Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

by Bill Whitfield

  Bill: Late February, one Saturday night, we took Mr. Jackson and the kids to dinner and then to see Lance Burton, a magician who performs at the Monte Carlo. After the show, the family went backstage to meet Burton, and as we were leaving through the side door of the theater, there were three quick flashes. Boom, boom, boom! This photographer snapped three quick pictures and then took off down Las Vegas Boulevard. Kids didn’t have on their masks or anything. Mr. Jackson freaked out. “He has pictures of the kids! Get him! Get him!”

  Feldman turned to me and said, “Bill, go!”

  I ran. Las Vegas Boulevard on Saturday night is packed with tourists. I was chasing this guy through all these people. I ran maybe three blocks and caught up to him and grabbed him from behind. It was a scene. People were stopping and watching. I grabbed his arm, wrested the camera out of his hand. Then I ran back to the car and gave Feldman the camera. I never saw what was on it. Mr. Jackson was so relieved. He kept saying, “Oh, thank God.” That was his biggest fear: exposing the kids to the press.

  I thought that was the end of it. Then about two weeks later, I was at home, sitting in the living room with my daughter. There was a knock at the door. We weren’t expecting anybody. We looked at each other like, Who the hell is that? I’ve got cameras around my house, one on the front door. I turned and looked at the monitor and I could see these two dudes with a third dude standing in the background. Having been in law enforcement, I knew. They were cops. Plainclothes, but I could tell. I answered the door.

  “Mr. Whitfield?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m Detective So-and-so and this is Detective So-and-so. We’re from the Las Vegas Metro Robbery Division. Do you work for Michael Jackson?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “We are subpoenaing you to appear before a grand jury. You’ve been identified as someone that robbed a man of his camera.”

  They hit everybody with subpoenas. Me, Feldman, Raymone, Greg Cross. This photographer had gone and hired a lawyer and told the police, “Michael Jackson and his bodyguards mugged me and took my camera.” Feldman was freaking out. He kept saying, “They’re gonna indict the boss for robbery. He’s going to go to jail!” Pretty soon he was freaking me out too, the way he was acting. The next day at work, we told Mr. Jackson what was going on. He said, “Get rid of it. Give him back his camera.”

  I figured it was simple. Erase the photos and give it back. But Feldman said he didn’t have the camera. He said he’d destroyed it. Why would you do that when all you have to do is pull out the memory card? It was an expensive one, too.

  Me, there’s two things I’m not doing. One, I’m not testifying against a client. Two, I’m not lying under oath. So I was wondering if I was going to have to make myself scarce until this whole thing blew over. Raymone got in touch with a lawyer, this big-time celebrity attorney in Vegas. He started working out a settlement.

  While all this was going on, in early March, Mr. Jackson had to go to Japan. His fans over there are some of the most devoted in the world. He was appearing at this event where people were paying thousands of dollars each just for the chance to say a few words to him and get their picture taken. Feldman told us that Mr. Jackson wanted me and Javon to stay and watch the house. He was going to reach out to a local team in Japan that had handled security for Mr. Jackson over there before.

  It was very quiet once they left. We didn’t have to do much except watch the house. I worked days. Javon came and stayed overnight. Mr. Jackson and the kids were away for four or five days. During the trip, Feldman called me from Japan, still worked up about the camera thing. He said, “It looks like the boss is going to be arrested as soon as we get back to the country.”

  I thought he was crazy. People like Michael Jackson don’t get arrested because of things like this. Sued? Yes. Arrested? No. But Feldman was all hyper about it. They flew back into LAX a few days later, stayed a few days in Los Angeles, and then drove back and met us in Vegas. The legal situation with the photographer was settled soon enough. The lawyer worked out a deal and the guy agreed to go away for some amount. I think it was around $75,000. For a $3,000 camera. The guy said he was roughed up. I didn’t hit this guy, nothing. I just got the camera. But this wasn’t about me; it was about Michael Jackson. Whatever the final amount was, it got settled. But by then Feldman was gone.

  Normally, Feldman communicated with Mr. Jackson every day, but after Japan and this camera business, his relationship with Mr. Jackson took a real turn for the worse. Feldman would come out with our schedules and tell us what we were doing. Then Mr. Jackson would come out and say, “Oh no, we’re not doing that today. I’m staying home.” They weren’t communicating. Their relationship wasn’t the same. You could tell.

  Then one day Feldman was just gone. This would’ve been in early April. There was no word from him. No telephone call. We didn’t know if he was gone for a week or gone for good. Nobody told us anything. After he left, three days went by without any sign of Mr. Jackson. The chef would come and deliver the family meals; we’d leave the food at the rear patio door and go back to the trailer. Then a few minutes later, on the security monitor, we’d see Prince come out, retrieve the food, and close the door behind him. For three days, other than that, we had no communication from inside the house.

  You have to understand: Feldman was our primary contact with Mr. Jackson. With him gone, we were in limbo. We didn’t really know what to do except show up to work and do our normal routine. Mr. Jackson didn’t leave the house. We barely saw him. Grace became the go-between. She started sending us on certain types of errands, things that Feldman normally would’ve done—that’s when we started getting the impression that he definitely wasn’t coming back.

  It went on like that for about three weeks. Then Grace came to me one afternoon and said, “Bill, you’re going to get a call tonight. Somebody wants to speak to you.”

  She was very cryptic. But just the way she said it to me and the way she looked at me, we both knew who she was talking about. I didn’t know what to think. Up to that point, I had never really talked to Mr. Jackson. There were “Good mornings” and “Good afternoons,” small talk about the day’s errands, things like that. But no real steady conversation. I didn’t exactly have a relationship with him. Pretty much everything had gone through Feldman. Grace said, “Just be yourself and talk to him like he’s a regular person. Don’t be nervous.” She made me nervous just by saying that.

  Late that night, around eleven-thirty, my cell phone rang, but I didn’t get to it in time and the caller didn’t leave a message. It wasn’t from the landline in the house, which was what I was expecting. It was a number I didn’t recognize, so I dialed it back. After several rings somebody picked up and said, “Hello, who’s calling please?”

  The voice was real deep and heavily distorted, like someone talking through an electronic voice changer. I was thrown. “Who is this?” I asked.

  “May I help you?”

  “You called me first, asshole.”

  Then I hung up the phone, a little confused and pretty pissed off. Seconds later, my phone rang again. Same number I’d just called. I picked up the phone and said, “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Bill, it’s me! It’s Mr. Jackson.”

  It was his regular voice, with no distortion. I froze. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m so sorry. I thought it was a prank call.”

  He kept apologizing too. He said, “Yeah, I get that all the time. I have to disguise my voice because people always get my number somehow, and they call and say very mean things. You have no idea how many times I’ve had to change my number.”

  He sounded like he was a bit nervous himself. He said, “Listen, I’m going to be taking a trip back east, and—you know that Feldman’s no longer with us, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right. So what I need you to do is—Bill, I can trust you, right? I can trust you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Jackson. You can trust me.”

  “Good
. Okay.”

  He told me that Feldman was gone and that Grace had told him I was okay. She and I had built up that rapport, and the good things she told him about me must have been enough for him to believe that I could be trusted. He started telling me all these things he needed me to do. He never came out and said, “Bill, you’re the new head of my security team.” Those words were never spoken. He just started talking to me in a way that conveyed a sense of “You’re handling this stuff from now on.”

  He asked me, “Do you have a computer here?”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Okay, I need you to go out and buy a laptop. I’ll give you the money. How much do you think one’s going to cost?”

  “About five to six hundred dollars, sir.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave you a thousand. Raymone is going to send you some pictures, and I want you to put them on the laptop and show them to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He left the money in an envelope at the back door and I went to Best Buy and bought a laptop. Raymone emailed me some pictures. I gave him a call to let him know I was back. He let me in the back door and I opened up the laptop and we looked at the pictures together.

  It was a strange feeling, being in there. This was my first time just being alone with him, talking to him. I’ve been around a lot of different celebrities. But this was Michael Jackson. This was the man that’s done everything, been everywhere. It’s like, I’ve never met the pope, but I figured this might be what it feels like. You’d get tongue-tied. You’d go to address him and you almost wanted to say, “Yes, your Highness!” The first time I met him, I didn’t know whether I should bow down or shake his hand like a normal person. That’s just how it felt. It took me a while to not be nervous around him.

  We sat there going through this little slideshow. It was pictures of all these houses and mansions in Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York. He’d look at one, nod, and I’d hit the button to go to the next. I was looking at the price of the houses going by: $6 million, $7 million, $12 million. We finally got through them, and he pointed at the screen and said, “Tell her I like this one.”

  I called Raymone and told her which house he liked, and she said, “Okay, I’m going to be arranging for you guys to come out here this summer. Mr. Jackson is going to be taking the kids on a summer vacation.”

  Over the next few days, Raymone started calling me more frequently to handle this or handle that. More and more, I’d hear Mr. Jackson on the phone with his lawyers and other people. He’d say, “Call Bill” or “Talk to Bill” or “Have Bill set that up.” I started getting faxes, emails, things for him to read, things for him to sign, appointments that needed to be scheduled. All that started coming to me. I didn’t ask for any of it, and I certainly hadn’t expected it. Three months earlier, I was just a guy freezing my ass off in this man’s garage. Now, all of a sudden, I’d become the gatekeeper for the King of Pop.

  8

  Estranged from his family, what Michael Jackson had long desired was a stable family of his own. When his life was engulfed by scandal in the fall of 1993, for solace and support he increasingly turned to one person, Lisa Marie Presley. The two had been introduced at the home of a mutual friend in Los Angeles the previous January. Soon after, they began seeing each other on a regular basis. Though they seemed an unlikely pairing, in some ways they were a perfect fit. The daughter of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, was one of the few people who understood the rigors of being the most famous person on Earth. In Michael Jackson, Lisa Marie saw a powerful, charismatic figure wrestling with many of the same demons that had troubled her father. She had no doubt that the allegations being made against Jackson were false, and she believed she could save him.

  In May 1994, Jackson and Presley married in a private ceremony in the Dominican Republic, but the marriage lasted for just eighteen months. Michael, who had focused on himself and his career so relentlessly for so long, was unable to share his world with someone else; his new wife kept her own house in Los Angeles and never lived at Neverland full-time. For her part, Lisa Marie, with two children from a previous marriage, wasn’t interested in having more—a fact that Michael, who very much wanted a family, could not accept. The hasty union had been a mistake. Jackson and Presley amicably divorced in December 1995.

  Less than a year later, Jackson married Debbie Rowe, a nurse he’d met in the office of his dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein. Rowe promised to give him the family he wanted. When they married in Michael’s hotel suite in Sydney, Australia, during the world tour for HIStory, Rowe was already six months pregnant with their first child. Three months later, in February 1997, she gave birth to a son, Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., nicknamed “Prince.” In April 1998, they welcomed a daughter, Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson. Rowe and Jackson divorced in the autumn of 1999, and both children remained in their father’s custody. Two years later, in February 2002, via an unknown surrogate mother, Michael fathered a third child, Prince Michael Jackson II. Jackson nicknamed his youngest son “Blanket,” a term of endearment he often used, meaning to blanket someone with love and affection.

  By the time Jackson settled in Las Vegas, his last studio album and his last concert performance were more than five years behind him. His children had become the sole focus of his day-to-day life. Shielding them from the media’s harsh glare had become the overriding consideration in almost everything he did. Though their childhood would never be the same as anyone else’s, he was determined to make a stable home for them and give them as normal a life as possible.

  Javon: The schoolteacher, Ms. Ilean, flew into town right after the holidays. She was an Asian woman from Bahrain. Mr. Jackson met her while traveling overseas, and he’d hired her to handle the kids’ schooling. He’d rented her an apartment about five minutes away from the house. Weekdays, one of us would go and pick her up at 7:30 and bring her to the house to teach.

  Mr. Jackson was no joke when it came to the kids’ education. School started at 8:00 a.m. sharp. A spare room on the first floor was converted into a classroom. Like, it was an actual classroom. We helped the teacher hang chalkboards, set up computers, bookshelves, maps, educational posters with the alphabet and multiplication tables, all that. The kids each had their own desk. It looked like any classroom you’d see at any regular elementary school. It was the same whenever we were traveling and staying in hotels. A separate room was always reserved and we’d have the hotel set up desks in there, and that room would be used as the kids’ classroom.

  Bill: As up and down as their lives could be, Mr. Jackson insisted that there be structure and routine in the kids’ educational environment. They even wore school uniforms. Prince and Blanket wore white shirts with black slacks and ties. Paris wore patent leather shoes and a dress, like a little Catholic schoolgirl dress. They were always well groomed. Hair combed, uniforms pressed. And Monday through Friday, every morning, the kids woke up, got dressed, came downstairs for breakfast, and then they “went to school.”

  The Nevada Board of Education has all kinds of requirements for homeschooling, which includes the children passing exams to make them eligible to move on to the next grade. Ms. Ilean organized her lesson plans to meet all of those benchmarks. She doled out homework, required book reports, instituted study hall periods. The quality of their schooling was as good as or better than what you’d see at any top-level private school. Those were some smart kids. They were constantly reading. Their brains were like little sponges, always curious, always asking questions.

  When we drove them out to dinner or to go to the movies, Mr. Jackson would be in the backseat, quizzing them on whatever they’d learned that day. He knew exactly what they were studying. He sat down every week with the teacher to go over her lesson plans and keep tabs on what was being taught. He’d help them with their homework, too, in the afternoon and at night. They would come to him all the time. “Daddy, will you help me with my homework?” That was one of his favorite things to do.


  Very little television was watched in that house. They’d have movie nights, watch DVDs together as a family, but it wasn’t like a lot of households where you see kids just camped out in front of the TV. They’d do their homework, read books, play games, listen to music.

  Javon: There were lots of extracurricular activities, too. The kids had PE every day. They’d jog laps around the yard, do jumping jacks, calisthenics. Sometimes we’d take them to this public park nearby. We set up a trampoline for them as well.

  We took them on field trips. We took them to the Lied museum—that’s the local children’s discovery museum with hands-on activities and science experiments that kids can do. Paris, she loved going to art museums and galleries. The hotels on the Strip were actually good for field trips; they’re constantly hosting exhibits and installations. We took the kids to the Bodies exhibit, the one with all the cadavers on display. That was at the Tropicana. We also did the shark exhibit at Mandalay Bay. There were IMAX movies at the Luxor, Deep Sea 3D and Dinosaurs. In class, the kids would read and study about the subjects, then we’d take them on these field trips and they’d have to turn in reports on them.

  The first time we took the kids out on a detail without Mr. Jackson was some time in February. We took them to a playground with the teacher. We were still new on the scene, but she’d been with him for a while and he trusted her. She was able to report back to him how we handled ourselves. Her phone would ring, and we’d hear her going, “Yes, sir. No, they’re okay.” So we knew he was keeping an eye on us and how we were doing our jobs.

  Bill: We relied on the fact that no one knew who they were. One of the first times we took them out was to the indoor amusement park at Circus Circus, with Grace. We got made by the paparazzi. Somebody must have followed us from the house. They took a few fuzzy snaps from far away but, fortunately for us, they didn’t get a clear shot. You couldn’t really tell who the kids were.