You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

  ‘I did! I did!’ he said, starting to laugh.

  ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘You want to speak with her? She’s here with me now …’ he said, and there was, apparently, a lot of laughter in the background before Lisa Marie said hello and eventually put Michael back on.

  Mother still didn’t believe it. ‘That’s not her – you’ve just got some black girl pretending to be her,’ she insisted.

  By now, Michael was laughing so hard that he could hardly speak. Bless Mother, her Alabama ears had expected Elvis’s daughter to speak with her father’s drawl. As she recalls it today: ‘She sounded so unlike what I had imagined. Goes to show …’

  There was probably another reason why Mother was sceptical: Michael was always ringing either her, Rebbie or Janet, disguising his voice and pretending to be someone else. His English-gent impression was apparently very convincing, and always had them fooled.

  In that phone call from the Dominican Republic Mother loved hearing how excited he was to have a wife. I only witnessed rare glimpses of this marriage because they were so wrapped up in each other. My previous concerns about him being alone – surrounded by professional advisers or filling the void with random people – evaporated. Now he had someone very real, firm and big-hearted, who wasn’t afraid of the vultures around him.

  I laughed at media suggestions that they were ‘faking it’ because we all knew in the family the intensity of their relationship and how they always wanted to be together. Michael’s joy couldn’t have been faked. The intimacy you see in the video for ‘You Are Not Alone’ was art imitating life; a sweet glimpse as to how easy they were with one another and how they liked to laugh. Reports that we ‘loathed’ our brother’s new wife could not have been further from the truth: she was only ever embraced and there was never one iota of doubt that she had Michael’s best interests at heart. She grew particularly close to Janet and Rebbie. When my sisters spent time with Lisa Marie and heard her speak about Michael, they always came away saying the same thing: ‘That girl is crazy about him!’

  Now that Lisa Marie had arrived in Michael’s life, I stopped throwing out my lines of communication. For me, it was only ever about ‘Is Michael okay?’

  Once I knew he was okay, I was, too.

  IF MICHAEL WAS INTENT ON ONE thing, it was securing his future. From very early on in his career, he vowed not to become ‘just another black artist who ended up with nothing.’ Of course, he first said that at a time when he had no idea how phenomenally successful he was going to become, but he had told Mother he wanted to make business decisions that meant ‘our family will never have to worry about money any more.’

  With him now married and looking to start his own family, financial security was paramount. No matter how many miles he put between himself and Gary, Indiana, and no matter how enormous his success, nothing removed the memory of our parents’ struggle. It never leaves you; it never stops pushing you.

  Perhaps now, people will better understand why Michael landed, and so ruthlessly pursued, what everyone referred to ‘as the biggest deal in music publishing history’. He had followed Paul McCartney’s advice, given in 1983, that the real security was in the ownership of copyright to songs. One year later, in 1984, Michael spent $47.5 million on the richly historic ATV Music Publishing catalogue comprising about 4,000 songs, including ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard (which, I’m sure, made Joseph happy). But the big fish was the Beatles’ hits, and every song they had written between 1964 and 1971. What made this deal ironically controversial was that Paul McCartney had tried to buy back the copyright he’d sold in the 1960s. He reportedly wanted to go halves in a $20 million bid with John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. Nothing came of it and his interest fell away, so he didn’t take it very well when he learned about Michael’s deal. A lot of injured pride found its public voice, but Yoko Ono said it was ‘a blessing’ that such a prestigious catalogue was in the hands of someone like Michael. As ever, I guess it depends on which side of the fence you sit. Michael followed the rules of the game, came in with the highest bid, and if Paul McCartney had wanted full ownership that badly, he’d have put his money where his mouth was. But he didn’t: he lost. That’s business. Like so many people, I think he underestimated who Michael was. If there was any advice I could have given to anyone who thought they had my brother’s measure it would have been this: don’t be fooled by the big-kid act, the gentle voice or the headlines. He was a shrewd businessman with a futuristic vision. Now when you placed his ATV library alongside his own MIJAC catalogue (which includes all his music as well as some Ray Charles and Sly and the Family Stone), he was suddenly sitting on the biggest-paying prize in the music industry. With the help of attorney John Branca, he had out-manoeuvred Hollywood to guarantee his future.

  Nine years later John Branca would take this coup to the next level. Michael’s own label, Sony, had said it wanted to buy half of the ATV catalogue, but it was not for sale. Sony wanted to do business, Michael wouldn’t budge. The record label presumably had to think again. The deal that was eventually struck appeared to give Michael an even firmer grip on the music industry, because Sony agreed a partnership in which each side would share half their catalogues, creating a merger of interests within Sony-ATV Music Publishing valued at around $1 billion. Michael, with 50 per cent of Sony’s publishing, as well as 50 per cent of ATV, had now become a significant stake-holder in his own label.

  Even more impressive was the clause that stipulated Michael could not be subject to an aggressive buy-out. As he himself explained it, his part ownership was cemented forever and ‘there was no way Sony or anyone else could do anything corporate to take it away from me.’

  On paper, it looked like a marriage made in heaven.

  I DIDN’T KNOW THERE WAS FRICTION in Michael’s marriage until crisis phone-calls were going back and forth between Lisa Marie and Mother, Janet and Rebbie. I wasn’t privy to those heart-to-hearts but it was obvious that the intensity of the romance at the start was mirrored in its falling apart.

  The compromise needed in a marriage was, I think, a more difficult shift for Michael to make than he’d imagined. I’d honestly thought this one was going to last because they seemed suited, but when there was a problem, one of them needed to bend first and neither partner knew how to do that. Michael struggled with the demands of married life, and I think Lisa Marie struggled with his isolating creative process. I’m guessing now, but when you think how she had grown up, with a father who was always away, always performing, always in the studio, the last thing she needed was an absent husband. She couldn’t understand why he had to be gone all the time, and he couldn’t understand why she had a problem with him being in the studio, sometimes sleeping there. So, when Lisa Marie questioned his decisions, he thought, wrongly, that she wanted to tie him down.

  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.