THAT YEAR, 1993, WITH THE ACCUSATIONS BY THE Chandler family, had been the hardest of Michael’s life. But now that the case was settled, he turned his attention to a new album: HIStory. He was working on it at the Hit Factory, a recording studio in New York, and staying in Midtown at Trump Tower.

   I was, of course, still in eighth grade, an unexceptional student, but a decent soccer player. I made some friends and settled into a rather unremarkable suburban life.

   But when Michael came to town, I had another life. After school, my brother Eddie and I, and sometimes our younger brother Dominic, would go to the city, spend the night with Michael, then wake up early to be driven back to New Jersey in Michael’s car. On weekends we’d either visit him or he’d come to see the whole family in New Jersey. We spent as much time with him as we could. I know it’s not looked upon as normal for a kid to drop everything and rush off to spend time with a world-famous adult friend, but it seemed completely normal—and fun—to me.

   Michael’s apartment at Trump was over the top, with dramatic views and gold fixtures in the bathrooms. On the second floor there were three bedrooms. He transformed one of them into a mini dance studio by having all the furniture removed and putting in a dance floor. He did a version of this almost everywhere he went. In the studio were the biggest speakers I’ve ever seen in my entire life: they must have been five feet tall. Michael also had a video camera in the dance room that he used while he was working on the choreography for his videos or stage shows. When he was dancing, he let the music guide him, and as a result, after the fact, he couldn’t always remember the exact sequence of his moves. Thus he’d review the tapes to see what he liked, and wanted to remember and reuse. On weekends in the city, we often went to the movies or comic book stores, but what I remember most fondly about those visits was that Michael introduced me to the joys of books. I was dyslexic, and reading had always been tough for me, but when I complained that I didn’t like to read, he said, “Well, then you will be dumb and ignorant for the rest of your life. Frank, you can do anything you want in this world, but if you don’t have knowledge, you are nothing. If I gave you a million dollars right now, would you take it? Or would you want to have the knowledge of how to make that million on your own?”

   I knew the correct answer to this question. “I’ll take the knowledge.”

   “That’s right. Because with knowledge you can make the first million into two.”

   The first book Michael had me read was The Power of Positive Thinking. I saw how the ideas in that book connected to some of the things that Michael had been talking about. I was intrigued, and just like that, the barrier between me and reading was broken. So just as I followed Michael’s lead in record stores, curious about what he was interested in hearing, I started reading the books he recommended and peeking into whatever he happened to be reading.

   During that period I met Michael’s nephews—Tito’s sons, Taj, TJ, and Taryll—for the first time. 3T, as the music group they had formed was called, had yet to release its first album. But I had heard the songs and was a big fan. From the start, I loved Taj, TJ, and Taryll, who were only a few years older than I was. We used to say that I was going to become the fourth member of 3T, and the group would be called 3TF. Michael’s nephews were also really into books, and in this respect they were a further inspiration to me to read. At the bookstore, Michael would say, “Get whatever you want. It’s an investment.”

   So we’d all buy a bunch of books, then head back to Trump, where every boy would find a place to sprawl out with his books and pens and notebooks. We called this our “training.” We would say to one another, “Time to train,” find a comfortable spot, and read for hours at a time.

   Michael told us to cherish our books. He got us into the habit of kissing every corner of a new book, as he did. When he read something incredible, he’d start clapping his hands, laughing, and kissing the book.

   “What did you read?” we would all start asking. “What did you learn?”

   “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “Just know it’s over. You all better watch out. I’m going to take over the world.” We’d try to grab the book out of his hands, but he’d hold it out of our reach, teasing, “No, no. You don’t get to read this yet.”

   I’m sure that if you’d asked the average American what it was like to spend a night in a hotel room with Michael Jackson, his three musician nephews, and a few friends, they would never picture this scene.

   As far as my family knew, during this period, Michael was dividing all of his time between working on his new album and hanging out with us kids. We were with him all the time. And we had no idea that he was falling in love. Or at least his version of falling in love.

   Then, one spring night in 1994, when Eddie and I were the only ones spending the night with Michael, the phone woke us all up at four in the morning. It was Wayne Nagin. When Michael got off the phone with him, he told us that the next day the news was going to break that he’d gotten married to Lisa Marie Presley.

   I was incredulous. “What? You got married?” I asked him. “We never even knew you were dating anyone!”

   I knew Lisa’s name from the stories Michael recounted. He had told us that back when the Jackson 5 were performing, Elvis would sometimes drop by at their shows, bringing Lisa with him. Even as kids, it seemed, they’d had a flirtatious relationship, and Michael always had a special place for Lisa in his heart. But I hadn’t seen this coming. I don’t think anyone did.

   But it was true. Before Michael had arrived in New York on this most recent trip, he’d married Lisa Marie. Even my parents hadn’t known about it. I suspect Michael didn’t tell them, because when they asked him the inevitable question—why?—he wouldn’t be able to answer it. He didn’t know how. That was just the way Michael was. He kept the various parts of his life separate from one another, and his reasons for doing so were his own.

   Now that we knew, we would have gladly accepted Michael’s marriage without any explanation at all, but he told us that he had made the decision for business reasons. At the time, he was doing business with Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who was known as “the Arabian Warren Buffett.” They were business partners in a newly formed company called Kingdom Entertainment. According to Michael, the prince and his colleagues liked to do business with family men, and so he wanted Michael, as his partner, to be married. Especially after the allegations in 1993. The prince was investing a lot of money in Kingdom Entertainment, and he believed that by marrying, Michael would restore his tarnished image. So Michael had married Lisa Marie Presley. Or so Michael’s story went. My father, who had an adult’s perspective on the whole affair, saw a simpler scenario. He believed that Michael wanted to be a father and hoped that he would have children with Lisa Marie. It was an unconventional courtship, to be sure, but Michael led an unconventional life.

   Did Michael love Lisa? I never really asked myself that question at the time. But thinking back, I have to say that if he was going to marry anyone, she was the one. First of all, he thought it was a great story: the King of Pop marries the King’s daughter. And certainly, if anyone understood Michael’s lifestyle, it was Lisa. But it was more personal than that: Michael trusted Lisa. After what he’d just been through with the Chandlers, that feeling of trust was paramount. Moreover, their relationship predated all the madness of the last decade. He adored her and her young children, Benji and Danielle. They traveled and visited orphanages together. I’m sure he opened his heart to her. What remains in question is how much Michael actually wanted to have an adult relationship, and whether he was even capable of sustaining one.

   Michael told me that while growing up, he’d got a bad taste in his mouth regarding marriage. Watching his brothers endure divorces, he resolved never to be in the same position. He was always worried about going through a divorce and losing all of his money. He said, “I can’t go out and date any random person. In my situation, who can I trust?” From this perspective, it was easy to understand why Lisa was a wise choice.

   But the issues he had with women ran deeper than fears about the financial cost of divorce. Like me, he had youthful crushes in which he worshipped iconic women from afar, taping their pictures to his wall. But I was thirteen. Michael was thirty-five. Because of his stature in the world, some of these women—Tatum O’Neal, Brooke Shields, now Lisa Marie—were accessible to him, but I’m not sure that when push came to shove, he didn’t prefer the images to the reality.

   Nonetheless, Michael was giving it a go, doing it his way, and the news was about to break. On the phone, Wayne Nagin said that he would meet me and Eddie downstairs in the car. We had to leave the hotel right away, before the hordes of reporters pounced on Michael. Michael always protected me and my family from the media as best he could, as he would later protect his own children. Half an hour later, we hurried into the car with blankets over our heads. We ducked down until Wayne told us that no one was following us and the coast was clear. Wayne took us home to New Jersey, and sure enough, in a couple of hours, the news of Michael and Lisa’s marriage was being broadcast all over the world. A month or two later, in August, he and Lisa returned to New York. Michael wanted my family to meet her. So the entire clan— my parents and all five kids—took a car service to the Trump building, and from there followed Michael’s van to the Hit Factory. We gathered in a private room that the studio had set up for Michael. It was filled with candy, drinks, and toys.

   “Lisa,” Michael said, “meet the Cascios. This is my family from New Jersey. Everyone, meet my wife, Lisa.” It was strange to hear Michael call Lisa his wife. But, to be honest, I thought she was sexy. Lisa was very nice to us, if a bit quiet. Who could blame her for being reticent? We were a group of seven outgoing Italian Americans, and there were a lot of different personalities in the room. I imagine she was trying to find her place. Eventually, she entered the convivial conversation—she was clearly making an effort—and we all welcomed her to the family.

   While Lisa was in New York with Michael, we saw them frequently, but soon she flew back to Los Angeles, and we didn’t see her again until we visited Neverland for New Year’s, in December 1994. That year for Christmas, Michael and Lisa got me a DAT machine and a studio mixer. A lot more useful than ten pocketknives. Maybe Lisa put the kibosh on the gag gifts: after all, it was she who handed me my amazing present. On New Year’s Eve we went to the Neverland theater to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Michael loved to watch Dick Clark hosting the proceedings.

   By this point, Lisa and I had gotten to know each other. She was more comfortable around all of us. Having her around shifted my relationship with Michael slightly—how could it not? I no longer stayed in his room with him at Neverland. But I was fine with that. I liked staying in the bungalows, and I was open to whatever Michael wanted. I never had the sense that I was losing him in any way. Despite his marriage, Michael’s behavior didn’t change much around us, and I imagine that this meant that Lisa was now seeing another side of him. It wasn’t just that her new husband liked playing with water balloons. I didn’t think about it that much at the time, but now that I’m an adult, it strikes me that it might seem odd to a recently married woman to find that her husband already loved and seemed to be a part of another family. Of course, Lisa Marie had to understand that in marrying Michael she was not signing on to a conventional life. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she had no idea of how much time he actually spent with us, or if she did know, that she had assumed his priorities would begin to shift once he was married.

   Still, it wasn’t hard to see the issues he’d brought to the marriage, and the trouble he had being a husband. And there was also the fact that Michael did not like confrontation. I remember the day when he began talking about staying in Lisa’s L.A. apartment with her and her children.

   “She likes to fight,” he said. “When she complains, I start clapping my hands and smiling.” There wasn’t a hint of selfawareness in his tone, a sense that perhaps he could have handled the situation more maturely. If anything, he sounded pleased with his reaction.

   “Does that work?” I asked.

   “Well, it makes her stop, and then I ask her if she’s done arguing.”

   Not exactly dialogue a couples’ counselor would condone. I had a sense that things weren’t going very well. They had married on a whim, without developing any ability to communicate about the issues that might crop up in their life together, and they had widely different expectations for the relationship. For all his study of people, their likes and dislikes, his deep recognition of the words and rhythms that touch people’s hearts … well, Michael didn’t seem to bring any of that depth to his marriage.

   Michael was also a star, one who was very much set in his ways. He was accustomed to being alone and doing whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it. In her past relationships, I imagine, men had pampered Lisa, as they should have. It was something she and Michael had in common—their worlds revolved around them—but that dynamic made it hard for them to take care of each other. Lisa tried to understand and accommodate herself to Michael’s personality, but I think the burden of making the relationship work fell entirely on her. As far as I could tell, Michael was never emotionally there for Lisa. She definitely tried to make the marriage work, but it must have been hard for her to figure out what her role was in Michael’s complicated life.

   The HIStory album was released in June 1995. Michael didn’t want to release a two-disc album. That added to the price and Michael wanted to keep his music affordable for his fans. But Sony wanted to do one disc of greatest hits and another of all new songs, and so the album came out. It was well received by critics and nominated for five Grammys. It remains the best-selling multidisc release by a solo artist of all time.

   Michael had a break between the release of the album and the beginning of a major concert tour, and it was during this period that his marriage to Lisa fizzled.

   In the end, the union had lasted about a year and a half. When they split up at the end of 1995, Michael claimed that one of the main reasons was that Lisa was jealous of us (she called us the “Jersey family”) and the relationship he had with us. He preferred spending time with us to spending it with her. Personally, I had seen no evidence of this, and I don’t believe my family had very much to do with the failure of the marriage, but I’m sure Lisa had been hoping to build a life with Michael. And I can certainly imagine that this life didn’t include a family from New Jersey. Michael shifted some of the responsibility onto my family—perhaps as a way of telling us how important we were, or maybe to convince himself that Lisa was asking him to make impossible sacrifices—but I believe we were only part of the greater routine of his life that he was unwilling to change.

   There was also the issue of children. Ambivalent as he may have been about having a serious relationship with a woman, there was one thing Michael was sure about: he longed to be a father. At one point he had wanted to adopt a child from Romania with Lisa, but she didn’t like the idea. Then he wanted to have a child with her, but she was not ready.

   Overall, although they did love and have a tremendous amount of respect for each other, I don’t think they were ever emotionally connected enough to sustain a long-term marriage. Michael inhabited his own world and had little desire to leave or adjust it. He didn’t know how to be in a relationship, and he wasn’t willing to learn. He only knew what he knew. Marriage, with its sharing, conflicts, and compromises, just didn’t work for him. When he and Lisa split, he seemed to me to be a little sad, but not entirely heartbroken. That, more than anything else, told me they were better off without each other.

   From my perspective, Lisa Marie disappeared as abruptly as she had arrived. Apparently she and Michael stayed close, but I rarely saw her anymore. Though I was never jealous of Lisa, when Michael told me they were parting ways, I have to admit to feeling a little relieved. I mean, I was a teenager and he was my friend. In most ways, it was as if we were high school peers, playing together, having fun, talking about girls. When you’re high school buddies and one of the guys gets a girl, things inevitably change. I knew that his having a wife meant that I would see less of Michael, but I accepted Lisa and loved her. That’s what buddies do. After all, I hoped to have a girl of my own one day, and when that day came, I would want Michael to do the same for me as I had done for him. When he and Lisa broke up, all it meant to me was that I had my friend back.