Michael Jackson (93 page)

It’s fascinating that Michael was able to have someone in his life like Debbie, a person about whom the public was completely
unaware. It had been presumed by his fans – mosdy because of the way Michael complained about his lack of privacy – that if ever
a woman became a part of his life in any meaningful way, the world would know about it, instantly. It would make headlines.
However, somehow, Debbie was kept a secret from Michael’s fans and the press for more than a decade.

‘When he went into the rehab for the drug problem, Debbie was relieved,’ says Tanya Boyd. ‘She’d been so worried about him,
never out of touch with him during any of the Jordie Chandler business. He may have been talking to Lisa on the telephone
a lot, but he was also speaking to Debbie – though I suspect Lisa did not know about that. When he got out of the hospital [Charter],
he started dating Lisa, but he never stopped seeing Debbie, either, even after he married Lisa.’

Lisa’s friend, Monica Pastelle, recalled, ‘Lisa once told me that she heard Michael was interested in a white nurse who worked
for his dermatologist. She laughed it off. She thought he was probably trying to make her jealous, playing games. Still, she
was interested enough to go to the doctor’s office and sneak a look at this generously proportioned blonde, blue-eyed nurse
named Debbie. After she saw her, she said, “I’m not sure Michael would ever be interested in her. She’s not his type. He likes
glamour. However, I think
she’s
into
him
. I think they’re, I don’t know,
dating
, or something. It’s crazy.”’

It turned out to be true. While he was with Lisa, Michael
was
seeing Debbie secretly, if only as a friend. When Lisa found out about it, she thought it odd that he would keep it from
her. However, she suspected that he had many secrets and this one was probably the least noteworthy of them. She did some
research and realized that Debbie was, as she put it in 2003, ‘a nurse who had a crush on him.’

Lisa called her ‘Nursey’, she didn’t seem concerned about her. One friend recalled, ‘One afternoon, in passing, she said,
“So, Nursey called about ten times today looking for Michael. I finally had to tell her,
please
, he will call you back,
okay?
Jesus Christ!” I said, “Lisa, what is that about?” She said, “Oh, I don’t know. She’s got it bad for him, I guess. I have
no idea what her thing is. I have enough trouble trying to figure out Michael. I’m not about to start trying to figure out
his friends, too.” That was her feeling about Debbie Rowe. She didn’t think of her as a threat.’

When in September 1995 Michael and Lisa appeared together at the MTV Awards, she sat at his side looking pissed off and miserable.
She was tired of arguing, tired of trying to save him from himself. She had recently called Katherine Jackson to ask what
she thought she should do about Michael’s insistence that he continue to have young boys in his life. ‘I want to save this
marriage, but I also want to save Michael,’ she said, according to what Katherine later recalled to a friend. ‘He’s just looking
for trouble. What can I do? This whole thing is freaking me out.’

‘I don’t know what you can do, but I know what you can’t do: you can’t try to tell him what to do,’ Katherine advised her
daughter-in-law. She told her what many people already knew: ‘Michael does what he wants to do.’ She also suggested that Lisa
call Johnnie Cochran, saying that the attorney might be the one to address the issue with Michael. Lisa called Johnnie. ‘My
God! It’s all so innocent, this business with kids,’ Johnnie told her. He suggested that if she wanted to save her marriage
she would ‘have to let Michael be who Michael is.’

‘You think she could have hid it for just one night in front of the cameras,’ Michael later complained to his mother about
Lisa’s glum appearance on the MTV Awards. ‘But, no, not her. She puts her feelings right out there, doesn’t she? She’s so
open.’

‘But that’s what you liked about her,’ Katherine reminded him.

‘Yeah, but now it’s working against me,’ Michael observed.

Despite the fact that their marriage seemed in trouble, Michael was still pushing for Lisa to become pregnant. Whenever he
brought up the subject of having children, though, Lisa acted as if it wasn’t a serious issue for them. ‘I mean it,’ he told
her, according to a later recollection. ‘I’m very serious. I want us to have children. I don’t think you’re hearing me,’ he
said.

However, Lisa had heard him loud and clear. She had two children with Danny Keough. She knew how much she loved them, could
never live a single day without them. Projecting ahead, she wondered what would happen to the child they would have if the
marriage ended. ‘When I imagined having a child with him,’ she confirmed in 2003, ‘all I could ever see was a custody battle
nightmare.’ Also, after getting to know him better and watching his day-to-day interactions with people, she became convinced
that he was too emotionally immature to raise a child. ‘I think
he
needs a parent,’ she told one confidante, ‘and maybe shouldn’t be one himself, yet.’ However, she wouldn’t tell him all of
that, at the time. Instead, she just hoped he would give up on the idea, at least for the time being.

Also, by this time, the heated physical intimacy Lisa had enjoyed with Michael had cooled. It could have only lasted so long,
without real communication between them. She decided to use their waning physical intimacy as an excuse. ‘I think we have
to have sex in order for me to get pregnant,’ she told him, according to what she later recalled. ‘And you know what? I ain’t
doin’ it.”

Michael wasn’t convinced that he and Lisa had to engage in sexual activity in order to have a family of their own. He wanted
children; that was his chief goal and he had made it clear. The question, then, became how to achieve it. Finally, one day
over breakfast he told her, ‘Look, my friend Debbie said she will get pregnant and have my baby. If you won’t do it, then
she
will. How about that?’

Lisa didn’t know how to take Michael’s statement. Was it a challenge? A threat? Or just a fact? It certainly wasn’t the kind
of news most wives would welcome hearing from their husbands: if you don’t have my baby, my nurse will. She was amazed by
the seriousness of his tone. Who would then raise this child? She and Michael? Debbie? Or, just Michael, alone? Life with
Michael Jackson was getting a little weird for her, as if it hadn’t been weird enough up until that time. She met his direct
gaze calmly. ‘No kidding?’ she remarked. ‘Well, cool, then. That’s fine with me,’ she said in a controlled tone. ‘Tell her
to go ahead and do it.’

The weeks slipped into months. By the winter of 1995, Lisa and Michael weren’t even speaking, and not because Lisa didn’t
want to communicate with him, but because she simply could not find him. She didn’t know his whereabouts, only that he was
not at Neverland – and no one in his camp would give her any information. After spending about a week trying to find him, there
was a floral delivery from him at her home in Hidden Hills: dozens of red roses with a card that read, ‘Love, Michael.’ Under
the circumstances, the gesture made no sense. Exasperated, she threw the flowers into the trash.

At about this time, she was already furious with him because of a cover story in
TV Guide
during which he was quoted as saying that she told him Elvis once had a nose job. ‘He was quoting me, “Presley told me Elvis
had a nose job,” which is absolute bullshit,’ she now recalls. ‘I read that and I threw it across the kitchen. “I told you
what?
”’

‘It was getting nasty,’ she recalled, ten years later. ‘I was ready to kill him, I swear to God.’

In December 1995, Michael finally returned to Neverland. Priscilla Presley decided to pay him a surprise visit to find out
what was going on with her son-in-law. ‘When she arrived, she saw Michael in the living room playing with about a dozen babies,
all crawling about, some laughing, some crying,’ recalled Monica Pastelle. ‘It was like a big nursery, with a grown man in
the middle of it all, seeming in a state of bliss. Though nothing wrong was going on, she was flabbergasted. It was so unsettling,
Priscilla left, immediately.’

Lisa was speechless when her mother confronted her about what she’d seen.

A week later, Michael went to New York to begin rehearsals for a concert at the Beacon Theater, ‘Michael Jackson – One Night
Only’, which was scheduled to be broadcast on cable television to 250 million viewers on 9 December. On 6 December, he collapsed
during a practice session and was hospitalized at New York’s Beth Israel North Hospital. His doctors said he was suffering
from heart arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat prompted by severe dehydration, gastroenteritis and a chemical imbalance affecting
his liver and kidneys. He also had a viral infection. Yet earlier in the day, he seemed fine. Marcel Marceau, who was going
to make an appearance on the HBO programme during Michael’s performance of ‘Childhood’, had been at the rehearsal when Michael
collapsed. ‘He was so full of energy, in absolutely wonderful condition,’ said the mime, who turned away for a moment during
Michael’s practice session of ‘Black and White’ under the hot and blinding lights.

‘I heard silence,’ said the mime, ‘and everything stopped. I looked and he was on the floor.’

By the time medics appeared on the site, Michael’s heartbeat was irregular and his blood pressure low. He had on so much makeup,
they had to check his pallor by the color of his chest when they lifted his shirt.

As soon as he was checked into the hospital, Michael’s press people telephoned Lisa in Los Angeles and, with frantic explanations,
begged her to fly to her husband’s side. ‘Hell, no,’ was her response. ‘Screw him. I’m not going. Why should I?’

She wasn’t going to get out of it that easily, however. Michael’s collapse had made big news: ‘Jacko on his Backo’ screamed
the front page of the
New York Post
. The hospital even set up a telephone number with daily, automatic message updates on his condition. The media had assembled
in front of the hospital, waiting for his wife to arrive to be with him. His ‘people’ then badgered her ‘people’ about Michael’s
image and how it would ‘look’ if his wife wasn’t at his side. After all, even Diana Ross had shown up. Finally – and surprisingly,
to her friends, anyway – Lisa gave in. Arriving at the hospital the next day, wearing a black pea coat and sunglasses, she was
whisked through a side entrance.

It’s possible that Michael really did want Lisa to be with him. However, when she got there he must have been sorry she’d
agreed to the public relations manoeuvre. She showed up with fire in her eyes. When she walked into the room, the first thing
that hit Lisa were all the framed posters of Shirley Temple as a child-star, Mickey Mouse and Topo Gigio, the strange, little
puppet-mouse popular from the old
Ed Sullivan Show
in the 1950s and 1960s. When Lisa looked down at Michael, he appeared to be on his death bed; it seemed as if he had tubes
coming out of every limb. He reminded her, she would later say, of the pathetic creature from
E. T
. at the end of the movie when the alien has taken a turn for the worst. As she stood there, ‘E.T.’ gazed up at her weakly
and, mustering all his strength, managed to say, ‘Hi, Lisa. How are you?’

Lisa wasn’t moved. She didn’t care much about Michael’s health, not at that moment, anyway. She suspected that he wasn’t suffering
from ‘exhaustion’ or ‘dehydration’. He had long ago confided in her about his panic attacks. According to those who know her
well, she figured that he’d suffered another and, based on his destabilized condition, that it had been quite a jolt to his
system. Surely, though, it wasn’t because of the upcoming concert, she speculated. He’d made many such appearances, why would
this particular one cause such a reaction? The broadcast had actually now been postponed indefinitely, costing both Michael
and HBO a fortune. (It would never happen.) Whatever was going on with him was serious. Now that Michael was a captive audience,
she wanted to confront him. So where had he been? Why was he so anxious? Most importantly, where did she stand with him?

Michael usually tries to avoid confrontation. So, for his irate wife to barge into his safe, hospital haven was upsetting.
His heart must have been thundering in his chest.

Making matters more tense was the fact that the Cascio brothers had just left the room five minutes earlier. Had Lisa seen
them? It was difficult to tell; her face was that impassive. But it’s likely she wouldn’t even have recognized them now. Still,
it was a close call.

Lisa closed the door behind her. She and Michael then engaged in a private and, judging from the shouting going on in the
room – hers, not his – heated conversation. ‘I’m like a lion, I roar,’ she would say in 2003. ‘I won’t be a victim. I don’t sulk,
I get angry. I go immediately into retaliation.

‘I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him,’ she recalled. ‘I started asking questions, and it was always a different
story. He said I was causing trouble and stirring up problems. He told me, “You’re making my heart rate go up,” and asked
me to leave. I said, “Good. I want out. This is insane, all of it.”’