MJ (31 page)

As
Dangerous
tour rehearsals were beginning in Santa Monica, Rowe worked with an internist and rheumatologist named Allan Metzger to reduce Michael’s pain medication. Rowe believed Michael’s doctors, Klein and Hoefflin, had been competing to give him more and more potent drugs. For example, to help with the collagen and other procedures on his face, Michael received Diprivan injections through his eyelid—this was also known as propofol, a sleep-inducing drug with heavy side effects. Metzger wrote instructions, and Rowe worked with MJ to carry them out. But one day, Debbie showed up at Neverland,
bearing soup, and he was gone—musical instruments, clothes, everything. Michael had left for the rest of the
Dangerous
tour.

When Michael arrived in Bangkok on August 21, 1993, to begin the third leg of
Dangerous
, he was hurting, emotionally and physically. His condition was so bad that promoters had to summon
Stuart Finkelstein, a general physician who had been traveling with the tour to take care of the crew, to treat Michael in his hotel room. When Finkelstein arrived, MJ put him on the phone with his regular doctor, Allan Metzger, who instructed him to administer pain meds. Finkelstein first tried a shot of Demerol, the painkiller, and noticed scarring on Michael’s rear end that suggested he’d had numerous versions of these kinds of shots before. The doctor put MJ on an intravenous morphine drip for twenty-four hours—during which they watched
The Three Stooges
in his hotel room—until the King of Pop was well enough to perform his show. The painkillers MJ took to recover from that surgical procedure, says Eve Wagner, one of his attorneys, who attended a portion of the tour,
“led him down the path of something horrible. That was the start of it.” By the end of the show, Michael was using an oxygen tank to breathe.
“He was exhausted,” recalls tour photographer Sam Emerson. He had to reschedule, then cancel, the second Bangkok show. “Dehydration,” promoters announced.

“Michael had to go on stage every night knowing that the whole world thought he was a pedophile,” Karen Faye, MJ’s friend and makeup artist, would say in court. “He had to stand up in front of all these audiences with the physical pain that he had and knowing that everybody in that audience is thinking that he was the vilest pedophile on earth. To this day, I don’t know how he did that.”

*  *  *

Back in Los Angeles, police were trying to figure out how to handle Jordan Chandler’s allegations of child molestation. The investigator from the Department of Children and Family Services who had interviewed Jordan had apparently sold her story to the media before the
police had a chance to follow up.
“So we were behind when we got the case,” recalls Federico Sicard, the LAPD detective who investigated the charges. Complicating matters, Jackson employees who may have had firsthand knowledge of what really happened between Michael and Jordie had some kind of interest—they were suing Michael for back payments, selling a story to the press, or trying to get attention.

Philippe and Stella LeMarque oversaw
Neverland’s household staff; Philippe said he saw Michael groping Macaulay Culkin, who stood there playing pinball as if everything was normal. Stella said she saw Michael groping an Australian boy. With the help of
Paul Barresi, a fast-talking former porn director and actor who injected himself into the story as a tabloid middleman, they fielded interview offers of $100,000 to $150,000 from the
Globe
and the
National Enquirer.
A group of security guards at the Jacksons’ family home who became known as the Hayvenhurst Five said they’d seen Michael bring thirty to forty boys into his private quarters at varying points between 1987 to 1993, sometimes in the night. They sued Jackson, claiming they were fired because of what they knew. They sold their story to
Hard Copy
. Mark Quindoy and his wife, Faye, had been
Neverland estate managers from 1987 to 1991; Mark gave a news conference alleging Michael was a “gay pedophile.” He said, “Whatever a gay man does to his partner during sex, Michael does to a child. I swear I saw Michael Jackson fondling the little kid, his hands traveling on the kid’s thighs, legs, around his body. And during all this, the kid was playing with his toys.” The Quindoys had been fighting with Jackson’s people over $283,000 they said he owed in “unpaid overtime wages.” They tried to get $25,000 for TV interviews. Blanca Francia, a Neverland maid, told
Hard Copy
she’d witnessed Jackson bathing naked in his Jacuzzi and showering with boys. It came out later that the show had paid Francia
$20,000 for her participation in an episode titled “The Bedroom Maid’s Painful Secret.” Under grand-jury questioning, Francia changed her recollection to say everybody had swimsuits on.

“It was frustrating,” says the LAPD’s Sicard, now retired. “You know, when you go to court, that’s going to come up, and it’ll be a tainted witness. The credibility is going to go down. That’s pretty much what we’re thinking—‘Oh, my gosh, make it a little more difficult for us.’ ”

None of the charges by security guards, maids, and staff amounted to anything, although reporters would repeat them for years, particularly Diane Dimond of
Hard Copy
, in her 2005 book
Be Careful Who You Love
. Police aggressively followed every lead. Detective Sicard flew to the Philippines to talk to the Quindoys. “They kept a diary. We saw the diary. That was going to be a good piece of evidence,” Sicard says. “When we went to the airport, 10,299 reporters were there. ‘Man, how did they find out?’ Of course, the Quindoys probably told them we were going to interview them.” A team flew to Melbourne to interview Michael’s friend Brett Barnes, who had said publicly he had slept in Michael’s bed. When the officers arrived, Brett and his family refused to speak with them, so they had to turn around and take the fifteen-hour flight back. They interviewed Michael’s other young friends, including Macaulay Culkin, Emmanuel Lewis, Jimmy Safechuck, Jonathan Spence, and Wade Robson, all of whom insisted Michael had done nothing wrong. The police weren’t sure whom to believe—“we were just trying to find out if, in fact, the accusations were true, never saying whether he was guilty,” Sicard says—but they were struck by how perfectly Jordan Chandler remembered events. After he told them about the Michael Jackson Suite at the Mirage, in Vegas, where he’d allegedly been sexually molested, the LAPD went to investigate, armed with a warrant. Jordie’s description perfectly matched the room, down to MJ’s name on the door.

Every cable channel, every tabloid, gave the Michael Jackson child-molestation story full-time coverage. The
New York Post
’s most infamous headline on the subject was
PETER PAN OR PERVERT?
The
National Enquirer
assigned twenty reporters and editors to the story, and a group of them knocked on five hundred doors in the posh Brentwood section
of LA to ferret out Evan Chandler. They succeeded, with the help of property records, and ambushed him in his black Mercedes.

Michael’s sister La Toya called a press conference to declare:
“I just think Michael needs help. This has been going on since 1981, and it’s not just one child.” She added that she could no longer “be a silent collaborator of his crimes against small, innocent children. If I remain silent, then that means I feel the guilt and humiliation that these children are feeling, and I think it’s very wrong.” (Later, she said her Svengali-like manager and abusive husband, Jack Gordon, made her write and say evil things during this period.)
“A lot of strange things happened,” says Larry Feldman, Jordan Chandler’s attorney. “There was a bird in a cage, dead on [the Chandlers’] doorstep. There were swastikas painted on my law office’s building.” The crush of news reports confused even the cops.
“Watching Diane Dimond on TV at times became a source of possible investigatory leads,” says Lauren Weis Birnstein, who was part of the LAPD’s investigative team at the time and is today a
Los Angeles Superior Court judge. “Sometimes she had better information and more resources than the police investigators.”

*  *  *

After Michael rebounded from Bangkok, the
Dangerous
tour rolled on, to Singapore, Moscow, and Tel Aviv. But there were inexplicable hitches. In Istanbul, fans had been skeptical about American music stars, but as the trucks rolled in and roadies set everything up in the middle of town, they began to get excited. The day before the show at Inonu Stadium, Michael decided he couldn’t perform.
“Sorry! I can’t do it!” he said, sitting in the back of a van en route to the airport. His local concert promoter was in tears. The fans went berserk. “He left us there to fend for ourselves,” recalls Greg Phillinganes, who left the tour shortly afterward. “We almost didn’t make it out. They almost didn’t let him out. It was crazy. It was a borderline revolt.”

Michael managed to keep it together through three shows in Mexico
City, in late October 1993, but then, recalls David Forecast, MJ’s personal physician,
“Things went belly-up and Mike got in a very bad way.” Those close to Michael noticed he wasn’t quite right.
“He was there, but he wasn’t there,” says
Benny Collins, the tour’s production manager.

For a week, Forecast spent his days and nights with Michael. Then he heard a knock on his hotel-room door, and when he opened it, before him stood Elizabeth Taylor and her new husband, Larry Fortensky. The tour’s
“head powers,” as Finkelstein, the tour’s crew doctor, had called them, had summoned Liz for an intervention. Forecast wasn’t particularly happy to see her:
“We had a slight professional discussion that maybe the doctor should deal with the medicine and the actors should do the acting.” Michael sorted it out by saying he wanted to keep Forecast on hand for medical consultation, and his old friend Liz would do the rest. Michael announced he was canceling his five scheduled shows at the hundred-thousand capacity Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, as well as the rest of the tour.
“The pressure resulting from these false allegations, coupled with the incredible energy necessary for me to perform, caused so much distress that it left me physically and emotionally exhausted,” he said in a statement. “I became increasingly more dependent on the painkillers.” With help from one of Michael’s most trusted security men, Wayne Nagin, his small entourage including Taylor, Fortensky, and Forecast managed to escape Mexico City, where promoters had told members of Michael’s team they’d land in prison if they weren’t able to do the shows. They took a
737 to Reykjavík, Iceland, where one of Liz’s dogs relieved himself. Then they flew on to Luton Airport in London.

Taylor had picked out a rehab facility for Michael—Charter Nightingale Clinic in central London. It didn’t work out, due to what Forecast calls “medical issues.” The doctor wasn’t pleased—he was jet-lagged and annoyed he had to leave his wife, a nurse who worked with him on the tour, behind in Mexico City. “We’d been hijacked by Ms. Taylor,” he recalls. Forecast steered Michael to Elton John manager John Reid’s $3
million home at Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Michael fell asleep on the sofa. Michael did most of his convalescence at Reid’s house, then relocated to millionaire investor Jack Dellal’s farm seventy miles south of London. At one point, they had dinner with Elton John and his new boyfriend, David Furnish, at Elton’s house. The rehab was a success and, amazingly, achieved Michael’s goal of eluding paparazzi completely.
“No one knew,” Forecast says. “When we left the farm, Mike was in a great place psychologically.” When they returned home, they went through customs in Billings, Montana. The customs officer couldn’t believe Michael Jackson was on the plane. “Listen,” Forecast told him, “we will send your kids more memorabilia than you can buy in the store if you just let us get home without letting the world know who this is.”
^II

When the
Dangerous
crew received the call to cancel the remaining shows in Mexico City—
“Okay, tour’s over, you’re done”—Michael’s people had no idea what to do. “We didn’t even know where to put the gear,” recalls Anthony Giordano, the tour’s assistant stage manager. Eventually, working with Rock-It Cargo, they scrambled to break down the production, repack everything into the An-124 freighter jets, and fly it all to Las Vegas, the only airport big enough to accommodate them on short notice.

*  *  *

By fall 1993, Jordan Chandler’s attorney,
Larry
Feldman, had taken charge of the case.
Barry Rothman, Evan’s attack dog of a lawyer, had resigned.
“I went to a lot of different experts and was convinced there
were lots of reasons to believe this boy,” Feldman says. “He had a lot to deal with. He had his parents separated, he had Michael Jackson in his life, [he had] the enormity of what he’s about to be doing . . . at a very just horrible time for kids, in general, as they’re going through puberty.” On September 14, the day before Michael was to play Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, Feldman filed Chandler’s lawsuit against Michael Jackson in LA Superior Court. The filing included a four-page affidavit in which Jordan declared Michael Jackson “put his tongue in my mouth,” “rubbed up against me in bed,” “masturbated me to a climax,” and “masturbated me many times both with his hand and with his mouth.” In terse, horrifying, declarative sentences, Chandler recalled how Michael kept telling him all these activities were okay and he’d done them with other kids.

For Michael Jackson, the public humiliation of that complaint was nothing compared to his private humiliation on December 20.
Jordan Chandler had given police a
description of Michael’s genitals, including an image he’d drawn by hand—Michael had distinctive
“splotches” on his rear end and penis, both of which were “a light color similar to the color of his face,” according to an affidavit by Deborah Linden of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department. Jordan drew a picture of Michael’s genital area, declared him to be circumcised, and added, “He has short pubic hair. His testicles are marked with pink and brown marks. Like a cow, not white, but pink color.” Police raided the offices of Klein and Hoefflin for Michael’s medical records. Finally, they obtained a search warrant to examine Michael Jackson’s entire body, from penis to scrotum to buttocks, and take photos. They had to see if the real thing matched the description.