Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Just five days after the wedding story ran, Michael again departed from Bahrain, bound this time for Hamburg, Germany. He and his children were headed for what they hoped would be a private visit with the Schleiter family, whose twenty-three-year-old son Anton had been a special friend of Michael’s for more than a decade. Jackson had dedicated a song on Invincible, “Speechless,” to Anton and his younger sister.

  Anton Schleiter was frequently mistaken by the American media for Michael’s other Anton, Anton Glanzelius, who at one time had been the best-known child actor in all of Scandinavia. Shortly after his appearance in Lasse Hallström’s 1987 film My Life as a Dog, Anton Glanzelius received a phone call at his parents’ home in Gothenburg, Sweden, from someone in America who identified himself as Michael Jackson. He wanted to let the boy know how much he had enjoyed his work in Hallström’s movie and invited him for a visit to California. The Swedish Anton had no idea who Michael Jackson was, but judging by the reaction of his family knew this must be someone important and ran to a neighbor’s house to ask if they had any Michael Jackson albums because he wanted to see what the star looked like. Anton Glanzelius and his mother made the trip to Los Angeles later that year and visited the Hayvenhurst estate, but only got to spend a couple of hours with Michael, whom the boy described as “very polite” but also very quiet. The biggest thrill of the visit, Swedish Anton said, was meeting Michael’s pet chimpanzee Bubbles, who came downstairs wearing a diaper and shook his hand. A year later, Anton Glanzelius received a second call from Michael, who said he would be in Sweden the next week and invited the boy to spend the day with him at Liseberg, the largest amusement park in Scandinavia. He had visited Liseberg several times before, the boy said, but never like this. The park’s management closed Liseberg to the public for the day so that he and Michael would have the entire place to themselves. They rode Michael’s favorite ride, a roller coaster called the “Loopen,” twelve times and spent nearly an hour driving bumper cars, where Michael was “laughing constantly,” the boy remembered. It was so much fun that after a while he barely noticed the photographers who lined the roofs of nearby buildings. He spent that night in Michael’s hotel room. When recalling the sleepover twenty years later, Anton Glanzelius said there wasn’t the slightest hint of a sexual advance. Instead they talked “about everything from football and fame to girls and love.” He had been amazed at how “kindhearted and humble” Michael was during that day and night, and even more amazed that Michael kept in contact afterward, regularly sending packages filled with presents and videos. Then, in 1993, when the Jordan Chandler scandal broke, Michael had cut off all contact.

  The German Anton, Anton Schleiter, had entered Michael’s life two years after the Chandler affair, when he met Michael during a taping of Germany’s hugely successful Saturday night television variety show Wanna Bet? That Michael had appeared on Wanna Bet? several times over the years was a testament to both his popularity in Germany and his comfort level with the country. No fans in all of Europe adored him so passionately as the Germans. When the Jordan Chandler accusations first surfaced, thousands of his German fans organized sign-waving “solidarity marches” in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. An astounding number inked themselves with “Michael” tattoos to express the depth of their support. Jackson answered their love by returning to Germany again and again, visiting the Phantasialand amusement park near Cologne in consecutive years during the late nineties. One of the most touching, disturbing, and emblematic photographs of him ever taken was shot when he attempted to ride the park’s carousel. Michael’s stricken expression as he had tried to sit astride a hand-carved wooden horse that was far too small for him was pathetic to some people, heartbreaking to others. Jackson’s relationship with the German media changed after the baby-dangling incident at the Hotel Adlon; when criminal charges were filed in California one year later a number of the country’s columnists took to calling him “the King of Flop.”

  His German fans, however, demonstrated their continued fervor when the nation’s biggest newspaper, Bild, published a front-page story on January 26, 2006, reporting that Michael Jackson and his children were ensconced at an ordinary redbrick house on Garstedter Weg in Hamburg’s middle-class Niendorf district. Michael was in fact making one of his regular attempts to vacation in “normal life,” and had hoped to give his children the private experience of a happy, healthy suburban family. The Schleiter household didn’t fit so snugly into that category these days, even without the fans and police outside. Anton’s father, Wolfgang Schleiter, an executive at the Sony subsidiary BMG who refused to offer support for Michael when contacted by reporters after Jackson’s 2003 arrest, had recently separated from his wife.

  When word circulated that the Bild story was true the crush of fans that surged into the snow-covered streets of Niendorf created an unprecedented level of chaos. Squads of police were dispatched to put up a barricade and restrain the screaming fans who stood outside the Schleiters’ house begging for Michael to appear. Some in Hamburg demanded to know why Jackson wasn’t being made to pay for the extra security, as many visiting celebrities were required to do, but a police spokesman explained that neither the pop star nor the Schleiter family had “encouraged the public to come.”

  Shortly thereafter, Anton left with Michael, Grace, and the three children for Venice, Italy. The young German was still among the traveling party when Michael checked them into the Excelsior Hotel in Florence. Because of its exquisite antique shops, the city had long been Michael’s favorite shopping destination. He was unable to bear staying there for more than a couple of days at a time when he didn’t have money to spend, so the group moved on to stay for five nights at the Villa Savarese on the Amalfi Coast. The six of them stopped over for two nights in Rome after that, then flew to London so that Mark Lester and his family could be with them on February 13, when Michael hosted a large gathering at storied Cliveden House for Prince’s ninth birthday.

  Returning to Manama on March 11, Michael had exhausted both his allotment from Sony and the remainder of the $250,000 that Abdullah had given him for Christmas. Several emerging controversies back in California had distracted from his holiday during that last week in England and Michael came back to Bahrain more convinced than ever that the American media was out to get him. Tom Mesereau had withdrawn as his attorney on February 23, and reporters in Los Angeles were doing their best to frame the announcement as yet another case of Jackson wearing out the loyalty of an indispensable ally. In fact, Mesereau said, “there was no problem at all with Michael.” He just couldn’t bear dealing with Raymone Bain for another day.

  Bain was a curvy, micro-miniskirt-wearing PR powerhouse from Washington, D.C., who, before becoming involved with Michael Jackson, had been best known for her professional relationships with Marion Barry and Mike Tyson. She was prone to labeling adversaries as racists and her insistence on doing so during Michael’s criminal trial in California was what led to the first falling-out with Mesereau. “Raymone is all about Raymone,” Mesereau said. He wasn’t terribly fond of Grace Rwaramba, either, Mesereau admitted, and found watching Grace and Raymone battle for control of Michael almost as grating and tedious as dealing with them individually. By early 2006, Mesereau was fed up with it. “But I still felt fond of Michael,” insisted the attorney, who had done what he could to convince a disbelieving media.

  In Manama, Sheikh Abdullah was working feverishly to protect his family’s investment in Michael Jackson. Jermaine, meanwhile, was maneuvering desperately to get a piece of 2 Seas Records, on the one hand promising Abdullah he would deliver Michael, and on the other urging Michael to remember all the sheikh had done for him. Worried by Michael’s obvious restiveness, the sheikh imported John Legend and Chris Tucker to Bahrain. Michael was interested in working with Legend as a producer. Tucker, best known for the Rush Hour movies, had been, along with Macaulay Culkin, the most loyal of all Michael’s celebrity friends during his criminal trial; they were the only two who had agr
eed without hesitation to take the stand on his behalf. He was suitably impressed by Abdullah’s palace in Bahrain, Tucker said, and absolutely awestruck by the sheikh’s mansion in Dubai. “Even Michael was blown away by the place,” Tucker said. “They had to kick me out.” He was encouraged by how much better Michael’s condition was than when he had last seen his friend, Tucker told Playboy shortly after returning from the trip: “Michael is a genius, a creative being in a whole other reality . . . We’re going to see a lot more from Michael.”

  Abdullah wanted badly to believe just that. The sheikh’s final attempt to put Michael back to work on the Katrina record came when he flew Tony Buzan in from Singapore. Buzan was an intellectual hustler of the highest order, a cofounder of the international Memory Games competition who now sold his services as a motivational guru to a global assortment of wealthy dilettantes. He had been working in Singapore when Abdullah (“an old friend”) phoned him one evening and said, “A fan of yours would like to speak to you.” After a short pause, Buzan heard someone with an American accent say, “Hi, it’s Michael.” It had taken Buzan some time to realize that it was Michael Jackson, mainly because the masculine voice he heard was nothing like the wispy murmur that the entertainer used when he spoke in front of television cameras. Jackson had just finished reading one of Buzan’s books and was enthused about applying some of the concepts in it. “I’d love to have you explain your ideas to my children,” Michael said, “and teach them how to think.” After Abdullah got back on the line, letting him know that Michael would be his primary student and that he, the sheikh, would be paying, Buzan caught a first-class flight to Bahrain, checked into a suite at the Burj Al Arab, then spent the next nine days commuting to Michael’s mansion in Sanad.

  Buzan was frequently identified in the media as the inventor of mind mapping, but that was hardly the case. Mind maps had been around since at least the third century, when Porphyry of Tyre began using them to try to illustrate the concepts of Aristotle. The American psychologists Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian created extensive mind maps in the early 1960s. Buzan’s innovations were so dramatic, though, that he had virtually reinvented the field, as he told it, by incorporating such elements as the semantics of Alfred Korzybski and the science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein. What he did for his clients, Buzan said, was help them create a diagram of their individual consciousness in which words, ideas, tasks, or goals were arranged around a central word or concept. The result was a kind of “graphic note taking” that encouraged people to solve problems by using the brain’s vast, untapped potential, the 99 percent of mental ability that most of us waste. Buzan charged his clients $37,000 per session, a fee that Abdullah paid without hesitation.

  The sessions would proceed, of course, as Michael Jackson wished them to. Jackson mainly wanted to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. Michael was fascinated by geniuses and by the whole idea of genius. He wanted to imagine what a map of da Vinci’s mind must have looked like, and how it would be different from the mind maps of Alexander the Great or Charlie Chaplin, two other figures he was especially obsessed with at the moment. Since he understood that Michael had been raised as a Christian, Buzan found it unusual that in their discussions of the great historical figures, his host never once mentioned the name Jesus. Yet for all Michael’s eccentricity, Buzan considered him to have been “probably the best pupil I’ve had.”

  Buzan was only slightly less impressed by Jackson’s two oldest children, Prince and Paris, whom he described as “fast learners like their father,” with the same ability to focus intensely on whatever engaged their attention. While it appeared obvious that Michael bore no biological relation to the two light-skinned older children, he suspected Michael might be Blanket’s natural father, because the youngest child had a much darker complexion than Prince and Paris. All three kids, though, were remarkably attached to their father, Buzan observed: “I would watch them coming and going from the international school every day. They left happy, and came back happy. On their return, those three kids could not run any faster from the car to get to hug their daddy.”

  The children were “greatly amused” by the larger-than-life-size photographs of themselves that their father had hung among the prints of portrait paintings by various Renaissance masters who included Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael that covered the interior walls of the house. Buzan noticed there were no photographs of the Jackson family in the house, not even a picture of Katherine.

  In the long days and evenings he spent with Jackson, Buzan said, Michael made only a single reference to the scandals that had engulfed him in recent years, the baby-dangling incident in Berlin: “Michael was indignant. He said, ‘I’m a dancer, one of the fittest, strongest people in theater. I lift and carry adults with no difficulty.’”

  Buzan saw no signs that Michael was abusing drugs except once when they were making a trip by car and the sun struck him at an angle that bypassed the dark lenses covering his eyes. “Michael cried out in pain and involuntarily ducked his head.” Such hypersensitivity to sunlight, Buzan knew, was among the more common side effects of regular opiate use, caused by the shrunken pupils such drugs produce. Just a few days later, a person identified as Michael’s “aide” was stopped at the Manama airport carrying a suitcase stuffed with synthetic opiates that included hundreds of OxyContin pills. The ensuing scene was an enormous embarrassment for Sheikh Abdullah, who was forced to involve his father in suppressing a criminal investigation, freeing Michael’s drug courier and keeping the arrest out of the newspapers. Once again, Abdullah swallowed his anger, even helping Michael to arrange a lavish party for Paris’s eighth birthday on April 3.

  The sheikh’s apprehension spiked again on April 13, when the New York Times published an article under the headline “Michael Jackson Bailout Said to Be Close.” “After months of talks that spanned the globe, with meetings from Los Angeles to New York to London to Bahrain,” the Times reported, Fortress Investments had reached a rough agreement with Sony on a deal to refinance Jackson’s debt at an interest rate of around 6 percent, only a little more than one-fourth of what they had been forcing Michael to pay since buying his loan from Bank of America. That deal wasn’t quite as close to a conclusion as the Times suggested, but the agreements in place were solid enough to suggest that within a matter of months Michael would be enjoying a level of solvency—and cash flow—he hadn’t known in several years. Among the many questions it raised was whether he would see a continuing need to remain in the Middle East.

  Abdullah pressed as he never had previously for a public agreement to secure the future of 2 Seas Records. On April 18, Michael obliged, dispatching Raymone Bain to announce that Guy Holmes, the former chairman of Gut Records, a successful UK indie, had been hired to serve as 2 Seas CEO. “I am incredibly excited about my new venture, and I am enjoying being back in the studio making music,” Michael had said, according to Bain, who promised reporters that on November 21, 2 Seas would release a new Michael Jackson song, coproduced by Bruce Swedien, under the title “Now That I Found Love.” Michael’s first album for 2 Seas would follow in “late 2007.”

  The problem was that Michael wasn’t really “back in the studio.” He seemed, in fact, even less interested than before in working on his new album, and did little more than tinker with the Katrina song. For the first time, the sheikh let his annoyance show, pointing out that he had now “advanced” Michael more than $7 million and needed to see him get serious about his work. What was the point of the $343,000 he had paid to Tony Buzan, Abdullah wanted to know, if Michael was still as lacking in motivation as he had been before the mind mapper’s arrival? Michael answered with his own complaint that Abdullah had taken advantage of his exhaustion at the end of a long and grueling criminal trial by manipulating him into agreements that weren’t really in his best interest and quite possibly violated his contracts with Sony.

  Tensions between the two mounted all during the first two weeks of May. Michael had been asking Abdull
ah to build him a house in Bahrain since his arrival in the country, but now he began to demand it, insisting to the sheikh that he couldn’t continue to move his children from one Al Khalifa property to another, that both they and he needed something more permanent, a home they could call their own. Abdullah replied that Michael first needed to demonstrate that he intended to honor his promises. In response, Michael announced that he would be forced to fly to London to give a second deposition in the Marc Schaffel case on May 22. From London he would be traveling to Japan to accept a “Legend” award at the MTV Music Video Awards ceremony in Tokyo, Michael told the sheikh, and when he returned he expected to have a home of his own waiting for him. Abdullah swallowed his indignation and made an effort to part as friends, embracing the singer as he said good-bye, wishing him safe travel and securing a promise that he would return to Bahrain soon in order to finish what they had started.

  It was the last time the prince of Bahrain ever saw Mikaeel.

  PART TWO

  NORTH

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