Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  This version of Michael owed much to the research and thought of Evan Chandler’s younger brother Ray, who had put together a portrait of the star that other members of the family adopted, with varying degrees of condemnation. Ray was also the one person in the family—the one person on earth, perhaps—who insisted on a compassionate portrait of Evan.

  In the years since the settlement with Jackson, members of the Chandler family—Ray in particular—had repeatedly pointed out that neither Evan nor Jordie ever said a single public word about what had happened in 1993 and 1994. “Everything people heard came from the Jackson camp,” one member of the family noted. “They began staging these worldwide media events, and that’s what whipped up the press.” The Chandlers remained most unforgiving of the “smear campaign” they accused Jackson of allowing his representatives to run against them during those weeks and months. “When Michael was faced with what he’d done, he had a choice to make,” one of them explained. “If he truly loved Jordie he would not have done what he did by setting his dogs on the family like that.”

  By the time the $20-million-plus settlement was made, the Chandlers said, they were a fragmented family made up of frightened individuals. During a meeting with the deputy district attorney and the lead detective who were handling the criminal investigation in Los Angeles, Evan and Ray were told, “You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the next ten years,” then warned that, “It only takes one nut with one bullet to kill you.” The relentless barrage of threats against not only Evan and Jordie, but every member of the family, sent them all into hiding. “The British were by far the worst,” recalled one of the Chandlers. “They were actually coming here to the States to hunt us down.”

  It would be reported years later in Vanity Fair that Jordie’s life had been “completely broken by his association with Michael Jackson,” while a UK newspaper described him as “a lonely, introverted young man.” But that might have been nothing more than another way of saying that he had spent the subsequent ten years hiding from reporters and photographers. Jordie had endured a great deal, though, and “broken” was certainly a fair description of his family.

  The “Jackson saga” had grown “like a cancer in the family,” Ray Chandler would say in 2009, “and it affected us all.” No one was more decimated than Evan, in Ray’s telling. “Evan was at one point the most vilified person on the planet,” his brother explained, “because he had accused the most loved person on the planet of something heinous. And when you are the most vilified person on the planet, it affects you. All of the adults who were touched by this came out of it broken and ruined, but Evan was the most broken and ruined. He spent the rest of his life being afraid.”

  When Jordie was still thirteen, his father had won custody of the boy by claiming in court that his ex-wife June had, effectively, prostituted her son to Michael Jackson. Even Ray wouldn’t defend his brother’s decision to abandon his two young sons, Nikki and Emmanuel, when he headed east with Jordie. The relationship with the boys’ mother Nathalie had turned so nasty that he couldn’t bear to deal with her, Evan explained, but he intended to remain in his sons’ lives. He would come out to visit them, Evan promised, more than once, but he never did. After more time passed, he said he would develop a relationship with the boys when they got older, but that didn’t happen either. In the Chandler family chronicle of events, Nikki and Emmanuel were just two more of Michael Jackson’s victims.

  Evan fled with his oldest first to Germany, then to a Long Island beach community, before returning the boy, at age fourteen, to Los Angeles, where Jordie found some sense of family in the home of his former stepmother Nathalie, his two half-brothers, and Nathalie’s new husband, the screenwriter Robert Rosen, who by all accounts was doing stellar work as a stepfather. The teenager refused to have any contact with his mother, though. The skateboard that June had delivered to her son on his birthday in 1996 sat for years untouched in the garage of the Brentwood house where he lived.

  Jordie paid his own way through the Crossroads School, an exclusive and expensive arts-oriented academy in Santa Monica whose alumni roster was well stocked with celebrities (Zooey Deschanel, Taylor Locke, and Spencer Pratt were among Jordie’s schoolmates during his years there). One of the first major business investments Jordie made was in the very school he was attending; after contemplating his $20,000-plus annual tuition and the prime piece of property that encompassed the campus, the boy had become one of Crossroads’ owners. He was successfully playing the stock market by the time he graduated from high school and then enrolled at UCLA, growing wealthier year-by-year with the assistance of a vice president at Santa Monica Bank who had become his financial advisor. By the time Jordie had transferred to New York University, he was hiring the best private instructors and became a skilled skier and windsurfer whose lifestyle included regular snorkeling adventures in the Bahamas and winter sojourns in Taos and Vail. He appeared to be thriving. His stunning looks, cheerful personality, and willingness to pick up one check after another made him popular among fellow students in both high school and college.

  Still, Jordie’s existence remained a furtive one. Threats against his life were regularly posted on the Internet by Michael’s most rabid fans. Evan Chandler had refused to return to Los Angeles after 1994, the year a twenty-four-year-old British woman began stalking him at home and at work. Other more aggressive fans had taken her place and everyone related to Jordie knew they had to watch out for both him and themselves. “We’re coming to take your blood. Your blood and your shitty little son’s blood,” was just one of the many frightening messages that had been left on Evan’s answering machine, according to Ray. After receiving a package at his dental office that contained a decapitated rat and a note reading, “You’re next,” Ray said, Evan arranged for his son to take shooting lessons at the Beverly Hills Gun Club. The tabloids put their own sort of bounty on Jordie’s head, offering six figures for candid shots of the boy.

  By the time he turned twenty, Jordie was once again living mainly in New York, where he felt safer. He had developed by then into a young man who was every bit as good-looking as he had been as a thirteen-year-old boy. He owned luxury properties on both coasts and was enormously wealthy, having more than doubled his payout from the Michael Jackson settlement by investing in Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco at the exact moment when oil company stocks were about to enter a period of explosive growth. He moved between his beachfront house in West Hampton and his apartment in a Manhattan building that featured a rooftop swimming pool and an indoor running track, working briefly as a dancer, interning at a record company, and dabbling as a songwriter in collaboration with a young Greek-American woman named Sonnet Simmons who wanted to be a pop star. As long as he stayed out of the media’s eye, life was good. People around the young man were protective. Jordie was increasingly disturbed, though, by what was happening to his father.

  What the public knew Evan Chandler best for during those years were his legal conflicts. He was accused in 1994 of attacking and beating Dave Schwartz in Larry Feldman’s office for calling him an extortionist. Two years later, Evan filed a $60 million lawsuit that accused Michael Jackson of violating the terms of their confidentiality agreement in his interview with Diane Sawyer and in the lyrics of a song from the HIStory album. Along with the demand for money, Evan had insisted that he be permitted to release his own album, to be titled EVANstory, with songs that included “DA Reprised,” “You Have No Defense (For My Love),” and “Duck Butter Love.” The lawsuit was thrown out in 1999.

  Handsome as he was (a better-looking version of Rob Lowe was how one relative described him), Evan had been unable to form another relationship with a woman after leaving Nathalie. He spooked the few he got to know. Though diagnosed as bipolar, Evan refused to take his medicine, complaining that it turned him into a “zombie.” Both his depressions and his manic episodes grew more pronounced as he aged. He could be vaguely dangerous and definitely scary when he transitioned from one state t
o the other. He also became nearly as addicted to plastic surgery as Michael Jackson. Inordinately vain and spectacularly insecure, Evan had subjected himself to at least nineteen separate cosmetic procedures in the years after the Jackson settlement. Evan would claim that part of the reason for his repeated surgeries was that he wanted to alter his appearance to avoid being recognized by the Jackson fans that were constantly promising online to chase him down and do him in. This, however, didn’t explain why he injected himself on a monthly basis with Botox and cosmetic facial fillers. The result of all this “work” was a face that still appeared remarkably striking and youthful from a distance, yet eerily smooth up close. People who met him for the first time got the impression of an old man who was wearing the unbearably tight mask of some youthful movie character they couldn’t quite place.

  Evan was also growing financially depleted, regularly asking his much wealthier son for loans that he never repaid. Money was a constant source of friction between the two.

  The filing of criminal charges against Michael Jackson in 2003 was viewed by some of the Chandlers—Ray in particular—as an opportunity for vindication. In the run-up to the trial, the media began dredging up information about the Chandler case that had never been reported earlier, and almost all of it reflected badly on the accused.

  Among the many unfortunate developments afflicting Michael was that Lisa Marie Presley’s debut album, To Whom It May Concern, was released in early 2003, when the effect of the Bashir documentary was still being felt. Lisa Marie, the one person in the world who was in a position to speak the truth about Michael’s sexuality, had agreed to a series of national interviews to promote her album and was distressed but probably not surprised to discover that the subject most interesting to reporters was her marriage to Michael Jackson. To her credit, she never suggested that Michael might be a child molester—quite the opposite—but her wish to distance herself from her ex-husband, combined with whatever residual ache she felt about it all had resulted in some edgy observations about Michael’s ability to manipulate people by pretending to be someone he was not.

  “You think he used you?” Howard Stern asked her.

  “Mmm . . . you know, sketchy,” she answered.

  “Sketchy?” Stern asked.

  “Mmm. Timing-wise,” Lisa Marie replied.

  In a one-on-one interview with Diane Sawyer, Lisa Marie described herself as “naïve as hell,” when she married Michael: “I never thought for a moment that someone like him could actually use me for any reason like that. It never crossed my mind, and I don’t know why—I’m sure it crossed everyone else’s.”

  The most devastating observation about Michael, though, was the one she offered to GQ in early 2004, two months after his arrest: “He’s somewhat asexual, but he can be whatever he wants to be when he wants to be.”

  The impact of Lisa Marie’s remarks was mild in comparison to the blow NBC delivered with its Michael Jackson Unmasked special that ran on Dateline around the same time that the first single from To Whom It May Concern was released. The program featured a Chicago private detective named Ernie Rizzo who had worked on the Chandler case. Rizzo gave NBC the names of multiple witnesses who agreed that back in 1993 Michael had gotten into the habit of phoning Jordie every weekday at 3:15 p.m., the moment the boy got home from school, and that the two of them regularly stayed up late into the night talking on the telephone. Several witnesses corroborated Rizzo’s claim that he had seen “lots of love notes” written by Michael to Jordie, and that Michael liked to play a game with children that he called “Rubba”—“You rubba me and I rubba you.”

  NBC quoted lines from Jordie’s sworn statement to the police that had never been seen or read before by the public, including those that described what had happened during their trip to Monaco for the World Music Awards. Jackson had rented two hotel suites, the boy said, one for his mother and Lily, the other for him and Michael. It was in that hotel suite, Jordie had claimed, that Michael first sexually seduced him.

  The same file of police reports included Evan Chandler’s recollection that when he confronted Jackson about the relationship with Jordie, Michael’s reply had been, “It’s cosmic. I don’t understand it myself. I just know we were meant to be together.”

  NBC had also found the maid who worked for Evan and Nathalie Chandler back in 1993, Norma Salinas, who described the “strange things going on” in the Brentwood house after Michael Jackson began to spend the night. Michael usually showed up “all by himself, no bodyguards or anyone,” Salinas recalled. Jordie introduced the star to her as “my best friend,” the maid remembered: “They were hugging, laughing. They looked very happy, like a couple.” On the first Friday night that Michael stayed over, Nathalie told her to pull out the trundle beneath Jordie’s bed, Salinas recalled, because that was where Michael would be sleeping. The two of them, man and boy, had spent nearly the entire weekend behind the closed door of the bedroom Jordie normally shared with his half-brother Nikki, according to the maid, who remembered coming into the room on Saturday morning to discover that the trundle had not been slept in.

  Nothing delighted the Chandlers so much as the fall of Anthony Pellicano, whom they regarded as the person most responsible for spreading lies about their family. Almost a year before the November 2003 raid on Neverland Ranch, FBI agents had swarmed Pellicano’s offices in Los Angeles, searching for evidence that he was behind a threat against Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had discovered a dead fish with a rose in its mouth and a sign reading “Stop” on the cracked windshield of her car. The FBI obtained its warrant to search Pellicano’s offices after learning that Busch had been working on a potentially shocking story about the private investigator’s client, the actor Steven Seagal. During their search, FBI agents found two military practice grenades modified to serve as homemade bombs and enough C-4 explosive to take down a jumbo jet, along with illicit telephone recordings of Tom Cruise speaking on the telephone to his estranged wife Nicole Kidman. Pellicano had pleaded guilty to illegal possession of dangerous materials and was sentenced to thirty months in federal prison. By the time Michael Jackson was preparing to go to trial in Santa Barbara County, federal authorities were already deep into an investigation that would result in wiretapping and racketeering charges against Pellicano, and an additional federal prison sentence of fifteen years.

  Ray Chandler began asking reporters if they still thought Mary Fischer’s GQ article about Evan Chandler’s dealings with Michael Jackson was so great.

  It became much easier to believe people like Robert Wegner, Neverland’s former chief of security, who told NBC that during the police search of the ranch back in 1993, he had received a phone call from Pellicano ordering him to collect all records involving guests who had slept in Michael’s bedroom and to delete the files from his computer. Dateline also quoted anonymous sources who said that Pellicano had been tape-recorded begging Neverland employees not to talk to the police, and reported that some of these people had been so shaken by Pellicano’s subsequent threats that they “still cower when they speak of him.”

  Ray Chandler would create a similar if slightly smaller sensation with the publication of his book All That Glitters: The Crime and the Cover-Up. He had been moved to pen his “exposé,” Evan’s brother said, when he saw the Martin Bashir documentary. Among the fresh revelations in Ray’s book was that the first to realize what was happening between Michael and Jordie was Nathalie Chandler, who had shouted at her husband one afternoon, “Can’t you see what’s going on? They’re in love!”

  Ray also produced a list of “six wishes” that he said Michael had given Jordie, telling the boy to repeat them three times a day to make them come true. These were:

  1. No wenches, bitches, heifers, or hos.

  2. Never give up your bliss.

  3. Live with me in Neverland forever.

  4. No conditioning.

  5. Never grow up.

  6. Be better than best friends forever.r />
  The most significant impact of all, though, was the publication of Jordan Chandler’s detailed and undeniably disturbing description to police investigators of how a sexual relationship had developed between Michael Jackson and him:

  “Physical contact between Michael Jackson and myself increased gradually. The first step was simply Michael hugging me. The next step was for him to give me a brief kiss on the cheek . . . He then started kissing me on the lips, first briefly, and then for a longer period of time. He would kiss me while we were in bed.

  “The next step was when Michael put his tongue in my mouth. I told him I didn’t like that. Michael started crying. He said there was nothing wrong with it. He said that just because most people believe something is wrong, doesn’t make it so . . . Michael told me another of his young friends would kiss him with an open mouth . . .

  “We took a bath together. This was the first time we had seen each other naked. Michael named certain of his children friends that masturbated in front of him . . . Michael then masturbated in front of me. He told me that when I was ready, he would do it for me. While we were in bed, Michael put his hand underneath my underpants. He then masturbated me to a climax. After that Michael Jackson masturbated me many times both with his hand and with his mouth . . .

  “He had me suck one nipple and twist the other nipple while he masturbated. On one occasion when Michael and I were in bed he grabbed my buttock and kissed me while he put his tongue in my ear. I said I didn’t like that. Michael started to cry . . .

  “Michael told me I should not tell anyone what had happened. He said this was a secret.”

  All that saved Jordie, Ray Chandler would say, was that “Evan separated him from Michael before it got to anal sex.”

  Evan Chandler’s brother took satisfaction in seeing former Michael Jackson defenders turn on the star. Among these was young actor Corey Feldman, who completely contradicted what he had told reporters back in 1993. “I started to look at each piece of information, and with that came this sickening realization that there have been many occurrences in my life and in my relationship with Michael that have created a question of doubt,” Feldman explained to Martin Bashir, who interviewed him for ABC’s 20/20.