Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Recognizing what he was up against and expecting criminal charges to be filed against Jackson any day, Bert Fields (who was primarily an entertainment lawyer) brought in his own high-profile trial attorney, Howard Weitzman, best known for helping auto magnate John DeLorean beat a federal case back in the early eighties that had at one point looked ironclad. Almost from the moment Weitzman became involved in the Jackson case, though, according to Fields and Pellicano, he began to push for a settlement. They resisted furiously, said Fields and Pellicano, convinced that the case against Michael was weak, even with Larry Feldman as the attorney prosecuting it.

  Jackson was at that point in no position to make any good decisions. He had been in the midst of the Asian leg of the Dangerous tour when the Chandler allegations surfaced, already suffering from a variety of minor injuries incurred during his punishing schedule, and almost completely unable to sleep. Within days of learning what Jordie had reportedly said about him, Michael began mixing painkillers, antianxiety medications, and sleeping pills in combinations and doses that swiftly became a serious threat to his health. Jackson was unable to provide the deposition Feldman was demanding, according to one of Bert Fields’s associates, because he was glassy-eyed, slurring his speech, could hardly stay awake, had difficulty even lifting a glass of water, and was unable to maintain focus for more than a few seconds at a time.

  On November 12, 1993, Michael arrived in London in the company of Elizabeth Taylor to be examined by Dr. Beauchamp Colclough, who promptly arranged for Jackson’s admission to an eight-week drug rehabilitation program. Eighteen vials of medications were found in Michael’s suitcase when he checked into a clinic where he had booked the entire fourth floor. Doctors put him on a Valium IV to wean him off the painkillers and his management company canceled the remainder of the Dangerous tour, at a cost to Jackson of at least $10 million.

  Feldman responded by filing a motion for trial preference that would force the case into court within 120 days, a request typically granted when a plaintiff is under the age of fourteen. He also filed to compel the deposition of Michael Jackson. The court granted both of Feldman’s motions on November 23, and set a trial date in March 1994. During the hearing, Bert Fields, in an attempt to delay the civil suit, argued before a courtroom filled with reporters that a criminal indictment of Jackson seemed imminent, and that, of course, the criminal case should be tried before the civil one was heard. Howard Weitzman immediately told the media that Fields “misspoke himself,” and the simmering tensions between the two boiled over. The next day, Fields and Pellicano resigned from the case.

  Amid the chaos and mounting pressure, Weitzman recruited Johnnie Cochran to the defense team. Cochran and Weitzman agreed that the judge’s 120-day trial ruling had been a “devastating” blow to the Jackson side, according to Carl Douglas, the top associate in Cochran’s law office. “It pushed us to settle,” Douglas recalled. An additional benefit of the 120- day ruling, according to Feldman, was that he had been able to use it to persuade the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to “let us take the lead in prosecuting the case. That put the defense in the position of having to defend the civil case knowing that a criminal case was behind it.”

  Feldman also vigorously opposed the defense request for a gag order, ensuring that the media would have full access to each of his highly detailed court filings. The defense lawyers felt increasingly harried by a tabloid media that continued to report only what made Jackson look guilty. “The British press was relentless,” Douglas remembered. A woman who had been working as Jackson’s maid at Neverland was quoted as saying that she had been sent to Michael’s bedroom at Neverland with several others to gather up all his makeup, eyeliner, lipstick, creams, and gels, then crate them up, along with stacks of magazines and photographs, including one of Macaulay Culkin in his underwear. “My job was to hide all the bottles of women’s perfumes,” she explained. “Michael used only female fragrances, not male, and I guess someone thought that might look bad.”

  After Pellicano acknowledged in an interview that Jackson had spent at least thirty nights sleeping (innocently, the PI said) in Jordie’s tiny bedroom at the Chandler house, a document was leaked to the media in which police investigators reported that Jordan had told them that Michael engaged in oral sex and mutual masturbation with him in both of his parents’ homes, at the Hideout, in Monaco, and at Disneyland Paris. Evan Chandler portrayed himself as a father desperate to protect his son, who was being victimized by Jackson’s defenders: His life had been threatened, a dead rat had been left in his mailbox, and his office had been ransacked, Chandler said. A statement from Jordie taken by a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy was published that included: “Jordan stated that Jackson told him that if Jordan ever told anyone about the molests, Jordan would be placed in juvenile hall and both Jordan and Jackson would be in trouble. Jordan said that Jackson told him he did this with other boys; however, Jackson said that ‘he didn’t go as far with them.’” “Peter Pan or Pervert?” read a headline in the New York Post.

  As 1993 drew to a close, Weitzman and Cochran huddled with John Branca, who had been replaced by Bert Fields three years earlier but had been brought back aboard as Jackson’s general counsel. All three men maintained that they believed Michael was innocent of the charges against him yet were inclined to advise him to settle the case. Branca worried that Michael might not be capable of withstanding a trial that could last six months. Cochran’s concern was the racial divide that had opened wide in the wake of the Rodney King debacle and the Los Angeles riots in April 1992. Ethnic animosities might work against Michael if the case was tried in largely white Santa Barbara County, Cochran fretted, and even if the trial was held in Los Angeles County, Hispanics might resent Jackson for his money and blacks might dislike him for trying to be white. The kicker was that a settlement could forestall the criminal case if it prevented Jordan Chandler from testifying against Michael. “We wanted to do all we could to avoid the possibility that there would be a criminal filing,” Carl Douglas admitted.

  Cochran’s long relationship with Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti (during the early 1980s the two had worked together on the district attorney team that investigated shootings involving police officers) enabled him to secure a promise that Jackson could return from London to Neverland without fear of arrest. As he emerged from the cocoon of rehab and began to make his way back to California during early December 1993, Michael was stunned by the immense media coverage the accusations against him were receiving. In the UK, the Daily Mirror set up a “Spot the Jacko” contest in which readers could win a trip to Disney World if they correctly predicted where Jackson would show up next, while another paper reported that the entertainer was at a European clinic receiving a course of cosmetic surgeries that would render him unrecognizable. In the United States, Geraldo Rivera convened a mock trial with a jury composed of audience members to consider criminal charges against Jackson that hadn’t even been filed. Michael’s own sister La Toya offered to provide proof that he was a pedophile for a fee of $500,000 and a bidding war erupted among tabloids in both the United States and the UK before editors on both sides of the Atlantic realized that La Toya had nothing to sell.

  The final blow that broke his will to fight was the warrant served on Jackson shortly after his return to the United States that permitted police to conduct a strip search of his body, giving officers from both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties the right to photograph and videotape “his penis, anus, hips, buttocks and any other part of his body.” Failure to comply, the warrant stated, would be used in court as an implied admission of guilt. On December 20, 1993, at Neverland Ranch, Jackson was forced to stand naked on a raised platform for twenty-five minutes while his lower body was photographed from every conceivable angle, so that resulting prints could be compared to Jordie’s description of Michael’s genitalia. Michael nearly fainted several times and perhaps only got through “the most humiliating ordeal of
my life” by keeping Arnold Klein in the room with him. In the end, the exercise proved to be a wash. While the several vitiligo splotches on Jackson’s buttocks and the one on his penis were an approximate match to what Jordie described, Michael was not, as the boy had said, circumcised.

  Larry Feldman stepped up the pace of his court filings, submitting one motion after another that demanded depositions of the defendant. “Each time Michael Jackson used the Fifth Amendment, we took the opportunity to be very specific about what he was not answering,” Feldman remembered. “We described in detail why we were entitled to the photos of his genitalia. It almost didn’t matter whether we won or lost—we were getting even.”

  Cochran, the lawyer Jackson most trusted, made the crucial decision to advise Michael that he should just pay these people and walk away. His insurance company wanted him to be done with this almost as much as he did, Cochran told Michael, and was prepared to write the check for their share of the cost. When Larry Feldman submitted a motion to the court in Los Angeles asking for the right to examine Jackson’s finances, Michael told his attorneys, “I want this over.”

  Cochran and Feldman, who were quite familiar with one another (Feldman had represented Cochran as his attorney in a number of “personal matters”), arranged to conduct their settlement conference under the supervision of three retired LA County judges. Cochran and Weitzman regarded the photographs of Michael Jackson’s genitalia as “the purple gorilla sitting in the room,” recalled Carl Douglas, and were desperate to keep them out of Larry Feldman’s hands. Fully aware of this, Feldman negotiated ferociously. “The numbers being discussed seemed fantastic,” remembered Douglas, who believed that the turning point of the settlement conference came when one of the three retired judges observed that, “It’s not about how much this case is worth. It’s about how much it’s worth to Michael Jackson.”

  On January 25, 1994, the day before Jackson’s scheduled deposition by Larry Feldman, Douglas was assigned to carry the settlement papers to the bungalow at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas where Michael was staying, and witness his signature on an agreement that would cost him more than $20 million, including a $15.3 million annuity for Jordan Chandler, $1.5 million apiece for Evan Chandler and June Chandler Schwartz, and more than $3 million in fees for Feldman and his law firm. The media was informed that same day.

  Tom Mesereau would say that settling the Jordan Chandler case on such terms was “the worst decision Michael ever made.” Most of the media and the public took the news that Jackson had paid so many millions to the Chandler family as an implicit admission of guilt, even after he had made his emotional public statement of denial: “I am not guilty of these allegations. But if I am guilty of anything, it is of giving all that I have to help children all over the world. It is of loving children of all ages and races. It is of gaining sheer joy from seeing children with their innocent and smiling faces. It is of enjoying through them the childhood that I missed.” Within a matter of weeks, Pepsi had canceled its endorsement contract and all of Michael’s film projects fell through. The theme song he had recorded for the movie Addams Family Values was dropped from the soundtrack, the development of a line of his and hers fragrances bearing his name was abandoned, and plans for a Jackson-themed Captain EO attraction at Disneyland were scrapped.

  Neither the Chandler case nor the Chandler story went away. Grand juries were convened by the district attorneys in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties during the spring of 1994 to hear evidence that Michael Jackson was a pedophile. Frustrated by the refusal of Jordan Chandler to appear before either grand jury, prosecutors dispatched police to find at least one other boy who would corroborate Jordie’s sworn statement. Jackson and his attorneys waited out proceedings that dragged on for months while nearly two hundred witnesses testified and stacks of evidence were presented, including the description of Jackson’s genitalia given by Jordie that was laid out next to the photographs of Michael’s lower body.

  Grand juries are generally a formality in California; nearly all such deliberations end in indictments. Only prosecutors can present evidence, and they are required to demonstrate no more than a “reasonable likelihood” that a crime has been committed. Yet in the summer of 1994, both grand juries refused to indict Michael Jackson. “There was no real evidence,” a police officer involved in the investigation admitted to the Los Angeles Times.

  Damaging allegations against Jackson continued to surface in the media (Hard Copy correspondent Diane Dimond was making something like a life’s work of that project) but Michael was buoyed by polls that showed the majority of the public didn’t believe the charges made against him by the Chandlers. He was determined to move on with his life and rehabilitate his image. Michael might have taken any number of different approaches to this task, ranging from going back into the studio to disappearing from public view. What he chose was to marry the daughter of the greatest pop icon of all time.

  Lisa Marie Presley was nine years younger than Michael Jackson but already the mother of two children by her first husband, whom she had met when she joined the Church of Scientology. Lisa Marie had grown up as Elvis Presley’s pampered daughter in Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tennesee, until her parents divorced when she was three. She then moved back and forth between Tennessee and her mother Priscilla’s home in Beverly Hills, which became the girl’s full-time residence after Elvis died in 1977, when Lisa Marie was just ten.

  Though she cut a demo in 1992, Lisa Marie had turned down the offer of a recording contract, put off by an executive at Sony who had told her she would “have to crawl before you walk,” and could not realistically expect the production or promotion support of an established star. It was not long after this that their mutual friend, the painter and sculptor Brett Livingstone Strong, suggested that Lisa get together with Michael Jackson to explore putting out a record on Michael’s new Nation Records label.

  Lisa Marie was “taking courses” at Scientology’s headquarters (or “Flag Land Base” as members of the church call it) in Clearwater, Florida, during early 1993 when Strong phoned her to suggest that putting out a record produced by Michael Jackson would give her the launch she hoped for. Lisa was excited by the idea, Strong recalled, but Michael was dismissive: “She can’t sing.” Strong insisted she could. “Get her to send me a tape,” Michael told him. Lisa said she would bring Michael a tape in person, and arranged to play it for him at Strong’s home in Pacific Palisades.

  She and Michael had actually met once before, in October 1974, when Lisa was six and Michael was sixteen, backstage at the Sahara Tahoe, where the Jacksons were performing one of the last concerts of a nearly year-long world tour. Neither remembered that brief encounter and believed they were saying hello for the first time when Lisa showed up at Strong’s house in January 1993 with her Scientologist husband, bass player Danny Keough, and a demo tape that persuaded Michael the young woman did, indeed, have some potential as a singer. He wasn’t so impressed that he wanted to take the time to work with Elvis’s daughter, though, at least not at that moment. Lisa, however, began calling Strong constantly, as the artist recalled it, to see if he could arrange another meeting with Michael. All Strong could get for Lisa Marie was a meeting with the head of Nation Records; Michael himself never showed.

  Lisa eventually became resigned to the fact that nothing was going to happen at Michael’s company, said Strong, who persisted anyway in playing matchmaker—at least at the professional level. On February 1, 1993, the artist arrived at the huge birthday party Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla Presley, was throwing for her at the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park north of Los Angeles loaded with wrapped presents, among them an art book and a framed photograph of her introduction to Michael Jackson in Strong’s living room. Strong had written the inscription in the book, but allowed Lisa to believe it was Michael’s handwriting and that the book and the photograph were Michael’s gifts to her. Lisa again began to express interest in meeting with Michael, and he
r interest now seemed as much personal as professional. In March 1993 Strong suggested that Michael escort Lisa Marie to the Academy Awards ceremony, just as he had Madonna the year before. Michael refused, saying he was not about to date a married woman. By the late spring of 1993, when Lisa inquired about Michael it was with “the passion of a woman who fell in love,” according to Strong. “And Michael wasn’t interested at all.”

  Sometime before late June of that year, though, when Michael would launch the European leg of his Dangerous tour, Michael himself arranged a face-to-face meeting between the two of them, Lisa Marie said. “He immediately went into this whole explanation of what he knew people thought of him, and what the truth was,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone in 2003. “He sat me down and said, ‘Listen, I’m not gay,’” Lisa Marie explained to Diane Sawyer that same year. “‘I know you think this, I know you think that,’ and he started cursing and started, you know, being a normal person. And I was like, ‘Wow!’” What most struck her, Lisa would say in another interview, was that Michael spoke in a normal masculine voice and used the word “fuck.”

  She had no idea that her feelings for Michael were developing against the backdrop of the emerging Jordan Chander scandal. “I just want to say he’s not stupid, he didn’t get where he was because he’s stupid,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone almost ten years later. “It’s unfortunate that not a lot of people know who he really is. He doesn’t let anybody see it. And he has some idea about how he should represent himself in the public, which he thinks works for him, which is the sort of meek victim, meek-quiet thing that he does, which is not like he really is. So, he doesn’t let a lot of people see that. When he wanted to lock into you, or intrigue you, or capture you, or, you know, whatever he wants to do with you, he can do it. He is very capable of doing that.” She swooned at the thought that Michael was being real with her in a way he couldn’t be with other people, as Lisa Marie told it. “So I get caught up in that, I’m pulled in right away,” she would tell Sawyer. “Like, ‘Wow, you’re so misunderstood. Oh my God, you’re this guy.’ I fell into this whole, ‘You poor, sweet misunderstood thing.’”