‘How can we get that shot?’ he asked excitedly.
It was an impossible shot, even if Harrison stood on top of wardrobes or hung from the curtain rail. ‘I can’t get it,’ he said. ‘We’d need a crane or a helicopter.’
‘Okay, let’s do it!’
Harrison knew he wasn’t joking. Michael was one of those pull-out-all-the-stops artists and when he had an idea, however outlandish, he wanted to execute it. Ultimately, after logistical calls with hotel management, he accepted that (a) a helicopter couldn’t get close enough and (b) health and safety wouldn’t allow it – but he’d had to face up to the impossibility before he’d give up on his idea. That was Michael: not really thinking, just acting on the spur of the moment.
MICHAEL’S THIRD CHILD, PRINCE MICHAEL II, a.k.a ‘Blanket’, was born on 21 February 2002. Debbie was not his mother: she had asked for a divorce three years earlier. I know little about that separation, except that I don’t think heartbreak was involved because they had never lived together, never been a conventional couple, and their arrangement had run its course. But Michael wanted more children so ‘Blanket’ came along as a result of artificial insemination with an anonymous surrogate mother. Nobody knows who she is, not even the family. I think it’s wonderful because that woman kept her privacy – and Michael achieved something that rarely happened: nobody got to the bottom of something personal to him. Such were the small victories he earned in his private life.
‘Blanket’ became unintentionally famous at the age of nine months old when Michael stood at his hotel balcony in Berlin, Germany, with a sheet over the baby’s head, holding him momentarily over the balcony’s top rail. He was in and out of those double doors in less than five seconds flat, and it was supposed to be a moment of playfulness, but then came the condemnation. Suddenly, back home in LA, we were reading reports about how he was ‘a reckless father’ who had ‘risked his son’s life’ by ‘dangling’ him over the balcony. Dangling – ‘to hang loosely so as to be able to swing freely’ according to the dictionary – was the word everyone used, making it sound like the poor kid was hanging on for dear life from a fraying rope, when the truth is that Michael always had the firmest grip on the baby, with one arm tight to his chest under his chin, and the other holding the sheet to his head. I’m not saying what he did with ‘Blanket’ wasn’t foolish because it was – he knew it was – but the whole episode was blown out of proportion, with talk of child protection services and Berlin police interviewing him for child neglect.
Michael issued an apologetic statement, admitting his ‘terrible mistake’, but privately he was furious. ‘I was proud [as a father]. I wasn’t thinking,’ he told me, ‘but I knew the grip I had – yet they came after me like I’d held a gun to Blanket’s head!’
Eventually, the media interest faded and I told him, ‘Just be happy the press don’t know how forgetful you are!’ He laughed, because we both remembered that memory.
Michael was probably the most forgetful person I knew – because, as an artist, he was preoccupied with creativity. One Family Day at Hayvenhurst, Prince and Paris were there with ‘Blanket’, who was still in diapers, tucked up in a carrier-cradle. At the end of a happy afternoon, Michael’s chauffeur loaded everything into the trunk and the children got in the car. We were all on the steps and Michael was all smiles, with his arm waving out the window as they drove away. We knew what he had forgotten, even if he didn’t. How long would it be before he realised?
We waited and waited. About five minutes later, we saw the nose of the car turn back into the driveway. The car door flew open and Michael jumped out, looking all sheepish and with his hand to his mouth, dashed out, rushed by us and hurried back inside. ‘Oh, I forgot Blanket!’
MICHAEL BECOMING A FATHER WAS THE completion of everything. No matter what he faced on the outside, his happiness – his reminder of what was important in life – now centred on Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’. They made him happy: they took away his loneliness and provided him with a greater purpose than music.
His performance as a father was an example of what fatherhood should be. He instilled in them the love Mother gave us, and he provided the kind of emotional fathering that our father, through no fault of his own, could not. Michael was father and mother rolled into one and he took that dual role very seriously. That didn’t mean he was a pushover, though: his discipline was authoritative without being physical. I remember once when both Prince and Paris were acting up and I was visiting with my children, Michael’s voice was no whisper in the wind that day: ‘I’m so ashamed of you acting like this!’ he told them. ‘Now go to your rooms!’
He was huge on teaching them manners, respect and kindness, and he would insist that they spoke when someone walked into the room. He would tell them: ‘Introduce yourself … Say hello … Say your name.’ When an adult walked in, it was no excuse to be distracted by toys. His directness was part of the honest communication that he felt was paramount in raising a child: always tell them, every single day, that you love them; hold them and be with them when they fall asleep so that they trust you will be there for them – as he always was.
WE ALWAYS KNEW WHEN TROUBLE WAS going down. Our early warning system – which paradoxically always came too late – were ‘the eyes in the sky’, the news helicopters hovering over Hayvenhurst. The moment we heard those rotor blades, we’d turn on the television and, nine times out of ten, the breaking news involved Michael. We’d start ringing round and regroup, reaching out to Michael and ensuring Mother had support. It took place so many times that we might as well have instituted a practice drill. Sometimes we’d wonder where the next big one would come from. It was like living with California’s earthquakes – you just learn to live with the daily risk that the very city you call home could implode at any minute. It’s the ‘Big One’ that is always in the back of the mind, locked away with the survival kits. Michael always said that he’d climb a tree and take cover in its branches. I don’t know if he did that when the 1994 Northridge earthquake struck, though. But when that terrible event happened, it made up Joseph’s mind: he was moving to Vegas and safer ground. God had found the one thing to terrify our father, but Mother refused to move out to Nevada. So, after 35 years of marriage, they decided to live apart and split their time between two homes, finding a late independence they were both happy with in what is not an uncommon arrangement with people of their generation. Their marriage had survived much worse than distance, and our family had survived more earthquakes than most. Ones that shake you to the core and shatter everything you’ve built. Ones that make you come together and fight harder than you’ve ever fought in your life. No matter how big the earthquake, we survive. And they always start with a tremor that seems like nothing at first.
EAST LA IS ONE OF THOSE low-income districts of social challenges, housing projects and gangland turf. In many ways, its spirit and work ethic remind me of Gary. Good people. Tough lives. Michael’s heart went out to one of its number, 10-year-old Gavin Arvizo. This kid was stricken with cancer and had ‘a bucket list’ of celebrities he wanted to meet, ‘the King of Pop’ among them. Anyone who’d heard of his plight – stage-four cancer, losing a kidney and spleen, vomiting blood and seemingly at death’s door – couldn’t help but do their part. It was our mutual friend Chris Tucker who brought him to Michael’s attention after Gavin’s mother had contacted him, fellow comedian George Lopez and basketball star Kobe Bryant. Michael responded typically, keen to help. Wherever he was in the world, he took time out to call Gavin in his hospital bed or at his grandmother’s house, promising him a visit to Neverland. Gavin was in and out of hospital for an entire year: he had never met my brother but he came to know his voice in many hour-long phone-calls. When Michael said he’d call, he called, and they would talk ‘forever – literally for hours,’ said the boy’s mother. And, as Gavin said later, the thought of going to Neverland ‘would always make me happy because Michael would always put a smile on my face.’ The imagined
visit, with the aggressive chemo, pulled him back from the brink and defied some doctors’ prognosis. The power of thought: survive to see Neverland.
In August 2000, when Gavin was well enough, Michael’s personal assistant Evvy sent a limo to pick him and his family up from their cramped studio in East LA and transport them to Santa Ynez. It is sad that a one-time friend of Michael’s, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has said that ‘Michael’s characterisation of the boy as having arrived at Neverland unable to walk, and Michael having to carry him, is entirely fictitious.’ The rabbi clearly had no idea how it had been at the very beginning. The truth, as seen on film in a courtroom in 2005, was that this boy arrived without hair, without eyebrows, and so weak he couldn’t stand. His brother, Star, pushed him around the grounds to all the places he had imagined in his hospital bed, and Michael walked with them and did carry him. As the mother Janet would say later: ‘Michael took us from way behind in the line and pulled us up to the front and said, “You matter to me. You may not matter to many people, but you matter to me.”’
Gavin put it differently, in the Neverland guestbook: ‘Thank you for giving me the courage to take my hat off in front of people. I love you, Michael,’ he wrote.
I doubt this back-story is one you will have seen in the newspapers because this wasn’t the humanitarian starting point that the authorities or the Arvizo family wanted to highlight once Gavin had recovered and then alleged, with the support of his mother, that Michael had molested him and tried to hold him against his will. Not just an alleged child molester but now a kidnapper. Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon was, predictably, all over it. He would later say that my brother had used his celebrity to invite this boy to the ranch as part of a paedophile’s grooming process.
But Sneddon didn’t come across Gavin because he had gone to the police or child protection services with a complaint: they were only alerted to him after Michael had, in 2002, invited his once-sick friend to sit with him on camera during taping for a television documentary. He had wanted to show how he’d helped this kid. After the loss of Ryan White, this was the story of a survivor; an example of what love could do. The documentary was called Living with Michael Jackson and the journalist Martin Bashir was granted access to shadow my brother for eight months. Michael trusted his gentle approach and Princess Diana credentials. Bashir had done his job: he had won my brother’s trust.
I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS going on until the evening of 6 February 2003, when the documentary aired in America – and I watched it with my head in my hands. All I seemed to say throughout the entire programme was ‘No … no … no … Michael,’ and the more I heard Bashir say, ‘Really?’ to things my brother said, I wanted to put my foot through the screen.
Michael’s true character was torn up by a warped edit – but this edit was the one that brought the authorities rushing in again as it played to every twisted, wacko, weird, eccentric cliché that had dogged my brother’s life. This wasn’t a world exclusive: it was a hatchet piece that could boast about its access, not its truth.
It was heart-breaking to see Bashir take Michael’s sincere love for children and use it against him. The saddest scene was when Michael was sitting on the sofa, with Gavin Arvizo next to him, affectionately leaning his head into my brother. As bare footage without commentary, it was nothing but a tender, innocent moment with the man who was apparently central to his recovery. But in the editing suite, Bashir applied his most grave, worrisome voiceover: ‘And so it was that we came back to our meeting at Neverland with 12-year-old Gavin …’ Cue a close-up shot of Gavin holding Michael’s hand. ‘… I’d found this easily the most disturbing moment of the past eight months.’
Then Bashir was back in interview mode, referring to how Gavin had spoken about sharing Michael’s bedroom. Gavin was in the bed on one occasion and Michael and his producer friend Frank Cascio slept on the floor. Bashir suggested people would be worried by that.
‘Why should it be worrying?’ asked my brother. ‘Who’s the criminal? Who’s Jack the Ripper in the room? This is a guy trying to heal a child. I’m sleeping in a sleeping-bag on the floor … I gave him the bed and he has a brother named Star, so him and Star took the bed.’ He explained that he’d never shared the bed with Gavin, but openly volunteered he had ‘slept in bed with many children.’ Smiling at the memory, he added: ‘When Macaulay Culkin was little, Kieran Culkin would sleep this side, Macaulay Culkin on this side … his sister’s in there, we’re all just jammin’ the bed. Then we’d wake up like dawn and go in the hot-air balloon! We have the footage. I have all that footage …’
‘But is that right, Michael?’ asked Bashir.
‘It’s very right … it’s very loving … that’s what the world needs now … more love …’
‘The world needs a man who is 44, sleeping in a bed with children?’
‘No, no,’ said Michael, ‘you’re making this all wrong …’
IF THERE WAS ONE SAVING GRACE in the fallout that followed, it was that Michael was smart enough to have the ‘insurance’ of his own camera crew filming the journalist’s unit. This would become the basis of his own documentary aired on Fox: The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Not Meant To See. It wouldn’t immediately save my brother’s reputation, but it would show Bashir’s two faces and how his ego-stroking statements made my brother feel falsely safe to open up.
For example, in the documentary, Bashir said, ‘One of the most disturbing things is the fact that a lot of disadvantaged children go to Neverland. It’s a dangerous place for a vulnerable child to be …’ But privately, he told Michael, ‘I was here yesterday and I saw it, and it’s nothing short of a spiritually kind thing.’
Or when Bashir told the world about Michael as a father, raising Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’: ‘They are restricted … they are overly protected. I was angry at the way his children were made to suffer.’ Privately, he told Michael, ‘Your relationship with your children is spectacular. And, in fact, it … it almost makes me weep when I see you with them.’
There were so many sly things about that documentary, but the most priceless moment came when Bashir, in his unused footage, asked my brother, ‘Do you sometimes despair at human nature? Can you ever do anything right?’
And Michael replied, ‘No, no, no … No matter what you do, no matter how good your intentions, there is always some mean-spirited person who wants to bring you down.’
In 2009, after Michael’s death, Bashir had the gall to pay tribute to my brother. He had since joined ABC’s Nightline show and asked viewers to remember ‘the greatest dancer and musician the world has ever seen.’ He then talked about his documentary: ‘There was a small part … which contained a controversy, but the truth is that he was never convicted of any crime, I never saw any wrong-doing myself and whilst his lifestyle may have been a little unorthodox, I don’t believe it was criminal.’ Nice words that were too little, too late. His truth and fairness mattered to Michael in 2003, not 2009. Besides, the damage was done, and nothing could undo the events that his documentary set in motion. With the hullabaloo that followed, the authorities felt compelled to act again, and the Department of Child and Family Services and the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department launched investigations.
CHAPTER TWENTY
14 White Doves
I HAD ALWAYS WONDERED WHERE MICHAEL’S breaking point was hiding, because I knew that the kid from Gary who lashed out in his tantrums against Joseph was in there somewhere. In the back of my mind, I had always been waiting for him to smash out and scream.
That inevitable day came six months into the police investigation as Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon sent his cavalry into Neverland with a search warrant, moving towards an arrest. It was 8.30am on 18 November 2003 – the same day that Michael’s penultimate album, Michael Jackson Number Ones, was launched. There was a horrible synchronicity to everything, and one inevitability: there was no way his album would be a success now.
When Michael heard that around 70 o
fficers were at the ranch, he exploded. In his hotel suite, he picked up plates of food from the room service trolley and hurled them at the walls, swiped two lamps, pushed over a sculpture, turned over a coffee table and sent all sorts of objects flying from table tops.
Meanwhile, in Santa Ynez Valley, the police were searching high and low, using knives to slit the backs of valuable paintings and his mattress during a 14-hour raid that turned up nothing. I know the damage they caused because Michael later showed the brothers, and he vowed never to sleep in the main house again (and he didn’t – he always stayed in the ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ guest quarters). They had seemingly waited for him and the children to leave for Vegas for a video shoot before carrying out the raid while he stayed at the Mirage hotel, taking over an entire floor.
I was heading for Las Vegas too – the MGM hotel – with family friend Steve Manning to discuss a deal with the CMX entertainment group for a Jacksons’ album featuring Michael. He’d said he was willing to ‘record two or three songs’ with us ‘as long as the brothers get in the studio and do what they need to do without no messing around.’ That meant no politics, no attorneys bickering, no voting systems.