy – was finally revealed when she was tricked into discussing it with a
‘friend’ who was surreptitiously tape-recording the conversation. ‘She just didn’t know any better,’ explained Tanya Boyd,
one of the neighbours in the Van Nuys apartment complex where she lived at the time. ‘She was an open-hearted girl who never
dreamed that there were people out there tape-recording conversations for the tabloids.’

However, there it was, for all to see, on the front page of
News of the World
(3 November 1996). ‘I’m Having Jacko’s Baby,’ blazed the headline, with individual photographs of Michael and Debbie. She
was appalled. ‘Oh, my God, no,’ Debbie said to a friend who was with her when she saw a copy of the publication. ‘Please,
tell me it does
not
say that. It’s my own fault. Look at this thing.
Look at it
. They’re treating us like freaks!’ Debbie took the newspaper and flung it across the room, angrily. Then, she sank into a
chair, buried her face in her hands, and burst into tears. ‘Those bastards,’ she kept said. ‘How can they do this to Michael?
He doesn’t deserve it. And he’s going to be so mad at me.’

In truth, the article was fairly accurate, especially reading it retrospectively. In it, Debbie was quoted as saying that
Michael was, indeed, the father of the baby, and that he’d be raising the child without her. She also said, according to what
the
News of the World
reported as being on the tape-recording, that the two had engaged in sexual activity, but that when she did not immediately
become pregnant, they decided to try what she said Michael referred to as ‘a foolproof way of doing it’: artificial insemination.
She said that the process occurred at the Los Angeles Fertility Institute (on Brighton Way in Beverly Hills). The first time
ended in miscarriage, she said. This time, she felt she would carry to full term. The article also said that Debbie would
receive about $500,000 from Michael when she delivered the baby.

The revelation was almost as startling – and maybe more so – than the excitement that had resulted from Michael’s surprise nuptials
to Lisa Marie Presley. The questions from the media came fast and furiously: who was the expectant mother? What is she to
Michael? Why is it that no one had ever heard of her before? It all seemed strange, almost like a publicity stunt.

Debbie’s father, Gordon Rowe – a retired cargo pilot who lived in Cyprus – went on the record to say that the baby was conceived
by artificial means at the Los Angeles Fertility Institute.

‘She broke the news to me in a telephone call,’ he said. ‘I only speak to her once in a while, and I knew something was up.
She said straight off: “I’m going to have Michael’s child.” After I recovered from the shock, Debbie said, “Come on, it’s
not so bad. We had the child by artificial insemination.” I said, “Debbie, why artificial insemination? Isn’t he capable of
fathering a child like anyone else?” She laughed and said, “Michael doesn’t do
anything
like anyone else.” I said to her, “Isn’t this the same man who was charged with child abuse?” She said, “He wasn’t charged
with anything, not at all.” Then, she told me, “Dad you have no idea who the real Michael Jackson is. He is the most compassionate
person I have ever met in my life. If you could only spend one day with him, you would love him like I do.”’

Gordon had rarely seen Debbie since he and her mom, Barbara, divorced more than twenty years before; he had not been directly
involved in her upbringing since the early 1970s. ‘She’s always been a rebel,’ he said of Debbie. ‘Maybe if I’d been more
of a father, things would have been different.’ After his comments received worldwide publicity, he issued a general retraction
of everything he had said, each and every word. It appeared that Gordon spoke too soon, and that Michael was unhappy about
his comments. The pop star soon issued his own statement: ‘The reports speculating that Ms Rowe was artificially inseminated,
and that there is any economic relationship, are completely false and irresponsible.’