CHRISTMAS WAS NO MORE THAN A BRIEF RESPITE from the arduous process of making Invincible. Some of the difficulty stemmed from Michael’s perfectionism, and some from his passionate wish to be ever present in his kids’ lives. But a lot of it was the result of a steadily growing problem in Michael’s life: his reliance on prescription drugs. And as the year 2000 drew to a close, I was increasingly worried.

   It hadn’t always been this way. When I’d first started working for him, I had called for doctors to attend to Michael because he was in physical pain. I had witnessed his treacherous fall on the bridge in Munich in 1999, and his chronic back problems had begun after that. It was evident that he was suffering. Various doctors prescribed a menu of pain medications: Vicodin, Percocet, Xanax, and so on. During this time, Michael also continued to be treated by his dermatologist, Dr. Klein, for his vitiligo. This treatment was itself intensely painful: it required that Michael endure having fifty needles stuck into his face, and for years—as far back as I could remember—the doctor had prescribed Demerol to sedate him during the procedure. Demerol was also the drug Michael had been given after the accident that had occurred during the filming of the Pepsi commercial, and it was the drug I had unwittingly seen doctors use to help him sleep during the Dangerous tour. It had all been a practical, reasonable plan for dealing with short-term pain. Or so it had seemed.

   When we’d arrived at the town house on the Upper East Side during the summer of 1999, it had become clear to me that Michael’s drug use was escalating. There were times when he would ask me to bring in one doctor, and then, hours later, a second doctor, to give him more of the same medication the first one had administered. Michael had always warned me away from cocaine, heroin, pot—a warning that he himself followed. But he didn’t view conventional, FDA-approved drugs the same way he viewed illegal ones. He was searching for relief from chronic conditions. He was trying to get better. Different rules applied. This situation became even more confusing at the town house when an anesthesiologist started showing up two or three times a week, some weeks, to help Michael sleep. I paid the man in cash, because all of Michael’s medical issues had to be kept from the public and their cost off the books. The doctor was perfectly straightforward with me.

   “What I do,” he said, “is put Michael to sleep for a couple of hours. Then I ease him out of sleep.” It was the same treatment I had witnessed after Michael’s accident in Munich. The doctor would set up equipment and an IV in Michael’s room, and would stay with him, the door closed, for about four hours. He said that the treatment was risky, but he assured me that he knew what he was doing. He promised that he would never endanger Michael’s life. His candor and his expertise with the procedure made me trust him.

   Whatever the doctor was doing seemed to be okay: after the sessions, Michael was clearheaded and seemed well rested. Again, I witnessed but did not understand that Michael was being given propofol, a powerful anesthetic that is used in hospitals to knock patients out for surgery. This was a measure of the depth of Michael’s pain, and the sleep problems that went along with it. When his schedule called for him to begin work early in the morning, without the option of sleeping in, he found it hard to fall asleep early enough to get the rest he needed in order to perform. On those nights, he couldn’t sleep unless this dangerous drug—the drug that would eventually kill him—was administered. For a long time I thought it was okay and normal. I didn’t think he had a drug problem. Over the years, I had grown accustomed to seeing doctors coming and going, particularly during tours, when Michael was under great stress and needed help falling asleep. I thought he was simply someone who had serious medical problems and used drugs to treat them.

   However, as work on Invincible proceeded, I was becoming more and more concerned. I knew Michael needed drugs to cope with the pain of his skin treatments: that made sense. But the necessity for some of the other drugs seemed questionable—the drugs for his chronic pain, the drugs to sleep. Obviously I didn’t want Michael to suffer needlessly, and I didn’t want him to be an insomniac, yet it was clear that the continual use of the drugs was taking a toll. Michael’s physical conditions were leading him down a dangerous path.

   Even the doctor who administered the propofol had told me, “I can’t keep doing this,” which I took to be a clear indication that it was starting to be too much.

   Michael wasn’t a junkie. He never acted crazy or chased a high. However, I was wary of all the medications, particularly Demerol, the seduction of which Michael had sung about in his song “Morphine” on Blood on the Dance Floor. I did not like the effect the drug had on him. It made him dull. In a fog, he’d look at magazines and watch movies, and then when he came down from it, his mood was mad, bitter, and grumpy. This was not the Michael I knew and loved. Furthermore, the drug seemed to exacerbate his paranoia.

   In addition to the effects of the drug that I witnessed on Michael, I had my own firsthand experience with Demerol. In early 2000, when we were working on Invincible in L.A., Michael and I were at Universal CityWalk with three-year-old Prince, two-yearold Paris, and Grace. Michael was disguised as a sheikh, and I was wearing a suit. The place was crowded that day, and it was drizzling as we strolled in and out of stores, shopping. Then, all of a sudden we looked around and Prince was gone.

   He’d been missing for only a moment, and I had an idea about the direction in which he might have wandered—toward some toy or character that I’d seen catch his fancy. I sprinted that way, but the sidewalks were slippery, and I fell, twisting my left leg badly. My adrenaline was up, so I was able to stand up without noticing the pain in my leg.

   A second later I saw a woman approaching, leading Prince by the hand. She said, “I saw you with this child in the store…” and in an instant we all surrounded him. Everything was okay again. Prince hadn’t gone far or been in any real danger, but it was a scary moment.

   Now that Prince was safe, it dawned on me that I was in a lot of pain. I could barely walk back to the car. By the time we arrived back at our hotel, my entire leg had swelled up. Michael got me to bed, propping pillows under my leg, and called a doctor. It was a strange reversal—him calling a doctor for me. Actually, it was strange just seeing him pick up a phone and dial it. Usually I set up calls for him. But Michael was always a good nurse. Whenever I— or anyone else—had a cold or a fever, he made sure to send out for tissues, medicine, tea, vitamins, whatever one might need. He would check in every hour to see if anything else was needed. One Christmas at Neverland, a chimp bit my little brother Dominic’s finger. Even though the fire department medics had cleaned and dressed the wound, Michael convinced his doctor—who was on holiday with his family—to drive two hours to Neverland to examine my brother.

   This time back in New York, the doctor came to examine my leg and declared it a bad sprain. He gave me Demerol for the pain. That was the first and only time that I experienced the drug. When Michael heard what the doctor had prescribed, he gathered magazines for me to read, put a glass of water on the bedside table, and made sure there was a vase of flowers nearby, because, he said, “You should have the energy and color of the flowers.” Then he told me how I would feel when the Demerol kicked in.

   “Everything’s going to be beautiful to you,” he said. “There will be a tingling feeling that starts in your toes and creeps up on you.” It all happened just as he described. He was right. Demerol took away the pain. It also made me feel calm, relaxed, and happy. I don’t live with chronic pain, but as I dealt with my leg, which took a month to heal, I had a taste of what it was like to be hurting all the time. It was hard to sleep. All I wanted was for the pain to go away, and I could see how someone in this situation might become increasingly desperate for relief. I also saw that relief from physical pain came with a seductive side effect. If you were unhappy with your life, the drug had the power to make you forget your unhappiness. I started to believe that Michael might be confusing physical pain with emotional pain in his desperation to dull both of them. Then, during those weeks of my recovery, Michael said something that gave me a further glimpse into his relationship with drugs. With an odd look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure how much he was revealing, he said, “One thing doctors can’t measure and diagnose is pain. If you tell them you’re in pain, they have to treat you based on what you feel.”

   It was almost as if he was letting me in on a dark little secret, the excuse that legitimized the abuse of medicine. Nobody could quantify the extent of his suffering, so nobody could question the necessity for the drugs he relied on to alleviate it.

   When we moved back to the Four Seasons in November 2000, the visits from the anesthesiologist stopped. But I came home one night to find that Michael had called the hotel doctor. He was going about his business—talking to Karen and making other business calls—but I could see that he was slightly disoriented. The next morning, I put my foot down.

   “You don’t want to end up like Elvis. Think about your children. Look at Lisa Marie and what she went through.” He didn’t brush off my concern. That would have convinced me that I was right. Instead, he looked straight into my eyes. “Frank,” he said with great sincerity, “I don’t have a problem. You don’t believe me? You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “It’s not that I don’t believe you—” I began, but then, before my very eyes, he dialed his dermatologist, Dr. Klein. He put the doctor on speaker and asked him to verify that the quantity of Demerol he was taking was safe and appropriate. Who was I to argue with the doctor who had been treating him for over fifteen years? Michael was right: I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Everyone’s body was different. Maybe he was so mentally strong that not even a drug could knock him out. And it was true that days went by without any visits from doctors. If he were a true addict, I asked myself, wouldn’t he need to take drugs every day? I was worried, but because I truly didn’t know how to judge the situation, there was no way for me to choose the right course of action.

   The above conversation may have ended our discussion for the moment, but it did little to remove my concern. I was worried about Michael, but I also began to worry about the role I was playing in his medical drama. When we stayed at a hotel, he often called the hotel doctor to his room, and inevitably the doctor gave him a prescription. I would be the one who had to explain to the doctor that the quantities he was prescribing were not sufficient for Michael. He needed much larger doses. In order to maintain secrecy, some of the prescriptions were written out in my name. At first, I did such things because I thought Michael had a handle on his problem. I was used to his living outside the rules. Toys “R” Us opened for him in the middle of the night. Streets shut down to let him pass. It made sense that doctors were paid under the table. It made sense that prescriptions couldn’t be in his name. It made sense that he needed far stronger doses than anyone else. He was Michael Jackson. As much as these bits of evidence were disturbing, they were just line items in a long list of the ways in which Michael lived differently from everyone else. Maybe he did need these drugs, and maybe they did affect him differently from other people. Otherwise why would the doctors be so willing to prescribe them?

   Still, while being Michael Jackson may have exempted him from the rules, it couldn’t spare him from the effects of the drugs. There were times when he would see a doctor and then go into a meeting. His eyes would be droopy. He would be lethargic, slurring his words. That was the worst of it: it was never more extreme. Still, if I happened to be around, I would cancel the meetings because I didn’t want anyone to see Michael in such a state. But if I was off attending to other business, he would usually proceed with the meeting. After one meeting, Rabbi Shmuley, a friend and associate of Michael’s, told me he was concerned about Michael and had asked him if everything was okay.

   “Yeah,” Michael had told him, “I had to take my medicine. It makes me a little out of it.”

   A few of these dicey meetings convinced me that I had to take action. But I had never stopped Michael from doing anything he wanted to do. That wasn’t our dynamic. I told him honestly when he shouldn’t do things, but I didn’t tell him he couldn’t. My first approach was plain and straightforward.

   “You’re taking too much Demerol,” I told him.

   “You think I have a problem,” Michael said, “but I don’t. You saw what happened to me in Munich. I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep. You have no idea what it’s like to be in this much pain. I have to work tomorrow. If I don’t sleep, how am I going to go to the studio?”

   As he himself had told me, it was hard to argue with someone’s evaluation of his own pain, and frustrating as it is in hindsight, I deferred to this seeming wisdom. I accepted his answer partially because there were doctors standing behind it and partially because Michael was an exception to every rule, but mostly I accepted it because it was uttered by a man who had guided me throughout my life, and guided me well, a man who had always told me not to abuse drugs, not to become an addict. To think that he could be steering me wrong at this point was simply an impossibility. My parents obviously weren’t with Michael round the clock as I was and didn’t have the same exposure to his behavior. There was one time when my mother was staying with Michael in South Africa and a doctor showed up.

   “I gave him some medicine to help him sleep,” the doctor told her. “Check on him every hour or so.” This was news to my mother. Michael had never shown this side of his life to my family since he didn’t want to make a bad impression on my parents or the younger kids. In a way that recalls his putting wine in soda cans, he didn’t think what he was doing was wrong in and of itself, but he didn’t want people to get the wrong impression. So my mother had limited exposure to Michael’s interactions with doctors—that evening is the only one I can think of—and wasn’t aware that they were part of a larger pattern. When the doctor arrived, my mother, like me, must have figured that both he and Michael knew what they were doing.

   When Michael came to our house for the Christmas of 2000, he may have brought a dog, but he also brought his habits. No doctors ever came to our house, but one night my father arrived home from work and noticed that Michael was on some kind of medicine. He sat down with him and said, “Michael, this is not good for you.” “No, Dominic, it’s okay,” Michael stammered out. “I’m fine. I have to take it to sleep, but I’m fine.” But my father was hearing none of it.

   “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but please be careful. Please, please be careful. I love you, but maybe you took a little too much this time.”

   There was a moment of awkward silence between them before Michael finally said, “You’re right, Dominic. You’re right. Maybe it was too much.”

   After that night, Michael never took medicine in New Jersey again—proof that at the very least he knew that what he was doing was not okay with my parents. Although my parents were always able to ground Michael in reality, even they couldn’t affect what he did when he was beyond the range of their influence.

   Their insulation meant that they didn’t see and experience the worst of Michael’s reliance on drugs, and though I considered it often, I was not eager to share the information with them. In short, I didn’t want to worry them more than they were already worried. Sadly, they were probably the only people with whom I could have trusted my fears. I couldn’t seek out the help of experts. I couldn’t talk to my friends about how to diagnose or handle a problem that seemed out of my league. I wanted to fix it, but I didn’t want to risk having the news become known. One part of me felt responsible, while another felt incredibly disappointed in Michael for allowing such a thing to happen to him.

   The only person I could talk to about Michael’s “medicine” was Karen, his executive assistant. She had a sense of what was going on, and had been setting up his dermatologist appointments for years. Sometimes I called her, crying, saying, “Karen, I don’t know what to do.” Karen didn’t have any more answers than I did, but she was a sympathetic, trustworthy confidante, and her behavior was always that of a consummate professional. Ultimately, Michael was his own man. Nobody told him what to do. Karen may have felt as powerless as I did, but the support she gave me during these times helped me get through them.

   Michael’s use of “medicine” wasn’t a secret within the organization, but the people who might have noticed were business advisers; they were yes-men whose top priority was staying in Michael’s good graces—not friends who’d risk incurring his wrath in the name of the truth. Their focus was generally on protecting his public image, not changing his behavior behind the scenes. That said, even if some of them had tried to talk to Michael—whether out of genuine concern or mere self-interest—they would probably have had the same experience as I had: Michael’s justifications were extremely convincing.

   During the first few months of 2001, I refused to call Michael’s doctors. His response was “Okay, then I’ll just do it myself,” a threat that made me anxious because I was reluctant to lose track of how often he was calling. If I stopped enabling him, there would no longer be an intermediary between him and the doctors, and I was scared of what he would do if he didn’t know I was watching his intake like a hawk.

   I began keeping the drugs—Xanax, Percocet, or Valium—in my room so that Michael didn’t have ready access to them. I didn’t want him waking up in the middle of the night and automatically reaching for a pill. If I had to give him something, I would do so, but at least in this case I’d know what the hell he was ingesting. How could I attempt to reason with him if I wasn’t armed with facts about the frequency of his drug usage and the quantities of the drugs he took? Would he bring in more doctors and more medicine? I worried that if I took myself out of the loop, I’d lose him entirely. Michael didn’t love the idea of my monitoring his drug use, but he agreed to let me do so because he knew it would make me more comfortable with the situation. It was a compromise. I fluctuated between trying to intervene more forcefully and being afraid of losing my connection with Michael and my ability to help him if I did so.

   One night, as we prepared to leave for a trip to Oxford University, we were drinking wine in his hotel suite and he seemed to be in the right kind of mood for me to initiate a conversation I’d been wanting to have with him for some time.

   “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain about your medicine,” I said. “It’s just that I love you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Michael took a sip of wine.

   “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “I try to fall asleep, knowing everyone expects me to be creative in the morning, but I’m in agony. This is the worst feeling in the world.”

   “I guess I don’t understand that you’re in so much pain.”

   “Trust me,” he said quietly. “This is not what I want to be doing. But I have been dancing and performing since the age of five. It’s caught up with my body.”

   As unhappy as I was, I didn’t have a response to this statement. How could I—how could anyone—know what it was like to have lived the life of Michael Jackson?