MJ (34 page)

Presley, a little girl running around at Graceland when her father died on August 16, 1977, had grown into a troubled young woman. Elvis and her mother divorced in 1973, and Priscilla Presley raised Lisa herself. It wasn’t easy—she went through a three-year drug phase and a long-term “destructo mode.” Singing became an escape. At age twenty, she needed a six-pack of beer and four takes to cover Aretha Franklin’s “Baby I Love You.”
“I wouldn’t change anything on that song. I think I did pretty okay, for the first time ever,” she recalls, years later. “But I do not, thankfully, need to drink anymore. People who are drinking think they sound good, but they really sound awful.” She began to write music in her early twenties, and used songs and poetry as therapy. This characteristic alone might have made her a good fit for Michael Jackson, who in 1994 was channeling bleak life events into his own lyrics. Lisa Marie was blunt, with a knack for subverting tragedy with disarming humor.
“My dad’s family’s from
Hee-Haw
and my mom’s family’s from
Falcon Crest
,” Presley told Clif Magness, a songwriter who worked on her 2003 debut album
To Whom It May Concern
. In addition, she was developing a talent for nurturing people. In 1988, she had married musician Danny Keough, who was struggling, in and out of bands.

Lisa Marie was still married to Keough when artist Brett
Livingston-Stone introduced her to MJ during a private February 1993 dinner at his home in LA. They had terrible fathers and damaged childhoods in common, and bonded over music and creativity. The night they met, Lisa had been trying to figure out how to start a music career. At the end of the night, shy Michael Jackson flirted with her in a bold, confident
way:
“You and me, we could get into a lot of trouble. Think about that, girl.”

Michael called her frequently from the road in Europe and Japan. “He was freaking out,” she says. “I believed that he didn’t do anything wrong, and that he was being wrongly accused and, yes, I started falling for him. I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it.” But she could tell something was wrong. As someone who’d had her own dependency demons, she picked up on his zoned-out demeanor and encouraged him to go to rehab. Like Elizabeth Taylor, she advised him to settle the child-molestation accusations with the Chandler family, just to excise the stress from his life.

After his stint in rehab, he returned home to relax with Lisa. At Neverland, the couple walked the grounds while a nanny took care of Lisa’s two young children. To answer a question the world wanted to know about Michael Jackson, she hinted strongly the two were actually, truthfully having sex.
“We’re together all the time . . . how can you fake that twenty-four hours a day with somebody?” she told Diane Sawyer in their widely viewed hand-holding ABC interview in 1995. Eventually she would say her sex life with Michael was
“very hot,” which made Lisa Marie Presley one of the few women to publicly confirm a sexual relationship with Michael Jackson. (Another, for the record, is Theresa Gonsalves, who claims to have been Michael’s girlfriend while he was filming
The Wiz
in New York.
“There were other girls,” says Gonsalves, who has written books about their relationship. “I met a couple of them.”)

Eventually, Michael pulled a
ten-karat diamond from his pocket, dropped to one knee, and proposed. Presley accepted. (She had divorced Danny Keough twenty days earlier.) The wedding was held in the Dominican Republic. The groom wore black, a pony-tail, and lipstick. Lisa Marie wore a
beige dress. The happy couple arrived with an entourage of lawyers and a bodyguard. The ceremony lasted fifteen minutes at the judge’s home. Gold bands were exchanged. The couple
stayed at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.
“They spent a full week in the tower and almost never came down,” recalls Trump, the perennial GOP presidential candidate. Hundreds of photographers soon rooted them out and stormed the beach.

When they returned to New York to live in a duplex apartment suite at Trump Towers, Michael went back to work on
HIStory
at the Hit Factory. Lisa frequently accompanied him.
“The magazines were questioning whether it was a publicity stunt, but from our observance, it was totally real and natural,” says Rob Hoffman, a
HIStory
engineer. “They were both pretty quiet people. When the two of them were in the studio, they were into each other. In our small, enclosed studio group, she was just very much the supportive wife.” The couple made an impression—on several levels. Rupert Wainwright, who filmed the
HIStory
teaser film in Budapest, recalls Lisa dressed in black chiffon even in August.
“Wherever she walks, she’s always in slow motion,” he says. When Wainwright visited Michael in one of his LA-area mansions to go over video special effects, the house began to shake from an earthquake. MJ and Wainwright ran in a panic to the center of the house, physically collided with Presley, and they collapsed into a group hug as paint chips fell from the ceiling. When the tremors ended, they separated, looked at each other awkwardly, and returned to their business.

Michael pressed Lisa into service for one famous publicity stunt, designed to show the world that he was, in fact, not a renegade child molester. At the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, MJ walked onstage, hand in hand with Lisa, in aviator shades, a white shirt, a black jacket, and red armband, while she clung to him wearing a black dress and a nervous smile. “Just think,” he said, “nobody thought this would last.” They embraced, kissed, and walked off as Lisa waved shyly. She looked like the dutiful, doting wife, said absolutely nothing, and allowed her man to guide her in public. But this was not Lisa Marie, and she said as much years later.
“His hand was blue afterwards after we got off that stage. He showed me and it was completely blue, I had squeezed it so
hard,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I did not want to do that. It’s not in my nature to do that sort of thing. But I understood . . . he needed to do things like that.” (Of her topless appearance nuzzling Michael in the dreamy and romantic but frustratingly unfocused “You Are Not Alone” video, Lisa would speak in similar, helpless terms:
“I don’t know why I did it. I was sucked up in the moment. It was kind of cool being in a Michael Jackson video. Come on!”)

*  *  *

Although Michael had told Oprah,
“I love my family very much,” and spoke of frolicking at Tito’s or
Jermaine’s houses on regular family days, his relationships were strained throughout the late eighties and early nineties. Jermaine’s 1991 song “Word to the Badd!!” seemed lyrically addressed to Michael: “You only think about you, your throne / be it right or be it wrong,” Jermaine sang in his high-pitched, lover-man falsetto. Later, Jermaine clarified:
“The bottom line here is that this song was written as a private message to help get my brother to heal our relationship.”

La Toya’s 1991 autobiography,
Growing Up in the Jackson Family
, divulged that Joe had sexually abused her when she was a child. She had intended to add that Joe had sexually abused Michael, too, but Michael’s lawyer John Branca stopped that by threatening a lawsuit. La Toya reportedly received a $500,000 advance from the publisher for the book, and her business manager, Jack Gordon, reportedly tried to extort Joe and Katherine out of $5 million in exchange for withdrawing it. La Toya’s literary marketing plan included a nude spread in
Playboy,
complete with strategically arranged boa constrictor. At thirty-three, La Toya had married her Svengali, the fifty-year-old Gordon, who purportedly wielded an unhealthy control over her life and career. La Toya’s second book,
Starting Over
, opens with a 1993 scene in which Gordon beat her nearly to death. In the book, and elsewhere, she recanted
Growing Up in the Jackson Family
and blamed everything on the late Gordon.

Since the Victory tour, Janet had been the only Jackson sibling other than Michael to truly succeed with any kind of musical career. La Toya and several of the Jackson brothers had shown signs of questionable judgment. Jermaine divorced Hazel Gordy, Berry’s daughter, who then accused Jermaine of refusing to pay child support. Margaret Maldonado, Jermaine’s common-law wife and mother of two of his children, wrote a tell-all book declaring, among other things, that Hazel accused Jermaine of raping her. After living with Jermaine and taking in the drama at the family’s Hayvenhurst home, Maldonado gave up and fled.
“I had been abused and humiliated and my children had been subjected to mental and physical cruelty,” wrote Maldonado, who directed 1992’s
Jacksons: An American Dream
, then became an agent for stylists and photographers. “We had to leave.” Jackie cheated on his wife, Enid, with Lakers cheerleader Paula Abdul; one night in 1984, Enid sought out Jackie and Paula at the Sepulveda Drive-In, grabbed Paula by the hair, then dragged her out of his Range Rover and across the theater lot.
^II

Janet’s career was a sharp contrast to that of Jermaine or La Toya. She began as a child performer, entwined with her brothers in the family shows in Vegas in the seventies. Janet snagged roles on
Good Times
,
Fame
, and, most memorably,
Diff’rent Strokes
. With Joe as her manager, she landed a contract with A&M Records, home of the Carpenters and Peter Frampton, and put out a self-titled kiddie-pop debut that was, at least, more memorable than anything by La Toya.

Janet would arrive at the studio with a driver and her tutor.
“She sounded like a young Michael Jackson,” says Bobby Watson, who wrote many of the songs and helped produce her debut. “She was really shy. Really, really, extremely shy.” Watson and his fellow producers started the project with visions of Motown, but the 1982 album came out
more like mini Chic—wah-wah guitars, synths, and drum programming.

Against her parents’ wishes, Janet took a career detour and married James DeBarge, a singer in another family band. They eloped in Grand Rapids, Michigan, DeBarge’s hometown, but annulled the marriage a year later. Jackson skated through album number two,
Dream Street
, but by 1985 she was contemplating a new musical direction. That was when an old Jackson family friend, John McClain from Walton High School, resurfaced as the urban music director at A&M Records. In what
Rolling Stone
would call a
“masterstroke,” McClain paired Little Janet with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the duo from Prince’s on-again-off-again backup band, Morris Day and the Time. Joe Jackson, still managing his daughter, warned them: “I don’t want my daughter sounding like Prince.” The crew ignored him. In the studio, Jam and Lewis coaxed Janet out of her shell and asked her to play more instruments and feel around for her identity. She found it with
Control
, an aggressive dance-rock album with booming rhythms, Time-style funky synths, and a commanding vocal sound.
“If we did something she liked, you could see the excitement in her eyes,” recalls Jesse “Jellybean” Johnson, the Minneapolis production team’s guitarist. Janet’s first album with the team,
Control
, distanced itself from its two lightweight predecessors with a funky mission statement: “This time I’m gonna do it my way.” Setting the stage for Miley Cyrus, Janet seized control through a sensuality far removed from her child-star persona: Among the best songs on
Control
are “Nasty” and “The Pleasure Principle.” By her second Jam-Lewis album,
Rhythm Nation 1814
, Jellybean Johnson was thinking “Beat It” and bestowed upon Janet the slamming rock-and-funk anthem “Black Cat.” “I wanted her to sound like a rock queen,” he says.

By 1994, for the first time in three decades, Michael Jackson was not the hottest Jackson in the music business. Janet’s
Rhythm Nation
had made her an MTV megastar. She appeared provocatively on the
cover of
Rolling Stone
and she was eclipsing Madonna as the top female star in dance and pop music. Michael, by contrast, hadn’t put out a new album in three years and his career was plagued by scandal. It made sense for him to borrow some heat from his younger sister in a collaboration.

“Scream” came together because, as Janet said, MJ called during her successful
Rhythm Nation
tour and asked to do a duet. She refused. But by 1994, she was confident
“people would see that I’m holding my own,” and accepted the invitation. The original plan was to include “Scream” on Janet’s upcoming album, but
“working on that with Michael kind of pulled us into
HIStory
,” recalls Steve Hodge, a recording engineer for the Jam and Lewis production company. Jam and Lewis tested four or five ideas for songs with Janet over a period of two days, and Janet pegged
“Scream” immediately as her brother’s choice. Sure enough, when the team arrived at the Hit Factory and played all the tracks for Michael, he listened to each for a couple of minutes and asked to return to “Scream.” “I told you,” Janet told Jam. After Jam and Lewis worked up the track in their Minneapolis studio, Michael and Janet recorded their vocals
separately. As usual, Michael put everything into the process, singing, dancing, snapping, clapping. Janet had many talents, but she was far from the most naturally gifted Jackson singer. “She wanted to work really hard to get up to his intensity on the record,” Hodge recalls. “So we had to redo it a few times.”

“Thriller” had led to a world in which superstar music videos could cost millions of dollars to make—an average video by a Sony artist cost $75,000.
“Much of what we were doing was trying to hold things back,” says Epic’s Dan Beck. “Not to stop things, but just keeping it from being crazy.” The $1 million mark was significant—if expenses went over that amount for a project, according to a source with knowledge of Michael’s videos, he paid for them, not Sony:
“It was like, ‘Michael, write a check.’ ”

The budget for “Scream,” thanks to its director, Mark Romanek,
ballooned to more than $7 million—which made it the most expensive video of all time, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records
. (Romanek later said many other videos were costlier, adding:
“I am annoyed that I am on record as this profligate maniac who spent $7 million.” Still, the shoot took fourteen days, when it had been scheduled for six.) Set in what appeared to be a black-and-white spaceship, with Michael and Janet dancing in black plastic pants, the video had a sleek, modernist feel, as if viewers were wandering through an art museum. (Before Michael and Janet slid down the floor on their knees, choreographers had to spread out a strip of baby powder to avoid friction between the pants and the floor.) Romanek mostly captured Janet and Michael dancing individually—which made the video great in itself, because both were the best dancers in pop music, Madonna notwithstanding—but he also found tiny moments in which the two teased each other on a couch while playing video games. It was before computer-generated graphics, so Richard Berg, the art director, had to create eleven sets on five different stages. The filmmakers had lofty artistic ambitions. Romanek was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
, and Berg designed the distinctive long hallway after works by Spanish architect
Santiago Calatrava.