Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  What would make Michael’s “Wacko” image more ominous than amusing was, of course, his insistence upon seeking out young boys as his closest companions. After the Jordan Chandler scandal broke in 1993, the game played by a media that for years had been titillated by Michael’s strangeness turned scary and mean. Back in 1988, though, when he came to England on the Bad tour, there were many mentions of Michael’s “young friend” Jimmy Safechuck in the British press that summer but virtually no insinuations of impropriety. Reporters who trailed the two of them on an after-hours trip to Hamleys, the seven-story toy shop on London’s Regent Street that was Michael’s favorite shopping destination anywhere, were giddy with the queer charm of it all. Jimmy had on an exact replica of the stage costume Michael wore (one of several the star had ordered for his ten-year-old friend) and seemed neither more nor less excited than the nearly thirty-year-old man who led him by the hand through the store. Many in the press knew that Jimmy’s parents had been provided with their own limousine and a blank check to eat at expensive restaurants or attend West End shows so that their son and the star could be alone. Some even knew that Michael and Jimmy slept in the same hotel room, yet the images that this conjured in those days were of battery-powered car crashes and scary story telling at midnight. It was understood that Michael Jackson sought the company of prepubescent males because he yearned to be one himself, longed to go back in time and make his life into what he believed it should have been, in those days when he had been a ten-year-old himself, staring out the studio windows at the playground across the street, imagining himself on swings and slides and merry-go-rounds with the other kids his age.

  It wasn’t as if Jimmy had been the first of Michael’s young friends. Few knew about Rodney Allen Rippy, but the whole world had watched Michael’s relationship with Emmanuel Lewis play out on national television. Shortly after the 1984 Grammy Awards ceremony, Michael, Emmanuel, and Brooke Shields were again a threesome when they arrived at the American Music Awards, but it was only the boy whom the star carried to the stage with him as he accepted the prize for best song and told the audience, “Important to me in writing songs is inspiration, and I’m holding one of my inspirations, Emmanuel Lewis.” The diminutive boy visited Jackson not only at the Hayvenhurst estate but also at the Westwood condominium known among Michael’s employees as the “Hideout,” the one place in Los Angeles where he could escape both his fans and the media. Rumors went around about the two but those who visited the Hideout said that all they ever saw was Michael playing games with Emmanuel or teaching him to moonwalk. Reporters’ ears pricked up when word got out that Lewis’s mother had pulled the boy away from Jackson in late 1984 after the two checked into a hotel as father and son. A story (later confirmed by Jackson publicist Bob Jones) circulated that the entertainer’s security guards had been ordered to purchase baby bottles and nipples each time Emmanuel visited. After the Chandler scandal, there would be public speculation about what sort of perverse sexual activities must have been involved. Then, in 2005, In Touch Weekly published photographs that had been taken years earlier of Jackson and Lewis lying in bed and sucking milk from bottles. For Michael this was barely less mortifying than the accusations of molestation, though perhaps it was easier to let people believe that he might be sexually abusing Lewis than to acknowledge what they were really doing, which was being babies together. How to tell the world that he wasn’t trying to be heterosexual or homosexual or even asexual, but rather presexual, was a problem he could never solve.

  After Emmanuel Lewis, Jackson collected an entire tribe of lost boys, including both of the young stars of the hit TV show Silver Spoons: Alfonso Ribeiro and Ricky Schroder. Much would be made later of his supposed preference for white boys but he had actually favored Ribeiro (who, like Rodney Allen Rippy and Emmanuel Lewis, was a fairly dark-skinned black kid) over the blue-eyed, blond Schroder. Michael met Corey Feldman in 1985 on the set of The Goonies, which was being produced by Steven Spielberg. They were shooting a scene that required an expression of shock and Spielberg had gotten it out of him, Feldman recalled, by blurting out that Michael Jackson was coming for a visit. He gave the star his phone number, Feldman said, but didn’t expect a call. Michael phoned that evening and spoke with him for two hours, telling stories about Paul McCartney. They talked at least once a week after that, according to Feldman (who had begun to dress up like Jackson long before Jimmy Safechuck did), and went on any number of trips together. Feldman not only scoffed at suggestions that Jackson had made sexual advances toward him, but recalled a trip to the Disneyland Hotel where Michael offered him the bed and took a cot for himself. All Michael had ever really surprised him with was kindness and generosity, Feldman said, a statement that would be echoed by one boy after another who got to spend time with Jackson. The kids who visited him at Neverland would come back with stories of pillow fights and food fights, reporting nothing worse than that they’d been allowed to gorge themselves on candy and stay up past midnight watching movies.

  Michael’s eccentricity was remarked upon in the media far more often than his friendships with young boys. “Why doesn’t this guy want to grow up?” was the question reporters asked about him, not, “Is he a pedophile?” Whatever nasty remarks editors made about him behind closed doors, they had to admit that stories like the one about him hiring the little people who played the Seven Dwarfs at Disneyland to come to the Hayvenhurst estate to frolic on the lawn in full costume for his entertainment made great copy. Before 1993, people found that stuff charming, not creepy.

  Most of the mockery Michael was subjected to arose from his fake romances, the continuing need he seemed to feel to pretend that he was hot and heavy with some young woman whose hand he’d held. Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields were both pretty forthright about it. “No big romance,” Shields would say of the relationship. “We have a lot of fun because we just joke like we’re in kindergarten or something.” Eddie Murphy was hilariously wicked on Saturday Night Live as an ultra-fey Jackson, bragging about his imaginary exploits with various women. Michael laughed at that himself. He continued to be highly reactive, though, to suggestions he was homosexual. He asked Joan Rivers to stop telling her “Michael Jackson is so gay he makes Liberace look like a Green Beret” joke, and when she wouldn’t, planted a story in the National Enquirer that he was thinking about suing the comedienne. Hardly anybody paid attention to the fabricated tabloid report that Jackson was having an affair with British pop star Boy George, yet Michael insisted on holding a “major press conference” in Los Angeles that served little purpose other than to draw attention to the story. After warning that any such future “false allegations” would be met with a lawsuit, Jackson’s publicist read a statement in which Michael denied taking hormones to keep his voice high and having cosmetic surgery on his eyes. He was speaking out, the statement read, purely to protect the children who admired him.

  Michael did enjoy the company of older women who had become famous themselves at a young age and who didn’t threaten him sexually: Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, and Sophia Loren among them. Jane Fonda had been the first to tell Michael he was born to play the role of Peter Pan. During tours, one of his employees was assigned to create a Shirley Temple theme in each hotel suite Michael occupied, decorating it from one end to the other with photographs and cutouts of the former child star, “so that when I walked in I would see her,” Michael explained. He even insisted that a picture of her at age five or six be taped to the mirror in his dressing room. When he finally met Shirley Temple Black, by then a former United States foreign ambassador who was thirty years his senior, “we said nothing to each other at first, we simply cried together,” Michael would recall, because they knew each other’s pain, knew what it was to mourn a childhood they felt they’d missed.

  It was Elizabeth Taylor, though, with whom he grew closest. During his purchase of Neverland Ranch, Michael confided to the real estate agent handling the sale that he planned to adopt twenty-nine
children and marry Elizabeth Taylor, then reacted emotionally when the woman said Taylor could be his grandmother: “But I love her!” The shared personal mythology that had collected around a core of common childhood experiences would keep their relationship going for nearly a quarter century. They had met in December 1984 when Taylor asked for fourteen tickets to one of the Jackson 5 concerts at Dodger Stadium in the final days of the Victory tour. The seats she was given were in a VIP box so far back from the stage that “you might as well have been watching it on TV,” recalled Taylor, who had led her large party out of the stadium before the concert was half over. Michael called the next day, crying over the phone as he apologized profusely. They talked for three hours that day, according to Taylor, and the calls between them continued for months as “we got to know each other on the telephone.” On the day Michael finally suggested dropping by, he asked if he could bring a friend. He showed up a short time later leading Bubbles by the hand.

  The root of the connection between them was the similarity between their upbringings. Each had become the family breadwinner before the age of ten, pushed by a parent/manager (in Taylor’s case, her mother) whose investment in them had more to do with money than with love. Taylor understood Michael’s tortured relationship with Joe Jackson in ways few other people did. “I was a child star at nine, had an abusive father, and that kind of brought us together in the very beginning,” Taylor would tell Oprah Winfrey in their 2005 interview. “Our fathers were very much alike, tough, hard, brutal,” Michael had explained to Rabbie Boteach five years before that. Sorrow and self-aggrandizement were fused in each of their psyches, and it produced a relationship that was both tender and toxic.

  They defied their imprisonment in fame by doing things like sneaking out in disguises each Thursday afternoon to take in a movie matinee, sitting in the back row with a tub of popcorn between them, holding hands. Taylor was a regular visitor to Neverland; she and Michael even had their own special picnic spot on a cliff overlooking the amusement park. Liz bought Michael an elephant for his zoo, and he returned the favor by presenting her with a bejeweled elephant bauble the size of a soccer ball at her birthday party in Las Vegas. On the whole, Michael did a lot more giving than she did, presenting her with assorted necklaces, bracelets, and pendants created by her favorite jewelery designers and regularly showing up at her door with bottles of the world’s most expensive perfumes. In 1991, Michael hosted and laid out a reported million dollars for Taylor’s eighth wedding, to Larry Fortensky, a mullet-wearing construction worker twenty years her junior, in a Neverland gazebo. It was widely reported that, at Neverland, Jackson had created a sort of shrine to Taylor where a television surrounded by photographs of her played the actress’s movies twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This was not true, but there was a large portrait of Jackson hanging in the hallway of Taylor’s Beverly Hills home on which he had written, “To My True Love Elizabeth.”

  Just as Michael had broken eventually from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Liz had separated from the faith she was raised in—Christian Science—to convert to Judaism, before her marriage to producer Mike Todd. Taylor embraced the mysteries of the Kabbala long before Madonna did and convinced Michael to wear a red string as protection from the evil eye during his criminal trial in Santa Barbara County. “We like the same things,” Michael had told Paul Theroux when the author asked about his relationship with Liz. “Circuses. Amusement parks. Animals.” What he left out, of course, was drugs.

  In the early eighties, when Michael and Liz were first getting to know one another, Taylor had received more than a thousand prescriptions for sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and painkillers. Many of those prescriptions were written by Taylor and Jackson’s mutual physician and friend Dr. Arnold Klein, who regularly provided Liz with both Dilaudid (“cream of heroin,” as it’s known on the street) and an assortment of powerful tranquilizers. Strictly to aid in recovery after medical procedures, Klein said. Friends said that Taylor regularly overdosed, passing out with her eyes open, barely breathing. Paramedics who weren’t entirely sure if she was dead or alive had to rush her to the hospital on multiple occasions. After she was revived and released, Taylor would use a flask of liquor to wash down more pills during the ride home. She was in and out of rehab during the next fifteen years, a period in which Klein had written many prescriptions for his other friend and patient, Michael Jackson. One of the drugs he gave Michael was Demerol, Klein would acknowledge, for “pain management.” Associates of both Taylor and Jackson said that the two regularly traded pills. Liz was Michael’s date when he arrived at the American Music Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in January 1993 and numerous witnesses described Taylor as “teetering,” her eyes so glazed that she couldn’t recognize people who were standing right in front of her.

  When Theroux suggested that Elizabeth was Wendy to his Peter Pan, Michael replied, “She’s Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, the Queen of England, and Wendy.” Mother Teresa and Princess Diana were who he always mentioned when he spoke about what sort of woman he imagined marrying some day, someone “classy and quiet and not into all the sex and the craziness,” as he put it to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. It was the same way he had described his mother Katherine, telling Boteach, “She is like a saint.” Elizabeth Taylor was no saint, and her sexual adventures were the stuff of legend in Hollywood, but Michael saw her as fundamentally innocent. “She’s playful and youthful and happy and finds a way to laugh and giggle even when she’s in pain,” he told Rabbi Boteach. “I know if we ever did anything romantically, the press would be so mean and nasty and call us ‘The Odd Couple,’” Michael lamented to the rabbi. “It would turn into a circus and that’s the pain of it all.” So they would remain simply “very good friends,” the same description he gave to the young boys who were at his side from the late seventies onward.

  In 1986, Michael had starred in Captain EO, a $20 million 3-D film produced by George Lucas and directed by Francis Ford Coppola that was both the most expensive and the most promoted short film in the history of the movies, despite being shown exclusively at Disney theme parks. On the set, only three people were permitted to speak to the star: Coppola, Liz Taylor, and ten-year-old Jonathan Spence, and of these Michael seemed closest to the boy. They were seen any number of times nuzzling and hugging, and seemed to love playing patty-cake with one another. People thought it was innocent, if a bit odd. When Santa Barbara County authorities contacted Spence years later, he assured them that nothing inappropriate had happened between Michael and him. Jackson’s secretary, though, said Spence continued to call the MJJ Productions office occasionally, asking for airline tickets, and once for a new car, which he received.

  Jimmy Safechuck and his family would do far better, and this time Michael’s generosity produced the first rumblings of suspicion. After Jackson purchased a Rolls-Royce for the Safechuck family in London, Frank Dileo warned him that reporters would find out about it and start asking questions. Hurt, Michael asked, “Who cares what they think?” and carried on with the relationship. When the Bad tour moved on to Dublin, a group of reporters drinking in the bar at Jurys Inn began to speculate about where wee Jimmy might be that night. Hotel stationery and an envelope were requested by the journalists, who laughingly wrote out a note telling Master Safechuck that he could be rescued if he was being held against his will. It had seemed a great joke at the time because no one thought seriously that there might be improprieties involved.

  There were whispers, though. Quite a number of people had been mildly scandalized—or at least put off—by the crotch grab that Michael had begun to do onstage. The move had first showed up in the “Bad” video, and was carried over into the Bad tour. Michael at first insisted it was “choreography,” but what he was doing onstage looked blatantly masturbatory to some in the audience. And, well, really, those were stroke motions he was making. When his story changed—what people saw was a reflexive move he made in response to the music, Michael said, and h
e wasn’t even conscious of it—people who doubted him grew more outspoken. Those were pretty sexual gestures for a guy who was supposed to be Peter Pan. There were murmurs that maybe he was hiding something.

  Only a handful of people knew in 1988 about the single credible claim of inappropriate conduct that had been made against Michael Jackson and most of those people were in England. The story involved a boy named Terry George who had been twelve when he approached Michael at London’s Lanesborough Hotel in 1979 and asked if he could do an interview for his school newspaper. Charmed, Michael invited the boy to his hotel room, where they spent most of the time “giggling and laughing,” recalled Terry, who realized during this first encounter that Michael preferred the company of kids to that of adults. It seemed a dream come true, especially when Michael called the boy at home the following week. By early 1980, the star was phoning him three times a week, occasionally collect, always at exactly nine at night, London time, the boy recalled, an hour when his parents were often out playing bingo. He and Michael would chat for hours “about silly stuff,” Terry said. Sometimes Michael would sing to him over the telephone.

  Then one night Jackson called and sounded different. The line went quiet at one point, and he asked Michael if he was still there, Terry remembered: “Out of nowhere, he asked me if I masturbated, and that if I did, did I use cream?” He really didn’t understand the question, said Terry, who “could hear down the line that [Jackson] was making strange noises.” The conversation left him feeling “confused and uncomfortable,” said Terry, who made it clear that Michael had never touched him when they were alone. His conversations with Jackson ended soon after, when his parents discovered that he had run up a huge bill, Terry recalled, and forbade him from using the telephone. He went to Michael’s hotel again when the star came to London in 1981 but this time his friend was “frosty,” and all contact between them ceased.