The Michael Jackson Tapes

by Shmuley Boteach

  SB: Do you ever close your eyes and see yourself in front of one hundred thousand adoring fans? Does that help?

  MJ: I love the fire and the majesty of all of that, that you can command an audience and the feeling of all of that. I love that a lot. That’s another great feeling. But it’s not the same as this feeling of flight. Or just looking over a panorama of some beautiful picturesque scenery which is so beautiful you really start to cry. I cry. I say, “Thank you.” You see the most beautiful sky where the clouds are hues of orange and purple. God, it’s so beautiful. I start to pray. I kinda take a mental picture of it because I want to remember it.

  SB: What would your prayer be in moments like that?

  MJ: God, this is so beautiful. Thank you for making the heavens and earth such a beautiful place. If other people don’t recognize it and appreciate it, I do. Thank you, thank you so much. That’s what I do. I have had moments when I have said to another person, “Look at that beautiful sky,” and they have said, “Yeah? It’s nice.” I go, “There must be something wrong with me. Why do I see it and they don’t?” Why do I appreciate it and they don’t appreciate it? I went to a museum in Paris and I swear to you, my bodyguards are a witness to what happened to me, they had to carry me. I broke down crying and the lady who was showing us round said, “What’s wrong with him?” And they said, “He is so moved by what he has seen.”

  Practical Jokes

  Michael described to me his honest love for playfulness, which could be amusingly childlike or annoyingly childish. Michael often could not discern the difference between that which was innocent and affable and that which was obnoxious, with laughs coming at other people’s expense.

  Shmuley Boteach: Tell me more about your practical jokes.

  Michael Jackson: [Once] I took a whole bottle of scotch and I poured it into this glass in this serious meeting with all these people and I started to drink the whole thing in one gulp. And I swallowed it and I started breathing and everyone went silent. I filled it with water. They died laughing. I love doing stuff like that. I had ’em Shmuley. They thought it was vodka.

  When Michael told me this story, I was still under the impression that he never drank. Even when he came to our home on Friday nights for the Sabbath dinner, in which it is customary for everyone to have at least a little bit of the Kiddush-benediction wine, he still never drank what he called “Jesus juice.” Why he would have gone to such lengths to mislead me and brag to me that he never even had alcohol in the smallest quantities is beyond me. Clearly, I would not have judged him harshly for having a glass of wine. It was a grave disappointment, therefore, to discover in his 2005 trial that he had lied so much about not consuming alcohol, the sin being in the lie rather than in the consumption.

  SB: I was visiting my brother’s house in LA. Debbie and I were dating at the time. Debbie came to my house because we wanted to get married and we wanted to get my father’s blessing and all that and we are very traditional. My father is Middle Eastern and he is looking at Debbie and she was only nineteen and I was twenty-one. I got married very young.

  MJ: I wish I had.

  SB: I always say better to have married the right person at the wrong time than the wrong person at the right time. Anyway, you know the hottest peppers, the little red ones. My brother, who is a practical joker, said to Debbie, who has this very sweet and trusting nature, “Have those.” She said, “Aren’t they the hot ones?” He said, “No. They are the sweet ones.” Debbie takes two and puts them in her mouth. She turns red, purple, blue, and says, “Oh my God. Water!” My brother says, “Here’s some water,” and gives it to her and she drinks the whole thing. And it was vodka. Pure vodka. It’s the first time she had met my father. Debbie can’t drink. She barely even drinks wine. She nearly passed out.

  MJ: That’s funny.

  SB: Debbie is very innocently naive. Tell me more of the practical jokes you have done?

  MJ: I love doing rowdy stuff. Tell ’em Frank.

  Frank: Shmuley, we went to the south of France getting a music award. We were in a suite overlooking the ocean. It’s a beautiful view. Downstairs below are people eating in a restaurant, elegant ties, suits, gorgeous, eating. It was 7:30-8:00 pm and it was still light. We were looking at each other and we had the same idea in mind. We got to the garbage bag and filled it with water and right below us the people are eating. We threw it [the rest is inaudible because Michael and Frank are laughing]. . . the deluge of water is on the table. We laughed so hard that we were dying. It was so mean, the dinner was over. They were standing up going.

  That same night, 4 am, people coming in, the sun’s coming up. They were singing. We got a bucket of water and waited until they got close enough.

  I love stuff like that. They don’t know where it came from.

  Frank may sound obnoxious from this story, but he was always charming and well-mannered when the three of us spent time together, which was quite often. Later, Frank would become an unindicted coconspirator in Michael’s trial, accused of attempting to abduct Michael’s accuser’s family. But Frank was never violent or threatening in any way, and I found the idea of him harming, or threatening to harm, Michael’s accuser’s family utterly inconceivable. Frank and I clashed somewhat over what Michael should be doing with his life. Yet today Frank is one of my dearest friends and I have tried to play the role of something of a mentor to him. When the trial ended, Frank told me that he had spoken to Michael the day after the trial and basically reaffirmed to Michael everything that I had preached four years earlier, namely, the need for Michael to reconnect with God and his family, to leave Neverland and live in a normal community, to stop taking medication for every ailment, and to get serious with his life.

  MJ: It was so much fun.

  SB: Did you ever get caught?

  MJ: No. I had one of my stage managers make me a laser and it was this long (makes a hand gesture) and it shoots out for several miles. People could have been walking several blocks away but we made this red dot go along with them. We do that everywhere. Here in the Four Seasons. They called the police and knocked on the door. It was four years ago. We were spying in somebody’s room, it was so much fun. We hid it because I didn’t want to lose it. The police knocked on the door and our security was talking to them and taking care of it. I don’t know what he said. You have got to have some fun, come on. We love anything with water.

  Frank: We were in a hotel once. . .

  MJ: South America wasn’t it?

  Frank: We filled up a garbage can of water and if you tilt it toward the door when you open it, so when you open it water falls all over you.

  MJ: I love that.

  Frank: So we knock on the door and we run. They open the door. Wham! Water.

  SB: This is in a hotel? This is the South American story?

  MJ: South America was different. There people go out on their balconies right below you, sunbathing, with no clothes on hanging their dirty laundry that they just cleaned on the rail of the balcony, their panties drying in the sun. Boom! A bunch of water goes over everything. I love that. I love it too much. It gives me great pleasure.

  Frank: There was this girl and this guy and the girl has no top on. We lean over, we see them, all of a sudden, whooom!

  MJ: [Laughing] When it comes down I love that. When they jump, it kills me.

  This is another sign that for all of Michael’s protestations that he was never childish but only childlike, that was simply not the case. To be sure, dropping a water balloon on some tourist is not murder or rape, but it sure can ruin your evening if you’re the target. And it always puzzled me that Michael, who was scrupulously careful to appear gentlemanly in my presence, could at times behave with such disregard for other people. But to be fair to Michael, certainly from everything I witnessed, he was scrupulously courteous to everyone he met. And, perhaps, these accounts were somewhat exaggerated. As I said, Frank especially was always a gentleman.

  SB: You have only ever got caught once w
ith that laser? Where is the laser now?

  MJ: It’s in storage somewhere in California. I wish I could find it. I would take it all over the world. It goes miles. Any of these buildings (Michael points out the window) where you are walking, it is a red dot.

  AFTERWORD

  Fall of an Icon

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.

  —Lewis Carroll

  “Humpty Dumpty” is said to have been inspired by England’s notorious fifteenth-century monarch, King Richard III. But it might also be applied to the self-styled King of Pop, Michael Jackson, the Humpty Dumpty of our time, who fell off the wall, became tragically disfigured, and crumbled before our very eyes. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men—the retinue of lawyers who got him out of legal trouble, the cadre of doctors who medicated him into oblivion, the sycophantic brownnosing handlers who catered to his every destructive whim—not only failed to put his life back together again but served as the principal culprits behind his fall.

  Off the Wall is, of course, the title of Michael’s first solo album as an adult artist, and it seems to capture the public’s experience of Michael in the years since we parted ways in 2001. To most people, Michael Jackson had become a weirdo, a freak, arguably the strangest celebrity on earth. His trial on charges of child molestation neatly confirmed for most people the fact that he was beyond redemption.

  But from reading these moving and at times heartbreaking transcripts, you may have arrived at a different conclusion, one that I arrived at years ago. The story of Michael Jackson is that of a once decent and humble man who was so desperate for attention that he made himself into an idol to be worshipped, only to be later exposed, like all false gods before him, as an impostor, as a god of tin rather than of gold, as a one-trick deity rather than an all-powerful divinity.

  Yes, Michael was once a very special man, a man of deep faith who grew up as a devout Jehovah’s Witness, a son of considerable devotion to his parents who despite being the most famous entertainer in the world insisted on living at home until his late twenties. A pop star who eschewed the usual mix of hallucinogenic drugs and promiscuous sex with groupies and, instead, visited hospitals and orphanages. An American icon who announced that his celebrity would be devoted to alleviating the plight of unloved and uncared-for children.

  Indeed, there were times in our two-year friendship when I stood in quiet awe at what I saw as this man’s deep-seated goodness. That it all came crashing down so thoroughly prior to his death, that Michael became one of the most loathed and reviled public figures of our time, was a tragedy of epic proportions.

  The sensitive and introspective Michael Jackson that you have encountered in this book, the man whom I once called my very dear friend, ceased to exist years before his tragic and untimely end. In its place a sad and hollow shell of something that once resembled a man lived on in squalid infamy. His reputation in tatters, he appeared more mannequin than man, more beast than being. Peter Pan had become Peter Porn. The man who expressed his ideas so eloquently in this book might have surprised you with his intelligence, delighted you with his wit, and provoked you with the depth of his insights about life.

  Possibility of Redemption

  In general, there are only two kinds of people: stars and planets. Those who give off an autonomous, inner light, and those who are forced to reflect a borrowed, exterior light; those who illuminate the lives of others with an intrinsic inner glow and those who are so inwardly dark that they become a black hole, soaking up every last speck of light so that none is left for others to enjoy. The irony of Hollywood is that nearly all our celebrities are planets rather than stars. Lacking an inner radiance, they become dependent on the external spotlight. Soon they become its prisoner and, bereft of a connection with the Source of all Light, they suffer the corrosive effects of celebrity sunburn, which usually manifests itself in the form of moral degeneracy, irredeemable loneliness, and deep unhappiness.

  A close friend of mine who is a television producer called me up after Michael died and told me that he was profoundly disappointed in my refusal to get back into Michael’s life to try and help him. “It seemed so unlike you, Shmuley, to give up on someone.”

  What my friend did not understand was that salvation must always involve some act of personal redemption. One cannot rescue someone who is not prepared to exert any effort to rescue themselves. I knew that if I went back into Michael’s life it would be me who would end up needing rescuing. Michael would have dragged me back into his orbit and the dysfunction and chaos would have ripped me from my moorings. I would have been one sinking ship trying to save another.

  Do you really believe that all the hucksters who surrounded Michael at the end of his life—the publicists who served as apologists for his most reprehensible behavior, the doctor-pushers who fed him his constant supply of drugs, the agents and managers who sucked his blood dry—were all bad people? I assume many or all of them were once quite decent. But they got slowly pulled into the unethical world of supercelebrity until they were compromised by it. A doctor would start by trying to resist Michael’s entreaties for more sedatives. But Michael would seduce him by making him feel that he needed him so badly. And it’s heady stuff to be needed by a global superstar. It makes you feel important and special and soon you close your eyes to all you know to be righteous. The glow of fame is too bright, the gravitational pull of celebrity too difficult to resist, until you have become nothing but a satellite in its orbit. All resistance has been quelled by the superpowerful narcotic of superstardom.

  So, was Michael Jackson beyond redemption? I am loath to answer that question. I am a rabbi, for goodness sake, and with the exception of cold-blooded killers, terrorists, and violent rapists, I believe in the divine spark of every human being. And it was undeniable that Michael had a luminous soul that once shined brightly.

  But having said this, I believe that short of the most profound and gut-wrenching intervention, Michael’s early death was almost inevitable. The reason: He had lost any real reason to live. Yes, there were his children, and he loved them dearly. But that was all. Other than that, his life had become so riddled with pain, his existence so directionless, his everyday routine so vacuous, that, aside from watching his children grow up, he had nothing to look forward to.

  It remains a mystery to me why the precious responsibility of caring for his children was not enough to make him choose life. But what is clear is that everything else that was important to him—being loved by the public, helping the world’s children, having relationships that were not mutually exploitative—were, in his mind, out of reach forever. In this sense, dare I say it, Michael was beyond redemption because he could not summon the strength or energy to redeem himself. He was lethargic, burned out, and drugged into a near comatose stupor, all under the watchful eye of people who claimed to care for him.

  Destructive Effects of Celebrity

  Celebrity, in the parlance of PR gurus, is called “exposure.” The term is apt because it connotes a negative that can be either properly exposed or overexposed. If film is not developed in a darkroom, if it is immediately exposed to light, the image is lost. Very early on Michael Jackson began to lose that darkroom, that private haven. Every particle of his being was exposed to the public. There was no place where he could retire for repose and reflection. His very existence belonged to the fans and he was their prisoner. He was exposed from the early stages of childhood and was never afforded a place of peace and solitude where he could regain a sense of self and reconnect with God, a nurturing spiritual presence who gives life higher meaning. The result was an image that, quickly overexposed, slowly faded until it disappeared. To be sure, Michael got a full hour rather than just fifteen minutes of fame. But the overexposure made him wither under the powerful lights until he shriveled and even his un
deniable talent could no longer save him.

  Celebrities like Michael Jackson have become so accustomed to being rescued by paid lieutenants that they forget that true salvation comes from the inside rather than the outside, through inner transformation rather than transient cosmetic modification. Only Michael Jackson could have rescued Michael Jackson. The conversations in this book serve as a good reminder of what he once was and aspired to be. But more importantly, they are also a morality lesson for a society filled with people who believe that their lives will become meaningful through fortune and fame.

  The blessings of renown and resources are ones to which many of us aspire. But if a solid grounding in something wholesome and spiritual is not laid before the journey commences, and is not sustained when the journey is at its peak, there is no telling to what depths one may fall. Without a solid moral and spiritual anchor, we become first a life adrift, then a life that is steadily eroded by the shifting sands of celebrity.