IN NOVEMBER 2000, MICHAEL JOINED ME IN NEW YORK. We rented an entire floor of the Four Seasons. Michael had a suite, as usual, Grace had a room, and I had a room. The kids usually stayed with Michael in his quarters, unless he was going to wake up very early to go to the studio, in which case they stayed with Grace. Michael had a recording studio set up in another room on our floor and brought in Brad Buxer to work right out of the hotel. One of the songs that he and Brad worked on here was “Lost Children,” in which Michael expresses the wish that the missing children of the world could be home with their fathers and mothers. If anyone thought Michael had a full-fledged Peter Pan complex, here was the proof that unlike James Barrie’s character, he didn’t long to inhabit a world where “lost boys” lived in an underground fort. Michael wanted children to be safe at home. At the end of the song, my brother Aldo, who was seven, and Prince, still three, carry on a little dialogue. Michael fed them the words and Brad recorded them. “It’s so quiet in the forest, look at all the trees,” Aldo says. “And all the lovely flowers,” says Prince.

   “It’s getting dark. I think we’d better go home now,” says Aldo. The source from which “Lost Children” sprang was Michael’s emotional life as a parent. He felt firsthand how important it was for his children to be with him. But Michael had possessed the instinct to protect children long before he became a father. He had always been concerned about their well-being. Fatherhood didn’t transform him: it fulfilled him. And when it came to his art, fatherhood only reinforced the beliefs that were already core to who he was. He often said that the music wrote itself, but I saw a lot of effort going into it. As always, Michael listened to the latest songs, following the top ten lists religiously. He had favorite songs that he played over and over. At this time he was into Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” and Whitney Houston’s “My Love Is Your Love.” The process of creation was different for every song, but he usually started with a bit of the melody, then brought lyrics into it. Brad and Michael worked privately, but their work was only a part of the Invincible production. Michael had two extremely well known producers also working on songs with him. Rodney Jerkins, one of the hottest in the business, was based in the Hit Factory studio. Another producer, Teddy Riley, who was an artist in his own right—as part of a group called Guy and one of the original members of the group Blackstreet—was working out of a studio that was built in a bus, conveniently parked right outside the Hit Factory. So Michael had essentially three studios to work in virtually simultaneously, with everyone working around the clock. Whenever anyone’s ego got bent out of shape, they called me to vent.

   I loved to watch Michael Jackson make music. He was a natural-born director. He would walk into the studio, give everyone hugs, and listen to what each person had been working on since the day before. He heard every note in a song. And if something was wrong, he knew how to say so in an inspiring rather than a derogatory way. Occasionally he’d get frustrated and walk out of the studio. He was never loud or freaked out: he was respectful, but assertive.

   Teddy Riley and Michael had a history: they had collaborated on the Dangerous album. And Rodney Jerkins had worked for Teddy Riley as a kid, so the two producers had their own shared past. Michael managed to spark a healthy competition between them. Sometimes he would have both Rodney and Teddy work on a song at the same time. He would wait for each producer’s take on it, then pick which he liked better. Teddy brought some great songs to the table: “Heaven Can Wait,” “Don’t Walk Away,” “Whatever Happens” (a duet with Carlos Santana), and a song called “Shout,” which didn’t make the album, but was a great song to start a concert.

   At the beginning of their collaboration, Rodney presented twenty songs to Michael. Another artist would have recognized any one of them as a smash hit, but they weren’t good enough for Michael. He told Rodney to scrap them all. All twenty songs! Now, Rodney Jerkins, at this time, had just come off hit after hit— “Say My Name” for Destiny’s Child, “If You Had My Love” for Jennifer Lopez, “Angel of Mine” for Monica—all of which had reached No. 1 on the pop charts, and he was considered the hottest music producer around. Being told to can twenty new songs was hardly a reaction he was accustomed to hearing.

   “You have to go out and find new sounds,” Michael told him. “Hit on random rocks or toys. Put a bunch of glass in a bag, add a mic to it, and throw it around.”

   I had seen Michael play around with this kind of sound creation himself. He would record the boing of a doorstop’s spring, and then play with the noise, mixing it with a snare to create a completely unique and original sound. Once we put a mic in a bag with rocks, toys, and some small pieces of metal, taped it to the outside of a DAT machine cushioned in bubble wrap, and threw the whole contraption down the stairs. Michael then proceeded to take all the sounds from inside that bag, put them across a keyboard, mix them, and tune them. On Invincible, you can hear those one-of-akind sounds on “Invincible,” “Heartbreaker,” “Unbreakable,” and “Threatened.”

   Rodney must have been nonplussed, to say the least, when Michael sent him back to the drawing board. The songs he had presented to Michael were the kind he was famous for producing. But working for Michael Jackson, he knew that he’d have to develop something new. Michael expected it. He drove his producers crazy, but he knew how to get the most out of everyone he worked with.

   So Rodney went back to work. Ultimately, he produced “Unbreakable,” “Invincible,” “Heartbreaker,” and “Rock My World” for the album.

   The time that Michael and his collaborators spent in the studios wasn’t entirely devoted to work. Michael kept some of his beloved video games and other games around. He didn’t just like to play himself: he liked to watch other people play them, too—especially the Knockout Kings boxing games. But despite all the hours he spent playing those games, he was never any good at them. Much like his inability to play sports, it was pretty baffling that someone as magically coordinated as Michael would be unable to dominate video games, but he just couldn’t get the knack of handling the buttons. That said, he always knew how to have a good laugh about his lackluster skills, which made it fun for everyone.

   Even back at the hotel Michael wasn’t focused solely on work and his children. When my brother Dominic and cousin Aldo came to visit, they complained that their soccer coach, who had been my soccer coach, too, wasn’t playing them enough. Michael picked up the phone at three in the morning and prank-called the guy. “Hey, buddy,” Michael said in a weird voice, “you’d better play my son, buddy.”

   “Who is this?” the coach asked.

   “Don’t worry about it, buddy. You better play my son, buddy.” Michael hung up. The four of us died laughing. The coach used *69 to figure out who was calling him, and realized that the call was coming from the Four Seasons. He put two and two together and called my parents to let them know what had happened, but I’m guessing he was a little amused to discover that his prank caller was none other than Michael Jackson.

  

   MICHAEL WAS NEVER AVERSE TO TAKING A LITTLE downtime while at work on Invincible, but his commitment to the album was extraordinary. Rodney told me that whenever he was in the studio, he was focused, his voice was excellent, and he was always professional. By the time he was done, he would have one hundred songs to choose from. Sixteen of them would eventually make the album.

   Because Michael wanted to keep working through the holidays, we decided to stay in town for Christmas of 2000, spending it at my parents’ house in New Jersey. Given that his children were his top priority, Michael took Christmas seriously. This year he was determined to find a special present for my mother.

   “What can we get your mother?” he asked me. “Something she’ll absolutely love.”

   My father had never been especially fond of pets, so I knew an opportunity when I saw one. “A dog,” I said. “If anyone can get her a dog without my father nixing it, it’s you.”

   “Okay, great,” he said. I arranged to have candidate dogs brought to the hotel, but ultimately I found a cute little golden retriever puppy at American Kennels, a boutique pet store that obtained animals from top breeders. I picked out accessories—a bed, a jacket, and enough food to get the puppy through Christmas. We only had two pets when I was a kid. One was a mynah bird. She could say “Thank you!” and “Dominic!” but when one of my younger brothers started imitating the bird (instead of vice versa), my dad said it had to go. Then my uncle gave us a fish, but my little brother Dom or my sister Marie Nicole banged on the fish tank, and the whole thing collapsed.

   “From now on the only animals in this house will be stuffed,” my father declared. But when Michael gave my mother the puppy, he made sure to lay it on thick with my dad.

   “Dominic, I examined lots of animals,” Michael said. (Actually I was the one who did all the examining, but why split hairs when we both knew my father couldn’t say no to Michael?) “When I saw this puppy,” he continued, “I looked into her eyes and knew she was the one. I spoke to her and told her to be the best-behaved dog your family could ever own.” As I predicted, my father allowed my mother to accept the dog from Michael. She was thrilled. They named her Versace and have had her for eleven years as of this writing.