Child Bride (67 page)

Mike Edwards, who had also remained close to Brett after the breakup with Priscilla, began getting phone calls from an amazed Brett about this time. “He’s saying, ‘Gosh, Lisa’s calling me, and Lisa’s really interested in
Michael!”
Brett’s impression, said Mike Edwards, was that Michael was absorbed in his work, but that Lisa was really interested in him. “And I said, ‘Come on!
What do you mean?’ [Brett] said, ‘You haven’t met him, but he’s very charismatic.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I can’t believe it. He said, ‘Yeah, she’s kind of pursuing him.’ And I went, ‘My God! What’s gonna happen?’ ”

“I could see that Lisa fell in love with him,” confirmed Brett. What attracted her in part, he felt, was that Michael was not after her money. “I think she didn’t know him very well, though. She didn’t know his quirks and eccentric lifestyle, and she thought, This guy is going to be great. A stepfather for my kids.”

Lisa, according to Brett, was the one who was in pursuit. “I think it was the passion of a woman who fell in love. And [Michael] wouldn’t have been interested at all. And he is a gentleman and wouldn’t have wanted to pull her away from her marriage to Danny. And she pursued him.” Family friend Bob Wall, who heard about it after the fact, confirmed this. “I know Lisa is the one who pursued the relationship.” She did it, Bob felt, to create an identity separate from the Presley name, to be known as something other than “the daughter of,” the same anxiety that Priscilla had experienced during and after the Elvis years. “Lisa really wants to be credible,” said Bob. “You’ve got her father, who’s a genius. Her mother’s done incredibly well. And all she’s got is a lot of money. So maybe that’s important to her, to create her own identity. Maybe it’s necessary for her sanity.”

Brett, seeing the progression of the friendship, suggested that Michael take Lisa to the Oscar ceremony that March, just as he had escorted Madonna the year before, but Michael balked, since Lisa was a married woman. The relationship intensified on Michael’s part that fall, however, after thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler charged him with child molestation, causing a scandal to erupt worldwide. In November Michael quietly escorted Lisa to the Jackson Family Honors.

Lisa was spending time with Myrna, who by then was divorced from Jerry Schilling. Lisa told Myrna about her secret romance with Michael Jackson. Myrna perceived that Lisa felt sorry for Michael because of the sexual molestation charges and the devastating effect the scandal had had on his career and his image. Myrna also believed Lisa had sincere feelings for Michael. “Yes, she did, according to what she told me. She did. She’s like her father: They like the underdog.… She did it for her own reasons, but she didn’t do it [because] Michael coerced her. She genuinely cared about him and thought he cared for
her.” Myrna, who knew and knew of Michael through music circles, tried to warn Lisa about the relationship, which she considered both dangerous and absurd. “I can only guess what his motives were, and I could only tell her what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me that he was.” Lisa did not tell Myrna whether she and Michael had sex, though Brett believed they did. “Yeah, sure, I think, because of what happened. I didn’t want to ask any questions. I could have asked Lisa the nitty-gritty.”

By Christmas 1993, Lisa was discussing with Myrna the possibility of marrying Michael Jackson. “He told her,” said Myrna, “that she was the only woman he could see himself marrying. And I was like, ‘You got to be kidding.’ ” Myrna recalled that Lisa responded, “Myrna, you don’t understand.” Myrna reminded Lisa that she was married and tried to convince her that Michael’s motives were not, in her opinion, pure. “When she was telling me what was going on, I was thinking, This is a plan. He’s got this calculated plan, and [he has] thought this all through: ‘This is the girl who is going to make me … Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll, and I’m going to be bigger than that.’ And that was his whole purpose. And she didn’t want to believe it.” Lisa asked Myrna not to tell Jerry or her mother about her romance with Michael. Priscilla did not have a clue that her only daughter was being courted by Michael Jackson.

In February 1994, Lisa and Michael stayed at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Springs with Donald Trump and Marla Maples. Then they moved into one of the millionaire’s luxury condominiums at Trump Tower in New York while Michael cut a new album. There were a few Michael-and-Lisa sightings in the press that early spring, but no one thought much about it, for no journalist would have imagined there was a romance. The next step in the strange progression of the relationship was Lisa’s public announcement, in April, that she was ending her marriage to Danny Keough, just as the second sequel to
The Naked Gun
was released. Priscilla, in an interview to promote the movie that May, expressed regret that her daughter’s marriage was “headed for divorce court,” but commented, she had no idea how sagely, “I don’t have much to say in Lisa’s decision-making now.”

What she did not realize, at the time, was that Lisa was already preparing to marry Michael Jackson, in the same high-espionage
fashion in which Priscilla had earlier married Elvis Presley. That April, Michael’s Beverly Hills attorney, Robert Kaufman, reportedly placed a call to a judge in the Dominican Republic, inquiring about the procedure for his client to be married on the island. Divorce papers for Lisa and Danny were quietly filed, and finalized, in Santo Domingo in early May. On May 24, Lisa and Michael flew on Sony’s private jet to La Romana in the Dominican Republic and checked into the Casa de Campo resort, accompanied by Danny’s brother and sister-in-law, Thomas and Eva Keough, both Scientologists, like Danny. Lisa and Michael checked into separate suites. That day, Michael’s lawyer telephoned Francisco Alvarez Perez, the same judge he had spoken to earlier, to confirm plans for the wedding, which would take place at Perez’s house on May 26. His client, Kaufman told the judge, had requested that the ceremony be “short and fast,” like Elvis and Priscilla’s. Lisa’s marriage to Michael took place in La Vega, as her mother’s had been in Las Vegas, in a ceremony performed, as Priscilla’s had been, by a judge arranged through a third party. Again like Elvis and Priscilla, Michael and Lisa flew secretly by private jet from their small wedding ceremony back home to L.A.

By mid-July rumors were flying wildly in the press about a suspected wedding between Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, who were reported to be—and were—ensconced in the Trump Tower in New York. Priscilla, who knew nothing of her daughter’s marriage, questioned Brett Strong about the newspaper accounts, for she knew he and Michael were friends. “And I told Priscilla that Michael had told me once when I was at his home, years ago, that he always wanted a son and a daughter, and didn’t know how he was going to get it, ’cause who was he going to marry? But he always wanted that, and had a room full of dolls and other toys.… He had a train set rigged up so that you thought he already had a kid somewhere.” Priscilla, Brett recalled, laughed nervously and said, “Oh, my God! He’s going to get his son and daughter by marrying my daughter!” Priscilla seemed embarrassed, said Brett, and “didn’t want to let on to anybody that she didn’t know anything.”

Lisa informed her mother she was married to Michael two weeks before she announced it publicly, just as Priscilla’s costar in the
Naked Gun
pictures, O. J. Simpson, was arrested for the brutal murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Priscilla, by everyone’s account, was appalled at the news of her daughter’s marriage.
Marco Garibaldi would later compare Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and his and Priscilla’s feelings about it, to “a mole on the end of someone’s nose. Everybody knows it’s there, and nobody’s happy about it, but you just don’t say anything about it.” Priscilla, who had shocked the world as Elvis Presley’s child bride, had now become, extraordinarily, Michael Jackson’s mother-in-law.

In the ever unusual world of Elvis and Priscilla—and now Lisa—there were some bizarre parallels between Lisa’s marriage to Michael and her mother’s marriage to Elvis. In addition to their similarly secretive weddings in Las Vegas and La Vega, Lisa had married a man she would discover had little interest in taking her to his bed, just as Elvis rarely had intercourse with Priscilla. Lisa had wed, by an obvious Freudian motive, the nineties equivalent of her staggeringly successful superstar father. Elvis was the King of Rock; Michael was the King of Pop. Both singers, oddly, had pet chimpanzees at one time; both shared an interest in UFOs. Elvis lived in semiseclusion at an estate called Graceland. Michael lived a reclusive life at Neverland. Elvis often rented amusement parks, one of his favorite forms of entertainment; Michael had re-created Disneyland on the grounds of his estate and took Lisa, incognito, to the California theme park on their honeymoon. Both men had married to avoid scandal in their careers: Elvis to erase the stigma of his live-in relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl, or to avoid the Beaulieus’ revelation of their illicit arrangement for Priscilla; Michael to rehabilitate his shattered image following the molestation charges. Michael and Elvis entertained small groups of fourteen-year-olds in their bedrooms for slumber parties. The two music legends were notorious eccentrics trapped in an arrested adolescence, existing on unorthodox diets.

Lisa, some of her friends surmised, had married Michael—on a subconscious level at least—to “save” the father she had loved and lost. By restoring Michael to his former position of glory, by elevating him from the ruin of his molestation scandal, she might, in her mind, redeem and perhaps resurrect her father. Choosing Michael also reinforced Lisa’s lifetime obsession with her mother, for by marrying the pop superstar, she had, in effect, become Priscilla’s equivalent in celebrity. The proof of that theory was evident after the wedding, when Lisa, who had spent most of her teens and twenties in grunge fashions, underwent an extensive cosmetic makeover. She emerged as Mrs. Michael
Jackson that summer, the epitome of couture chic, with a different facial bone structure, a newly slender body, and customized glamour by makeup stylist Kevin Aucoin. She looked, suddenly, like
Priscilla
.

The Espositos, who had lost touch with Priscilla and Lisa through the years—an estrangement they attributed to the Presleys’ conversion to Scientology, which encourages its disciples to socialize together—construed Lisa’s marriage to Michael as an act of rebellion against her mother. Lisa, they concurred, had never
looked
happier. “She’s got a smile on her face,” Joe said. “Before, she never, ever smiled. Never, ever.”

Priscilla declined, after Lisa’s marriage to Michael ended, to comment on the relationship. “It’s her situation, it’s her life. As a mother, I have to honor that. I don’t want to come out and say anything bad about Michael, or bad about her, or bad about the relationship. It certainly surprised me, I will say that.” She told Rick Stanley, shortly before the divorce, that she followed Scientology doctrine vis-à-vis Michael, and considered him a “granted being,” meaning, she said, “I grant people the right to be what they are.” That, according to Mike Edwards, was Priscilla’s modus operandi with any problem: “She’ll block it out of her existence, and she’ll let Scientology deal with it for her.”

Scientology’s protective cloak certainly enveloped Lisa throughout the secret wedding to Michael and afterward. As Lisa and Michael Jackson prepared to do their much-publicized, hugely anticipated and watched July 14 interview with Diane Sawyer on
Primetime Live
, answering questions about their bizarre marriage, Lisa was seen coming out of the president’s office at the Celebrity Centre in the Hollywood Hills the afternoon before, where she was being advised on how to handle the questions and answers. Her childhood friend Dana Rosenfeld, who watched the show along with most of the rest of America, was stunned by her former friend’s aggressive, almost hostile stance during the iterview and analyzed it as a delayed reaction to unresolved emotional issues concerning Elvis’s death and her strained relationship with Priscilla. “Just Lisa’s whole body language. She was so angry. That element of her personality when she was a child, when she was angry, was still there.” After seeing the videotape of the wedding, with Lisa chewing gum and giggling, Dana said, “My only take on that is that for so long she was hidden from everybody and nobody knew anything, and what better way to just catapult yourself
to the center of the media’s attention than to marry someone like that?”

Brett Livingstone Strong’s response to Lisa and Michael’s
Primetime Live
interview was, quite simply, anger, for both created the illusion—the lie—that they had been friends for years, ever since their initial meeting at a Jackson Five concert when they were children. Michael and Lisa did not even name the correct city where the concert was held: They said Las Vegas when in fact it was Lake Tahoe. Michael and Lisa told the world, on television, that Michael had lusted after Lisa since she was six, that they had been in frequent contact over the years, and that it was always in his mind that he would marry Lisa one day. Brett, who knew the truth—that he had orchestrated the meeting not two years before, for the express purpose of getting Lisa a record contract with Michael’s company—was deeply offended, particularly since Scientology is founded on truth. The interview was, he realized, classic media manipulation. “Michael thought that was the way he should present it, as if it had always been in the background, whereas … the truth [was] that I did it as a business thing.… He was trying to defend his life [after going] through this traumatic period of being an accused child molester, and now [he’s] married to Lisa Presley—and is that a beard, or what? So he says, ‘Well, I’ve known her all my life,’ when the truth of the matter is that they had briefly met one another, but Lisa had never [considered it a real] meeting, and Michael exaggerated it out of all proportions.”

Mike Edwards, to whom Brett expressed his indignation, understood Lisa’s strategy in lying to the media about her private life, for he had witnessed it, for seven years, with Priscilla, who learned it from Elvis. “A friend of mine once said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ ”