My Friend Michael 2011
 
 
CHAPTER SIX
TWO WORLDS


  EDDIE AND I LEFT MEXICO ON NOVEMBER 13, 1993, our fantastic trip cut unexpectedly short. Going back to school and readjusting to my normal routine were difficult. Before the tour, I’d been excited about attending a new school in a new town. My mom took me shopping for new clothes and everything, but my dramatically late arrival cast a spotlight on me, and my excuse for missing school was kind of mind-blowing. I was famous among my eighth-grade classmates before I’d even met them.

   Michael was being accused of child molestation, and here I was, a young boy who had been traveling with him. From the outside, I have to admit, it did look rather strange. Not everyone knew Michael well enough to trust him the way my parents did. Even the district attorney sent my father a fax expressing concern that his children were at risk spending time with Michael Jackson. My father ignored it. Perhaps not surprisingly, the press was all fired up about me and Eddie. They set up camp outside our new house. One reporter, Diane Dimond, a correspondent for Hard Copy, showed up at the front door and stuck a microphone in my father’s face. People followed me when I left the house. Sometimes the media arrived outside the school, asking kids questions about me. Our new neighbors, who were still strangers, later told my parents that reporters had offered hundred-dollar bills to their kids if they could procure snapshots of us. The school issued a memo telling students not to talk to the press.

   Given all of this hubbub, Michael sent his head of security, Wayne Nagin, to stay with my family and help us manage until the situation died down. My parents tried not to make a big deal about what was going on. They kept it simple, saying to Eddie and me, “Be careful what you say. Go on living your life.”

   But my life had changed. When I walked down a hall at school, I heard other students whispering, “That’s the kid who was with Michael Jackson.” Some people thought I was weird, strange. Other people were intrigued. The most popular girl in the school wanted to hang out with me. That was cool. I was happy to go to parties with her, but I knew her interest didn’t really have to do with me. I befriended a guy named Brad Roberts, who understood that I was being judged and was kind of protective of me: I knew he had my back. Ordinarily I didn’t mind a bit of attention. A tireless prankster, I did things like covertly shining laser pointers on people and watching them try to figure out where the light was coming from. I was that kind of kid. But at this point even I wanted to shift the spotlight away from myself.

   The experience of entering school that year changed me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that the attention stemmed from my association with Michael. I became very careful about whom I chose to be friends with, what I said, and to whom I said it. And I was generally reserved, keeping my mouth shut about everything I’d just experienced. If my experience might have won me some momentary status, I wasn’t interested. For whatever reason—most likely my parents’ example—I was wired to be loyal. I wanted to protect Michael, and I didn’t know whom I could trust. I didn’t know what people’s motives or agendas might be—especially after Jordy’s accusations. It was hard to put my experiences with Michael aside, but discretion came with the territory.

   It was during this time that I truly learned to compartmentalize my life. In one compartment were my family and social life at school, and in the other was my life with Michael. Most adults do this kind of thing to one degree or another: there is a natural divide between their work lives and their home lives. The split between the public and the private that evolved in my life was not dissimilar. I never mentioned Michael, who was very much part of my life. Trips with him, vacations, phone calls, laughs, worries, life lessons—I kept all of it to myself. I became a person who thought carefully before he spoke. That caution has never left me.

  

   AT FIRST, MICHAEL WAS IN A REHAB HOSPITAL IN LONDON. My family and I talked to him on the phone every day for hours, passing the phone around among us to keep him company. It got to the point where we had to install what we called a “bat line” just for him. Line one was the house phone, line two was the fax, and line three was Michael’s dedicated line. He complained about how the staff at the hospital was treating him. The place was almost like a psychiatric ward, he said, and he knew full well that he wasn’t crazy. One day he couldn’t take it anymore and made his escape, bolting down the street. Some orderlies chased him down and brought him back. Finally Elton John stepped in and coordinated his transfer to another rehab place—a private estate outside London that was much more Michael’s speed.

   Soon after Michael’s transfer, he asked us to come and visit him in rehab. Thanksgiving break was beginning, so my parents gave the okay and Wayne brought me and Eddie to London for four or five days.

   This new rehab was located in a house in the country, a warm, comfortable, homey place, complete with fireplaces. Michael was really happy to see our familiar faces. He gave us a tour, introducing us to the friends he’d made and explaining his routine—like a child showing off his school. Come to think of it, it was probably the closest experience to going to school Michael had ever had. The patients had a daily schedule, spending time playing games, reading, watching movies, and doing arts and crafts. Michael was kind of proud of the artwork he’d been doing. He showed us a dinosaur he’d made out of paper and beamed like a little kid.

   During that visit, Michael was back and forth on the phone with the lawyer Johnnie Cochran. They were talking about settling the case—paying Jordy’s family a substantial amount of money to withdraw their accusations. Michael didn’t want to settle. He was innocent and saw no reason to pay people to stop spreading lies about him. He wanted to fight. But things weren’t quite that simple. The fact was that Michael was a money machine, and nobody wanted him to stop being one. If he took time off from his career for a two-to three-year trial, he would stop producing the billions of dollars worldwide that made him an industry. Because the legal fees of a trial would cost far more than any settlement, his insurance company, who would bear those losses, was determined to settle. Johnnie asked him if he really wanted to go to trial, was willing to have his whole life exposed to public scrutiny. If he settled, Michael could call it a day: move on with his life and get back to doing what he did best. And so Michael agreed to settle for what I believe was something in the range of $30 million. As I would later understand it, he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. At the end of the day, the decision to fight it out in court or to settle out of court was in the insurance company’s hands.

   The settlement was in the works before we arrived in England, and it was finalized while we were there. Michael was now free to return to the United States, and he was eager to come home. So, after only two days in London, Eddie and I joined Michael on a private jet to Neverland to finish our visit there.

   It was hard for Michael to return to Neverland knowing it had been ransacked by police in search of evidence against him. His staff had cleaned up, of course, but personal items like books were still missing and would be returned only gradually. Michael felt his privacy had been invaded. But Neverland was still his home, and it was the safest place to be.

   Michael tried his best not to put the burden of his troubles on us. There were times when I could tell that his mind was elsewhere, and he’d excuse himself to make a phone call. But he didn’t want Eddie or me to have to cope with such adult issues, and we remained, for the most part, blissfully ignorant, emphasis on “blissfully.” While Eddie and I were on tour with Michael, we had designed custom golf carts to use at Neverland. Michael had ordered them, and they were waiting for us. My own golf cart! It was practically as big a deal as getting my first car, and it was a sign that I had an open invitation to Neverland. Macaulay Culkin, whom I’d met a couple of times in New York because of Michael, was, along with his siblings, a frequent guest at Neverland. He and Michael had been friends ever since Mac had starred in Home Alone. Mac already had his own golf cart—his was purple and black. Mine was black and lime green. Eddie’s was black with a picture of Peter Pan on the front. The carts were equipped with CD players with superb sound systems. We hopped in those carts and drove them everywhere, at great speeds. I was more adventurous than I am now, and I’d go as fast as I could on the steep, narrow dirt roads that stretched up from the ranch into the mountains, precipitous drops on either side.

   At night, as usual, Michael, Eddie, and I made beds of blankets and pillows on the floor of Michael’s bedroom. As a result of the accusations and the lawsuit, Michael’s innocent childlike qualities had been warped into something pathological and creepy in the public’s perception, but none of the talk had influenced our sleeping arrangements, and none of us had a moment’s pause about it. Everyone knew not to think about taking the space next to the fireplace. That was mine. We called those floor beds our “cages,” and if anyone came near mine, I’d say, “Hey. That’s my cage. Don’t think about stealing my cage.” I put on classical music and fell asleep to beautiful melodies and the cozy warmth of the fire. However, because I frequently had trouble sleeping, when the house was dark and quiet I often went into Michael’s bathroom to listen to music. That might sound odd, but the bathroom had an amazing, studio-quality sound system, with Tannoy speakers and everything. Michael had had the speakers installed because he liked to blast music while he was getting dressed and ready for the day, and he got plenty of use out of them: it took Michael a long, long time to get ready. Michael found it amusing that I rarely slept. He liked to suggest that I just move my bed right into the bathroom. But sometimes in the middle of the night he’d shuffle in and listen with me.

   In that bathroom, Michael kept a lot of his own music: demos of stuff he wanted to record or songs he was working on but had yet to finish. So at night, alone, that’s mostly what I played—music that Michael had never released or was still developing. I sometimes sat in that room for hours, listening to certain songs over and over again. It was like my very own private unplugged concert.

   One of the unreleased songs that I loved the most was “Saturday Woman,” about a girl who wants attention and goes out to party instead of spending time on her relationship. The first verse went, “I don’t want to say that I don’t love you. I don’t want to say that I disagree…” —then Michael mumbled the rest of the lines because he wasn’t sure of them yet. The chorus went, “She’s a Saturday woman. I don’t want to live my life all alone. She’s a Saturday woman.” I liked “Turning Me Off,” an up-tempo song that hadn’t made it onto the Dangerous album; a song called “Chicago 1945” about a girl who went missing; a pretty song called “Michael McKellar”; and a song that eventually came out on Blood on the Dance Floor called “Superfly Sister.” I listened to that song over and over for years before it was released.

   While recording a song called “Monkey Business,” Michael had squirted his chimp Bubbles with water and taped him screaming in response; you hear this at the beginning of the song. That song was only available on a special edition of the Dangerous album. Another song I loved was called “Scared of the Moon,” which would come out in Michael Jackson: The Ultimate Collection. Michael told me that he wrote that track after having a dinner with Brooke Shields during which she told him that one of her half sisters was scared of the moon. He said, “Can you imagine? Being scared of the moon?”

   Some of the songs that I listened to were so rough they were just chords with hints of melodies, but I’d think to myself that rough and unformed as they were, they could probably be hits.

   I knew those unreleased songs so well that I started to play them on the piano. Michael would joke, “See, now you’re stealing my songs. You’re not allowed to listen anymore.” He said this in a joking way—and really my piano playing was bad enough that it alone was capable of obscuring the value of the songs—but he made it clear that he didn’t want me playing his music for anyone outside our family. He was paranoid that someone would steal his ideas, a harmless paranoia that seemed, at the time, to be about an artist’s possessiveness of his vision. Eventually, though, before our very eyes, we would see this paranoia expand far beyond his music to become a dominant part of his personality.

   Once, in the Beverly Hilton at Universal Studios, I was doing whatever it was I did on the piano, and I came up with some chords. I played them for a while, and before I knew it, I swear Michael was playing the same chords in the song “The Way You Love Me.” I said to him, “Where’s my half of the publishing?” — joking of course—but he took me seriously and insisted that the chords he was using were different. Michael and I fought all the time about who was ripping off whom.

   Being in that bathroom was one of my favorite things about Neverland. I was there almost every night. I played mostly mellow music: even the music I listen to today tends toward the sad and depressing. But sitting there alone with the incredible Tannoy speakers and the unreleased Michael Jackson songs, I was happy. AGAIN, I LIKE TO THINK THAT THE YOUTHFUL DIVERSION Eddie and I offered Michael helped him endure the stresses of his life. I kept him company, and I kept him positive. Yet there were cracks in the facade, moments when his eyes would suddenly darken and he’d seem to drift very far away. I know that the argument for settling out of court with the Chandler family made a certain amount of sense, but I have to say that as incredible a lawyer as Johnnie Cochran was, I don’t think he should have settled that case. Michael was never the same after it. Not fighting for the truth took a heavy toll on him. He was the biggest star in the whole world. The unresolved accusations cast a shadow on his character. They damaged his reputation. They threatened his legacy. And they wounded his soul. From then on, people wouldn’t know what to believe about Michael Jackson. Above all, they challenged his love for children—something that was central to his being—and that hurt far more than the media circus that had been stirred up by the accusations.

   During the Dangerous tour, Michael had made a point of visiting orphanages and children’s hospitals. In every city we visited, we brought toys to these children, and it was clear that Michael wished he could adopt them all. He could not stand to see a child suffer. There were times during those visits when Michael would break down crying because he couldn’t stand seeing a child in pain. He was moved and inspired by the innocence and purity of youth, and always said that of all the creatures in the world, children were closest to God.

   After the purity and genuineness of Michael’s love for children was called into question, he became a different man. Inevitably, his relationships with children changed forever. The days of the innocent freedom with which he’d played with kids were gone for good. In addition, he now saw what a target he had become for people who were looking to exploit his eccentricities for cruel and selfish ends. Family excluded, he stopped hanging out with kids in the same way as he’d done before. It wasn’t worth the risk. Beyond this, if I had to sum up the change I saw, I’d say that Michael lost his confidence. Not just in himself—the way he would boldly and without a second thought do whatever he felt like doing, no matter how unconventional or immature it might have seemed— but in others as well. He lost his faith in the fundamental decency of his fellow humans. Where once he had seen only the good in people, now he worried about the intentions of those around him. He questioned their motives. He thought everyone around him was trying to take advantage of him, to manipulate him. That hint of paranoia he’d expressed when it came to other people stealing his musical ideas started spreading to other areas of his life. Sometimes, even if he encountered someone whose intentions were good and sincere, he’d look for reasons to doubt that person. He created scenarios in his head that didn’t exist in reality as a way of guaranteeing that he would again never be caught off guard. My family, however, was exempt from Michael’s escalating paranoia. Eddie and I were innocent kids, and his faith in our parents never wavered. As for his own family, they stood by him, with the notable exception of his sister La Toya. She had issued a statement claiming that she thought the allegations might be true. Later she said she did this under duress from her abusive husband. Michael eventually forgave her, but he really didn’t want much to do with her after that. As for the rest of his family, I didn’t see Michael having much real contact with them, but they were supportive in public, and he always said that he loved them and knew they were on his side. My sense was that they would have done more to show their support, but Michael kept them at a distance, as he kept so many people at a distance. He never explained why members of his family were excluded from his small sphere of intimates, but over time I saw him do everything he could to protect himself from real and imagined foes…

   The one thing I never imagined was that one day he would add my name to that list.

  

   EDDIE AND I RETURNED TO SCHOOL, BUT SOON ENOUGH we were back at Neverland. That Christmas, the Christmas of 1993, was the first Christmas that my family spent with Michael.

   Michael was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, which meant that when he was growing up his family had never celebrated birthdays or holidays. He’d enjoyed the Christmas experience before—at least once with Elizabeth Taylor—but as a guest of someone else’s family, not as a member of his own. It was one of his fantasies to have a big family with whom he could share the Christmas tradition. So this time my whole family flew to Neverland, which was quickly becoming my home away from home. The house was beautifully decorated with white Christmas lights outside, wreaths on the door, and garlands encircling the banisters. In the entrance hall there was a Santa hat on the butler statue. A big, beautiful tree dominated the living room.

   On Christmas Eve, a woman dressed up as Mother Goose showed up at the house. We all sat around the fire, even my parents, drinking tea and eating cookies as Mother Goose read us nursery rhymes and sang to us. I know. Mother Goose—not exactly a perennial Christmas fixture. But she fit in perfectly at Neverland.

   The next morning was Christmas Day. It was the usual rush to open presents. Michael led the proceedings like an old pro, picking out gifts from under the tree and handing them out. Michael shared my offbeat sense of humor: as I’ve said, we were always playing jokes on each other. So for Christmas that year, he bought me ten presents. Ten! What could be in them? From a guy who gets you your own custom golf cart for no reason at all, what could ten Christmas gifts possibly be? I opened the first one. It was … a pocketknife. Okay, that one was a pretty good joke, since after all, in his company I had already bought all of the pocketknives in the town of Gstaad. We all had a good chuckle about it, and then Michael, who at this point was failing miserably at hiding a mischievous smile, told me to keep going. So I opened my second present: another pocketknife. And another. By the time I was done, I had ten identical pocketknives. We laughed from start to finish. Not to be outdone, I had a very special present ready for

   Michael. What do you get for a guy who can buy the world? I had taken a pile of garbage—toilet paper rolls, plastic bags, and empty candy wrappers—and wrapped each item carefully and put it in a box. Yep, I gave Michael a box of garbage for Christmas. When he opened it, he said with picture-perfect mock sincerity, “Oh, thank you so much. You shouldn’t have. You really shouldn’t have.” From then on, Michael always spent Christmas with my family, at Neverland or in New Jersey. He always showed up in New Jersey with a giant tub of Bazooka bubble gum. Michael constantly chewed huge wads of that gum, blowing enormous bubbles. Snapping the gum as he chewed was perfectly acceptable for him, but whenever I chewed gum, he’d say, “Can you please close your mouth? You sound like a cow.”

   Bazooka was his favorite gum. He always said, “It’s the best gum in the world, but you have to keep popping new ones in your mouth.”

   On Christmas Eve, there would be a huge turkey dinner. If we were at Neverland, we could expect an appearance from good old Mother Goose, or sometimes a magician, and the lousiest gag gifts you could ever imagine: a year’s supply of tampons, an unappetizing bundle of food scraps from our Christmas Eve dinner, a collection of mouthwashes and toothpaste (a reference to our long-running joke about each other’s bad breath).

   It was hysterical. It was strange. It was tradition. In short, it was Michael.