Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  In 2001, Rowe signed a court order terminating her parental rights, but in 2004, after Jackson was criminally charged in Santa Barbara County, her attorneys filed a motion to reverse that decision. Her main concern, Rowe stated in court documents, was Jackson’s involvement with the Nation of Islam: “Because she is Jewish, Deborah feared the children might be mistreated if Michael continued the association.”

  Jackson and Rowe reportedly reached a settlement of their custody dispute in late June 2005 but when Debbie’s attorneys read the fine print of the contract prepared by Michael’s legal team, they realized that their client was about to be shut out of her children’s lives entirely. The lawyers’ concern mounted when Michael and the kids left the United States and took up residence in a country that was not a signatory of the Hague treaty, meaning Rowe’s legal rights were unenforceable. Debbie refused to sign the settlement agreement and threatened to go back to court. Hoping to assuage her, Michael agreed in August 2005 (two months after his move to Bahrain) to allow Grace to take Prince and Paris to meet their natural mother at a Los Angeles hotel. Debbie was infuriated when Grace told her she would be introduced as a “family friend” because Michael didn’t want to confuse the kids, then had to sit through the meeting hearing Prince and Paris repeatedly address Grace as “Mom.”

  Less than a month after Grace took the kids back to Bahrain, Debbie filed a lawsuit demanding money for legal fees, support, and increased access to the children, who she claimed had been “abducted” to the Middle East on fake passports. The February 15, 2006, announcement that the California Court of Appeal had reinstated Rowe’s custody rights made headlines across the country. During the next several months, Debbie’s lawyers began to play rough, submitting court filings that for the first time made public what everyone already suspected: Michael Jackson was not biologically related to either Prince or Paris, despite his claims that the children had been conceived “the natural way.” Rowe’s attorneys also disclosed some details of the original deal with Jackson, revealing that she had agreed, among other things, not to speak to anyone about her ex-husband’s physical condition, drug use, or “sexual behavior”—boiler plate language that raised eyebrows when it was applied to Michael Jackson.

  Debbie and her attorneys became even more aggressive when they learned that Michael and the children were now domiciled in Ireland, which was a Hague signatory, filing a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court that demanded $245,000 in missed payments while pressing forward with Rowe’s custody and visitation claims. If Grace hadn’t let the kids call her Mom in front of Debbie, none of this would have happened, Michael grumbled. It was Michael’s fault for not keeping his promises to the woman, Grace answered.

  Neither Nordstrom nor Sheehan had even the slightest notion that there was any drama involving the kids playing out across the pond during the Jacksons’ stay at Blackwater, even as they lived under the same roof with them. Michael continued to enjoy sitting by the fire with Nordstrom during the evening to pepper the master of the house with questions about the castle’s history. Sheehan remained amazed that “Michael was so normal to talk to. At the castle, he used to come down in the middle of the night for a bowl of apple crumb and he absolutely loved being able to do things like that.”

  The Jacksons’ stay at the castle ended on July 4, which happened to be the magician’s birthday. “The kids all jumped into a waiting limousine,” Sheehan recalled, “but Michael made them get out and thank each and every one at the castle for their hospitality. I think that tells you right there what sort of father he was.”

  9

  Not one of the people who attended to Michael at Blackwater had been aware that cable news networks back in America were providing nightly coverage of the Schaffel v. Jackson civil trial at the Los Angeles County courthouse in Santa Monica. Michael barely seemed to have been aware of it himself. The only appearance he made in court was via the videotaped deposition that Howard King showed the California jury during Jackson’s fifth day in Ireland.

  “I played some of it that first day just to buy myself time,” King recalled. “I really wasn’t prepared to go to trial, to tell you the truth, because I just didn’t believe there would ever be a trial. I thought this would be settled right up until the moment they brought the jurors in. All the accounting had been done, so it was pretty clear. Some of it was embarrassing to Marc. He wasn’t quite as pristine as we had thought, and so we were ready to settle.” King had already whittled his original demand of $3.8 million down to $1.4 million and would have taken half that to avoid a trial. “But they wouldn’t offer any money,” King remembered.

  What King didn’t know was that the day before the scheduled trial date, Raymone Bain had announced a massive “restructuring” of Michael Jackson’s business relationships that involved the dismissal of his attorneys in both the United States and Bahrain, and the termination of his relationships with 2 Seas Records, Sheikh Abdullah, and Guy Holmes. Bain, who had orchestrated the entire thing, was now Jackson’s “general manager” and in that capacity had hired New York–based entertainment lawyer Londell McMillan to supervise the “turnaround” of Michael’s affairs. McMillan, whose other clients included Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Spike Lee, would be taking charge of all financial and legal matters involving Michael, effective immediately, according to Bain.

  “All I knew,” King recalled, “was that Michael suddenly had this new attorney, Londell McMillan, who was running things, and that Londell was committed to being a hard-ass: ‘Michael doesn’t have any money and he’s not paying.’ Even the judge was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ The judge, God bless her, spent two solid days with us, trying to get this settled. She said, ‘Do you really want all this dirty laundry aired?’ And Londell’s answer was yes. What was obvious was that here was another new advisor who felt he had to prove to Michael how important he was. And prove it by showing how tough he could be with Michael’s money and reputation. I got used to seeing it in their eyes, the next in the long line of people who think they are going to be Michael’s savior and his advisor for the rest of his career. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, right.’ But I have to deal with it so off to trial we go. I was shocked, but also delighted. I mean, there was a lot of press. I was on CNN every night. It couldn’t have been better for me.”

  It couldn’t have been much better for them, either, most of the reporters in the courtroom agreed: Liz Taylor insisting on a $600,000 bracelet, Marlon Brando demanding a million in cash, Celine Dion in tears, Marc Schaffel delivering his supersize fries. They had Michael only on video and in tape-recorded messages, true, but that was enough to support the “Two Jackson Personalities Emerge” headlines that appeared in newspapers across the country after the first day of the trial. Michael had whispered “meekly” that he wasn’t sure when or how Schaffel was paid, according to the wire service story that became the most widely distributed account of his deposition testimony. Yet only moments later the jury heard the tape of a message Michael had left for Schaffel in a voice that was much louder and deeper: “Marc, call Al Malnik. I do not want any ifs, ands, or buts about releasing ‘What More Can I Give?’ at this point. Do it now!”

  Hearing these two very different voices “left those who listened wondering if they had any idea who Michael Jackson really is,” one TV reporter breathlessly informed her viewers. Fans, critics, and creditors alike were startled and amused by the revelation that for the past several years one of Jackson’s main sources of spending money had been earned by leasing hundreds of acres of pasture at Neverland for cattle grazing.

  Schaffel himself took the stand on July 5, the day after Michael and his children left Blackwater Castle. On cross-examination, he was immediately confronted by the fact that he had backdated eighteen checks totaling $784,000 after receiving a termination letter from Jackson’s attorneys on November 21, 2001, and that he had used $54,000 of that money to make a prepayment of the rent on his home. When Schaffel was questioned about his claim that Michael owed him for the
$300,000 he had delivered to a “Mr. X” in South America, he could produce neither a receipt nor a canceled check to show the jury. Schaffel claimed he had taken the money in cash from a safe in Brazil where he was keeping it and without prompting told the jury about being asked by Michael to find children in South America who could join his family. Several jurors squirmed; one shielded her eyes.

  The full panel delivered a “split verdict” on July 14, 2006, awarding Schaffel $900,000 of the money he claimed to be owed and Michael $200,000 that jurors agreed had been skimmed by Schaffel. Raymone Bain and Londell McMillan fell all over themselves declaring victory. The jurors had “turned back” Schaffel’s claims against Mr. Jackson, said Bain, while McMillan declared, “It’s a new day for Michael Jackson. We were unwilling to pay one penny more than the amount Schaffel was owed, and the verdict proved us successful.”

  His client had won a net judgment of $700,000 and immediately placed a lien on Neverland. King pointed out: “I guarantee you I was better paid for my time than Michael’s attorney was.”

  The three jurors who spoke to the media after the verdict were unsympathetic to either the plaintiff or the defendant, saying that neither was “the most upstanding character,” as one put it. A young woman from Tarzana who was now a nursing student at Brigham Young University said she hadn’t held Schaffel’s background against him because of what she believed about Michael Jackson: “I have issues with adult entertainment, but I also have issues with child molestation.”

  Jackson and his traveling party spent the last ten days of the Schaffel trial at Ballinacurra House near Kinsale, a harbor town on Ireland’s south coast. Though not a castle, Ballinacurra was an even more gorgeous property than Blackwater, surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls and, beyond that, by thirty acres of woodland and lawns. The residence offered its own ballroom, formal dining for ninety-six people in its Garden Room, and twenty-two bedrooms with sleeping accommodations for as many as fifty-three guests. Michael’s group numbered only seven persons, three of them children, but he took the entire place. The entertainer spent much of his time in the African-theme bedroom he had chosen for writing songs, while his children were “in school,” then joined the kids in afternoon walks along the banks of the Whitecastle and Ballinacurra creeks. He had not left the grounds at Blackwater once during his two weeks there, and seemed similarly disinclined to venture forth from Ballinacurra. Michael sent the house’s proprietor, Des McGahan, on several runs into Cork to pick up what had for years been the staple of his diet: KFC original chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. One day, though, Michael had decided to venture into Kinsale proper, where his costume of silk pajamas and a surgical mask did little to discourage the attention of townspeople. “A furor,” McGahan described the ensuing scene. “People were all askin’ one another, ‘Didjya see Michael Jackson around town in his pajamas?’”

  Other than that one mad excursion into town, Michael seemed to be seeking at Ballinacurra the same simple pleasures he had found at Blackwater. After a week or so, he and his wife began to feel sorry for the man, McGahan said: “He was lookin’ for a home. He was tryin’ = to look for normality.” Still, the most memorable moment of his famous guest’s stay for him, McGahan would recall, had come late one night when he ventured into the garden to satisfy his curiosity about why Mr. Jackson insisted that the outside lights be left on between dusk and dawn: “I popped my head through the hedge and saw him moonwalkin’ across the lawn. I thought, ‘This can’t be true. Michael Jackson is dancin’ on the grass.’”

  Michael would rent a number of Irish castles and country homes during his six-month-long stay in the country. Back in the United States, though, gossip columnist Roger Friedman wrote that Jackson was “mooching” off Lord of the Dance creator Michael Flatley at the tapmaster’s CastleHyde during his summer in Ireland, and that claim would be repeated in “news” stories for the next four years. But if the entertainer and his children stayed with Flatley at all (Flatley claims they did), it was a very short visit, because by the beginning of August 2006, Michael, Grace, and the children were ensconced at the most luxurious of the properties they would occupy in Ireland: Luggala Castle in County Wicklow, on Ireland’s east coast, just south of Dublin. The six-thousand-acre estate included not only the exquisite lake Lough Tay and a beach of imported sand so white that it looked like granulated sugar against the black rocks of the Irish Sea’s shoreline, but also a two-mile-long driveway that wound up what the Irish called “Fancy Mountain” to the magnificent Gothic Revival house where the “Golden Guinness Girls” had once cavorted. Luggala rented for a reported 30,000 euros per week, which meant that Michael Jackson had paid upward of $300,000 for the eight weeks he occupied the castle. That price included use of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce but not the cost of the helicopters Jackson was using to scout out recording facilities where he could continue work on what Raymone Bain persisted in calling his “comeback album.”

  In the last languid weeks of the Celtic summer, Luggala offered Prince, Paris, and Blanket a variety of outdoor adventures boasted by few other properties on the planet, but their father swiftly discovered that he couldn’t go outside himself unless he was covered head to toe in netting, because the midges swarmed to him in clouds, gorging on his blood wherever they found a patch of exposed skin. Retreating indoors, he probed the chefs, butlers, and cleaners for stories about previous guests like Mel Gibson, then asked what they would say about him when he was gone, and laughed when they answered, “Oh, nothing at all, sir.” The Rolls-Royce took Michael and the children to Wicklow town for visits to cinemas and restaurants and Michael created his largest local stir when he stopped at a store in Dun Laoghaire to buy a book of Beatles lyrics. Paris got a book about fairies.

  Like everything in his life, of course, this peace was fragile. On the morning of August 29, word came that a towering brush fire had broken out at Neverland, near the amusement park. A firefighting helicopter extinguished the blaze; beyond burned ground, damage was minimal, but the Santa Barbara Fire Department was unable to say how the inferno had been set off. Michael naturally suspected arson. He pictured the ranch falling into decay, its windows shuttered, the grounds around it blackened. The news from Neverland was not an auspicious beginning to his forty-eighth birthday. If Michael had learned anything during the past few years, though, it was compartmentalization, and he said nothing about the fire to his children as they helped Grace prepare their father’s “surprise party,” or when he joined them for a trip to the Lambert Puppet Theatre in the coastal village of Monkstown, just outside Dublin.

  It was Grace who finally found the ideal place for Michael to resume making music, in the Irish Midlands of County Westmeath. Viewed from the main road between Dublin and Galway, Grouse Lodge looked to be nearly as far removed from the splendor of Luggala Castle as the Jackson family dwelling back in Gary, Indiana. All that showed from the unsigned entrance just outside the village of Rosemount was a gravel driveway filled with bumps and potholes that wound through a screen of trees, then disappeared behind the stone walls of a three-hundred-year-old Georgian estate that appeared to have fallen into a sad state of neglect. It was here that Jackson would make the most serious sustained effort at producing new work that he had managed in years.

  Proprietor Paddy Dunning was a renowned sound engineer whose Temple Bar studios in Dublin had served U2 and many others. Working with a family of local stonemasons, along with assorted other skilled tradesmen, Dunning and his wife Claire had spent nearly five years converting the assorted cowsheds and other outbuildings of Grouse Lodge into a unique collection of cottages assembled around a grassy courtyard filled with flowering plants. The manor house was now outfitted with two state-of-the-art studios where the slab-cut stone created acoustics that, since 2002, had delighted recording artists as diverse as REM, Manic Street Preachers, and Shirley Bassey.

  During her visit to Grouse Lodge in the late summer of 2006, though, all Grace Rwaramba would tell the Dunnings
was that on behalf of someone she would identify only as “an A-list pop star” she wanted to book the larger of the two studios plus a three-bedroom cottage that had once been a cowshed for at least a month and perhaps longer. They had absolutely no idea who this new lodger might be, the Dunnings would say later, until the day when a bus rolled down the gravel driveway, pulled up outside the main building, and opened its doors to release three excited kids who were followed by their shy but smiling father, Michael Jackson. The stunned couple waited for the rest of the entertainer’s entourage to emerge from the bus, but the only other passengers were Grace Rwaramba and the children’s tutor.

  From the day of his arrival, Michael made it clear that he thought of himself first and foremost as a father, Paddy Dunning would recall. What had sold him on Grouse Lodge, Jackson explained, was that it offered an atmosphere that encouraged “family living.” The Dunnings and their staff were known for protecting the privacy of their guests, and Claire’s reputation for fabulous home cooking was another major draw. He wanted a place where his children could eat well and find plenty to do while he was working, said Michael, who seemed every bit as interested in the estate’s big indoor pool, archery range, billiards, and Ping-Pong tables, along with its close access to horseback riding stables and fishing platforms, as he was in the recording equipment at Grouse Lodge. He didn’t even want to go into the studio until he had set up a school for his children and organized their schedules, Paddy Dunning remembered.