Michael Jackson (78 page)

During that 8 July conversation, transcripts of which were later filed with the Los Angeles County Court House, Evan said
that he was angry because Michael had stopped telephoning him and no longer wanted a friendly relationship with him. ‘There
was no reason why he had to stop calling me,’ Evan told Dave. He added that he’d recently had a long conversation with Michael
and told him ‘exactly what I want out of the relationship with him.’ (He didn’t say during the conversation with Dave, however,
what it was he wanted from Michael.) He also maintained that, in his view, Michael was spending too much time with Jordie,
and that something was ‘not right about it’. He was furious with June, he said, who had told him to ‘fuck’ himself, when he
tried to discuss Michael with her. When pressed, Evan said that he believed Michael Jackson had ‘broken up the family’ and
that Jordie had been ‘seduced by this guy’s money and power’. He didn’t say, during the conversation, that he suspected Michael
might also be having sex with Jordie. However, he did allow that he had hired an attorney to start looking into the matter,
his friend, Barry Rothman.

As it happened, Barry had been in Evan’s dental chair one day for work when Evan began to confide in him about certain changes
in Jordie’s personality. He became so emotional when recounting recent events, he began to cry. There was a wall between him
and his son, he told the attorney, and he simply didn’t know how to scale it, or tear it down. He was losing Jordie, he said.
As the two discussed the matter, Barry recalls Evan saying that he had begun to believe that Michael and Jordie’s relationship
may have become sexual. If that was the case, Barry Rothman suggested, perhaps Evan might need an attorney. They agreed to
trade services, dental for legal.

‘I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find,’ Evan told Dave, speaking of Barry Rothman who had, in the past represented
Little Richard, the Who, the Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne. ‘All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as
he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can,’ Evan continued. ‘He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s smart, and
he’s hungry for publicity. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. Once I make that phone call,
this guy [Barry Rothman] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. I’ve given
him full authority to do that.

‘Jackson is an evil guy,’ Evan continued, sounding fired up. ‘He is worse than that, and I have the evidence to prove it.
If I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed
forever. June will lose [custody of the son] and Michael’s career will be over.’

Evan and Dave then discussed June’s plans to take Jordie on Michael’s Dangerous tour in the fall. ‘Well, they may think so,’
Evan said, ‘but they’re not going anywhere.’

Clearly baiting him for more information, Dave asked Evan how his plan might help Jordie. Evan’s response was disconcerting.
‘That’s irrelevant to me,’ he said. ‘The bottom line is, yes, his mother is harming him, and Michael is harming him. I can
prove that, and I will prove that. It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get the information I got, and you know I don’t
have that kind of money. I’m willing to go down financially. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want. It’s going
to be bigger than all of us put together.

‘I believe Jordie is already irreparably harmed,’ Evan continued. ‘The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and
destroy everybody in sight. This man is going to be humiliated beyond belief,’ Evan concluded. ‘You will not believe what’s
going to happen to him. Beyond his worst nightmares. He will not sell one more record. The facts are so overwhelming, everyone
will be destroyed in the process.’

Did Evan Chandler know he was being tape-recorded? Did he also suspect the recording might one day be played for Michael Jackson?
Was he being melodramatic and intimidating just for the sake of scaring Michael off? Or, did he really plan to ruin him? Only
he knows what was in his head at this time… and he hasn’t said.

The day after Evan Chandler’s inflammatory comments about Michael Jackson were tape-recorded by Dave Schwartz, Evan hoped
to have the family conference he had long sought to discuss Jordie. However, no one showed up at the meeting. Now, he was
more infuriated than ever. Finally, he got June on the telephone. According to June’s former attorney, Michael Freeman, Evan
reiterated his concerns that something improper might be going on between Jordie and Michael. June said that Evan was ‘full
of baloney’. Moreover, she told him that she and Jordie still intended to go on tour with Michael, and that Evan would ‘just
have to get used to the idea’.

Michael Freeman recalled, ‘Evan then said that he was going to go to the media. Right away, we thought, Why would he do that?
If he really believed Jordie was being abused, why would he not go to the police instead of the press?’

That same day, June and Dave decided to meet with Michael to tell him there might be trouble ahead where Evan was concerned.
However, Michael didn’t take them seriously. ‘Oh, this kind of stuff happens to me all the time,’ he told them. ‘People are
always trying to get money out of me. I’ll have my people work it out. Don’t worry about it.’ However, when they played Michael
the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan, Michael became anxious. ‘He sounded so angry,’ Michael told me of Evan
Chandler in an interview months later. ‘I knew then and there that it was extortion. He said it right on the tape. So what
I did then,’ Michael told me, ‘was turn it over to Bert [Fields] and [private investigator] Anthony [Pellicano] and I decided
to try to forget about it.’

‘Were you angry?’ I asked Michael.

‘No,’ Michael told me. ‘I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, so why would I be angry?’

‘Because you believed you hadn’t done anything wrong, yet you were being accused of a horrible crime?’ I offered.

‘I don’t think like that,’ Michael said, bluntly. ‘I don’t live in fear.’ In retrospect, it seems that Michael may have been
feigning nonchalance with me, perhaps because I was in my reporter’s role and he was saying what he felt was appropriate for
an interview. Later, one of his closest advisers told me that he truly was angry when he heard the tape of Evan. ‘He said,
“After I’ve been good to him and his family, he says these terrible things about me? After I took his family around the world,
after I bought them presents, after I let them into my life, allowed them into my home? Tell him Michael Jackson said he can
go to hell.”’ That was his reaction.

‘I asked him if it was true, or not. Was something going on with him and Jordie? “Of course not,” he said. “It’s absolutely
ludicrous, and it’s not even the point. Tell Evan that Michael Jackson said go to hell.
That’s
the point.”’

On 9 July 1993, June and Dave Schwartz met with Michael Jackson’s investigator, Anthony Pellicano, in his Sunset Boulevard
office to play for them the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan Chandler.

A tough, no-nonsense kind of personality, Anthony could be intimidating, always getting his way and representing his clients
fiercely. Interestingly, he got his start in 1977 by finding the bones of Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, Mike Todd, under
a pile of leaves. Todd’s corpse had been stolen from an Illinois cemetery by mobsters looking for a ten-carat diamond ring,
a gift from Elizabeth which they thought had been buried with the deceased.

Today, Anthony’s career is in tatters. In November 2002, he was arrested following a probe into allegations that he had hired
a man to threaten a
Los Angeles Times
reporter researching a story about a Mafia extortion plot targeting actor Steven Seagal.

Michael’s attorney, Bertram (Bert) Fields, was also present. Fields is, today, still one of the most daunting and influential
attorneys in show business with a client list that has included some of the biggest names in show business from The Beatles
to Tom Cruise to John Travolta. He’s never lost a trial in which he was lead attorney. He was determined to represent Michael
in as aggressive a manner as possible, especially after he heard the audio tape June and Dave brought with them. ‘I was concerned,’
Bert recalled. ‘It sounded bad. It sounded like extortion.’

The next day, Anthony Pellicano arranged a meeting with Jordie Chandler at Michael’s hide-out in Los Angeles. He asked Michael,
June and Dave to leave the room so that he and Jordie could be alone. His intention was to interrogate the youngster about
his relationship with the pop star. ‘I decided to be straight with the kid,’ Anthony would later recall. ‘This was serious
business. There was no time to be delicate. I asked him, have you ever seen Michael Jackson naked? Has he ever seen you naked?
Have you ever done anything sexual with him? The kid looked me straight in the eye and said, “No. No. No.” I believed him.’
Anthony spoke to Jordie for more than an hour and, he says, was convinced that nothing inappropriate had ever occurred between
him and Michael.

After that meeting, Bert Fields (working on behalf of June Chandler as well as Michael) and Barry Rothman (Evan’s attorney)
negotiated an agreement whereby Evan would have custody of Jordie for a week. Reluctantly, June agreed to the terms, not wanting
to keep the boy from his father. Anthony Pellicano and Bert Fields gave personal guarantees that Jordie would be delivered
as promised. Barry Rothman then gave his word that Evan would return the boy on schedule.

At the appointed time and place, Evan waited for his son to show up, but he never did. Instead, June decided to take Jordie
and his sister, Lily, to Neverland to celebrate Lily’s birthday with Michael Jackson.

While in the limousine on the way from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Michael and company stopped at the beach house of financier
Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king who had just been released from prison after serving a couple of years for securities
fraud. He was a friend of Michael’s and the two had been in discussions to set up an educational cable TV network for children.

While at Michael Milken’s, Michael Jackson telephoned Anthony Pellicano to tell him of the change in plans: they had decided
not to allow Evan to have Jordie for the week. This decision put both Anthony and Bert Fields in difficult positions; they
had given their word, and now they appeared to be liars. Anthony was furious; he let Michael have it. ‘You’re being ridiculous,’
he recalled telling him, ‘Now you get that kid back here, and you do it right now, Michael. You and Jordie apparently share
a brain. So,
use it
. Do you hear what I’m saying?’

‘Listen, you don’t tell me what to do,’ Michael shot back. ‘I tell
you
what to do, Anthony. Not the other way around. Do
you
hear what
I’m
saying?’

As Michael’s side of the telephone conversation became more heated, June became uncomfortable.

Michael continued. ‘Evan gets to see Jordie when I…’ He corrected himself. ‘Evan gets to see Jordie when
we
say so, not when he says so. And we don’t say so. So that’s the end of that. Got it?’ Michael slammed down the telephone.
He clenched his fists and made an angry face, so furious he seemed as if he was about to explode. ‘Why does he treat me like
I’m an idiot?’ he asked no one in particular. ‘I’m not an idiot. I’m Michael Jackson,
I’m Michael Jackson
.’ He kicked a wall. ‘It’s offensive and insulting, damn it!’

June, Jordie and Lily looked at one another with surprised expressions. ‘Gosh, Mommy, Michael’s so mad,’ Lily said, surprised.

After witnessing Michael’s unexpected tantrum, June no longer wanted to go to Neverland with him, saying she wasn’t in the
mood. ‘Whatever,’ Michael told her, annoyed. ‘Do what you want to do.’

June, Jordie and Lily called a cab and went back to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Michael proceeded to Santa Barbara alone. When he finally got to the ranch, he was greeted by his housekeeper,
Adrian McManus. ‘Where are the guests of honour?’ she asked. ‘Is there still going to be a party?’

‘There’s not going to be a party,’ Michael said. ‘So, forget it. Throw the food away. Just throw it all away,’ he said. ‘And
tear down those decorations, too,’ he added, motioning to colourful streamers hanging from the doorway.

Michael then stormed off to his bedroom and slammed the door.

On the way back to Los Angeles, June Schwartz had time to think about the way matters had evolved with her son and Michael
Jackson. When she got home, she called Evan. She’d had a change of heart, she said. Perhaps when she saw Michael lose it the
way he had, she realized that
someone
needed to put things into perspective. Though Jordie didn’t want to go, she now felt it important that he visit with his
father for the week.

In young Jordie’s world these days, no one ever seemed to do anything he didn’t want to do. Therefore, he was sullen and disagreeable
when he finally got to Evan’s house. He said he missed Michael.