You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (39 page)

They spent most of their time living at Lisa Marie’s house in Hidden Hills, north of Los Angeles, but there was added pressure because Michael had taken under his wing the grandkids of our uncle Lawrence, Joseph’s brother. There were problems in that family and my brother had stepped in, feeling that the kids needed real love at a difficult time. I’m sure Lisa Marie had every sympathy but she understandably wanted her husband to be emotionally there for her, too.

As the weeks went by, she realised she was not spending enough family time with her own kids, even though they spent some weekends at Neverland, which still remained a place where visiting families came together. At times, and no doubt in response, Lisa Marie disappeared for a few days and when she wasn’t around, Michael became insecure. A vicious circle developed: she wondered where he was and he wondered where she was – jealousy and distance never were a good combination in Hollywood. Now, instead of coming together, they were pulling apart.

On one occasion, Michael spent the day in the studio with his protégé Wade Robson, working late into the night. He decided to stay
at Wade’s family home at the invitation of his mother instead of returning to his wife – it was easier that way. Michael hated arguments or raised voices and preferred to avoid a problem rather than confront it. But Lisa Marie wasn’t putting up with it: she stood up to Michael and challenged him. That was what he needed, even if he didn’t appreciate it. Also, he was still contending with the remnants of his Demerol dependency. I don’t know how much of it Lisa Marie saw, but I do know that Michael wasn’t finding his recovery easy and he was still suffering pain that agitated him and kept him awake at night.

Another uncomfortable factor for Michael was Lisa Marie’s beliefs as a Scientologist. She gave him lots of reading material about her religion and he devoured it all. At some point he discovered that Scientologists don’t necessarily rely on medication to treat a child’s sickness. Michael’s first port of call would be a paediatrician and he worried about what that might mean when they had children. As it was, he didn’t have to concern himself for long. The one big factor that tipped things over the edge came when Lisa Marie – in Michael’s eyes – reneged on her promise to give him kids. As soon as they got married, he started his countdown to having his nine little Moonwalkers. When he became convinced she had broken a pact he felt they had made, it would have taken him back to that time when Joseph promised him dinner with Fred Astaire and never delivered. I’m pretty sure Lisa Marie would have felt, from that moment on, as if she was living in Siberia because he would have shut down and gone into retreat.

Soon enough, Lisa Marie ran out of patience. Eighteen months after their wedding, she filed for divorce.

The saddest thing about this whole breakdown is that there was genuine love and friendship between them, but all that got eclipsed and scarred within some power-struggle. At the end of the day, it came down to two people with different temperaments and different outlooks, but I had always wished for a compromise that never happened.

In the months that followed, I know that she reached out to Janet, Rebbie and Mother for their advice on how best to get through
to Michael, to see if there was any way back. For me, that illustrated the love she had for him. But when my brother built those walls, he built them high. What I am thankful for is that Michael only ever wanted to know what a real relationship felt like, and he wanted to be loved, and find true love. As much as the reality didn’t work out in the end, his heart finally got to know true love and I think a part of it stayed with Lisa Marie right until the very end.

WHENEVER VISITORS ARRIVED AT NEVERLAND, THEY
were handed a colour map of the grounds, just as you receive at any theme park, and it was then that you first saw Michael’s logo for the ranch, which he designed in 1988: a boy wearing a blue pyjama jumpsuit sitting inside a blue moon with his legs dangling over the front as he looked down on the world. When I went to the movies and saw the logo for the DreamWorks studio, it was like looking at my brother’s logo: the DreamWorks logo is silhouetted in blue, with a boy sitting back in the curve of a half-crescent moon with a fishing rod dropping its line.

An amazing coincidence, I thought.

But, like I said, I don’t believe in such a thing. So maybe it was telepathy between Michael and Steven Spielberg. Proof that great minds think alike.

The shrewd businessman in Michael had actually believed he was going to be part of DreamWorks when it was set up by director Steven Spielberg, ex-Disney studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and record producer David Geffen in 1994. He had worked with, and known each of them well, and he told me he had been ‘instrumental’ in bringing them together. Whether the trio would agree with that, I don’t know, but that was Michael’s belief.

As he explained it, he believed that all four of them would approach Michael’s friend Prince Al-Waleed, of the Saudi Arabian royal family, to fund the venture. The Prince was keen to partner Michael in business and make all sorts of creative visions come true. (They would later set up Kingdom Entertainment in 1996, with an eye on movies, theme parks, hotels and children’s books.)
I don’t know why Michael ultimately didn’t feature in the DreamWorks equation, but the moment he was out of the picture, Prince Al-Waleed wasn’t interested either. What then happened was that Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen went to Microsoft’s Paul Allen, who injected the necessary $500 million to get the studio launched and operating.

For a time, Michael licked his wounds and felt he had missed out, especially when the studio won the Oscar for Best Picture for three consecutive years with
American Beauty
,
Gladiator
and
Beautiful Mind
. But its creative successes with high-grossing movies didn’t necessarily translate financially and, soon enough, there was talk of a hundred-million-dollar debt, bankruptcy, and some crash and burns at the box office, come the start of the new millennium. And that was when a certain rumour spread that Michael was behind this run of bad luck.

‘Can you believe this?’ he said. ‘I’m now being accused of putting a voodoo spell on the studio and apparently that’s the reason they’re not doing so well. I didn’t know I had that much power!’

There was some crazy story – later perpetuated by people like Bob Jones – that he had consulted a witch doctor in Switzerland. This wasn’t a report in the
National Enquirer
: this was gossip published in
Vanity Fair
in 2003. It said Michael had put a curse on Spielberg and had paid $150,000 for a ritual that included the slaying of 42 cows! I would say you couldn’t make it up, but someone did. Out of all the excuses I’ve heard for financial troubles in Hollywood, the sacrifice of a herd of cows 6,000 miles away in Europe is probably the best one yet. Ultimately, DreamWorks’ founders would sell the studio to Viacom in 2005. My Indian friends, the Ambani family, at the Reliance Group took over in 2008. Interestingly, the studio’s music-publishing rights were later licensed to Sony-ATV Publishing. I guess what goes around, comes around.

VANITY FAIR RAN ANOTHER ARTICLE IN
September 1995, quoting Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, who didn’t appreciate my brother’s statements on television that there ‘was not one iota of information’ linking him to those old allegations. Tom Sneddon decided to comment on this publicly, pointing out that my brother had not been ‘cleared’ of sexual involvement with boys and his comments ‘were not consistent with the evidence in this case’, leading to a rash of headlines that immediately screamed, ‘JACKSON LIED IN TV INTERVIEW’.

Two years on, Mr Sneddon was making Michael aware that he was still watching.

WHEN YOU TAKE INTO ACCOUNT MICHAEL’S
yearning to be a father, the snap decision he took next was hardly surprising. As ever, he kept his lips sealed about his plans to have children, with or without Lisa Marie, but when a motherly blonde admirer offered to bear him children, it was ‘an offer from God’ that he wasn’t going to ignore.

Debbie Rowe was not a stranger to Michael. She was the nurse at the Beverly Hills clinic of his dermatologist, Dr Arnold Klein, who treated his vitiligo. Because of the intimacy of his treatment, Michael knew her to be trustworthy and discreet. When I heard Debbie was a nurse, I knew she would be soft, gentle and spoiling; someone who knew how to catch flies with sugar, not vinegar. Someone who was happy to roll along with Michael’s wishes. This was a chance for him to have children entirely on his terms: with 100 per cent custody and a mother prepared to waive her parental rights. Looking back, and understanding how important fatherhood was to him, I don’t see what other choice he had when there was a volunteer willing to make his dream come true at a time when he was standing in the rubble of his marriage in an already-isolated world, not knowing when – or if – his next ideal ‘mate’ would come along. Besides, it was a practical procedure rooted in love – Michael’s love for children. I viewed this arrangement as a blessing because of the devotion these young souls
would be born into. I’ve read all sorts of accounts and imagined dialogue that claimed Michael was somehow pressured into marrying Debbie, and that Mother played some kind of role in this decision because of her beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s not true, and it ignores the fact that my brother had his own values and relationship with God. If he felt the pressure to marry, it was from Him and no one else; ‘to do the right thing’ and deliver his kids into a holy union.

Michael married Debbie in November 1996 in a ceremony at his hotel in Sydney during the Australian leg of the ‘HIStory’ World Tour. His first son, Prince Michael, was born on 10 February 1997, followed by a daughter, Paris Michael Katherine, on 3 April 1998. The moment Prince arrived, Michael ensured he had the support of a full-time nanny. The ideal candidate was under his nose: Grace Rwaramba was already working as his trusted secretary. He bounced the idea off Mother and me: ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘I need someone I can trust, who understands what I want for my children.’ It was at times like this that Michael returned to family as his sounding board, and both Mother and I gave Grace our full support. Originally from Uganda, Michael felt she was not only solid but would bring to his children her African values of absolute dedication to family and community. ‘I also want them to grow up knowing where our journey began,’ he said.

From the very beginning, Grace was brilliant with the kids and was an integral part of Michael’s mission as a parent to keep his children respectful, polite, grounded and loved. During their infancy, as the media began to focus on these additions to the family, Michael became distressed – more so for his children – by speculation that questioned his paternity. At first, this seemed to be aroused by headlines about the children’s faces being covered by veils or party masks – suggesting they were used to obscure their lack of similarity to their father. But those veils were not, at first, Michael’s idea. It was actually a privacy measure, first instituted at Debbie’s insistence because there was anxiety about the threat of a kidnap. Newspaper talk about the finances behind the
arrangement between Michael and Debbie had apparently led to the typical crazy correspondence from sick minds threatening abduction, the idea being that Michael would pay anything for his children. Crazy threats were par for the course, but it was new to Debbie and she was understandably freaked out. Later, Michael maintained the veils for privacy reasons.

Then people were wondering whether Michael had used an anonymous sperm donor. Why anyone thought my brother was incapable of fathering his own children was beyond me, as was the idea he’d use a donor when it was
his
personal legacy that mattered to him. I think it’s fair to say that Debbie had a dominant gene (Prince had white-blond hair when he was born) but when I look into that kid’s eyes or catch his profile side-on, his similarity to Michael as a boy is obvious. But, to nail the myth once and for all, Michael has passed on his vitiligo to Prince. My brother’s paternity is irrefutable when Prince removes his shirt. What really matters, though, is that my niece and nephews know without a shadow of a doubt that Michael was their biological father and they were born out of love.

WHEN I LOOK AT PHOTOS OF
Michael from this period – post-marriage and pre-children – it is difficult to ignore the facial changes that he underwent through further plastic surgery. In fact, over the following decade, I would say that he reached the point of over-correction because he got so caught up in a negative self-image that he tried to find in the mirror what he had set in his mind: unattainable perfection.

I don’t know the exact extent of the work he had done but there were several more surgeries to his nose. He was someone whose wealth allowed him to do something about his insecurities, but he hadn’t changed to us because we looked in his eyes and they were the same, and his heart was still the same: he was still Michael.

Personally, I think his preoccupation with plastic surgery was some form of body dysmorphia, a condition often rooted in childhood or puberty, where the sufferer finds exaggerated flaws that do
not exist. This is my opinion, not a diagnosis. Over the years, I wanted to shake him and say, ‘Michael, can you not
see
how damn handsome you are?’ But it was such a sensitive issue that I felt I could not, and he failed to realise that his self-esteem was not something a knife could correct.

That is why I get angry with the doctors who enabled him to go too far. I always thought if you went to see a doctor and nothing was wrong, they had a duty to tell you so. The saddest thing was that Michael was never happy with his final look. Ultimately, I think he learned a painful lesson that the face is not a piece of music; it cannot be endlessly tinkered with and made perfect. The mirror lied to my brother more than anyone in his life, and it saddened me to know that he never saw how beautiful he was. As I wrote for the memorial programme in 2009, Michael, this world was never meant for someone as beautiful as you – and with that, I referred to not only how he looked, but how he thought and viewed the world.