They had never stopped loving Michael in Japan. Hundreds of fans stood in a downpour, holding signs welcoming him back to their country on May 27, 2006, when Jackson walked the red carpet at Tokyo’s Yoyogi Olympic Stadium, where he would accept his MTV “Legend” award. After being introduced as “the King of Pop, the King of Rock, and the King of Soul,” he grew emotional onstage, thanking “all the people who believed in me,” then told the Japanese, “I think you are a very sweet, generous, and kind people.”
He kept repeating “Aishiteru!” (“I love you!”) during the five days he spent in a country where no one breathed a word about the molestation trial that had ended less than a year earlier, not even when he visited a Tokyo orphanage run by Catholic nuns. During his visit to the Seibi Gakuen children’s home in downtown Tokyo, a crowd of excited orphans performed traditional dance and music, then swarmed him afterward. A day later, Jackson showed up “unannounced” in the TV studio where the enormously popular band SMAP was recording. The dropped jaws and bug eyes of the boy band members appeared to amuse Michael enormously, though he only stayed long enough to give them all high-fives. The president of Avex Records threw him a party hosted by the socialite Kano Sisters, who introduced Jackson to the singer Yoshiki and surrounded him with “glamour models.” He visited a Pachinko parlor long enough to play on a machine that featured a Michael Jackson character and promised the clutch of cameras that he would return to the Land of the Rising Sun for a “Christmas party” in December.
The Japanese had long appreciated Jackson in ways that would never translate across the Pacific. While the country’s young idolized Michael as the ultimate pop culture icon, Japan’s intellectual elite embraced him as a Kabuki theater performer of the highest caliber. Without the slightest awareness of it, he had adopted a stylized persona that seemed to combine the onnagata and wakashu roles of yar o kabuki (young man kabuki): the exotic and androgynous garb, the heavy layer of white-pallor makeup, the smooth, shoulder-length black wig, and the high-pitched falsetto voice. Michael could project the qualities of profound hurt and deep sadness that was part of every major Kabuki performer’s character, as well as the sense that he held a deep mystery in his core.
After brief appearances in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Jackson stopped in Brunei to attend the sultan’s birthday party—then he fell off the radar. Sheikh Abdullah certainly couldn’t find him. Every day the king’s son had been phoning the contact numbers he had been given, and every day he was told by those who answered that Michael would get back to him quickly. Abdullah never received a return call.
During his absence from Bahrain, someone Abdullah would identify only as “an American in the music business” gradually convinced the sheikh that Michael had been merely using him to mark time, that he would never come back to Bahrain from Japan, and that the Al Khalifa family was not going to get anything at all in return for the $7 million it had invested in Jackson. When Jackson did in fact fly back to Manama that June, Michael discovered not only that the sheikh had failed to provide the home he asked for, but that he had moved Michael’s possesions out of the mansion in Sanad, packing them into suitcases now in storage at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The jewelry he had left behind and nearly a million dollars in cash, Jackson was told, were secured in a bank safe. Michael, Grace, and the children spent less than twenty-four hours at the hotel, feeling menaced the entire time by members of the kingdom’s “public security” police, who followed them wherever they went. The next day, Michael once more put on his abaya, raised the veil, then traveled to the Manama airport disguised as a woman before joining Grace and the kids aboard a private jet that had just flown in from Paris.
They departed without saying a second good-bye to Sheikh Abdullah. The money and the jewelry were left behind.
Less than twenty-four hours after leaving the land of the Al Khalifas, Jackson was the guest of an equally wealthy Arab, his friend Prince Al-Waleed, who was hosting Michael, Grace, Anton Schleiter, and the children aboard the Saudi prince’s gargantuan $200 million yacht, Kingdom 5KR, anchored in the Mediterranean just off the Côte d’Azur. When money from Sony arrived, Michael moved the traveling party to Versailles, where he gave a deposition in the Prescient Acquisitions case, then led the group to the New York Hotel in Paris.
Jackson looked so healthy on a foray with the children to Disneyland Paris that it seemed there might be truth in Jermaine’s claim that Michael was doing three hundred push-ups a day to get in shape for a comeback world tour. Being chased by a raucous crowd of reporters and photographers from one attraction to the next at the park, though, seemed to wear the entertainer out. Two days later, he was photographed looking wan and weak as he was pushed about in a wheelchair, shielded from the sun by a big black umbrella while on a tour of the city’s botanical garden, Jardin des Plantes. Carried behind their father by security guards, Jackson’s children wore long black gowns and face veils that made them look like mini-mourners at a funeral.
Word that Michael Jackson had arrived in Cork on the afternoon of June 23 set off a wave of frenzied speculation that spread from southern Ireland across the entire country in a matter of hours. The most widespread rumor was that Michael would be making a cameo appearance at Bob Dylan’s concert the following evening in Kilkenny, most likely to perform a duet of “I Shall Be Released.” What Dylan made of the “We want Michael!” shouts that came at him out of the Irish darkness the next night only he knows.
Sony executives were incredulous that Michael had flown from Paris to Cork aboard a regular Aer Lingus flight instead of one of the private jets he typically leased. Perhaps, it was suggested, the reality of his fiscal circumstances had finally registered with Jackson. This hope dimmed, though, when word came that, once on the ground in Ireland, Michael had hired both a stretch limousine and a cargo van to transport his traveling party and the twenty-seven designer bags filled with his wardrobe to an eighteen-room castle he had rented as his temporary residence in the country. Blackwater was set on its own private woodland in southern County Cork’s Castletownroche. Michael might’ve told Sony that Blackwater was relatively affordable as castles go, costing a mere 7,500 euros per week in high season. For that you got a piece of living history that went back at least as far as the Iron Age, maybe even to the early Mesolithic. History mattered to Michael Jackson, as Blackwater’s proprietor Patrick Nordstrom would discover within hours of the star’s arrival. Jackson was full of questions about the fort of Cruadha that had stood on the site before the castle’s construction in the twelfth century and about the eighth-century Sheela na Gig that was among the fort’s remnants.
Nordstrom was struck within a day by how little resemblance the Michael Jackson he was hosting bore to the bizarre character depicted in London tabloids. While the castle’s owner agreed with those in Bahrain who had remarked that Jackson was far less strange-looking in person than in magazine and newspaper photographs, it was Michael’s regular fella demeanor that made the more memorable impression. He was shy, curious, and exceedingly polite. What the Michael Jackson living under Nordstrom’s roof seemed to want from life were simple pleasures, like porridge in the morning and afternoon walks in the woods. The privacy and serenity of the fifty-acre estate that surrounded Blackwater were why Michael had rented the castle. He loved that its grounds were a nationally protected nature reserve and that a lengthy stretch of the River Awbeg was enclosed and secured by Blackwater’s boundaries. Watching the pop star and his children frolic along the pathways of the castle’s fifteen-acre woodland maze was marvelously touching, Nordstrom recalled. Under that canopy of leaves, Michael revealed a personality that was far different from the one that most of the world knew, Nordstrom observed: “The shyness left him and I saw a much more boisterous and loud spirit who loved playing with his children.”
Be on the lookout for leprechauns, Michael told Prince, Paris, and Blanket. He truly believed in the little-old-man fairies, as he admitted to anyone who asked. Shortly after his arrival i
n Ireland, a British publication reported that Jackson was in Ireland specifically because he was determined to meet a leprechaun. London’s Daily Mirror followed this with a report that Michael was planning to open a five-hundred-million-euro leprechaun theme park in County Cork. “He loves the whole idea of leprechauns and the magic and myths of Ireland,” an unidentified source was quoted as saying. The theme park story was bogus but that last remark was quite accurate.
Michael had told his children on the plane ride from Paris that there was no better place to chase magic than Ireland in the summertime and the two oldest kids knew this was a big statement. “Magic” was the most fraught word in their father’s vocabulary. The way Michael used it (and he did so constantly), “magic” might refer to a movie star’s charisma or to a fairy-tale ending or to the spells cast by one of the witch doctors he consulted. “Magic” could be his description of a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland or of a James Brown spin and slide. “Magic” was anything that made Jackson marvel, made him gasp, made him laugh like a child or tremble with fear of the unknown. “Magic” was wonder, superstition, and the suspension of disbelief. It was what he had substituted for the religious enthusiasm of his youth. To call a person “magic” was the highest compliment he could bestow.
He admired those who practiced magic almost as much as he did those who possessed it. Michael followed the careers of the top stage magicians with an almost fetishistic intensity, and arranged to see and meet them in nearly every city he visited. He had become close friends with Siegfried & Roy during the early 1990s when he was often Steve Wynn’s guest at the Mirage, even writing the duo’s theme song, “Mind Is the Magic.” As soon as Patrick Nordstrom mentioned that he had a magician friend in Cork, Michael urged his host to call the man and invite him for a visit.
Liam Sheehan was on the road with a packed bag within half an hour of receiving the call, “driving like I was in a dream,” he remembered. He had anticipated that Jackson would be traveling with a huge entourage, Sheehan admitted, and was taken aback to discover “it was just Michael, the kids, their nanny Grace, their teacher, and Michael’s friend Anton.” Michael and the kids were finishing their grub, his friend Nordstrom told Sheehan upon arrival, but Grace Rwaramba came out to greet him a moment later, and immediately produced the nondisclosure form the magician would have to sign before settling in at the castle. “Grace told me straightaway how difficult it was for Michael to trust people,” Sheehan remembered. “She told me about how they had gone on a helicopter trip to the home of a so-called friend, hoping to find a little peace and quiet, and as they were landing, they saw that there was a huge crowd of people gathered outside the door to the place, and that the field below them was swarming with paparazzi. Grace told me that people were always trying to get something from Michael, and he knew it. She said he was betrayed constantly. It was a sort of sobering way to begin the evening.”
Michael and the kids were grinning excitedly, though, when they followed Grace into the drawing room a short time later. Sheehan, who specialized in what he called “walkabout magic,” led the group around the first floor of the castle, performing tricks as he went. He wowed them all with his special version of the card-to-ceiling trick, but was most affected himself by how Michael’s daughter responded to the fish production trick. “I borrow some money—a fifty-euro note in this case—and the fish comes out of the money,” Sheehan explained. “And then I put the fish into a glass—no worries, the fish will be okay. But as we moved into the bar, Paris came in behind us holding the fish in her hands. She said she didn’t want it to be alone. It was very innocent. That’s what all three of those kids were: very, very innocent.”
Like millions of people worldwide, Sheehan had been horrified by the images of Jackson dangling Blanket over the balcony at the Hotel Adlon in 2002. That, “along with all the rest,” as Sheehan put it, had led him to imagine that Jackson’s children would be “pretty weird.” In fact, the magician said, “they were as bright and polite and delightful as any kids I’ve ever been around.” He was especially touched, Sheehan said, by how close Michael seemed to his eight-year-old daughter, and marveled as well at the girl’s composure and intelligence. “The very first conversation we had,” Sheehan recalled, “was when Paris came up to me and asked, ‘Do you know my dad’s name?’ ‘Michael,’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Michael Jackson,’ I told her. She shook her head again. I was baffled. ‘His real name,’ Paris told me, ‘is Michael Joseph Jackson. His middle name is the same as the first name of his dad, my grandfather.’ She seemed very proud of that. I saw then, and again and again over the days that followed, how determined Michael was to give his children the feeling that they were part of a big, happy family.” Sheehan felt almost ashamed of himself when he discovered that Michael did not call his oldest son Prince as the expression of some ridiculous royal fantasy, but because that was the first name of his maternal grandfather.
The three kids spent most of every day “in school,” as they put it, shut up in one of the castle’s rooms with their teacher, and it became obvious to Sheehan that they were learning at a more than respectable rate. When the magician performed his best-known trick, which involved having the children select a word from a book that he would identify by a process of deduction, Sheehan had suggested that either Prince or Paris might want to pick a word for little Blanket, who was just four. But Blanket insisted upon choosing his own word, Sheehan recalled, and then afterward upon demonstrating that he actually knew what “actually” meant.
All during the two weeks he spent with them, Sheehan remembered, Prince and Paris kept trying to get him to run a footrace against their father: “Paris told me, ‘My dad is really fast. He just ran a race against a doctor in Dubai and beat him by a huge distance, so I know he’ll beat you.’ She told me the doctor was thin, meaning, without saying it, that I was a trifle fat.” Grace Rwaramba confirmed the story of the footrace in Dubai. The doctor had questioned Michael’s physical condition and Michael, offended, challenged the man to a race, then beat him so easily that the doctor couldn’t stop talking about it for the rest of the day.
The woman who identified herself as the children’s nanny was clearly more than just that, as Sheehan had realized within his first week under the same roof with the Jackson family. “Michael’s personality was meek and mild,” the magician recalled, “but Grace was very direct and quite assertive. She looked so ordinary in her T-shirt and jeans, but you had no doubt within a few days that she was the one in charge. She wasn’t just taking care of the kids, she was taking care of Michael, too. She was the boss, and you felt it.”
Behind closed doors, Grace was complaining constantly about Michael’s financial mismanagement. She had been furious for weeks over how her employer had handled the windfall of a seven-figure payment he hadn’t been expecting near the end of their stay in Bahrain. “Instead of buying a small house, so that we won’t go from one hotel to another or stay with friends, he told me, ‘Grace, you have to go immediately to Florence and buy antiques.’” She had used her own credit card to pay for the trip, Grace said, but when she arrived in the Italian city to inspect the collection that Michael wanted, she was less than impressed. “I called him and said, ‘This is not worth anything.’ Michael wouldn’t listen to me. He said, ‘Buy it. Buy it.’ We didn’t even have a home to live in so we had to put the antiques in storage.” Just a short time later, before the trip to Japan, she had warned Michael not to believe the promise of a million-dollar payday he had been given, Grace said. “I told him, ‘Michael, by the time everyone takes his cut you will end up with a very small amount.’ He didn’t want to hear. He flew to Japan. By the time everyone took their share, he ended up with just two hundred thousand dollars.” She would not be returning with him to Japan at Christmastime, Grace said, to watch the whole thing happen all over again.
Grace may have talked like the boss in front of Liam Sheehan, but Michael never forgot that the real power was his, as he made clear
more than once in private discussions of the biggest issue that existed between Grace and him that summer: how to deal with Debbie Rowe.
Prince and Paris’s biological mother was, to put it kindly, a quirky character. A big (five-foot-ten), beefy (two-hundred-plus pounds) Germanic-looking blonde, Rowe had been raised as the adopted daughter of a millionaire Jewish couple from Malibu. Sheltered as a girl, she didn’t have her first boyfriend until she was thirty, but within two years was a “biker babe” tricked out in black leather who swore like a sailor and drank like one, too. Rowe had gotten to know Michael Jackson back in the early 1990s when she was working as a nurse for the entertainer’s skin doctor, Arnold Klein. A certain intimacy had developed between the two when Michael dripped a skin-bleaching agent on his scrotum and Debbie attended to his burns. Jackson bought her a car to show his gratitude. Klein and Rowe eventually began traveling with Jackson; when he toured Debbie would give him massages.
In 1996, just as Michael’s nineteen-month marriage to Lisa Marie Presley was ending, he confided his distress over Lisa Marie’s refusal to bear him children. Rowe said she would be happy to take the job. She was already pregnant (by in-vitro insemination) in November 1996 when the couple married at the Sheraton Hotel in Sydney, Australia. Michael’s publicist Bob Jones would claim that Michael had only married Debbie because he was deep into a business relationship with Prince Al-Waleed and the Saudi royal had not been happy that Debbie was pregnant and unmarried. The best man at the ceremony was an eight-year-old boy. After exchanging pecks on the cheek, the couple retired to separate suites and never slept in the same bed.
Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. (soon to be known as Prince) was born in February 1997 and rushed directly from the hospital to Neverland so the baby would not be able to bond with his mother. Michael had a team of nurses watching the infant around the clock, Jones recalled: “He measured the air quality in the room every hour.” She had “never seen Michael so happy,” said Rowe, who offered to serve as a surrogate a second time. Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson was born in April 1998 after a complicated pregnancy that left Rowe unable to bear more children. Protected by a prenuptial agreement, Jackson divorced her in 1999, securing sole custody of the kids with a deal to pay Rowe a reported $8 million and buy her a house in Beverly Hills.
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