The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (60 page)

This decision angered many fans who believed – rightly or wrongly – that Stern had something to do with Anna Nicole’s wild behaviour and the drug abuse which eventually led to her death. They were not the only ones, it would seem, as in October 2012 – two years after the initial guilty verdict – a California court made the decision that the judge had been wrong to throw out the case and that the convictions should be looked at again. Judge Robert Perry was then given the unenviable task of deciding what to do next: to consider Stern’s request for a new trial (which would mean that the original case would have to be dismissed as the new trial could constitute double jeopardy); to find another grounds for dismissal; or to sentence the former lawyer to prison or probation based on the original conviction. As of March 2013, no decision has been made as to what the outcome will be, though if the former court appearances of Anna Nicole Smith are anything to go by, the case could run and run.

And what of Anna? Much has been said about her life and personality, though most of it is derogatory and untrue. Her life was so full of twists and turns that it is almost hard to believe it really happened. One thing that is not often reported, however, is that in spite of all the scandal and intrigue, she had a very big heart, lavishing her friends and children with attention and love in equal measure.

She was also extremely generous to her fans, as demonstrated when she lived for a time at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, the last home of her idol, Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t stay long, due to her son’s apparent distaste for the property, but while she was there Marilyn’s fans would often write and tell her how much the actress meant to them. Instead of ignoring the fan mail that came for her idol, she would often reply and send photographs of herself inside the home. These photos regularly appear on the internet, a testimony not only to how she appreciated her fans, but also how much she adored Marilyn Monroe.

It is a tragedy that, in the end, the woman who wanted so much to be like Marilyn, who dressed in replica costumes and rented her home to be “close” to her idol, ended up passing away in a strikingly similar situation. But then, given her tragic life, perhaps that was always inevitable.

“The King of Pop”, “Wacko Jacko” . . . whatever you want to call him, the fact remains that Michael Jackson was one of the biggest pop superstars of the twentieth century. A dancer, singer, actor and all-round performer, he dazzled audiences across the globe with hits such as “Thriller”, “Bad” and “The Way You Make Me Feel”. However, it cannot be denied that away from the thrills of his music and stage presence, it was his personal life and death that caused the most sensation – and the circumstances of both are still furiously discussed and argued by fans today.

Born on 29 August 1958, Jackson was the eighth of ten children born to Katherine and Joe Jackson. The family was raised in a small house in Indiana, where Michael’s father – who played in a band – had dreams of his children following in his footsteps. He got his wish, and in 1964 some of the brothers (including Michael) began performing together and eventually the Jackson Five (later the Jacksons) was born. The band was a huge success, signing to Motown and performing such hits as “I Want You Back” and “ABC”. But in spite of the success of the band itself, it was “Little Michael” that got the most attention, and ultimately, while still young, he ended up releasing several albums and singles as a solo artist, including “Ben” and “Rockin’ Robin”.

Michael’s childhood was traumatic and he was constantly bothered by the fact that he was unable to have the regular upbringing enjoyed by other children. There was little – if any – time for playing with friends, visiting the park or riding his bike in the street. Instead, the children were all expected to practise their dance routines day and night, under the everwatchful eye of their father Joseph.

In several later interviews Michael claimed that his father would become emotionally and physically abusive while supervising rehearsals. He also said that as a child he was exceptionally lonely and often watched other children playing outside the building where he was working, unable to go down and take part because he had to record his latest single or album. Added to that, it is also said that the child was told on numerous occasions that he had a big nose and spots; a result of which – it would seem – was the obsession Jackson developed with undertaking plastic surgery procedures during the latter part of his life.

By the time he was a fully grown adult, Michael Jackson had the world of pop at his feet. A phenomenal superstar, his albums with the Jacksons were still huge hits, but he was ready to branch off on his own. He made a film – a box-office disaster – called
The Wiz
(1978) and then in 1979 he released his own album,
Off the Wall
, which went on to sell a staggering twenty million copies and introduced the world to a more mature Michael Jackson. More albums followed, including the astronomically successful
Thriller
in 1982 and
Bad
in 1987. He also toured the world extremely successfully, but while his professional life was nothing short of amazing, his personal life was heading towards disaster.

In January 1984 Jackson had been filming an advert for Pepsi Cola, when some pyrotechnics set his hair on fire. Footage of the episode shows Jackson dancing without realizing that his head is ablaze, and finding out too late to prevent second-degree burns to his scalp. This seems to have been a real turning point for the singer, and as a result he undertook various plastic surgery procedures and began taking tablets to ease the pain. Unfortunately, it would seem that this was to be his undoing, and Michael Jackson never truly recovered from the trauma inflicted that day.

After that tragic episode, certain elements of Jackson’s life began to develop in ways that outsiders may describe as somewhat odd. He owned a chimpanzee – Bubbles – which slept in a crib by his bed and travelled the world with him on a private jet. Not only that, but it was also reported that it did everything with the singer – from watching movies in a private cinema to sitting at the table to eat his dinner. This seems to have been the start of the “Wacko Jacko” era; the media absolutely loved the Bubbles stories and rumours, and photographed the pair together at every opportunity.

It was not just fun stories being reported in the media, though. By summer 1993, rumours of a very different kind were circulating that involved Jackson being accused of the sexual abuse of a thirteen-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler. Money was said to have been demanded by the family of the boy, which Jackson refused to give, and then the matter of the alleged abuse was reported to the police. By Christmas 1993 Jackson’s home had been investigated and the singer had been strip-searched. Jackson released a video statement, protesting his innocence. “Don’t treat me like a criminal,” he begged, and asked the media to wait for the truth before labelling him. “I am innocent,” he said.

In January 1994 the matter was settled out of court with Michael still protesting his innocence and a rumoured $22 million being paid to the Chandler family. Then in early summer the entire matter was dropped by the police and Jackson was able to continue with his life, which – in May 1994 – included marrying Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley.

If the media had enjoyed a field day with the Bubbles stories and then the sexual abuse rumours, they really went to town on the marriage between Michael and Lisa Marie. How on earth had this come about, they wondered? And why were they suddenly so close? Actually, the pair had met in 1975 at a concert, and had reconnected in 1992 when they became friends after meeting to discuss a demo tape that Lisa Marie had recently recorded. Unknown to the media, the two then became friends. Michael took to phoning Elvis’s daughter at every opportunity and was in constant contact with her throughout the child abuse accusations.

Lisa apparently believed she could somehow “save him” and fell in love with the singer to such a degree that when the possibility of marriage was brought to the table, she ultimately said yes. The two waited until the child abuse scandal passed, and then without making a big deal of it to anyone, decided to make their relationship official by marrying in the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately this did not sit well with Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla, who knew nothing about the relationship at all; the first she heard of the marriage was when helicopters were buzzing around her house and she saw a news report on television. Priscilla was understandably suspicious and extremely confused by what was going on with her daughter and the King of Pop, and later said that at that particular time she was deeply worried that Lisa Marie was somehow being used.

Reports about the marriage of Jackson and Elvis’s daughter were fuelled with rumour and gossip from the very first day. Once the story got out, the media wanted to know if the whole thing was a carefully manipulated scenario designed to rebuild Michael’s reputation, and felt that maybe he was marrying in order to get closer to the Elvis back catalogue, since he was a huge fan himself. Members of the public, meanwhile, had other things on their mind and became obsessed with whether or not Michael and Lisa Marie were husband and wife in every sense of the word, or were they merely platonic friends? It seemed that everyone had their own ideas as to the basis of the relationship, and things were made no better after an embarrassing appearance at the MTV awards, where the pair stood on the stage with virtually nothing to say, before finally sharing an awkward kiss and leaving.

It is fair to say that in light of the way the media reported on it, everything about the relationship seemed a little contrived, but Lisa Marie laughed off the allegations and assured everyone that they were just like every other married couple out there – physically and otherwise. Yet people continued to remain doubtful that Michael had ever been intimate with anyone, though in all honesty, without knowing the man personally, this seems to be an unfair assumption.

It was not long before rumours began to surface that the marriage was on the rocks; that the couple were arguing and would no doubt separate soon. Of course, this meant that reporters crowded around the couple’s home, spoke to their friends and tried to dig the dirt in order to find anything they could. However, because of the heavy secrecy surrounding Jackson’s life, no one could really give much of an insight at all. Michael later shed some light on it when he explained to an interviewer that he and his fiancée had agreed to have children as soon as they got married, but after the wedding his new wife had changed her mind. Michael declared himself to be “broken-hearted” and gave this as the reason why the marriage started to break down.

Of course, as often happens, the other party – in this case, Lisa Marie – had a different version of the reasons why the marriage ended when she spoke to Oprah Winfrey some years after the divorce. In several recorded interviews the singer described that she had indeed planned to have children but wanted to make sure that everything was strong between the couple, as she had no intention of getting into a custody battle with Michael Jackson.

She also described the time she was married as “insane” and explained that during their relationship she was blindsided and naive. Finally – after enduring times when Michael would disappear for weeks on end and collapsed mysteriously during the making of an HBO special – she decided that she’d had enough. Added to that, Jackson was surrounded by a number of people whom she felt were sucking the life from him, and yet he seemed to choose them over her in his life. Eventually the young woman woke up and knew that in circumstances such as these, she was not able to carry on trying to “save” him and just wanted out.

The couple eventually went their separate ways in 1996, though they apparently stayed in touch and got back together several times. But when the affair finally breathed its last breath, Jackson began another relationship, this time with a nurse called Debbie Rowe, whom he married in November 1996. Not surprisingly, from the very start it seemed like a complicated relationship. Rowe had apparently met the singer during a dermatology appointment at the surgery where she worked. She felt sorry for him and the two became friendly. The story goes that during their friendship, Jackson shared his concerns over the break-up of his marriage to Lisa Marie and confided that he believed he would never have children – a revelation which prompted Rowe to suggest that she might be able to give him a child herself.

Michael agreed, but not before telling Lisa Marie that if she wasn’t interested in having his baby then Rowe was more than willing. His ex-wife could not be swayed, however, and eventually a baby was conceived with Rowe (some claim by artificial insemination) and a son, Michael Joseph Jackson (known as Prince Michael), was born on 13 February 1997. Another child followed a year later when Paris Michael Katherine was born, and Jackson caused controversy by later claiming that he had literally taken the baby straight from the delivery room back to his home.

It was statements like this that led people to believe that Debbie Rowe had merely acted as a surrogate to Jackson, especially when she was said to have given up her rights to the children when the couple divorced in 1999. This supposed decision was later revoked, however, and it is said that as of 2012, Rowe does have visitation rights with her teenage children and is frequently quoted in newspapers as being concerned over their current welfare.

Jackson’s next child was not conceived with Rowe, and instead an unknown woman gave the singer a child in 2002. Named Prince Michael Jackson II (but known to everyone as Blanket), the child became famous when his father took him out on to the balcony of his Berlin hotel room when he was just a few months old, in order to greet shouting fans. What he was thinking is not clear, but he ended up dangling the blanket-covered baby over the balcony for a split second before coming to his senses and taking the child back inside. Although Jackson later apologized for what he described as a mistake, the action of putting his son in danger caused controversy in the media and people wondered about the state of his mental health.