Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  “What really started up the problems at the house,” Schaffel said, “was Alejandra undermining everything that Grace did, because Alejandra was looking at Michael’s kids as her meal ticket. Alejandra was basically trying to instill in the children that she was the next best thing to their mother. Any time Grace would say, ‘Do your homework. Don’t watch TV. Go to bed,’ Alejandra would say, ‘Oh, stay up as late as you want. Don’t listen to Grace. She’s not your family, I am. She’s just hired help.’ And Alejandra’s cool, right? She’ll basically let them stay up all night, eat ice cream, cruise the Internet, whatever they want.”

  Michael had refused to allow his children to go online, and was quite restrictive about what they could watch on television as well. “He made them read,” recalled Tohme Tohme. “I never saw them when they didn’t have a book in their hands. They were reading constantly. Michael wouldn’t let them go on the computer or any of that. Always a book.”

  “The kids were brought up to be very well mannered,” Schaffel said. “They always said hello, good-bye, please, thank you, you’re welcome, because that was what Michael taught them. But when they went to live at Hayvenhurst, their world changed dramatically. They had the Internet there, and all the kids had computers. The kids got on the computer, their parents got on the computer. It was just the way things were. And so with Alejandra’s permission or encouragement they started reading shit about Debbie, and about Michael being a pedophile, and they had never been exposed to any of this information before.”

  Among the worst effects on Prince, Paris, and Blanket of what Alejandra (and the Internet) had done, Schaffel said, was how difficult it became for the kids to develop a relationship with their biological mother. “The kids didn’t want anything to do with Debbie, even though Debbie really wanted to get to know them. It was very painful for her.”

  Katherine Jackson said she had no idea what to do. “She didn’t want to cut the Internet off at the house because there was Genevieve and the other kids, Donte and Randy Jr., and they claimed they needed the Internet for their schools and their lives,” Schaffel explained. “And meanwhile Michael’s kids are watching the rude and nasty way that Alejandra’s two youngest kids, Jaafar and Jermajesty, are treating Grace. They were always swearing at her and saying, ‘You’re the hired help.’ And Prince and Paris started giving her a little lip themselves. Then whenever she laid the law down, Alejandra would undercut her. So it wasn’t very long before Grace was saying that she didn’t know how long she could stay at Hayvenhurst with Alejandra in the house. What it all boiled down to was that Katherine started realizing she was going to have to find another house where she could raise Michael’s kids separately.”

  Nothing quite revealed how the Jackson family functioned—or dysfunctioned—as the announcement that Michael’s funeral, scheduled to take place on his fifty-first birthday, was being postponed. Ken Sunshine delivered the news but gave no reason for the delay. Joe Jackson told reporters only that the family “had things we need to take care of first.” What he didn’t say was that those things involved appearances by family members at various events where they had been promised hefty fees. Joe himself was scheduled to spend the morning of Michael’s birthday with La Toya at the Nokia Theater in Times Square in New York, where they would greet fans at a $25-per-ticket “birthday celebration” for Michael called “Long Live the King!” Joe would then immediately jet to Las Vegas to appear with Robin Leach at the installation of the Brenden Theaters “Celebrity Star” at the Palms.

  The funeral finally took place on the evening of September 3, 2009, a date of no special distinction other than that no one in the Jackson family had any paying gigs to attend. Raging wildfires in the Angeles National Forest lit the northern horizon and turned the sky into a startling, spooky frieze of smoky vermilion. From a distance, the entire affair created a scene that might have been an outtake from the “Thriller” video. It seemed appropriate that the fleet of Rolls-Royces delivering the Jackson family to Forest Lawn should all be Phantom models.

  A motorcade of more than twenty long black vehicles had made the trip from the Hayvenhurst estate to Glendale. Those who emerged from the assorted limousines and made their way toward the Great Mausoleum included Lisa Marie Presley, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, Chris Tucker, Macaulay Culkin and his actress girlfriend Mila Kunis, Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and federally indicted home run champion Barry Bonds. The most notable guest of all was seventy-seven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, who had scorned the public “hoopla” of the Staples Center memorial but arrived early at Forest Lawn, pushed in a wheelchair that was positioned at the end of one row before most of the other guests arrived. Joe Jackson came separately as well, but took a seat in the front row next to his estranged wife and alongside his sons, who showed up dressed in black tuxedos brightened by red ties and pocket handkerchiefs, accented by the same single silver glove that each of them had worn at the public memorial. The most notable absences were Stevie Wonder, who had stayed away so as not to be “a distraction,” and Debbie Rowe, who had received an invitation but remained at home.

  Owing to the suffocating heat of an evening on which the temperature didn’t drop below ninety degrees until well after sunset, the service itself was to be conducted in a garden space just outside the Great Mausoleum, from which Michael’s gold-plated casket was carried to the specially built stage, then adorned with and surrounded by enormous bouquets of white lilies and white roses. Two large painted portraits of the star, both from Thriller Time, flanked the stage.

  The funeral’s opening prayer was delivered not by a Jehovah’s Witness but by Pastor Lucious Smith of Pasadena’s Friendship Baptist Church, who began by reading Ecclesiastes 3:7. “A time to tear and a time to mend; a time to keep silent and a time to speak.” Gladys Knight’s performance of the gospel hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” moved most to tears, while Clifton Davis delivered a heart-stopping rendition of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Lisa Marie wept throughout and seemed in some way conjoined to Katherine as mourners in chief. His death had transformed Lisa Marie’s attitude toward Michael in ways that seemed at once predictable and surprising. The last time Michael had called her, in 2005, shortly after his acquittal on the criminal charges against him, “He asked if I still loved him,” Lisa Marie would tell Oprah Winfrey a year later. Michael said “he wanted to tell me that I was right about a lot of the people around him, that it had panned out to be exactly what he and I had talked about years ago,” Lisa Marie recalled. Michael “was trying to throw a line out to see if I would bite emotionally, and I wouldn’t,” she said. To his question about whether she still loved him, “I told him I was indifferent,” Lisa Marie remembered, “and he didn’t like that word, and he cried.” But still, for some reason she had sobbed all during the day of Michael’s death, Lisa Marie told Winfrey, even before she heard the news: “I was in England and I don’t know why but it was the strangest day of my life . . . I was trying to work and I came home and I was literally cutting my food, eating my dinner, crying. And I wanted to go upstairs and watch something mindless on TV and stop crying. I looked at my husband and said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t stop,’ and then an hour later the call came and I heard.” She was still crying more than two months later. She had spent the time since Michael’s death “trying to gain clarity,” Lisa Marie would tell Winfrey, “because at some point I pushed it away and I just had to move on with my life and when that happened it was like a tidal wave brought it all back.”

  When Elizabeth Taylor rose from her wheelchair to speak, the choke in her voice gave the simple words a complex power: “We shouldn’t have to be here. It shouldn’t have happened! He shouldn’t have passed away.” Joe rambled on about the people who had tried to “cheat” Michael and warned that he and the rest of the family would find those responsible for his son’s death and make them pay, but Michael’s father’s thinly disguised avarice was forgotten moments
later when a young man who had scar tissue for features stood to speak.

  David Rothenberg had become a public figure back in 1983 when, as a six-year-old boy, he was the victim of a crime that shocked Southern California to a depth that few other events of the eighties would reach. David’s monstrous father Charles Rothenberg, seeking revenge against his ex-wife during a bitter custody dispute, had doused his son with kerosene and set him afire as the boy lay sleeping in a hotel room bed. David survived, but third-degree burns covered more than 90 percent of his body, leaving him so horribly scarred that no amount of plastic surgery could give him a face.

  Protected by his mother from the pitying looks of adults who shuddered involuntarily the first time they saw him, the boy still glimpsed the terrified expressions on the faces of children he met outside burn wards. He had just turned seven and was still cycling in and out of surgery when he was first invited to visit Michael Jackson at home, David Rothenberg recalled, at the height of Michael’s Thriller success. Michael looked him in the eye and hugged him on that occasion, and every time they met afterward, the young man recalled. He had visited Neverland Ranch many times over the years, and if he was certain of anything in this world, it was that Michael Jackson would never hurt a child. “Michael was always there for me,” David Rothenberg finished. “Through everything, he never let me go.”

  Michael’s own three children sat in front-row seats throughout the service. Before it began, they had been permitted to approach the casket together and lay a golden crown at its head. By the end, Prince and Paris were so spent that they fell asleep against each other’s shoulders in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce. Blanket, though, remained awake and continued to sob as the children were driven back out onto the street.

  The mourners were gone by the time Michael’s casket was carried back to Holly Terrace and installed in the Sanctuary of Ascension, where it would remain, Forest Lawn had promised the family, as long as the building stood.

  On August 27, 2009, one week before Michael Jackson’s funeral, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office had officially ruled his death a homicide.

  “Acute propofol intoxication with benzodiazepine effect,” was the cause cited in the coroner’s report, which listed the drugs in Jackson’s system as “propofol, lorazepam, midazolam, diazepam, lidocaine, and ephedrine.” The implicit indictment of such reckless polypharmacy was about as clear an indication as could be offered that Dr. Conrad Murray was going to be charged with responsibility for Michael’s death.

  LAPD Chief William Bratton had told reporters as early as July 9 that his detectives were investigating a possible homicide but would have to wait for the coroner’s toxicology reports. A finding that the benzos in his system had contributed to Michael Jackson’s death would certainly complicate matters. The Los Angeles Times quoted a senior law enforcement official as saying that even if the coroner ruled that Jackson’s death had been a homicide, it was possible no charges would be filed, given the entertainer’s well-documented history of drug abuse. If the coroner ruled that propofol was what had killed Mr. Jackson, the Times source added, then Murray and any other doctor involved in providing or administering the drug could very well face involuntary manslaughter charges.

  In addition to the independent investigation being conducted by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, at least seven state, local, federal, and foreign agencies were working with LAPD detectives. That the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had been called in was not simply the result of DEA “expertise,” but also because the agency had the power to operate across jurisdictional boundaries. News that the police departments in Las Vegas and Houston were cooperating in the investigation of Conrad Murray was no surprise, but word came that the New York police department, the Dade County sheriff’s department in Florida, Scotland Yard in London, and Interpol were also involved. California State attorney general Jerry Brown told reporters that his office was mining its computer database for information about prescription drugs that had been provided to Michael through various doctors and pharmacies under any number of aliases. A team of physicians had also been assembled through the medical board of California to make a determination about whether Conrad Murray and/or other doctors had been guilty of negligence in their treatment of Michael Jackson, a finding that would have to be reached in order to sustain a manslaughter prosecution in the case.

  As early as July 4, the Los Angeles Times had reported that investigators were “focusing on at least five doctors who prescribed drugs to Michael Jackson.” None of those physicians was named, but it didn’t require inside sources to know that one of them was Arnold Klein. Among the first search warrants executed by the DEA was one that ordered the Mickey Fine Pharmacy to turn over “all records, reports, documents, files, inventories, and written information” in connection to its distribution of controlled substances. The raid on Mickey Fine appeared to have been targeted primarily at the dermatologist whose offices were just upstairs, and any doubt was removed when Los Angeles County assistant chief coroner Ed Winter showed up at Dr. Klein’s door to serve a subpoena demanding information about medical files in his possession.

  Klein had been answering tough questions since the afternoon of Jackson’s death, when Debbie Rowe called the doctor and, according to Jason Pfeiffer, “started screaming at him. I heard her say, ‘What did you give him?’ And Klein said, ‘I wasn’t there. I haven’t given him Demerol for a couple days.’”

  Ed Winter would say he had become interested in Dr. Klein when he examined the more than thirty vials and packages of medications that had been recovered from Michael Jackson’s master suite at the Carolwood chateau. “We located prescription slips in the names of Omar Arnold, Peter Madhonie, and other names,” Winter recalled. “These were specifically from Klein.” Winter promptly filed a subpoena for Dr. Klein’s medical records, and by the time the coroner’s investigator visited Klein’s offices in mid-July reporters were already chasing the story.

  In public, Klein seemed self-assured as ever, initiating a media offensive the moment his name began to be raised in connection to the criminal investigation. Though unwilling to reveal much about the prescriptions of Demerol and Dilaudid he had written for Michael Jackson over the years, and refusing to say a word about the twenty-seven occasions on which he had self-prescribed controlled substances between the time of Jackson’s return to the United States from Ireland in 2008 and his death in 2009, Klein wanted to make it clear that he had never prescribed propofol for Michael or anyone else. “I didn’t give him the crap they’re talking about,” he snapped at an interviewer on ABC’s Good Morning America. “How am I going to prescribe Diprivan when I don’t understand how to use it.” Klein’s claim seemed convincing when he added that whoever had provided and administered propofol to Michael should be treated as a criminal: “It becomes nothing more than manslaughter, or something worse than that.”

  By August, Klein was just one of at least a dozen physicians who were either flinching from or responding to stories that they had provided Michael Jackson with controlled substances. Subpoenas had been served to obtain the medical records of not only Arnold Klein, but also of Mark Tadrissi, the dentist who had acknowledged giving Michael and his son Blanket propofol; Dr. David Adams, a Las Vegas physician who reportedly admitted to the LAPD that he gave Michael Jackson propofol before Conrad Murray did; and Dr. David Slavit, who had conducted the independent medical examination of Michael for AEG. Assistant Chief Coroner Winter arrived unannounced at Dr. Larry Koplin’s clinic in Beverly Hills with a search warrant shortly after his first visit to Arnold Klein’s shop just down the street, demanding to examine the records of a nurse who had worked as an anesthetist in Koplin’s office during the time Michael Jackson was his patient. Winter also visited Dr. Randy Rosen at the Spalding Pain Medical Clinic in Beverly Hills, a high-end outpatient surgery center where Arnold Klein had reportedly required the services of the clinic’s anesthesiologists while he performed an assortment of cosmetic
procedures, including, perhaps, some on Michael Jackson. The Spalding Pain Medical Clinic was also, it turned out, where Debbie Rowe had given birth to Paris Jackson in 1998. Knowing that he might be visited next, Dr. Allan Metzger sent forth his celebrity attorney Harland Braun to tell reporters that while his client “did give Mr. Jackson a prescription for a mild sleeping pill in 2009, because Michael was complaining of not sleeping,” Dr. Metzger “turned Michael Jackson down” when the entertainer asked for propofol. The doctor had not seen Mr. Jackson since an April 2009 visit to Michael’s home, Braun added, which was the occasion “when he said no to Michael’s request for Diprivan.” Even without a search warrant served upon him, Dr. Metzger was cooperating fully with authorities, the attorney added: “We have turned over all of Dr. Metzger’s records to the LAPD.”

  Alex Farshchian, on the other hand, was resorting to a duck-and-cover strategy, refusing even to admit that he was one of the doctors being targeted by the investigation into Michael Jackson’s death. Plenty of other people, though, were talking to investigators about allegations that the Miami doctor had “overprescribed” antianxiety drugs to Jackson at a time when Michael was downing as many as forty Xanax pills a day. LAPD detectives confided in off-the-record interviews that they were convinced Farshchian had supplied Jackson with Demerol over a period of years.

  Even as Farshchian kept silent, a number of other doctors who were not implicated in the investigation chose to be proactive with the media and to make it clear that they were not among Michael Jackson’s enablers. Tokyo-based physician Eugene Aksenoff, who had treated both Michael and his children during their visits to the city, told the Japan Times that he had steadfastly refused Michael’s requests for stimulants (though he said nothing about any requests for sleeping medications) and hypothesized that Michael’s overuse of skin-whitening medications had contributed to the symptoms that plagued him in later years, including his insomnia. Deepak Chopra, who had been licensed as an internist and endocrinologist long before he became a celebrity self-help guru, was outspoken in criticizing the doctors who had fed Michael’s drug habit. “We put drug pushers in jail, but give licenses to doctors who do the same thing,” Chopra said in one of many interviews. “I know personally that they write multiple prescriptions and they even use false names . . . This cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their codependent relationships with addicted celebrities, must be stopped.”