Authors: Steve Knopper
In some portions of
Living with Michael Jackson
, Michael came across more sympathetically than ever. He seemed prepared, rehearsed, suppressing sobs when detailing the iron cords and belts his father used on him and his brothers. The goodwill he generated from this portion extended through the shopping section of the show. In Vegas, where Michael spent months at a high-end hotel because “it’s a fun place to visit,” Bashir couldn’t comprehend Michael racking up $500,000 on a couple of high-end urns or $89,000 on a chess set. He seemed to say:
Can you believe this guy?
But the viewing audience remained on Michael’s side.
Then Michael spent the last half hour dismantling this goodwill. Bashir was confrontational—kind of a jerk, really—but his personality was far overshadowed by the insane language Michael used to describe himself and his lifestyle. He stared straight into the camera and lied about his facial surgery. Cheek implants? “No!” Dimple in chin? “Oh, God!” Reconstructed eyelids? “It’s stupid! None of it is true! They made it up!” Bashir asked whether Debbie Rowe had been upset to hand over Paris so quickly after she was born. “She said, ‘Go right ahead,’ ” Michael claimed. He said he swaddled Paris immediately after birth, placenta and all, and rushed her home in a towel. “They told me it was okay!”
Bashir was an eyewitness to one pivotal event in MJ history. In
November 2002, Jackson had flown to Berlin for the annual Bambi Awards. He brought his entourage, including manager Wiesner and nanny Rwaramba, to a fourth-floor hotel room. Fans began to buzz outside, and Michael made one of the worst snap decisions of his career. He seized his infant son, Prince Michael II, underneath the armpits, and displayed him to the fans below. He held Prince tightly—as he would later say repeatedly on camera—but his mistake was in displaying the baby on the outside rather than the inside of the balcony barrier. The incident lasted less than three seconds, but once paparazzi developed their film, the image became damning, iconic, the perfect clip to kick off the nightly news and the front page of the
National Enquirer
. Michael appeared to be the most monstrous celebrity father ever. Bashir said in his TV narration months later: “I was worried. There was a manic quality about him that I had never seen before.” Wiesner, who was in the room at the time, didn’t catch any of this dark subtext.
“For us, it was not something special,” he says. “Next day, we realized this disaster.”
Finally, Bashir delivered the crescendo. Capturing Michael at home in Neverland, Bashir zoomed in on twelve-year-old cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo, who gazed in a fond, babyish way toward Michael and placidly rested his head on his older friend’s shoulder. He seemed as comfortable as a twelve-year-old boy with his head on Michael Jackson’s shoulder could be. Gavin was giddy and fast-talking. He started to ramble: “I was, like, ‘Michael, you can sleep in the bed,’ and he was like, ‘No, no, you sleep in the bed,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no, you sleep in the bed.’ And then he said, ‘Look, if you love me, then you’ll sleep in the bed.’ I was like, ‘Oh, man.’ So I finally slept in the bed.” Michael chose the floor—an important detail that might have allowed him to escape the interview unscathed. But instead of emphasizing this point, he insisted to Bashir that a forty-four-year-old man sleeping in a bed with children who are not in his family was the most natural thing in the world. “I have slept in the bed with many children,” he said, citing Macaulay Culkin and his brother, Kieran, from an earlier Neverland era. “We’re jammed in there,
like a hot-air balloon. It’s very right. It’s very loving. That’s what the world needs now. More love.” Then he asked Bashir: “You don’t sleep with your kids, or some other kid who needs love, who didn’t have a good childhood?” Bashir, outraged, disagreed. “I would!” Michael shouted. “Because you’ve never been where I’ve been, mentally!”
It wasn’t until after Bashir’s final interviews, in Miami, that the enormity of the project began to sink in with MJ and his people.
“We got information it was going to be bad news,” Wiesner recalls. “[Michael] was sitting on the bed and crying. I said, ‘Michael, it’s too late now.’ He was down. He was on the floor.” The Bashir documentary sent Jackson and everyone around him into full damage-control mode. In a statement, he said he felt “devastated” and “utterly betrayed.” After the show aired in the US a few days after its British viewing and drew an audience of thirty-eight million, Michael called his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley. “Dude,” she said,
“that documentary fucking
sucked
, man. What were you thinking?”
The morning after the show, Schaffel was sitting in his kitchen with MJ videographers Hamid Moslehi and Christian Robinson and publicist Stuart Backerman. They were eating breakfast from McDonald’s, wondering what to do about their boss’s crumbling career, when Moslehi mentioned to the group he’d been rolling his own tape of the Bashir interviews. He caught the British journalist delivering bromides such as
“Michael, I love the way you are with children. It’s spectacular the way you treat them.” Schaffel and Backerman shouted at him: “Get your ass in gear right now and get your butt out that door and get that footage!” Moslehi did as he was told, and Schaffel was soon conducting a bidding war between ABC (considering a $1 million offer), NBC ($2.5 million, and the promise to kill an upcoming
Dateline
special on Michael’s plastic surgery), and Fox ($3.5 million) over the new film.
The bids went up considerably, and Schaffel finally sold the show to be called
Michael Jackson Take Two: The Footage You Were Never Meant to See
to Fox for
$7.3 million, and a companion piece called
Michael
Jackson’s Home Movies
for $4 million—and negotiated a 20 percent fee for himself. (
Home Movies
bombed in the ratings, discouraging the team from creating part three.)
Thus did two Michael Jacksons emerge on television. The first, as interpreted by Bashir, showed MJ talking directly to the camera, in such a way that emphasized every touched-up portion of his face. In the rebuttal videos, the camera angle was more forgiving. Viewers could see only a portion of Michael’s face—set in the best light to avoid his chin cleft and thin nose. Bashir’s coverage suggested a trip to a zoo in Germany, in which crowds swarmed Michael and his children and jostled little Prince, was an example of indifferent or even negligent parenting. Michael’s version explained how his people contacted the zoo in advance, attempting to arrange a visit when it was closed to the public, but the situation escalated unexpectedly.
The rebuttal video is an extraordinary MJ performance, an hour and a half of public-relations spin disguised as a hard-hitting documentary, hosted gravely by afternoon-TV host Maury Povich. As for Michael’s business of sleeping with children, Debbie Rowe says, authoritatively: “Apparently there’s some confusion with sleeping in beds. My favorite thing to do is to sit in bed and watch TV. If you’re coming over, take your shoes off, get on the bed, we’re watching the TV.” Those who slept in her bed, most likely, were aware she’d never been accused of molesting children.
The most dramatic moment of the rebuttal, though, was when Schaffel and crew trotted out the Arvizo family to unequivocally clarify their presence in Neverland.
Janet Arvizo added an emotional touch: “My children and me know what rejection is, to be neglected, to be spit on, talked about, to be made an outsider—only because of our status in life, or what we were going through,” she said. “Gavin was the one who asked him, ‘Could I call you Daddy?’ and Michael said, ‘Of course.’ . . . Very innocent and beautiful relationship, but everyone has spun it out of control.”
The more than $11 million MJ received for the rebuttal videos gave
him, in a small and temporary way, a financial
lifeline. Until that point, Wiesner and Konitzer had the unpleasant task of informing Michael he lacked the funds to plant flowers around the trees at Neverland or water certain lawns. MJ wanted to buy his mother something like
$20,000 in cosmetic pharmaceuticals—but a budget for it didn’t exist.
Rebuttal or no rebuttal, child advocates were growing disturbed by watching a forty-five-year-old man admit on national TV to sleeping with young boys. Dr. Carole Lieberman, a well-known psychologist, filed a formal complaint with California officials:
“I felt enough was enough,” she told reporters. “I just couldn’t believe that the world was standing by and letting these children be potentially harmed.” LA’s Department of Children and Family Services, as well as the police department, investigated, but concluded the complaints by Lieberman and others were “unfounded.” Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara County district attorney who’d gone after MJ in 1993, told reporters he couldn’t act unless victims came forward.
Despite Michael’s cash-flow problems, the Arvizos were
“shopping all the time, coming back with drivers and bodyguards and a load of toys,” Konitzer recalls. “Dieter [Wiesner] took care of the situation, and from that day on, we were the enemies.”
Stung, the Arvizos began to describe a third, more sinister reality beyond the one in Bashir’s video and the one in Michael’s rebuttal.
Michael would never recover from it.
* * *
On June 13, 2003, police in Santa Barbara County received new information. Dr. Stan Katz, an LA child psychiatrist, had sent a report about a meeting he’d had with the Arvizos.
Katz was an experienced soldier in the Michael Jackson child-molestation wars. He had interviewed Jordan Chandler at length in the early nineties to help his family prepare for a civil case before they ended up settling. He had spoken with Janet Arvizo, then conducted
a formal interview with Gavin. For the first time, Gavin Arvizo said Michael molested him. His brother Star corroborated the story. Katz believed them—and still does.
“Kids who fabricate are usually given a script. They often exaggerate where they can,” Katz recalls. “[The Arvizos] didn’t exaggerate.”
The accusations were enough for Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon, Michael’s old nemesis from the Jordan Chandler investigation, to make a move. More than seventy sheriff’s deputies piled into Neverland on November 18, raiding the property in search of anything to implicate Michael—books, videos, papers, computers. Holed up at the Mirage in Vegas, where he’d been working on the “One More Chance” video, Michael did not take the news well. Upon hearing screaming and breaking glass in MJ’s room, hotel security had rushed to his door.
“Go away!” the singer told them. When Wiesner finally arrived with a key to open the singer’s room, he found the remnants of a rampage—Michael had destroyed a glass table, knocked over breakfast carts, flung food, dishes, lamps, and vases, and tossed chairs at the wall, prompting a hotel bill for $250,000 in damages. His kids gaped fearfully at what publicist Stuart Backerman called “some berserk, out-of-control madman in those monstrous moments of his rage.”
For many who’d been working with MJ, the raid represented the end.
“Everything fell apart very quickly,” recalls Ronald Konitzer, who had been launching the plan to overhaul Michael’s finances. “Within two weeks, it was clear we can bury MJ Universe.” Santa Barbara authorities arrested Michael and hauled him to jail, where he posed for one of the most disturbing celebrity mug shots ever—sculpted lips and nose, freaked-out eyebrows, and a wide-open fish eye. Michael’s new defense attorney, Mark Geragos, had been making arrangements for the star to fly from Vegas back to LA for his booking. While that was happening, Karen Faye flew to Las Vegas to prepare his makeup for the shot, but she was no match for the anxiety on MJ’s face. He took a private Gulfstream IV to the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport
and surrendered to sheriff’s deputies, who hauled him to the station in a black SUV. Despite his preparation, the mug shot,
Backerman says,
“wasn’t even the Michael that I knew. It was some strange, pathetic, pasty-skinned, pink-lipped, doll-like dandy that gazed out wide-eyed and witless at the camera.” Michael posted $3 million bail—
Malnik supplied the cash. (Through a discounted bond service, it wound up being less than
$300,000 up front.) The sum was more than three times as much, the Rev.
Jesse Jackson would note, as the bail set for white murder suspect Phil Spector. Rick James, the outspoken funk singer, reminded viewers on CNN that Elvis Presley, who’d slept with his wife Priscilla when she was fourteen or fifteen, was never prosecuted. “As soon as you get famous and black, they go after you,” James said.
With these kinds of arguments in mind, Grace Rwaramba and Jermaine Jackson reached out to the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, the black-nationalist group whose members Jermaine had befriended while traveling in Saudi Arabia in the late eighties. Michael met with Nation officials twice—they “called him ‘Sir’ and gave him respect,” providing security, not ideology, Jermaine said. But when Wiesner, his manager, pounded on his door one day, Michael let him in and began to whisper in a strange voice.
“Dieter,” Michael said, “the devil is listening. The devil’s up there; the devil’s on the roof. The devil’s listening to what we’re saying.” After that, MJ stopped returning Wiesner’s calls. He was shutting out the rest of his advisers as well, including Schaffel and Malnik.
“And there was no access anymore,” Konitzer recalls. “Nothing you can do.”
* * *
The most pointed personal attack Michael Jackson ever delivered in his music, buried within the end of the
HIStory
album, was against someone called “Dom Sheldon,” or “D.S.,” for short. In the recording, it’s impossible not to hear the words
Tom Sneddon
repeated throughout the chorus—even the National District Attorneys Association referred to
Sneddon as
“the only D.A. in the nation to have an angry song written about him by pop megastar Michael Jackson.” Sneddon, the sixty-three-year-old Santa Barbara district attorney, was three years away from retirement when the Arvizos’ accusations landed on his desk. MJ supporters believe Sneddon, after the Jordan Chandler investigation devolved into a settlement, had revenge on his mind.
“Was he eager to put him in prison? Any prosecutor who recognizes there’s a sexual predator among us was eager to take care of that problem,” prosecutor Ron Zonen says. “Were we more eager with Michael Jackson than anybody else? No, absolutely not.” Still, Zonen calls Sneddon an “aggressive sort of guy.”