Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Those feelings intensified when the lawsuit on Jordan Chandler’s behalf was filed in September 1993. “That whole shit hit the fan,” Lisa Marie would recall in her 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, “and he was quick to call me and tell me what his side of the story was, so it looked like an extortion situation. I believed him, because he was so convincing. I don’t know . . . I just believed everything he said, for some reason.” After that first conversation, Michael began to spend hours with Lisa Marie on the phone nearly every day, sharing his distress and seeking her advice. “I believed he didn’t do anything wrong, and that he was wrongly accused and, yes, I started falling for him,” she would tell Diane Sawyer in 1995. “I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it.” Maybe it had something to do with her father, Lisa Marie would acknowledge years later; she still wasn’t sure.

  During the last months of 1993 and in early 1994, Michael was showering Lisa Marie with flowers and gifts, saying that without her and Liz Taylor, he might have killed himself to escape the horror of what was happening to him. Lisa Marie confided in her childhood friend Myrna Smith about the developing relationship, but Smith recoiled, finding the whole thing both suspicious and ridiculous. “I can only guess what his motives were,” Smith would tell author Suzanne Finstad, “and I could only tell you what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me he was.”

  Michael settled the Chandler lawsuit in January 1994, but was still under investigation by two grand juries and remained the object of an unstinting media investigation. Whether the goal was to remake his image or to create something that resembled a normal life, or both, he began to tell the people around him he was longing for family and children. During one of their phone conversations in April 1994, according to Lisa Marie, Michael asked, “If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?” She answered “I would do it.”

  On April 29, 1994, Lisa Marie announced her separation from Danny Keough. Barely more than two weeks later, on May 14, 1994, Michael and Lisa Marie exchanged marriage vows at a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic in May 1994 at which no family or friends were present. Priscilla Presley was indignant and publicly accused Michael of using her daughter to repair his public image: “It’s so obvious.”

  There were others, though, who believed the relationship was genuine. Donald Trump purported to be one of them. Michael hadn’t been too convincing at the beginning, Trump admitted. Michael told him over dinner one evening that he had a new girlfriend, Trump recalled, and “I congratulated him and asked, ‘Who is it?’ He was very shy and looked down into his napkin, then put the napkin over his face and said, ‘Trump, Trump, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m so embarrassed.’” Later, Trump invited the couple for a stay at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The couple stayed in separate bedrooms, which also did not encourage anyone to believe that this couple was enjoying any sort of romance. One afternoon, though, he happened to see the two of them walking the grounds of the estate, Trump said, Lisa Marie wearing a form-fitting black silk dress and Michael in a sharply tailored black suit with a scarlet dress shirt and black tie. Suddenly Michael dropped to one knee and kissed Lisa Marie’s hand, Trump remembered. She pulled him to his feet and they kissed, staring into one another’s eyes. Then Michael pulled a small box from his vest pocket and when Lisa opened it she found a string of pearls. “For awhile, those two were really getting it on,” Trump would insist several years later.

  Few others believed it. Among those who scoffed at the notion of a love affair was the man who had performed the couple’s marriage ceremony. “Michael looked like a little boy lost,” Judge Hugo Francisco Alvarez said a few weeks after the wedding. “He stared at the floor throughout the ceremony and when I pronounced him and Lisa Marie man and wife, he was reluctant to kiss her. There were no tears of happiness, no joy, no laughter. The ceremony had a somber tone. It was bizarre. I never heard him say he loved Lisa Marie.”

  The president of the Elvis Presley Fan Club in California, Terry Marcos, responded to news of the marriage by blurting, “Oh God, no! Are you serious?” Michael Jackson was “not even a man as far as I’m concerned,” Marcos said.

  Michael had tried repeatedly over the years to satisfy the fans who wanted him to have a real girlfriend, and the mother who wanted him to find a wife. Both Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal, whom Michael continued to describe as the loves of his life, acknowledged that he never made the slightest sexual advance toward them. Lisa Marie, though, was spreading a very different story. With her apparent encouragement, one of Lisa Marie’s friends, Monica Pastelle, told a reporter that his new wife had described Michael as “very hot” in bed, albeit a bit kinky, given to dressing up in women’s clothes and “role playing” during their sexual encounters. Lisa Marie appeared wearing only a towel around her waist in the video for his song “You Are Not Alone,” and kissed him with apparent passion onscreen. In one of the few statements she ever made to the media about their relationship during that time, Lisa Marie described it as “a married couple’s life . . . that was sexually active.”

  Michael’s longtime PR chief Bob Jones, though, would call the marriage “nothing more than a publicity stunt. Michael had no desire for a woman,” Jones would say shortly after his firing ten years later. “Not the natural desires that heterosexual men have, anyway.” The odd thing was, though, that Lisa Marie seemed to sincerely care for Michael and to want the marriage to work, said Jones, who admired the young woman. “Lisa Marie was so down to earth,” he said, yet remained “a tremendous supporter and believer” in Michael, even when it was obvious to him and everyone else, Jones said, that the feelings didn’t run both ways.

  Lisa Marie became hurt and angry when Michael began to disappear without warning, often for weeks at a time. She had no idea where he might be, his wife said, other than what she read in the press. As early as December 1994, London tabloids began reporting that Michael planned to file for divorce after complaining that his wife was “invading his space.” By that point, Lisa Marie was spending almost no time at Neverland and when Michael came to stay at her house in the San Fernando Valley’s Hidden Hills enclave, he always brought kids with him. “He would join them running around the house and creating havoc,” Jones recalled. “They were out of control and she couldn’t say a word.”

  According to Jones, Lisa Marie was becoming increasingly annoyed by the efforts Michael made to convince her he was worth just as much as the Elvis Presley estate she had inherited and to either impress or threaten her with a relationship to Princess Diana that did not actually exist. And she was more and more offended by what her husband told the press. In a September 1994 interview with London’s Daily Mirror, Michael offered an entirely invented story about his marriage proposal, saying it had taken place when he and Lisa Marie were drinking wine in the living room at Neverland: “We had just finished watching All About Eve, starring Bette Davis. We both love that movie. I just walked over to her, reached into my pocket and pulled out this huge diamond ring. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked her. ‘You want?’ She screamed out, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’” The voices of those who said he was just using her began to penetrate Lisa Marie’s defenses. She became truly angry, and a little disgusted, when she read Michael’s interview with TV Guide and saw that he had said, “Lisa Marie told me Elvis had a nose job.” It was “absolute bullshit,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone: “I think it justified something in his mind—they were asking him about his plastic surgery. I read that, and I threw it across the kitchen. ‘I told you what?’”

  Friends would say that the marriage began to truly sour shortly after Lisa Marie and Michael were interviewed by Diane Sawyer in June 1995. Lisa Marie watched the ABC interview afterward and was shocked and hurt by the moment when Michael had reached behind her to hold two fingers over the crown of her head, making devil horns. A month after the Sawyer interview
aired, Lisa Marie left with her ex-husband Danny Keough and their children for a two-week vacation at Hawaii’s Mauna Lani Bay resort, and tabloid reports described them as acting like a young couple in love, kissing and cuddling on the beach. A young waitress at one of the resort’s restaurants told a reporter, “If they’re divorced, then maybe all couples should split! They were just totally in love.” Lisa Marie would tell Oprah Winfrey years later that, “I was very torn up because I broke up my family. I left my husband for Michael. I was having a hard time trying to process that.”

  By the end of their first year of marriage, Elvis’s daughter seemed to be tiring of the whole charade. Monica Pastelle, the same friend who had spread the story that Lisa Marie said Michael was “very hot” in bed was now telling people that Elvis’s daughter had become fed up with the hours and hours her husband spent in the bathroom applying and removing various cosmetics. She had never seen Michael when he wasn’t wearing makeup, Lisa Marie complained; if they slept in the same bed, she’d find his pillow smeared with it in the morning.

  In August 1995, the Daily Mirror reported that Lisa Marie was about to file for divorce. Lisa Marie denied the story, but she and Michael were separated. The two of them hadn’t seen one another in nearly a month when Bob Jones and other Jackson representatives began calling her in September to say it was important that she show up at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in New York, where Michael was going to open the show with a twenty-minute long medley. She finally consented, Lisa Marie said, on the condition that she didn’t have to walk the red carpet with Michael. Michael’s people agreed, but when they delivered her to Radio City Music Hall on the evening of the event, she was dropped off right at the red carpet, where her estranged husband was waiting. “I was pissed. I just felt like I was being used at that point,” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone. It got worse when Michael said he was going to sing to her, and that he had a surprise for her. “He says, ‘I’m gonna kiss you,’” Lisa Marie would recall in her interview with Playboy. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Do we have to? That’s bullshit.’ On the way there I kept saying, ‘Do we have to?’ I squeezed his hand so hard that I cut off the circulation. He wouldn’t tell me when it was going to happen.” It happened onstage, with a worldwide television audience watching. “And they said it wouldn’t last,” Michael said into the camera, then locked lips with Lisa Marie in one of the most awkward kisses ever caught on camera. “It looked awkward because I wanted out of my skin,” Lisa Marie would tell Playboy. Afterward, “I remember my whole look was, ‘Don’t you come anywhere fucking near me,’” Lisa Marie would tell Rolling Stone, and Michael got the message. After his performance, “he didn’t come over,” Lisa Marie remembered. “I talked to him later and he said, ‘I saw the look on your face and I knew that if I walked up to you, I didn’t know what you were going to do to me.’”

  Bob Jones would say he realized how little Lisa Marie truly mattered to Michael when the star collapsed onstage while rehearsing for an HBO special in December 1995 and was taken to the hospital. Michael was excited by the arrival of Diana Ross at the hospital (where his room was decorated with posters of Shirley Temple and Mickey Mouse) and welcomed his mother Katherine as well. But “Bill Bray had to talk him into letting his wife, Lisa Marie, visit,” the publicist remembered. “Bill had to explain to Michael that the media would crucify him if he turned his own wife away.” When she arrived at the hospital, Lisa Marie said, she was confused by the conflicting accounts of her husband’s condition. “Every day there was a different report,” she would explain to Oprah Winfrey. “I couldn’t tell what was happening. Dehydration, low blood pressure, exhaustion, a virus . . . we were all a little bit in the dark.” Eventually, “There was a bit of a showdown in the hospital,” Lisa Marie would tell Playboy. “When I started asking too many questions about what was wrong, he asked me to leave. This is the real story. He said, ‘You’re causing trouble.’ The doctors wanted me to go. I freaked out, because it was all too familiar. When he got out, I called him and said, ‘I want out.’”

  Michael had insisted from the beginning of their marriage that he wanted Lisa Marie to bear his child. Increasingly inclined to suspect that having a baby who was Elvis’s grandson was part of Michael’s motivation, Lisa Marie dreaded what she imagined would be a “custody battle nightmare” in the not too distant future, and refused to abide by Michael’s plans for impregnating her. One morning over breakfast he told her that the nurse in Arnie Klein’s office, “my friend Debbie,” had offered to have his baby if Lisa Marie wouldn’t. “Tell her to go ahead and do it,” was Lisa Marie’s level reply. The two separated for good shortly thereafter, but when Lisa Marie learned that Debbie Rowe was being artificially inseminated she made a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation. “Lisa Marie Presley actually had a thing for Michael Jackson, and for a time she wanted him back,” Bob Jones would recall. “She not only would seek assistance from his family in trying to reunite with Michael, but Lisa Marie also often called me and Johnnie Cochran asking for help in her quest to get back her husband.” When it was announced in late 1996 that Debbie Rowe was pregnant, though, Lisa Marie’s “quest” ended.

  Michael made slight pretense that he and Debbie were living “a married couple’s life.” He did, though, continue to either tease or try to please his fans with the illusion that he had healthy heterosexual appetites. Michael encouraged his fans to pass around the rumor that one of the boys who was often seen in his company during the late nineties, Omer Bhatti, was his “love child.” The evidence collected to support this story included the fact that the entire Bhatti family had lived at Neverland for a time, and that Omer (who had begun performing a Michael Jackson tribute act that toured worldwide when he was still a preteen) began to appear regularly in public and onstage with Michael after about 1996. The boy, fans posted among themselves, was the product of a one-night stand Michael had with Omer’s Norwegian mother, Pia. Look how dark the kid’s skin is, more than one believer suggested. What those fans overlooked was that Pia’s husband was a Pakistani named Riz Bhatti whose own complexion easily explained his son’s. The Bhattis were very close to Michael, though. Many believed, with good reason, that Pia Bhatti was the biological mother of Michael’s son Blanket. How the child had been conceived, and who the father might be, remained a matter of pure speculation. The only certainty was that the conception of Michael’s youngest child had not occurred, as he liked to put it, “in the natural way.”

  Jackson repeated his determination to leave behind the Jordan Chandler scandal throughout the last years of the twentieth century. It would never happen. He might refuse to discuss the Chandler allegations following his interview with Diane Sawyer, but they would follow him everywhere he went, permanently tarnishing his image in the United States. After his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley ended, he left America more and more often, and was almost perpetually on the move. When he was in his home country, he spent at least as much time in New York, Florida, and Las Vegas as he did at Neverland Ranch, and a lot of time in Los Angeles. His HIStory tour set attendance records in Europe and Asia, but didn’t make a single stop in the mainland United States—American fans had to be content with two concerts in Hawaii. And yet, as he prepared to take a last stab at the recovery of all he had lost, Michael was not simply returning to the country of his birth, but to the very city where, fifteen years earlier, it had all been taken from him.

  17

  The Christmas season of 2008 would be a wrenching one for Michael Jackson’s three children. The woman who had raised them was out of their lives and this time, it seemed, for good. Grace Rwaramba had once again been dismissed from Michael’s presence. The reasons were disputed. Rwaramba’s enduring claim was that she and Michael were fighting constantly about his abuse of prescription drugs, but Michael had been injecting or ingesting drugs, often heavily, during most of the time she was in his employ. Grace also said that Michael hadn’t paid her salary or her health insurance
premiums in months, and that he gotten rid of her by sending Tohme to say that her pay was being cut by half. Jackson family friend Romonica Harris, a Chicago school teacher, would report that, shortly before her departure, Grace attempted to force Michael to marry her and that Rwaramba grew incensed when Jackson refused. The nanny denied the story and there was no evidence it was true other than Harris’s claim.

  Grace’s support of Sheikh Abdullah’s legal claim against Michael, though, was without doubt a sore point. “When Abdullah sued Michael last year, Michael said in the beginning, ‘Oh, I never got money from him,’” Grace would explain not long after being sent away from the Carolwood chateau. Worried that she was being set up to take a fall for filching the more than $1 million that Abdullah had wired to her personal bank account, Grace turned for help to Katherine Jackson: “I said, ‘You, Michael, and I—we will all go to jail! You know we didn’t report to the IRS about that gift.’ I told her I had all the documents. That worked. She immediately called Michael and he stopped denying that he knew about the money.”