The Michael Jackson Tapes (2 page)

I remember being stunned as a listened to him, his tear-ridden voice hauntingly describing the abject loneliness of his life. One cannot read his statement without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul who was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly abandoned. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved
what he did
but he never had true compatriots who loved him for
who he was
.

The ancient rabbis of the Talmud proclaimed that words which emanate from the heart penetrate the heart. Michael's admission to me of how all he ever wanted from his career was the love that had so eluded him as a child pierced my heart like a dagger and drew us closer as spiritual soul-friends. I was being summoned into his loneliness.

I was filming a TV show with my family in Iceland when my office called and shared the terrible news of Michael's passing. My wife and children were with me in the van and we could scarcely believe what we had heard. The children all remembered Michael fondly. He had given them their dog Marshmallow, who is still a member of our family. My daughter teared up. My heart bled for his children, whom he adored and who adored him in turn. I thought of Prince and Paris who were my children's playmates, and their brother Prince II, known as “Blanket,” who I never met, and how attached they were to a father who regularly
told me that he knew that when they grew up they would be asked by biographers what kind of parent he had been. He wanted them to have only warm memories to share. Alas, the memories will remain largely incomplete.

Yet I was not shocked to get the news. I had dreaded this day and knew it would come sooner rather than later.

During the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life, what most frightened me was not that he would face another child molestation charge, although he did. It was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, in an internationally telecast interview, “My greatest fear. . . is that Michael's life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity, you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis . . . Michael is headed in that direction.”

Michael's family publicly disputed any insinuation that he would die. As CNN reported in response to my interview “Jackson's family has denied suggestions that the pop star's life is unhealthy, insisting he is doing very well, particularly for someone who faces his unique pressures.”

I was also rebuked in that same interview by Raymone Baine, Michael's spokesperson through the trial and for several years thereafter, who said I was being wreckless and irresponsible for saying that Michael was going to die. On May 6, 2009 Raymone Baine sued Michael for $44 million. Six weeks later it didn't matter much because Michael was dead.

I am no prophet, and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. He confused an affliction of the soul with an ailment of the body. But all the barbiturates in the world could never cure a troubled soul that had lost its way.

Yes, from the media's infatuation with every prurient detail of the aftermath of his death one would think that it was a cartoon character, a caricature of a real man, who had died rather than an actual person. Michael always had a mutually exploitive relationship with the American people. He used us to feed his constant need for attention and we used him to feed our constant need for entertainment.

Still, it would have been hard to believe that Michael's story could be more bizarre in death than in life. But from the mother of Michael's two older children “deciding” whether or not she wanted her kids; to his dermatologist leaving open the possibility that he is the father of Prince and Paris; to Joe Jackson talking up his new record label as his son's body lay unburied; to nurses coming forward to claim that Michael asked them to inject him with quantities of painkillers that would have felled a water buffalo; to doctors being pursued by the Feds for acting as medically sanctioned pushers, clearly the impossible has been achieved.

And just when you thought this theater of the absurd had reached its zenith, the news came that Michael's memorial service would take place at a basketball arena complete with twelve thousand fans and that the Ringling Brothers Circus would be occupying the same arena the very next day.

Were there no adults present to bring proper sobriety to the moment, to actually remind us that a human being had died, that a tormented soul had finally lost its battle with life, and that three innocent children had been orphaned? Was there no one to say that what actually destroyed Michael's life and what brought such untold misery to the Jackson family as a whole was an inability to cope with fame? Was there no one who saw that something important and lasting could be learned from Michael's passing by sending him off in a quiet, dignified, truly religious ceremony that focused on the silent acts of kindness he performed rather than the albums he sold?

To my mind his death is not just a personal tragedy but an American tragedy. Michael's story is the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grew up in Gary, Indiana, ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency with which we can purchase self-esteem. Being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.

When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb he had worked so hard to develop, he famously quoted from the
Bhagavad-Gita
: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Anyone who witnessed the tragic implosion of the life of Michael Jackson and its circus aftermath in the weeks following his death might amend the saying to read, “I am fame, destroyer of lives.”

Michael was anything but a monster. He was a thoughtful, insightful, deeply scarred, and at times very profound soul who was so broken that he could find no healing. No amount of fame or screaming fans would ever rescue him from his inevitable descent into the abyss.

Michael deserved a different kind of attention, and the public deserved and needed to hear a different kind of message, a eulogy that could bring redemption to Michael's life. In my sadness and self-questioning, I wrote and published the following words on July 5th, two days before the funeral and memorial service:

I first met Michael in the summer of 1999 through my friend Uri Geller. While much of the world knows Uri through his claims as a psychic, I knew Uri as a close friend who lived in a town not far from my family's home in Oxford, England. While I was born and raised in the United States, I spent eleven years at Oxford serving as rabbi to the students of Oxford University and as founder and director of the Oxford L'Chaim Society, a large organization of students that specialized in hosting world leaders lecturing on values-based issues. Uri and his family were frequent guests at our home for Friday night Shabbat dinners and we grew quite close.

In the summer of 1999, I was a scholar in residence for a program in the Hamptons with my entire family as we prepared to move back to the United States. Uri called me up and simply said, “Shmuley, you should go and meet Michael.” I had known that Uri was acquainted with Michael Jackson and he explained that he'd told Michael about me and that Michael wanted to meet me. By that time I had authored more than a dozen books on marriage, relationships, parenting, and spiritual healing and I guessed that Uri felt Michael needed some guidance in his life and it would be good for him to connect with me.

So, arrangements were made. Although I was interested in meeting Michael, I did not feel awed at the experience. I had counseled many people who lived life in the spotlight and was already of the opinion that fame did more harm than good in their personal lives. On the
day of my visit, I remember knocking on the door of the beautiful Fifth Avenue townhouse Michael was renting by Central Park. Frank Tyson (whose real name is Frank Cascio), who served as Michael's manager and who would later become a dear friend, opened the door, said hello, and let me know that Mr. Jackson had allocated thirty minutes for our meeting. Michael, who was languishing in his career and ostensibly working on a long-delayed album that finally emerged in 2001 as
Invincible
, was very different from what I expected—quieter, shyer, yet more open and more accessible than his public image would suggest. He introduced me to his children, Paris and Prince (then about one and two), showed me pictures that had arrived that day from a concert in Germany, and openly talked about a host of topics including raising kids, the challenges of living in a fishbowl, and my life and work as a rabbi.

The conversation was more pleasant and substantive than I had expected for a man I believed to be inordinately materialistic. Our meeting went well beyond thirty minutes and by the time I left I felt that, for reasons I could not explain, Michael, a famous recluse, was becoming close to me.

After that we spoke on the phone a few times and made plans for a second meeting. This time Michael himself answered the door, but only after checking that no paparazzi were standing outside. I had brought two small gifts with me. The first was a mezuzah, the roll of Biblical parchment that Jews affix to their door which brings the divine presence into one's home. Normally, only Jewish homes display them, but I said to Michael, “God is the source of all blessing. Let this mezuzah always remind you of that.” He was moved by the gift and we jointly affixed it to his front doorpost. I also brought him a Chanukah menorah as a symbol of God's light that should illuminate his life and home.