Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Only Katherine had standing before Judge Beckloff, though. “Frankly, Mrs. Jackson is concerned about handing over the keys to the kingdom so quickly,” her attorney Schreiber told the judge at the July 6 hearing, making reference once again to “conflicts” that might affect John Branca’s ability to make decisions most favorable to the Michael Jackson estate. If anyone’s judgment was going to be clouded by conflicts, countered Paul Gordon Hoffman, it was Katherine Jackson, who would be more interested in spreading the wealth throughout her family than in building the fortune that Prince, Paris, and Blanket Jackson would eventually inherit.

  After acknowledging that, “we’re getting off to a bit of a rocky start here,” Judge Beckloff ruled in favor of the executors named in the will. “Someone needs to be at the helm of the ship,” the judge explained, and for now that would be Mr. Branca—and Mr. McClain if he was able to assist.

  Under the circumstances, Beckloff’s decision made sense. Weitzman and the other attorneys representing Branca in court had argued effectively that a singular level of knowledge and acumen would be required to sort through the mountain of debt and scores of lawsuits that Michael Jackson had left behind while at the same time managing the assets of his enormous—and enormously complicated—estate. Regardless of what enemies said about Branca’s character, few disputed that he was a brilliant lawyer and a masterful deal maker. In the years since he had helped Michael Jackson secure the ATV catalog, Branca’s negotiations of sales involving the copyrights of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana; Steven Tyler’s Aerosmith publishing catalog; Julian Lennon’s share of the Beatles’ royalties; Berry Gordy’s Jobete Music; and the catalog of the legendary Leiber and Stoller songwriting team each had established new precedents in the valuation of musical properties. Branca had helped Don Henley of the Eagles and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival regain copyrights and secure royalties they’d lost years earlier. The unprecedented deal he brokered that made Korn partners with the band’s record label, EMI, had become the industry standard. That Branca would put millions of dollars into his own pockets if permitted “unfettered” control of the Michael Jackson estate was a given, but it appeared reasonable to assume that the attorney would do this by “maximizing the estate,” as Weitzman put it.

  In his ruling, Judge Beckloff not only removed Katherine Jackson as the administrator of her son’s estate, but also formally revoked his earlier order giving her power over her son’s possessions, meaning that Branca could demand the return of anything that had been removed from the Carolwood chateau. While Beckloff left Mrs. Jackson’s temporary custody of Prince, Paris, and Blanket Jackson in effect, the judge put off a decision about permanent custody until the end of the month, a ruling that was clearly intended to permit time for challenges.

  The Jacksons recognized immediately how precarious their position had become. “Family attorney” Londell McMillan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Branca outside the courthouse pledging to work with the estate’s executors to ensure the futures of Michael’s children. “We have no reason to believe that this is going to turn into a nasty fight over millions of dollars,” McMillan told the assembled media.

  For the moment, John Branca was no longer the Jacksons’ main concern. The greatest threat to their grasp on Michael’s fortune now, they knew, was Debbie Rowe.

  One competing report after another about the parentage of Prince and Paris had surfaced during the days immediately following Michael’s death. Us Weekly published an article that identified Arnold Klein as the biological father of Prince and Paris, and suggested he would demand some say in deciding custody. Dr. Klein’s denials, made to ABC’s Good Morning America and on CNN’s Larry King Live, were at the very least equivocal. “I think, to the best of my knowledge, I am not the father,” Klein told King, then conceded a moment later that he had “once donated sperm” at Michael Jackson’s request. He would not take a DNA paternity test, Klein insisted on both programs: “It’s no one’s business,” he told King. Yet the doctor was quite willing to make suggestions that sounded vaguely like demands about the upbringing of the Jackson children. Debbie Rowe, their natural mother, should be involved in raising the two older kids, Klein said, and Grace Rwaramba should be included as well, since she was the caregiver all three of the children knew best. Within weeks, he would be dispatching an attorney to a courtroom filled with reporters with the demand that he be permitted to play a role in rearing Michael’s children, a request Judge Beckloff dismissed as “quite bizarre.”

  Even as Klein’s comments were being batted about in the United States, Mark Lester was telling newspapers in the UK that he could very well be the father of Paris and might be Prince’s father as well. It was at Michael’s request that he had donated his sperm at the Harley clinic in London (where Jackson had undergone a number of cosmetic procedures), Lester said, back in early 1996, about eight months before Michael’s marriage to Debbie Rowe, and eleven months before the birth of Prince. It was to Paris, though, that he had always felt a “definite bonding,” Lester said. “I think there’s a definite possibility that she’s part of me,” he said. “Paris is very pale, with blue eyes,” the former child actor pointed out. “All my daughters, apart from my eldest, are fair with blue eyes.” When the Lester and Jackson families went on holiday together, he noted, people commented regularly upon how alike Paris and his daughter Harriet looked. He was only speaking out publicly, Lester said, because the Jackson family had cut him off from contact with all three children. “With Michael’s mother now their legal guardian, it’s like the kids are being isolated,” he complained. “I’m their godparent, and Michael was the godparent to all my four kids. Our two families spent a lot of time together, and had a lot of fun together. Now I’m not able to have any communication with the children. My repeated phone calls aren’t returned and e-mails go unanswered . . . I think it’s cruel that I’ve been excluded.” Uri Geller, who had been Jackson’s friend for years and remained friends with Lester, confirmed that Michael had mentioned to him when they were in New York together that “he wanted Mark to help him father a child for him.” Lester had offered to take a DNA test to settle the question of his paternity and Geller urged the Jackson family to allow it. “That would solve everything,” he observed.

  The Jacksons, though, categorically refused to acknowledge that there was any question about who had fathered Prince, Paris, and Blanket. “These genetic lottery attempts aren’t going anywhere,” Londell McMillan told reporters. Jermaine and Tito Jackson each insisted, in separate interviews with British tabloids, that Michael was the biological father of all three children. “People say things just to get attention, but those are definitely Michael’s children,” Jermaine told the News of the World. “You can look at the kids and tell that they are Michael’s kids.” Tito echoed his brother in a paid interview with the Daily Mirror: “They are [Michael’s] children. Blanket is Michael’s, I can tell. Those eyes don’t lie. Them eyes are Michael’s all over again. I see a lot of Michael in him.” Prince and Paris were Michael’s offspring as well, Tito went on: “Yes, they are. Just because they look white doesn’t mean they are not his.”

  The motivations for the Jacksons’ claims were obvious to many cynics. “What people don’t understand is how powerful those kids are,” Leo Terrell observed. “Those kids are the key, because the money goes wherever they go. And that means all the money, except what’s being given to charity. Believe me, all the players know that.

  “The provisions of the will hold initial weight, but not long-term weight,” added Terrell, who had read the document closely. “Celebrity aside, no court is going to allow Michael Jackson to dictate from the grave who is the best parent for his kids. Will or no will, Debbie Rowe has the inside track, in front of Katherine Jackson.”

  Biology was a trump card in California custody contests and it was obvious that the Jacksons had been advised of this by their attorneys. On July 2, four days before the court hearing at which control of the estate and guar
dianship of the children was to be decided, Debbie Rowe had told the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles that she would seek a restraining order to keep Joe Jackson away from the kids. “I want my children,” she told a reporter for the channel. “I am stepping up. I have to.” A friend of Rowe’s told Us Weekly that Debbie also planned to seek custody of Blanket, so that the children could stay together. Iris Finsilver, the attorney who had represented Rowe in her custody disputes with Michael Jackson, told the same magazine, “They are her children. She loves them and always has.”

  A private viewing of Michael Jackson’s body for his family at Forest Lawn and a public memorial at the Staples Center were scheduled for July 7. At Forest Lawn, Jackson’s corpse had been prepared for its final public appearance by Karen Faye and Michael Bush, the makeup artist and costume designer who had been with him for years. The two spent nine hours blinking back tears and gagging on the reek of formaldehyde as they worked on the body as it lay next to the casket on a mortuary table. Faye applied a thick coat of the Lancome Dual Finish Powder that Michael had carried in a compact for years. Bush dressed his longtime client in a black tunic that was specially crafted for the occasion, draped with white pearls and accented by a gold belt that La Toya would liken to a boxing champion’s. The costume designer had also helped to lift the body into the coffin. “The work me and Karen did with Michael at Forest Lawn, that bonded us for life,” he would say later.

  After the Jackson family had admired the work of Faye and Bush and said a private goodbye to Michael, his closed casket was transported to the Staples Center, the same venue where the final rehearsals for the “This Is It” concerts had been held, and where AEG would get its chance to put on a blockbuster Michael Jackson concert after all. The company had hired Ken Ehrlich and Kenny Ortega to work as the memorial’s producers in consultation with the Jackson family. The assembly of those who would speak or perform was inevitably fraught with opportunism and exaggeration. Brooke Shields was among those chosen to deliver a eulogy even though she had had no relationship with Michael during the previous quarter century and not much of one before that. Perhaps in anticipation of Debbie Rowe’s potential claim on both Michael’s children and his estate, the Jacksons were loading the deck with race cards, asking that Reverend Al Sharpton, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and the children of Martin Luther King Jr. all be invited to speak. Berry Gordy, whose only contact with the deceased in recent years had been through the attorneys handling the lawsuits they filed against one another, was on hand to describe Michael as “like a son to me.” By contrast, Marlon Jackson was genuinely affecting when he stood to say of his brother, “We will never understand what he endured . . . being judged, ridiculed. Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone.” Eleven-year-old Paris upstaged everyone who had appeared before her when she stepped to the microphone at the end of the event to make a short speech that the memorial’s producers insisted was unscripted and unplanned: “I just want to say that ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine. And I just want to say I love him so much.”

  In all its false notes and true ones, the Michael Jackson memorial had been suffused with a sense of uplift, and it would be remembered as yet another demonstration that Michael was far more loved than hated. After only 8,750 pairs of tickets were awarded, at random, from among the 1.6 million members of the general public who applied for them, the City of Los Angeles had braced for what they feared might be a stampede of the perimeter its police department had set up around the Staples Center. Instead, the atmosphere that surrounded the event was hushed. The 31.1 million television viewers in the United States who had tuned in to Michael’s memorial made it the third-most-watched send-off in TV history, just behind the 33.2 million Americans who had watched Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997 and the 35.1 million who had seen Ronald Reagan’s burial in 2004.

  Internet video streams that had not existed in 1997 and were nascent in 2004 attracted another 33 million views at the Web sites of the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) alone. Worldwide, the memorial collected the biggest television audience ever to watch a farewell to a public figure. More than 6.5 million British viewers had tuned in, which was still only about a third of the 18.7 million people who watched it in Brazil. Every one of Japan’s networks covered the service, and 7 million of that country’s viewers had tuned in to a live broadcast that was running simultaneously in Germany, France, and at least a dozen other countries. Politicians in Los Angeles who attempted a public objection to the estimated $1.4 million in costs associated with what one city councilman called a “private memorial for a celebrity singer” were quickly sent scurrying for cover when economists pointed out that the event had added at least several times that amount to the revenues of local businesses for three days, during which nearly every hotel room in the city was occupied.

  Marlon Jackson’s hope that his brother would finally be left alone was, of course, futile. Michael Jackson’s death provided British tabloids with a freedom from their country’s restrictive libel laws that they had never enjoyed while he was alive and they intended to take full advantage. As debate raged within the family and among Jackson’s fans over the prospect of Michael’s interment at Neverland, the tabloid media rushed to fill the void of decision with round after round of ghoulish speculation. One British tab reported that Jackson had long been “interested in having his body frozen in the hope he could be brought back to life.” Because of the autopsy, however, “It is now too late for his wish to be granted as the freezing process—cryonics—must be initiated almost immediately after death.” Another tabloid reported that “Michael Jackson will live on as a ‘plastinated’ creature’” preserved by the controversial German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibition of human corpses had already shocked and fascinated more than 26 million visitors in cities around the world. The tabloid quoted von Hagens as declaring that, “An agreement is in place.” The doctor had spoken to representatives of the Jackson family months earlier, a spokesman explained, and it was agreed that Michael’s body would be plastinated and placed next to Bubbles, his late pet monkey, plastinated years ago and now on exhibit in the Body Worlds and the Mirror of Time exhibition at the O2 Arena.

  On the day of Jackson’s public memorial, the coroner’s office released his death certificate. No cause for Michael’s demise was listed. That determination would likely take weeks, it was explained, while various toxicology tests were completed. The coroner’s office did for the first time acknowledge that it retained possession of Jackson’s brain—or at least part of it—for neuropathology tests, adding that it would return the organ to his family when the testing was finished.

  The question of what would be done with Michael’s corpse continued to fill news columns, especially in the UK. What had kept so many Jackson fans at Neverland was, according to a London tabloid report on June 30, that Michael’s family had scheduled a “public viewing” of his body at the ranch. This was entirely untrue, but the Jacksons were feeling the pressure of an enormous fan base that was insisting Michael should be buried at Neverland. Many local residents in Los Olivos were already unnerved by the vigil that had been taking place outside the gates of the ranch since the day of Michael’s death. Two-lane Figueroa Mountain Road was bottlenecked by satellite news trucks, while vendors hawking T-shirts and spring water trailed hundreds of fans (and dozens of reporters) who appeared ready to camp out there “until it’s all over,” as one of them put it to the Los Angeles Times. The young clerks at the Corner Coffee House in Los Olivos enjoyed collecting business cards from journalists who had arrived from Germany, Belgium, Poland, and Venezuela, but most of the property owners in the community fretted about what the traffic and noise would do to their bucolic community if Neverland became Graceland West.

  Jermaine Jackson and his father Joe were the two family members pushing hardest for a “shrine” at Neverland that would far exceed both the scale and appeal of th
e Elvis attraction in Tennessee. The creation of a private memorial park at the ranch would ensure a revenue stream that even Michael’s music catalog couldn’t match, Jermaine argued. Tohme Tohme had arranged for a helicopter to fly Jermaine to Santa Maria in order to make a direct appeal to local officials. All of the other Jackson brothers supported plans for a Michael Jackson memorial at Neverland, Tohme said. Tohme was also trying to negotiate an arrangement with Tom Barrack and Colony Capital, which still held the note on Neverland. Sensing an opportunity, Barrack ordered the work crews at the ranch to step up their pace. The main grounds were cleared and close to the condition in which Michael Jackson had left them within a few days of his death. The flower beds were “pristine,” as Fortune magazine had it, while the mansion, guesthouse, and movie theater were all thoroughly refurbished, with fresh candy placed at the concession stand.

  Barrack himself began quietly working to persuade county authorities to permit a burial at the ranch but learned quickly that California state regulations about the disposal of human remains were quite restrictive. Graves on private property were disallowed if even a single neighbor objected, and the last thing a majority of the people in the Los Olivos area wanted was an international tourist destination with a 10,000-vehicle parking lot in their backyard.