My Friend Michael 2011
 
 
CHAPTER NINE
A NEW FATHER


  WHILE MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MICHAEL WAS evolving, Michael was undergoing changes of his own; he was getting ready to be a father, a role that he took very seriously.

   Michael as a father made much more sense to me than Michael as a husband. Maybe being with Lisa, loving her children, and wanting to have a child with her had made him see that he was now ready to raise his own children. Much as Michael acted like a child at times, the truth was that he was a grown man, and he always cared for the children in his life the way a responsible father would do. For years he’d had hands-on experience with me, my brothers, and my sister, and over the course of our long friendship I’d watched him part-time parent all of my younger siblings. His instincts were excellent: he knew how to listen to kids and his patience with them was infinite. In addition, he researched parenting the way he did his other passions—through books. In our many trips to bookstores, Michael always stocked up on titles about parenting and child-rearing. He was determined to be the best father he could possibly be and sought to understand the psychology of children and the meaning of their interactions with their parents.

   Michael’s care for every element of his baby’s experience began the moment his son was conceived. He knew, before the baby was born, that he was going to name him Prince. He said that the name had run in his family for generations. Michael taped himself saying, “Prince, I am your father. I love you, Prince. I love you, Prince. You are wonderful. I love you.” He also recorded himself reading children’s books and classic novels, like Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities. At night, Debbie would put earphones to her belly or play the tapes aloud so that when the baby was born, Michael’s voice would be familiar to him.

   I was excited for Michael, in no small part because I had every confidence that fatherhood would only strengthen our friendship. In the past, I had worried about how our relationship would change if Michael fulfilled his dream of having his own family. Once, he had come close to adopting. At the time I asked him, “If you have a family, are you going to forget about us?”

   “You are my family,” he told me. “You never have to worry about that.” But he also seized the moment to remind me how lucky I was to be healthy, to have a wonderful mother, father, and siblings, and to have the kind of loving childhood that I’d had. When he said this, I realized how much Michael was a part of all the things that I should appreciate and feel lucky for having. He had been a third parent to me. As I grew older and made more and more of my own decisions, his words of advice stayed with me as much as or more than those of my parents. That’s why I say with confidence that Michael Jackson was meant to be a father. After that conversation, my insecurities about the impact that Michael’s starting a family of his own would have on our relationship disappeared. That he should be having a baby felt like the most natural thing in the world. But I was still a little shocked in November 1996, a few months before Prince was born, when Debbie and Michael got married.

   “Why get married?” I asked Michael. After the whole experience with Lisa Marie, it was hard to understand why Michael would want to take this step again.

   Once again he told me that the powerful Saudi prince Al- Waleed bin Talal had influenced his decision. When the prince found out that Michael was going to have a child, he wanted him to be married. Michael didn’t want to jeopardize his working relationship with bin Talal, so he married Debbie. Or so his story went. And just as he had done with Lisa, Michael downplayed the importance of the marriage, insisting that it was merely a formality. “Debbie does not want anything from me,” he insisted. “All she cares about are her horses. Besides, she’s Prince’s mother.” I guess it made sense by his logic. Debbie was pleasant to be around; their dynamic was friendly; she seemed to have his best interests at heart; and maybe the semblance of a traditional family structure would be good for the baby.

   Prince was born on February 13, 1997. I was in New Jersey when the phone rang. Michael was calling from the car as he brought Prince from the hospital to Neverland. He spoke to my mother first; then we passed the phone around, taking turns congratulating him. Michael said that holding the baby was the most amazing feeling in the world, that this was what life was all about. I thought back to all the images of babies Michael had taped to the walls of various hotel rooms around the world. For all his talent, all that he had to give the world, he longed for this more than anything else: a baby to nurture and love. His joy was almost palpable. As we were speaking, I noticed that the TV that was on in the room was showing the news cameras that were following Michael’s van all the way to the ranch.

   “I can see you on TV,” I told him. It felt funny to know that the image I was seeing on the TV screen was synced with the words we were speaking on the telephone, sort of like a primitive video chat. For most of the first year of Prince’s life, Michael was still on the eighty-two-concert, fifty-eight-city HIStory tour. But the baby was aptly named: he was Michael’s little prince. All of Michael’s plans at this time revolved around his child: he didn’t believe a baby should be dragged from city to city, so he set Prince up in Paris, a central location in terms of the tour’s itinerary, with two nannies to care for him day and night. Each night after he finished his concert, Michael flew back to his apartment on the Champs-Élysées by private jet. Whenever he wasn’t performing, he was with Prince. It was a tough schedule, but Michael was trying to be both a father and a mother to his son. My mother, my brothers Aldo and Dominic, and my sister, Marie Nicole, accompanied Michael for the majority of the HIStory tour, along with Prince and the nannies. Eddie and I couldn’t leave high school, but we escaped for long enough to meet the baby at Disneyland Paris.

   In the hotel, as he would wherever they traveled, Michael made sure to create a stress-free, stimulating environment for the baby. My mother remembers that there was always beautiful harp music playing and that she, Michael, and the nannies read to Prince from the day he was born. I was happy to hold the new bundle. He slept in my arms, as babies always do.

   The nannies were named Pia and Grace, and I would come to know both of them well. Pia, who was the primary nanny at first, happened to be the mother of Omer Bhatti, Michael’s “son.”

   Not long after Michael had introduced me to Omer, he’d told me the truth—that Omer wasn’t really his son. His parents were Pia and Riz—the couple who, in Michael’s original story, were his adoptive parents. I didn’t even pretend to be surprised. Omer looked just like Pia and Riz. By way of an explanation, Michael gave me the same reason he’d given for his marriages to Lisa Marie and Debbie Rowe. He needed to show the Saudi prince and the rest of the Arab business world that he had a family. I wasn’t sure how discovering a long-lost illegitimate son boosted Michael’s image with bin Talal, but that was his story. Questionable as it was, I bought it for Lisa Marie and for Debbie, and now I was buying it for Omer. At least he was consistent in his explanations.

   Omer and his family began to celebrate holidays with us, which made sense given that Pia was working as Prince’s nanny. Riz, Omer’s father, ran errands and took care of the cars in California. Omer was the first kid to spend a lot of time with Michael since the 1993 allegations, but Michael had taken a liking to the whole family, and he mentored Omer and treated him like a son. I liked having Omer around. He was a nice kid: my only complaint was that he still spoke so fast that I was constantly asking him to slow down. My nickname for him was “Little Monkey.”

   Meanwhile, Michael and Debbie seemed to be getting along very well. They spoke on the phone every once in a while. There was no romance or intimacy between them, but Michael truly loved Debbie as a friend. He was endlessly grateful to her for making him a father. And she believed in him as a father. As I’d discovered at the age of five, Michael had no trouble connecting with children. He had an innate ability to see the world through a child’s eyes, and he didn’t have to change at all to become the kind of father he wanted to be. His heart and mind had long been committed to the challenge. Once Prince was born, Michael wanted another child almost immediately, so the two of them could grow up together. Five months after Prince was born, he and Debbie arranged another pregnancy.

  

   IN THE FALL OF 1997, I BEGAN MY SENIOR YEAR OF HIGH school. I was something of a phantom at school—not a hotshot student, not a partyer—but I had very good friends. I played soccer, and for fun I did the same thing I’d been doing since I was fourteen: I called up Mike Piccoli and maybe a few other people. My former rival had become one of the few people I could really talk to. We’d get dressed up, and we’d go to my father’s restaurant for dinner. The waiters might sneak us glasses of wine, and we’d have good conversation. That was my ideal night out.

   Sometimes Mike and I would cut school, go to the restaurant for lunch, and return to school. One time we were in the middle of eating huge plates of pasta when our varsity soccer coach walked into the restaurant. We were busted.

   “I know we’re supposed to be in school,” I told the coach, “but we wanted to make sure we had a lot of protein before the game.” “Are you crazy?” he said. “You can’t be eating pasta with pink sauce.” That was about as much trouble as I ever got in. That year, I drove Eddie to school every day, and every day we were both late. Eddie’s teacher started giving him Saturday detentions as punishment, but somehow I talked my way out of it. I never had a single detention.

   I didn’t worry much about what life after high school might bring. I knew how to cook and was good with people, so I always had the option of working at my father’s restaurant; he was planning to open another one, Il Michelangelo, and my parents would have loved for me to help out in the place. Or, I thought, I might go into the entertainment business, as an actor or otherwise.

   That Christmas, my entire family flew out to the ranch. Michael was in great spirits when we arrived. The HIStory tour had finished in October, and he was glad to be recuperating at Neverland with Prince. I remember that we were all in the dining room just talking —my family, Omer, and his family—when Debbie showed up to say hello and wish everyone a happy holiday. Michael and Debbie may have been married, but it was obvious to all that the marriage was not real, or traditional, in any sense of the words. By that point, Debbie was visibly pregnant, and Michael told everyone that the name of the new baby was going to be Paris. He said that the reason for her name was that she’d been conceived there. He let people believe that he had been intimate with Debbie, although he had told me that this wasn’t the case. Much as the public seemed to care about such matters, it was an insignificant detail to Michael. Debbie had given him the greatest gift in the world and was about to do so again. That was all that mattered to him.

   Before Paris was born, Michael asked my mother to fly out to Neverland. I guess he wanted to have family with him: he didn’t want his kids to always be with the nannies, and he knew how much my mother loves children. On Paris’s birth date, April 3, 1998, my mother was at Neverland with Prince, waiting for Michael and the newborn baby to come home from the hospital.

   Michael was a great father. People can say what they will about his life and his choices, but nobody will ever take that away from him. He loved his children deeply. He fed them, changed their diapers, held them, spoke to them. Michael didn’t believe in baby talk.

   “Speak to children as if they’re adults,” he said. “Trust me, they understand. And it’s better to train them to speak properly from the start.” Michael raised his children the way every parent should raise a child, but from the outside, his approach seemed strange. His children never went out in public without wearing masks or blankets to shield their faces. People didn’t know what to make of this bizarre practice, and some thought it was eccentric at best, cruel at worst: why would a father force his children to hide from the world? But Michael’s world was a different place from the world the rest of us live in. He felt he had to protect his children from the media, from the public, from the circus he had known his whole life. He knew what it was like to grow up in the public eye, and he wanted something different for his children. Besides wanting to shield them from photographs, Michael was also afraid that if the world knew them as his children, they would be vulnerable to kidnapping for ransom. All parents have some fear of kidnapping—a parent’s worst nightmare—and those fears were multiplied in Michael, given his unique blend of wealth, fame, and paranoia.

   Aside from the extreme measures he felt he had to take, Michael was a thoughtful, attentive, loving parent, and his children grew to be the most intelligent and well-behaved children I have ever met. In Peter Pan, it is thinking happy thoughts that allows the children to fly. His children were the happiest part of Michael’s being.

   Seeing Michael’s sincere joy with his children made me realize that he hadn’t been happy in a long time. I don’t know when exactly —to my mind it started with the accusations in 1993—but it was dawning on me that Michael lived in a constant state of depression. If he was alone, he often forgot to eat. Sometimes he slept through the afternoon. He kept his room dimly lit at all times. Of course, he and I still had plenty of fun, but in the quieter moments it was clear to me that something was wrong.

   Michael had been born with a rare talent that drove an intense showbiz childhood. That kind of life takes a harsh toll on most children, and the world watches—as much in judgment as with fascination—as, one after another, they crash and burn. Michael fought his darkness in his own way. He didn’t party recklessly. He didn’t turn to recreational drugs. He didn’t act out his pain in the public arena. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t suffering. All of this, however, seemed to change when he became a father. There was a renewed vibrancy to him, an energy that had been missing for years. An enthusiasm appeared, one that my whole family could see. For all his attempts at meditation, turning Neverland into a sanctuary of happiness, and freeing himself from his own demons, the best remedy turned out to be his children. They made him the happiest person in the world, and knowing Michael was building his family gave me the reassurance that he would keep fighting the darkness that hid below the surface of his day-to-day existence.

   IN SPRING OF 1998, SOON AFTER PARIS WAS BORN, I graduated from high school. I was as untethered and ambivalent as any seventeen-year-old. My soccer coach thought he could help me get an offer to play soccer for Penn State, but I hadn’t decided whether I wanted to pursue it. I looked at a college in Santa Barbara, privately fantasizing that I could live at Neverland and commute to school.

   Then, unbeknownst to me, some TV scouts saw me playing a soccer game in New Jersey. I was a showy player—always dribbling between my opponent’s legs or doing a rainbow over someone’s head. Sometimes I got in trouble with the coach for never giving up the ball. I thought I could take on a whole team by myself. I definitely wasn’t the greatest player in the world, but I scored goals and hammed it up for the audience. When I was done with this particular game, a couple of scouts came up to me and asked me to audition for a Powerade commercial. My father brought me to the audition, which was in Manhattan, and for some reason I can no longer recall we were late. I was one of the last candidates to audition. There were tons of people there—maybe three or four hundred; I guess it was an open-call audition. But soon after, I got a call telling me they wanted me for the commercial.

   Immediately after the shoot for the Powerade commercial, I was in New York getting my hair cut at Tony Rossi’s hair salon. Sitting in the next chair was Danny Aiello III, the son of the actor Danny Aiello, who was a family friend of ours. He told me that he was directing a film starring his father called 18 Shades of Dust. “Actually, you’d be perfect for my movie. Want to be in it?” Danny said.

   Coming on the heels of the Powerade ad, it seemed easy enough to give this a try. I read some lines and ended up getting the part. It was a bit part, playing Danny Aiello’s character as a child. My little brother Aldo, who looked a lot like me, got a role, too. These were only small roles, of course, but they had fallen effortlessly into my lap. I was two-for-two in landing parts without trying. What would happen if I actually made an effort? I’d always been interested in films but hadn’t done anything to try to start a career. Now I figured, Okay, I must have something. I got head shots done and found an agent-manager in New York who started sending me out on auditions. I was ready to take the time and effort to pursue an acting career … but as things turned out, I never really even had a chance.

   One night—about a year after I graduated from high school—I was playing beer pong with my friends Mike Piccoli, Frank Barbagallo, and Vinnie Amen in the backyard of our house when the phone rang. It was Michael. He asked what I was doing. “I’m playing beer pong and I’m three-for-three,” I replied. “Listen, I need you to come to Korea tomorrow,” he said. “I could use some help out here.”

   I didn’t hesitate. Michael didn’t specify what the job entailed, but that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t think of it as a job. I thought of it as an opportunity. I had seen Michael’s world and I was fascinated by it. After all the books, the meditation, the mind maps —it was as if Michael had been grooming me for this role, whatever it might be. Of all the people in the world he could have called, he had chosen me to help him.

   “Of course. I’d love to come,” I said.

   I took my parents aside and had a private conversation with them. I told them that Michael had invited me to travel across the world, and that it was what I wanted to do. They gave me their blessing.

   I went back to playing beer pong and, it should be said, continued to win. But my mind was on the next day. I was leaving for Seoul. I had no idea how long I would be gone, but I was almost nineteen years old and I was ready to seize the day. The next morning I packed one suitcase and left.

   It was a fifteen-hour flight direct from JFK to Seoul. The whole first-class cabin was empty except for me and another gentleman, but the flight attendants were pretty. I had learned to flirt with flight attendants from Michael: they always had interesting stories to tell. Michael and I always asked them about their favorite travel destinations, whether they were married or had boyfriends, and so on. On this trip a pretty young attendant asked me why I was going to Korea. I told her I was involved in an entertainment-related project. I had been keeping my relationship with Michael confidential for years—by now it was a habit—but just saying those words made me realize that this time, my visit to Michael was no longer solely about friendship: this time it was business, too. One of Michael’s security guards picked me up at the airport. It was around nine P.M., and we drove through the city. Seoul was magical—with lights everywhere, it felt like a futuristic version of New York. I was thrilled to be on the other side of the world. I went directly to my hotel room, and before I’d finished unpacking, Michael called. He said, “Oh good, you’re here. How was your flight?”

   “It was great. I’m excited to be here. What an amazing country.”

   “Yeah, it’s wonderful. Did you eat?”

   “No, did you?”

   “Come to my room, we’ll order something. Make sure you wash your black ass and brush your teeth. Don’t come in here smelling all funky.” That was how we talked to each other. I went to his room and knocked our secret rhythm on the door. He opened it and said, “Frankfrankfrankfrank,” his odd, familiar nickname for me.

   Michael was wearing his pajama bottoms, a white V-neck Tshirt, his fedora, and black penny loafers. Classic Michael loungewear. He wore pajamas everywhere, even, eventually, to court. And he had those fedoras custom-made by the boxful. When he was on tour or traveling, he liked to throw his hat out of hotel windows to the fans. They would fight over it, so he’d throw another. And another. He went through a whole lot of hats that way.I gave him a big hug, and he showed me around the beautiful hotel suite. While he was doing this, I thanked him for the opportunity he was giving me and told him how honored I was to be there with him.

   “Frank,” he said, “I could give this job to anyone, but I chose you because I trust you and I love you like a son. Remember, I raised you. I know what buttons to push to get you going. You have a lot of potential, and I want to see you grow.”

   Over kimchi and bibimbap, we caught up. He asked about my family, and explained that he was doing two benefit concerts—one there in Korea and another immediately afterward in Germany. The show was called Michael Jackson & Friends. It featured Mariah Carey, Andrea Bocelli, and other musical luminaries and would benefit a group of children’s charities.

   By way of explaining what my role would be, Michael said, “Frank, I can’t go out all the time. There are things I need you to get for me.” I knew this was true. Because the fans made it tough for Michael to go out in public, in the past he’d had an assistant who would pick up T-shirts, movies, whatever Michael needed or wanted. Now I was going to be that assistant, although at that point we didn’t name the job or put a salary on it. Initially, I refused to be paid. I just wanted to be part of it. But Michael was having none of that.

   “This is a job,” he told me. “One day you’ll have a family. You need to start somewhere.” He told me I’d have a driver and my own security. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was thoroughly optimistic.

   That was the start of my professional relationship with Michael, and once it was launched, I never looked back. I didn’t regret not going to college: I already knew that what I would learn from Michael would surpass any mainstream education. It would be a one-of-a-kind experience, and to me that was priceless.