MJ (51 page)

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In the early days after his death, as Branca and McClain continued to apply a precise order to Michael’s business affairs, his legacy briefly descended into chaos without MJ himself as the center of gravity. No longer could he protect Neverland Ranch: Colony Capital, which took it over when he defaulted on a $24.5 million loan in 2008, stripped out the rides and the zoo, spent millions on upgrades, dialed the name back to Sycamore Valley Ranch, and offered it for $100 million in May 2015. No longer could he protect his children the way he wanted them protected and keep his parents and siblings at the distance he preferred. Tension spilled into the public. Paris, Prince, and Blanket were growing older, and photos of them began to pop up in tabloids and on TV
broadcasts without their disguises. At first, it didn’t matter—the Jacksons were growing up in public as mature, poised, attractive children.
“The most artistic was Paris,” says longtime MJ friend Mark Lester, who was Blanket’s godfather and spent time with the family until Michael’s death. “Prince is more into computer games like any normal sort of kid that age, always playing with his PlayStation and his handheld devices. And [Blanket] used to go off into his own world and had figurines, like Spider-Man, and little cars.” After his father’s death, Prince has grown into a handsome eighteen-year-old, with a round face, small eyes, and thick eyebrows; family sources say he’s the extrovert of the family, easily making friends at school and thinking about college. (Tabloids made a big deal about a photo of him smoking in public.) Blanket is quieter, less chatty with strangers, but every now and then he surprises his family with a dance move that recalls his father during the Robot days. It’s Paris, though, with her searing blue eyes, who recalls Michael’s complex, tortured beauty. By all accounts, she was a
daddy’s girl who doted on her father; in the days after his death, every time she heard his name on television, she burst into tears. After being home-schooled her whole life, with specific rules set down by Michael and a succession of nannies and tutors, she was thrust into high school with kids who had no problem mocking her father and family. “She is tough, but she’s so emotionally wounded that she just couldn’t take it anymore,” says a family friend. In July 2013, the fifteen-year-old slit her wrists but survived the suicide attempt; after psychiatric treatment at UCLA Medical Center, the hospital where her father died, she wound up attending the Diamond Ranch Academy in Utah, chosen by Debbie Rowe and Katherine Jackson. She has since left the academy and returned to Katherine’s home outside Los Angeles, where she was reported to have been dating a pro soccer player.

Members of the Jackson family are perhaps the only people in the world who insist Michael’s three children look exactly
like him. And that, as Randall Sullivan suggests in
Untouchable
, may be because everybody in the family realizes the kids are Michael’s only true beneficiaries,
and the closer they get to the kids, the closer they get to the estate’s hundreds of millions.
“They are [Michael’s] children,” Tito told a British tabloid. “Blanket is Michael’s, I can tell. Those eyes don’t lie. Them eyes are Michael’s all over again. . . . Just because they look white doesn’t mean they are not his.”

After Michael died, Debbie Rowe let slip that Prince and Paris were the products of artificial insemination. That led to a worldwide quest to identify the father:
Vanity Fair
pointed out that Michael’s longtime friend and Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Arnold Klein, looked quite a bit like the two older kids. He denied it, sort of:
“Once [I donated] to a sperm bank,” he told CNN’s Larry King. “To the best of my knowledge, I’m not the father.” Other suspects include Al Malnik, Michael’s former business partner in Florida, although he has strenuously denied it, and Michael’s friend Mark Lester, the British child actor turned chiropractor, who once told a tabloid he saw the resemblance, but has since backed off.
“I’m not interested in that,” Lester says. “Michael was their father, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t really matter, biologically, whether he was or not. He brought them up, he raised them as his own. They were his kids.”

In death, Michael Jackson cleared up the other great mystery of his life: What had he actually done to his face? Sullivan and
Rolling Stone
declared Michael died without a nose—in a grotesque, final, sensational twist, according to these reports, he had just two holes for nostrils. The official autopsy report, however, contradicts that description.
“Absolutely false,” says Ed Winter, assistant chief of investigations for the Los Angeles County coroner’s department. “He had a nose. He used to put makeup on it and stuff. It was thin. People make it sound like he had this wax nose that he’d take off at night and put on in the morning. No.” He did, however, tattoo his lips red and his hairline black and adjust his eyebrows. As for more specifics about what exactly he’d done to his face, his longtime doctors were little help. Steven Hoefflin and Arnold Klein intensified their rivalry after Michael’s death. Hoefflin accused Klein of
“over-treating him to make money” and addicting his patient
to Demerol; Klein sued Hoefflin for libel. Then, in a blunt and lengthy TMZ interview, Klein dredged up old dirt about Hoefflin and his supposed molestation of his own patients, including MJ.
“He would put the time of the clocks forward and wake him up and say he did a nose job,” the acid-tongued Klein declared, before accusing Hoefflin of supplying MJ with propofol during what he estimated were twenty procedures on his nose. (Hoefflin, who turned down an interview request, has denied the patient-molestation allegations and has never been charged with any wrongdoing.) Perhaps the most accurate posthumous catalog of Michael’s facial surgeries appeared in
Allure
, showing Hoefflin’s early “two-stage procedure” to narrow Michael’s nostrils, shave his excess tip tissue, and round the tip of his nose with shaved ear cartilage. Over the years, Michael also widened his eyes, thinned his nose, tattooed his eyelash lines and eyebrows, added the chin cleft, lightened his skin, sharpened the tip of his nose, sharpened his jaw, reduced thickness in his lips, and thickened the tissue in his face. Throughout his life, he publicly owned up to only two nose procedures and the chin cleft, but that was clearly false. Michael spent much of his life breaking down barriers, of race, gender, and music. Those included the barriers of physiology.

In the years after Michael’s death, two court proceedings would reveal the sad
details of his final ten or fifteen years. Conrad Murray’s 2011 trial for involuntary manslaughter pulled back the P. T. Barnum–style curtain on
MJ’s life. For the first time, the public learned the secrets of Michael’s medical care, as doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals appeared on the witness stand to flesh out his struggles with painkillers, insomnia, scalp pain, and vitiligo. Murray’s attorneys did not succeed in persuading jurors he was merely the fall guy for Michael’s overwhelming addiction to prescription drugs. On November 20, 2011, jurors found Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter; he served two years of a four-year sentence.
“My entire approach may not have been an orthodox approach, but my intentions were good,” Murray told CNN. Conrad Murray’s language was eerily similar to that of all the
Dr. Feelgoods who’ve preyed on pop stars and besmirched the history of music. Elvis Presley’s George “Dr. Nick” Nichopoulos and Brian Wilson’s Eugene Landy claimed to be helping their celebrity patients, too.

In late 2012, Katherine Jackson filed a multibillion-dollar wrongful-death lawsuit against AEG Live, the promoter of his ill-fated This Is It shows, for hiring Murray and therefore committing negligence with regard to her son’s medical care. The case went to trial the next year, and friends, family, and associates spent six months on the witness stand, fleshing out the medical history that Murray’s trial had begun to reveal. The public finally heard from much of Michael’s long roster of doctors and nurses: David Adams, Scott Saunders, David Fournier, Debbie Rowe, and others divulged thorough medical details. During this trial, e-mails surfaced from Randy Phillips, the promoter’s chief executive, suggesting Michael was in far worse shape than promoters had let on as they spun the press while preparing for the shows. AEG won the case, on a 10–2 vote, because, while the jury agreed AEG had hired Conrad Murray, it believed him to be fit and competent to perform the work for which he was hired. An appeals court upheld the decision in January 2015, but as of this writing, Katherine Jackson’s attorneys plan to appeal to the California Supreme Court.

Was Michael Jackson a child molester? All evidence points to no—although sleeping in bed with children and boasting of it on international television did not qualify him for the Celebrity Judgment Hall of Fame. The man had a fair trial. Most serious chroniclers of Michael Jackson, with the notable exception of Diane Dimond, come away with some version of the conclusion Ian Halperin prints in
Michael Jackson Unmasked
:
“I could not find a single shred of evidence suggesting that Jackson has molested a child. In contrast, I found significant evidence demonstrating that most, if not all, of his accusers lacked any credibility.” More evidence may be yet to come, however. In the years after Michael’s death, James Safechuck and Wade Robson, who as boys had the water-balloon fights at Neverland and traveled with MJ on tour,
accused him in graphic detail of child molestation. Robson testified unequivocally in 2005 that Michael never did anything untoward during the time they spent together—his defense of his longtime friend, along with those of Macaulay Culkin and Brett Barnes, helped attorney Thomas Mesereau win the case. But in 2013 and 2014, Robson, then Safechuck, announced they’ve only recently, as adults, been able to acknowledge MJ’s abuse to themselves.
“People can admit it when they can admit it,” says Henry Gradstein, an attorney for both men. “That’s how victims deal with it—they just compartmentalize it, refuse to believe it, can’t believe anything was wrong with it.” In May 2015, Judge Beckloff of the Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed Robson’s petition to file the claim against Jackson’s estate because he filed his probate claim too late. Robson plans to appeal, and two of his other claims are pending. “Wade and James should have the ability to have their claims tried to a jury,” says Maryann Marzano, their attorney.

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Shortly before Michael died, Jackie, Jermaine, Tito, and Marlon agreed to participate in an A&E series called
The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty
. For a family that had only obliquely referred to its dysfunction in the past, the brothers were unexpectedly open to airing at least some small portion of their conflicts on reality television. They made a record. Jermaine, the domineering prima donna, took charge and recorded his own vocals; he allied with Tito, who was happy to finish quickly and go to lunch. Then Jackie and Marlon returned to the studio, heard Jermaine’s track and passive-aggressively erased it.
“Jermaine’s gonna be upset,” Marlon said. “He’s gonna go to Momma, probably.” Sure enough, Jermaine erupted—it’s scripted Hollywood shtick, but it captures the brothers’ personalities, too.

Debbie Rowe made a deal to give Katherine permanent custody of Paris and Prince, the two children she had with Michael. One of Rowe’s conditions was that Joe, who was already beginning to say
creepy and borderline-aggressive things to the press about Blanket’s dancing ability and how he was “watching” Paris, could see the kids only during family gatherings. Katherine brought in Michael’s longtime nanny Grace Rwaramba to provide a familiar face during a crucial transition period. But
Hayvenhurst was not the secluded, one-parent existence MJ’s kids had known their whole lives. Suddenly they had to share space in the eleven-thousand-square-foot home with Jermaine’s thirteen- and nine-year-old sons Jaafar and Jermajesty, as well as two of Randy’s older kids. Also on the premises was Alejandra Oaziaza, who’d married and divorced both Jermaine and his brother Randy. She undercut Rwaramba’s strict rules carried over from Michael’s parenting.
“Anytime Grace would say, ‘Do your homework. Don’t watch TV. Go to bed,’ Alejandra would say, ‘Oh, stay up as late as you want. Don’t listen to Grace. She’s not your family, I am. She’s just hired help,’ ” said former MJ adviser Marc Schaffel, who became engaged to Rowe in spring 2014 and spent time with Michael’s family. Rebbie was brought in to help with the kids, but she was too religious for them. Grace eventually fell out of favor, too.
“My dad didn’t like her, so he tried to, like, keep her away from us. So he sent her on errands a lot,” Paris said in a deposition for the AEG trial. “He felt bad because she didn’t really have a lot of money. He said she was sneaky and she wasn’t an honest person and she lied a lot.” It’s hard to say whether that’s how Michael really felt about Rwaramba, but it certainly reflected how Paris felt about her at the time.

After Jermaine’s son Jaafar reportedly shot off a
stun gun in the house, Katherine decided to move the kids out of Hayvenhurst. She enrolled them in the posh Buckley School and relocated to a rented, $26,000-per-month, 12,670-square-foot mansion in nearby Calabasas, where she would live with her nephew and right-hand man Trent Jackson. Paris refused to
visit until recently.
“It’s not like it was with her father,” said Brian Oxman, the Jacksons’ family attorney, “and she’s very disturbed by it.”

Meanwhile, the Jacksons continued to battle over Michael’s will. Katherine was receiving cash from the estate, including a
$3,000-per-month stipend and a $115,000 family vacation in 2010, in her role as guardian of Prince, Paris, and Blanket. The rest of the Jackson family, as Michael stipulated in his will, received nothing. That was another source of tension, which blew up in July 2012, after Katherine plotted a trip to follow her sons on their Unity concert tour in a Prevost motor home MJ had bought for her. While she was traveling and out of reach, the media reported on a letter signed by Randy, Janet, Jermaine, Rebbie, and Tito that insisted Branca and McClain resign immediately as executors of MJ’s estate. They called Michael’s 2002 will
“fake, flawed and fraudulent” and accused Branca and McClain of lying to Katherine and making unfounded promises. The siblings also said Mrs. Jackson had suffered a “mini-stroke.”