One fact that has been established from preliminary hearings is that Dr Murray used his iPhone a lot through the early hours of that fateful day. One call was to a woman he’d recently met, logged at 11.51am, some 15 minutes before my brother apparently stopped breathing.
She said she was talking to him when she realised he wasn’t listening any more but the line was still open and she heard ‘a commotion – I heard coughing and mumbling’ and she did not believe the coughing came from her doctor friend. She tried calling and texting him back, but received no reply.
The circumstances of Michael’s death were rough enough without us learning about events in the run-up to 25 June. We’re finding it impossible to accept Michael’s inexplicable decline and that one company didn’t spot that something was seriously wrong.
As a family, and for peace of mind, we would like to know who else – if anyone – entered and left the house on the night of Michael’s death, but although the LAPD are treating his death as homicide, its investigators decided to retain only the four minutes of CCTV footage showing Dr Conrad Murray’s expected arrival. Unless the authorities surprise us, it seems all other footage has been erased. It is hard for us to understand why such crucial footage could be wiped like that. It makes us wonder if every stone has been turned in the LAPD’s investigation: it has so far concentrated on one doctor, and one night. I guess time will tell, but our only hope is that, ultimately, justice doesn’t fail Michael, like everyone else seems to have done.
EPILOGUE
Smile
AS WE WERE ALWAYS TOLD, a song, story and a life need a beginning, a middle and an end. Now we had a life to honour: the life of a kid who started off, just like everyone else, with an impossible dream. But as Michael’s death returned him to where he belonged, at No.1, I came to realise that Mr Gordy hadn’t always been right: not every story has an end. Not Michael’s, anyhow. He is, through his music – that which is past, and that which is yet to come – immortal. As he always wanted to be. His life, voice and message have a sense of continuation even in death and it’s almost as if he’s locked himself away in creative mode, writing songs up at Neverland. Sometimes that’s what I tell myself.
So, when it came to planning his memorial service for the world, it wasn’t about writing ‘the end’, it was about the send-off and honouring his legacy. We knew how close he had come to pulling off the comeback everyone had doubted: ‘The most amazing show anyone will have ever seen,’ as one of his inner circle said. And now we had to do our best, in limited time, to put on a memorial service to match no other. We had a family meeting and took our usual show of hands on the ambitious plans we threw around. Let’s hold a service at the Washington Monument for one of America’s greats. Let’s do it at LA’s Coliseum within its vast bowl. Let’s hold a procession through the streets of LA. Let’s drive his coffin from the city all the way to Neverland for one last trip home so the fans can line the streets and highways and throw flowers, just like they did with Gandhi and Princess Diana. But the ideas either didn’t earn a majority vote or there were logistics to think about. The LAPD said it was expecting at least two million fans to pour into the city to commemorate him. ‘We’ve never dealt with something on that scale before,’ they said. All the police chiefs and sheriffs from different counties gathered in my living room to discuss street closures and security.
During the passionate discussions, I looked at Mother. She seemed, at first, uncomfortable with the size of our vision and we could tell that she was torn between her beliefs about praising only Jehovah and the need to give her son the global respect, love and remembrance that his star demanded. She was wondering if we were going a bit too far. Bless her. In her eyes, Michael was only ever one of her nine babies who had grown up and done well. She, like Michael, wasn’t one for fuss when it came to private events and I think it was hard for her to reconcile a very private grief with an incredible public demand.
It was Janet who stood up and said respectfully that we were going large, regardless of what the people at the Kingdom Hall might think, because Michael belonged to his fans as much as he belonged to us. Mother – who had always told us that there would be no Jacksons without the fans – smiled. ‘Okay, okay,’ she said.
‘And before the public memorial, we will hold a private viewing and family service in accordance with the Jehovah’s Witness faith,’ we reassured her.
‘Okay, okay – I think that’s what Michael would have wanted,’ she said – and he would.
It was always going to be impossible to stage a memorial that was accessible for all Michael’s fans so we had to settle for television to share the event with the world. When AEG stepped forward and offered the Staples Center – before we knew what had gone down at rehearsals – it seemed the most practical option at short notice and, as home to the Grammy Awards, this was a fitting venue.
We spent many of the days beforehand at Hayvenhurst, sorting out the plans and timetables, and often gathered in Michael’s old theatre, where we had first watched with him the video for ‘Thriller’. I guess it was the most confined room in the house. When we reached a consensus, many of us were exhausted by all the talking and planning. There was a moment when Mother and Joseph were just sitting together in the middle of those red velvet seats and Mother broke down. My father put both his arms around her and then we all joined them in a big family hug.
Eventually Joseph stood up. ‘Stop it now! You all going to make me cry,’ he said.
For the first time in our lives we saw our father show emotion: there were tears in his eyes. That was some moment. Joseph gets a hard time in the press, but Michael thought the world of him. People forget he’s human, too: we’re not a business, we’re a family, and he is our father.
Those days in late June and early July passed so quickly – I have no idea how we got organised in time with AEG and all the friends, music and memories. But, come 7 July, we would stand backstage with Michael one last time, waiting to go on before a packed arena and a worldwide television audience: the brothers united, as it had been at the beginning.
BEFORE THE PUBLIC MEMORIAL, WE HELD a family-only service at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where we would later lay Michael to rest. I had always wanted Neverland to be his final resting place and I flew up there to scout for an appropriate plot. I found a site not far from the train station, near a paved area with the ranch logo – the boy in a crescent moon. It was, to me, the ideal location for a private mausoleum, but Mother didn’t agree, probably because she had heard Michael talk so strongly about never going back there. Yet Neverland is Michael, his joy and his fairytale, and I will always maintain that that is where he should be.
On the morning of our private memorial, we left for Forest Lawn in Glendale, setting off from Hayvenhurst in a fleet of vehicles under police escort. From the air, the cortège must have looked as long as a presidential cavalcade. That was when I started to notice how many people had stopped in Ventura Boulevard out of respect. And when we reached the 101 freeway heading south it was shut down on both sides. There wasn’t a car in sight in either direction, which, as anyone from LA will tell you, is as rare a sight as can be. Wow, Michael, you’ve cleared the roads.
At the service, Wendell Hawkins, our cousin and an elder at the Kingdom Hall, gave a eulogy that was positive and uplifting: he spoke of the spirit and eternal life. We ended the service with a request from Paris. She wanted to hear her daddy sing ‘Gone Too Soon’ and when Michael’s voice came from the speakers, I understood that he was still with us in spirit, and always would be.
AT THE STAPLES CENTER FOR THE public memorial, every little detail mattered. The brothers wore matching suits, with white shirts, gold ties, and a red rose tucked into our top left pockets, accentuating the huge bouquet of roses on Michael’s coffin. The coffin came from Indiana. We took up our positions, flanking him, each wearing one sequined glove. Pulling his coffin on its trolley into that arena would be our proudest, saddest, most surreal and yet most honoura
ble moment. After everything that had been thrown at him and said about him, this was the dignity he deserved. I was facing Randy at the front of the coffin, with Jackie behind me, Marlon on the other side in the middle and Tito holding up the rear, with two pallbearers from the funeral director’s. We then heard our cue: the gospel choir – standing beneath the projected image of church windows letting in shafts of sunlight – singing ‘We Are Born To See The King’. As we began to walk, I looked ahead and saw our mark: a pool of light where we would let the coffin rest on a raised platform surrounded by flowers. I kept my eyes on it and, as we came into view, cheers and applause greeted our brother. Glinting flashbulbs popped across the floor, up in every tier, and from high up in the glassed-off suites.
Mr Gordy walked onstage to deliver the first eulogy and pay tribute to his ‘consummate student’ from Motown University. As so many friends and artists spoke, I think we all felt that Michael’s spirit filled that vast space, but as everyone remembered ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Thriller’ and his Moonwalk, I smiled at the memory of the kid who had stuck a pencil through two Quaker Oats cartons and who sang ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’, bringing a school to its feet. Fame and fortune hadn’t changed his soul, it had just changed how people treated him. He left behind so many great deeds, far bigger than the superstar he was, and he did what every one of us should do: he lived his truth, undeterred by what anyone said and, forever kind, trusted God. I heard Mother’s voice from our childhood asking, ‘Is Michael okay?’ Yes, Mother. Michael is okay now. He’s more okay now than he’s ever been.
Before the ‘This Is It’ concerts began, Michael had planned to visit Vevey, Switzerland, to spend time with the family of Charlie Chaplin. He wanted to take Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’ to show them everything about the legend who had inspired him. No one loved the song Chaplin wrote, ‘Smile’, better than Michael. The intention of our family was that none of us would perform at the memorial service, but Michael and I had visited Vevey at different times and we had both raved about the experience of being at the Chaplin home, so I told Mother, ‘I know what’s been agreed about not performing, but I have to do this …’
‘Baby, if there’s anything you want to do for Michael, now is the time,’ she said.
In rehearsal, I was strong. But when it came to going live, it didn’t feel so easy, probably because the occasion was so loaded with emotion. But someone pointed out to me backstage that Michael’s image would be projected behind me, his arms out wide and a smile on his face. I’d be singing in his shadow, standing before his coffin. I had to do him proud. I hate wearing ‘in-ears’ and usually avoid them during performances, but on that occasion I had them – so I knew something was off as I sang the first line: the music in my ears kept cutting out, like a cell-phone with a bad signal. That was why I looked to my side for a split-second and put a hand to my ear. I had no idea there was no music in the arena, just my voice – it was by accident that I started to sing a cappella, but then the band kicked in until the music tracking returned. I felt so emotional that I forgot part of the lyric but we’d been taught to keep going, of course, so I pulled myself together and finished the song. It was then, as the audience applauded and I threw my rose on to Michael’s coffin, that the reality hit me: this was the last time we’d share a stage. In our Jackson 5 days, he always said he was used to looking to his left and seeing me there. Now, when the brothers and I sing our music or his, it is healing for us. It cannot fill the hole, but it keeps us close to him.
AFTER THE PUBLIC DUTIES AND THE private burial, Mother needed to feel close to Michael in her own way. She packed her bags and told us she was returning to Gary to spend some time at 2300 Jackson Street. None of us joined her; she wanted to be alone. When I checked in with her that first week, she sounded so calm. ‘I’ve found comfort,’ she explained. ‘I can hear him running around the house playing when he was a kid; I can hear his laughter.’ She stayed at the old house for more than a month, living among those memories. But she also expressed a slight worry: she had noticed, when she looked out of the front window into Jackson Street, that more and more people were stopping their cars outside to take pictures. ‘I’ve got to get this place fixed up … We can’t have it looking like this if people are going to keep coming by,’ she said. And guess what? She ensured it was given a lick of paint and made to look pristine again. I heard Michael’s laughter, too, when she told me that.
I also had to smile when she told me that the stack of bricks was still in the backyard after all those years. I asked her to bring one back as a souvenir for me. If it hadn’t been for those damn bricks, we wouldn’t have turned into the perfectionists we were, I told her. Those bricks were a lesson for life. I have that memento to this day – and Michael’s voice is always in the back of my head, saying, ‘Remember the bricks?’
When Mother was back in LA, she came across a lost poem of Michael’s, written some time in the nineties and rediscovered in 2011. It was as if he was pointing her to his own words, two years after he had died, to provide her with further comfort. This is what he wrote – in pencil, on yellow legal-pad paper – and she treasures his words:
The reflection of a Mother’s heart
Is in the glimmer in her children’s eyes
Her every emotion and feeling is somewhere in her children’s character
Noble men are what this Mother made them
Why does my Mother cry?
Are these happy tears or sorrow?
Oh please God, let them be happy tears
All my success has been based on the fact
That I wanted to make Mother proud
To win her smile of approval.
IN JANUARY 2011, HALIMA AND I travelled to Senegal to visit some old friends. One day, we drove three hours away from the city to a village in the middle of a dusty nowhere, where a community lived in clay huts with no water, no electricity, no nothing. As we arrived, so did some guy on a wagon loaded with yellow canisters carrying the village’s water supply. But the kids didn’t chase that vehicle, they chased ours. Dozens of children ran alongside us, waving and laughing. That day I learned a lot: those people were happy and joyful without material possessions or expectations. Apparently they knew little about the outside world, but they had their community, each other and family, and that was all that mattered. As far as they were concerned, I was just another black man, but one dressed in smart clothes and visiting from America. My name was Jermaine and my wife was Halima. That was how we were introduced.
We were led into a hut, where we met the village sage: a 97-year-old man with skin wizened like leather and only patches of white hair left on his head. His name was Waleef and he moved real slow, but he was the head of the village and what he said went. We stepped into his tiny place: it had a concrete floor and one raised mattress on a wooden frame, with four poles in the corners and a mosquito net. The flies were coming in and out, yet that man and his two elderly friends were sitting down, untroubled. He took my hand and invited me to sit. He read my palm and told me I was going to have a long life, then said a prayer as he traced every line in my hand. He reached under his bed, took out a pan, mixed the contents of four plastic bottles with some oil and sand, then started to rub it into my face and hair. Now, nobody touches my hair – nobody – but this man was allowed to, because I felt nothing negative from him as he mumbled and closed his eyes. ‘What is he saying?’ I asked Kareem, our friend who had taken us there.
‘He’s blessing you, and wishing you a good and safe onward journey,’ I was told.
Halima, out of random curiosity, then said, ‘Ask Waleef if he’s ever heard of Barack Obama.’
It drew a blank expression and our host was unmoved.
‘Ask him if he’s ever heard of Michael Jackson,’ she said.
Kareem relayed the question in their native tongue and the man started nodding and talking. ‘Yes! He knows Michael Jackson.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘He’s heard of my brother? Out here?’
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The sage took his hands off my head, placed them together as in prayer and said two words of English: ‘Michael … Jackson.’
The two men either side of him were nodding, and one asked Kareem a question.
‘Yes!’ he replied. ‘This is Michael Jackson’s brother.’
At that, a teenage boy who had been standing in the doorway rushed off. A few minutes later, I heard a gaggle of children getting giddy, jumping up and down. When I walked outside, there must have been 50 of them and more were coming out from behind the huts to swarm around me. They started to shout my brother’s name: ‘MICHAEL JACKSON! MICHAEL JACKSON! MICHAEL JACKSON!’ How was it possible that they knew of him in a place so detached from the modern world, without television? Kareem explained they sat around the odd crackling radio.
My eyes filled with tears: this was innocence, purity – this was what Michael was all about, and he had penetrated the most primitive, most remote of places. It blew me away, because those people had no preconceived ideas that would have tainted him for them. They knew Michael only as an incredible human being, an entertainer – and that is how the world should remember him; that is what he deserves.
I sat down to write this book two weeks after that visit, because it is important to me that people the world over understand who Michael was, what his legacy is, and how his time on earth was spent. I couldn’t have been more motivated to write after walking into that village, where I didn’t need to explain who he was or defend him. Those African children already knew his name, and the sound of it lit up their faces.
Halima threw me a bag of candy and I stood in the middle of the mêlée to hand it out. It was amazing to see the excitement that a piece of candy could bring. I remembered Michael standing at our back fence in Gary giving candy to the kids in the neighbourhood who were less fortunate. And now here I was in an African community that perfectly illustrated what he had been about all his life, surrounded by his ‘We Are The World’ children, who had nothing but love to give and joy on their faces as they shouted, ‘MICHAEL JACKSON! MICHAEL JACKSON!’