You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (36 page)

And her overall experience of Neverland? ‘I loved being here because it made me feel like a child again,’ she said.

AS MOST PEOPLE ARE AWARE, MY
brother was as keen on preserving his privacy as he was his memories and it is widely assumed that, once away from Neverland, there was no escape from scrutiny. But he kept his small victories equally private and there was one other place on earth that the world never did find about.

From the early nineties onwards, and when in L.A., Michael headed to Santa Monica Airport – but he didn’t go there to catch a plane: he went there to find refuge. As flight instructors took up student pilots in their Bonanzas, and different limos dropped off VIP clients at waiting Gulfstreams, one man in a baseball cap slipped between them and walked to an anonymous-looking hangar not far from the runway. Once Michael pulled down its
giant shutter of a door, he was able to relax. This was his secret windowless bunker where no one could find him. And he didn’t come to this place to sing or dance, or rehearse: he went there to paint. It was an ‘art space’ found for him by Australian artist Brett Livingston-Strong – whom he’d commissioned to do some portraits. The two of them could disappear there for hours. Michael said this bolt-hole and ‘the therapy of art’ allowed him to ‘escape the craziness and take my mind off everything’.

In 2011, the world finally found out about this secret refuge when Michael’s art work was first revealed. I don’t think anyone had, until then, appreciated what a superb artist he was, but he derived endless pleasure from experimenting with watercolours and pencil sketches. He even designed his own furniture – with the number ‘7’ detail. It is a priceless collection which Michael requested be kept at the hangar because of its anonymity and because most of that work was done under the tutelage of, or in collaboration with, Brett.

I visited the hangar after Michael’s death. His art from across the years was still on display, unframed, surrounding the large worktops in the middle of the floor and the clutter of art materials in the corners. There must be upwards of 50 pieces. As I stood there and imagined him locking himself away, immersed in his work, all I could do was smile and think, Golly, you’ve come a long way from splashing paint on Diana Ross’s carpet.

AS A FAMILY, WE KNEW MICHAEL
reached out to befriend children and if you knew his heart like we did, the idea that we should have been concerned by this trait is ridiculous.

I knew of two children Michael had invited into his life. Dave Rothenburg adopted the name ‘Dave Dave’ to sever all connection with his own father’s surname because, when he was six, his father had set ablaze his hotel room and the bed he was sleeping in, causing him 80-degree burns and leaving him scarred all over his face and body. As Dave Dave so eloquently said at my brother’s funeral: ‘Michael reached out to me, befriended me, and the first time we
met, he hugged me – and he never stopped hugging me throughout my life as he continued to provide emotional support.’

Then there was Ryan White, the boy from our home state of Indiana, who contracted AIDs from a blood transfusion and was first invited to Neverland in 1989. His mother Jeanne spent time at the estate before allowing her son to stay on his own for long weekends. Michael liked Ryan because he didn’t treat him like a pop star. Ryan liked Michael because he didn’t treat him like an AIDs victim. When Ryan got sick, my brother tended to him the way a true care-giver would. He was devastated when Ryan passed away in 1990. The song ‘Gone Too Soon’ was written in Ryan’s memory.

But it wasn’t just sick children who stayed at Neverland. Michael liked being surrounded by his nieces and nephews; he kept gravitating towards child stars and that was how child actors Jimmy Safechuck, Emmanuel Lewis and Macaulay ‘Mac’ Culkin became friends; and then there was an Australian boy, Brett Barnes, and brothers Frank, Eddie and Angel Cascio, whom Michael bent over backwards to help financially in life. Michael just wanted to help any sick child and any child star struggling with the less happy sides of celebrity.

He became particularly close to an Australian kid called Wade Robson. Michael went so far as to describe Wade, his sister Chantal and mother Joy as ‘my second family’ and he expressed this to them in writing. Over the years, there would be other surrogate families but I can only speak of his fondness for the Robsons. First, it was mother, daughter and son who visited and stayed at Neverland. Then, as Joy trusted what we all trusted, Wade was allowed to stay at the house on his own. This fact was always conveniently overlooked by the media: no child ever stayed at Neverland without their parents also being present, or without their parents first getting to know and trust my brother as the child’s guardian. Newspaper coverage always erased the parents, preferring to build the image of Michael having an isolated relationship with the boys, as opposed to his all-embracing relationship with the families. Nobody ever mentioned that the families of
Marlon Brando, Tommy Hilfiger, Chris Tucker, Kirk Douglas and the master of positive-thinking, Wayne Dyer, were also regular visitors but I guess it seemed more titillating to think of unchaperoned children as the only guests.

The Robsons had met Michael in 1987 as his
Bad
Tour passed through Brisbane. Five-year-old Wade had won a contest to dance with him on stage – and he wowed the stadium. Michael was blown away and later said that watching Wade was ‘like looking in the mirror at myself all over again.’ All he wanted to do was harness this kid’s talent and make his dream come true, so to cut a long story short, he ended up moving the family to LA when Wade was seven. In that two-year gap, Michael had built a solid phone friendship with Joy, spending hours on long-distance calls. By the time they pitched up in California, they were not strangers. Michael then took Wade under his professional wing, putting him to work with his choreographers, Bruno ‘Poppin’ Taco’ Falcon and Michael ‘Boogaloo Shrimp’ Chambers, two guys whose invisible input was all over Michael’s routines, and especially the Moonwalk. Then, in an echo of our childhood in Gary, Michael sat with Wade for hours in front of the television watching dance videos, mentoring him and pointing out which moves to watch and what detail to note. The upshot was that Wade became a dance teacher
aged 12
at Millennium Dance Complex, North Hollywood, where Michael held many of his by-invitation-only dance auditions. Four years later, he became choreographer to Britney Spears and then, later, to Justin Timberlake. A talent – spotted, harnessed and nurtured by Michael – passing down his teachings to Britney and Justin.

Many parents saw Michael making a difference to their kids’ lives in so many positive ways, and not once did anyone see or sense anything untoward about leaving them in his company. There was a consensus in parental instinct. Every time. It wasn’t ‘allowing a young boy to sleep over at a house with a grown man’, it was entrusting a child to the responsible and tender care of Michael – the difference between an impersonal connotation and personal, cast-iron knowledge.

In hindsight, there was always going to be a problem in an untrusting world that, by now, was becoming celebrity-obsessed. The more strangers you befriend with good faith, the more the odds shorten that, one day, someone will walk in, smell wealth and opportunity, and decide to take advantage. My brother’s trusting nature and, perhaps, naïvety wouldn’t discern that day coming.

MICHAEL DESPERATELY WANTED TO BE A
father and have children of his own, but he never stopped being consumed by work and the perfect woman hadn’t come along. But that didn’t stop him
talking
about wanting kids and he made no secret of his desire to have nine. That was the number he quoted, just as we had been nine.

Both of us had mentioned having ‘lots and lots of children’ when we grew up. Maybe when you come from a large family, you want to repeat it. I don’t know. I just know that we love kids. Michael had an upstairs room at Neverland filled with a collection of porcelain dolls, dressed in velvet and lace dresses. I could never go in there because I didn’t want a million non-blinking doll faces in my dreams. As Mother said, ‘That’s one scary room with all those faces staring at you.’

I think this room was more than just a collector’s prized possession. In my mind, it was a positive visualisation of what he wanted: a house full of children. His bedroom and games room were also busy with mannequins dressed in all sorts of fashions he admired and then there were his life-size superheroes like Superman, Darth Vader, Batman, R2-D2 and Roadrunner. I think at Neverland he missed being surrounded by people – having grown up in a full house – which was also why he invited relative strangers into his world, constantly building surrogate families for himself. I am also certain that he found echoes of his boyhood in the child friends who became his new ‘brothers’. Through them, he relived his own childhood after he had rebuilt his playground.

People failed to understand that what Michael created for himself was a comfort blanket – it had no ulterior motive.
Everything he surrounded himself with substituted something in his past. He wanted to be solitary yet struggled to sit with it and he was to struggle with it until the void was filled with a family of his own.

I REMEMBER 1993 MOSTLY FOR WHAT
happened behind Michael’s back. It was the year when the dream lost control and everyone seemed powerless to stop it – or content to let it happen. From now on, there seemed to be schemers, plotters and planners everywhere, triggering a destructive chain of events that would affect my brother for the rest of his life. Outside his fan community, it was no longer about loving and appreciating Michael Jackson the entertainer; it seemed to be about the authorities and media ghoulishly anticipating his downfall.

Not for a second did the family think that success could betray him in such a way. It wasn’t the kind of lesson we had been taught at Motown University and Michael wouldn’t understand the forces he was up against until he was staring the living nightmare in the face. We had spent our lives as the Jacksons trying to control our goals, strategy, image and music: we woke up one day to find all hell had broken loose. It’s at such moments you realise that, in life, you’re never in control. Only God is – and Michael’s unshakeable belief in Him would pull him through the biggest injustice I’ve ever seen.

VENICE BEACH IS ONE OF THOSE
laid-back towns I’ve always avoided because of its crowds. It’s a log-jammed tourist trap at weekends with its mime artists, psychics, performing dogs, rappers, musicians and dancers all taking their chance on the ocean-front boardwalk. One weekend, Wade Robson was one of those street performers, trying out his moves. He was about 10 and he, his sister and mother Joy were still regular guests at Neverland and had set up home in a condo in west LA. Michael had used Wade, with Macaulay Culkin, on his ‘Black and White’ video, but he was still an anonymous face in the crowd, especially in Venice Beach. There was no way anyone should have known who he was, let alone linked him with his mentor.

Until, that is, some ‘freelance writer’ named Victor Gutierrez sidled up to his mother and explained that he was investigating Michael Jackson for ‘being a paedophile’. How did he know who she was? Joy took his business card and immediately phoned Michael’s office. It was early summer 1992 – a year before any formal allegation or police investigation – and a butterfly started to beat its wings near the beach.

IF HE WERE STILL AROUND TODAY,
Michael would tell you that he was wary about the people he engaged with. He only mentored, nursed or nurtured maybe 10 or 15 children over the years. And that, to him, was doing good deeds in the eyes of God. The more he reached out to help, the more he was practising what he’d been taught all his life. Michael was his mother’s son. We all are: each of us has been taught to see the good in everyone. Ever since Mother had invited fans to sit at her kitchen table while we were on tour as the Jackson 5, our artist-fan relationship has been finely balanced. Even at Hayvenhurst, we’d be seated at the dinner table when the bell would ring at the gate – ‘Hi, we’re visiting from Australia and we’re just here to see the family.’ Joseph would invite them to join us.

We were probably the only family in Hollywood with an open-door policy and the irony was not lost on me: don’t let the outside
world in when you’re working towards the dream, but let anyone in once the dream has been achieved. In our minds, we were still folk from Gary, with temporary citizenship of California. We never wanted to lose the common touch. As Mother always reminded us: ‘There would be no Jackson 5 and no Michael Jackson without the fans.’ With that in mind, maybe it’s easier to see why Michael wasn’t street-smart when it came to letting random people into his life.

One day in May 1992, he was driving along Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and broke down. Fortunately, there was a Rent-A-Wreck nearby so he could hire a replacement car. The owner of the business was an elderly man named Dave Schwartz. He had a younger, attractive wife named June, and she had a son from a previous marriage: 13-year-old Jordie Chandler. At first, everything seemed okay. It turned out that the kid was a huge fan of Michael’s – the boy was rushed to his step-father’s offices, with his sister Lily, before his idol left. Michael apparently spent no more than five minutes with them, but was told he wouldn’t have to pay for a car if he took Jordie’s telephone number. It would make the boy’s day if he called him sometime. Please. It would be a dream come true.

The pressure on my brother was, apparently, polite but forceful, and he would have been sympathetic because at 13 he’d have done anything to meet Fred Astaire. So, he took the kid’s number, promised he’d call and was a man of his word.

Somewhere along the line, he clearly felt comfortable enough to stay in contact. He called the mother and the boy over the next several months as he travelled. Before anyone knew it, they were part of his entourage and snatched press photos referred to them as ‘Jackson’s adopted family’. Such reports went over our heads, but one person was apparently really happy about it: the boy’s father, Dr Evan Chandler. He was a dentist who didn’t have custody of his son, and who harboured a dream to become a screen-writer. He’d already had one story idea picked up, which would evolve into the Mel Brooks’ movie
Robin Hood: Men In Tights
, but
he wanted more. Only one thing stood between him and his Oscar: the money to fund that dream. But his son now appeared to be Michael Jackson’s new best friend and, as the dentist told his ex-wife – as we heard in court, many years later – the relationship was ‘a wonderful means for Jordie not having to worry for the rest of his life’.

MICHAEL HAD INCREASINGLY SHUNNED
contact with the outside world. Sadly, in consequence, he drifted away from the brothers again. We knew that he called Mother and asked about us, checking that we were okay, but I was unhappy that we had slipped back into lazy-communication mode.

This time, instead of leaving futile phone messages, I sent numerous letters, reminding him of what we had agreed about family and how important it was that we stick together. A lot of those letters were sent in the blind hope they’d get passed on and, in April 1993, I made that point to him by writing: ‘I’ve sent a lot of letters to you. I hope you get them all.’

When I didn’t get a response, I wrote again: ‘I really need to talk to you about our relationship. I’m your brother and I miss you a lot.’ The following month, I wrote again: ‘Dear Michael, it would be great if you and I
only
could spend some time together and just talk about things … What’s important to me is our friendship now. Please respond asap – Jermaine.’

Again, there was no response. I just kept praying he was okay.

BY FEBRUARY 1993 – AROUND THE
time of the big Oprah interview – Jordie Chandler, his sister and mother were guests at Neverland. Sometimes a whole bunch of families were staying there together. As with every other parent, Jordie’s mother June ‘never’ had a problem with her son spending time in Michael’s bedroom because, as she put it, ‘it was a boy’s room … a big boy’s room, lots of toys and things’, and everyone seemed to be crashing there. She then invited Michael to stay at their house in Santa Monica, which he did for a total of 30 nights, we found out. Even
Dr Chandler played host and was happy for Michael to stay twice at his house with his son; all three of them ended up having a water-pistol fight. I know this from the court hearing.

In time, Dr Chandler was clearly getting on so well with Michael that he asked my brother to pay for ‘a new wing’ to his property. Thankfully, Michael had the good sense to dodge that one. But maybe it sparked Dr Chandler’s resentment – a resentment which, however it started, would deepen as Jordie missed his weekend visits to his father so that he could stay instead at Neverland, where Michael treated him to expensive gifts, trips on Sony’s private jets with his mother and stays in five-star hotels. This would later be misrepresented as a seduction technique ‘to force a minor to comply with his sexual demands’. But Jordie Chandler wasn’t alone in receiving such treatment. My brother had always been generous to a fault with his nieces and nephews. He’d allow them to have whatever toys they liked from his games room or he’d take them on a Toys R Us hunt, where they would close the store and he’d say ‘Go on! Buy whatever you want!’ For me, his generosity was his over-compensation for those years as a child when he’d only ever known what it was like to shop at the Salvation Army; his way of giving back something he’d never known.

He didn’t just treat the boy Jordie, though. He bought the mother, June, Cartier jewellery, a $7,000 Fred Segal boutique gift certificate and even allowed her to use his credit card to buy two designer handbags – and no one one ever accused him of trying to seduce her.

Meanwhile, as more time passed, Dr Chandler became inreasingly angry because Michael had stopped calling him; he felt left out. Suddenly he said something ‘was not right’ about Michael’s relationship with his son. None of us could have known what his remedy would be and if Jordie’s step-father, Dave Schwartz, hadn’t secretly taped a telephone conversation to protect his wife’s interests, we would never have found out the truth behind what happened next.

Dr Chandler – presumably using his ‘set routine of words that have been rehearsed’, as he put it – would demand $20 million
from Michael to fund his screenplays ($5 million for each of four scripts). If Michael refused to pay, he’d go public with allegations that his son had been molested. A month earlier, he had said as much to Dave Schwartz in the call that was recorded. It was an extortion that was presented in person to my brother at a hotel on 4 August 1993. Michael ultimately refused to pay.

For a lone man who was, it turned out, $68,000 in debt, Dr Chandler had supreme confidence in taking on the most powerful and wealthiest artist in the industry. Maybe he felt like he had nothing to lose, but it didn’t sound like he was acting alone. As he said, ‘Everything is going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine … There’s other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are intentionally … in certain positions.’ I presume he was referring to his legal team, even if he was only advised by one attorney. Either way, he would stick to his ‘plan’.

From now on, the focus would be on the spectacle of this episode, not on the absence of fact. No one would listen when my brother’s team held a press conference playing back some of Dr Chandler’s taped conversation. No one would listen even when his malicious motivation came across loud and clear: ‘… that’s all I regard him [Michael] as … an attention-getting mechanism. It’ll take on so much momentum of its own that it’s going to be out of all our control. It’s going to be monumentally huge …

‘I mean, it could be a massacre if I don’t get what I want …

‘… Michael has to be there. He’s the main one. He’s the one I want. Nobody in this world was allowed to come between this family. If I go through with this, I win big-time … I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever.’

‘Michael Jackson … is gonna be humiliated beyond belief. You’ll not believe it. He will not believe what’s going to happen to him … beyond his worst nightmares … he will not sell one more record.’

A father was using his own son to extort money. And people wondered why Michael was so keen to give love to children.

MICHAEL WAS IN THAILAND ON THE
Asian leg of his
Dangerous
World Tour when police raided Neverland with search warrants and a locksmith. We wouldn’t find out until two days later when it broke on the television news. We had no means of contacting him immediately, but we thanked God that Bill Bray was with him because he was as good as family being there. All we could do was sit on the sidelines and watch the nightmare unfold.

When Michael had refused to pay, the dentist had taken his son to a psychiatrist to discuss child molestation. Standard procedure led to a call to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), who brought in the Sexually Exploited Child Unit of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Glory-hunters smelt blood. Then two things happened. Dr Chandler started a $30 million civil lawsuit, citing child battery, seduction and negligence. At the same time a criminal investigation was launched, overseen by two District Attorneys: Tom Sneddon for Santa Barbara County and Gil Garcetti for LA County. That was when an LAPD convoy arrived at Neverland, looking for evidence. They left with nothing more than memorabilia. There was nothing subtle about the raid: the police got as carried away as anyone else who came into contact with Michael’s world. One of America’s greatest entertainers was being treated like one of America’s most wanted.

Days later, they also searched the condo in Century City, but Michael was truly devastated when they searched Hayvenhurst because he didn’t want to bring trouble to Mother’s door. Thankfully, she and Joseph were away so were spared the ordeal as police went through medicine cabinets, asking what this and that was used for. They hammered open a safe in Michael’s old quarters and found it empty, but seized private notes and writings, which turned out to be his scribbled lyrics – the seeds of his ideas. Those notes were never returned and yet, over the years, they appeared in magazines. In all three properties, the police found nothing but word reached us via attorneys that officers believed Michael to ‘fit the profile of the characteristics of a paedophile’ because he used
words like ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ and he preferred child-like activities and bought gifts for boys. Gone were the days of true detective work, replaced by the psycho-bullshit of a one-size-fits-all template. No one looked at my brother’s unique background, his character or what he’d done for people.

In the meantime, Jordie Chandler – now under the control of his father – had sworn an affidavit that built a false picture of intimate allegations and descriptions of my brother’s body. Armed with that testimony, two detectives turned up with a camera and video-camera to subject Michael to what he rightly described as ‘a dehumanising and humiliating’ body search. He was compelled to undergo it because refusal ‘would indicate guilt’, they told him. Once they had stripped him of his dignity, Michael was made to stand naked in a room and lift his penis so that it and his scrotum could be photographed from front, right and left. As he turned to have his buttocks, chest and back photographed, a detective stood with a notepad, taking down every last detail. None of the markings on Michael’s body matched the boy’s description. In fact, the imagination bore no resemblance to the actuality.