The Michael Jackson Tapes (8 page)

I was Michael's friend and rabbi, not his fan. My purpose was to redirect his life with a moral and spiritual foundation, not to clap when he moved his feet. I would not be a sycophant. I would never go back to our friendship unless I could influence him positively. I would not sit passively and watch his decline. I could never allow myself to be compromised in this way. I called my office and dictated the following message to be faxed to his personal assistant:

In the end it was a painful but necessary moment. I was acknowledging that something about Michael was beyond redemption and that if I returned to his orbit I would sink too. I later explained to Frank that I was never the friend of Michael Jackson the superstar. I loved and cared for Michael Jackson the man. Since he had buried that side of himself, I was moving on. I wanted to go back to what I had been before Michael Jackson: a rabbi who tried to spread the glory of God rather than bask in the glow of a superstar.

There was a time when I felt Michael could redeem his life, and that I could be a strong, perfect, caring guide to help him. Many others thought they could play that role too—from his mother Katherine, to his first wife Lisa Marie Presley when he was coping with the 1993 allegations and his drug addiction, to Frank Cascio, whose devotion to Michael knew no end. But for all Michael's strengths—his fierce determination, his pure talent and charisma, his patience, his innate gentleness and love of children—there were forces in his life that he didn't want to overcome or didn't have the strength to—especially his own hubris, his use of drugs, and the stone around his neck with the 1993 and then 2003 molestation charges.

What most corrupted the life and career of Michael Jackson was his belief that he was different from ordinary folk—more elevated, more sensitive, more long-suffering—and thus not subject to rigid rules of right and wrong. His hubris knew no bounds. If you thought he was having too much plastic surgery, well, you could never understand the imaging needs of a superstar. And if you thought that sharing a bed with a child, however platonic, was morally deplorable, well, that too was because seeing it from your mortal vantage point could never enlighten you as to how the self-proclaimed “voice for the voiceless” saw it. While Michael could be forgiven for his naïve assumption that even hardened mass murderers have something good left in them, what is truly shocking is his belief that
he
could somehow have gotten through even to Adolph Hitler, as our conversations will later demonstrate.

To justify sharing a bed with children, he told boldface lies. For example, his telling Ed Bradley on
60 Minutes
that Gavin Arvizo arrived at Neverland in a wheelchair and had to be carried to places such as the game room was preposterous. The boy I saw that day in August 2001 was extremely active, running around from ride to ride, and might even have been construed as wild. It's not, I think, that Michael consciously wished to deceive. Rather, he was so insecure about himself that he had to always sound like more of a saint than he was. Michael's insecurity led him to being an extremist. It was not enough to be a humanitarian. He had to be the greatest humanitarian on the planet. It was not enough to give hope to a child with cancer. Always the martyr, he pictured himself carrying the child on his back through a parched desert with no promised land in sight.

With the passage of time, I watched Michael's unhealthy Messiah complex grow, no doubt egged on by ingratiating fans who never rebuked him for behavior, which was clearly self-destructive. He refused to accept responsibility for his actions and blamed others' jealousy for his incessant problems.

The Bible's word for an adulterous wife is
sotah.
It literally means “to stray, to turn aside, to depart the path of love and righteousness.” It is a word that is relevant to the sins of Michael Jackson. For his sins—aside, of course, from the extremely serious allegations of child molestation—
were never crimes he committed against someone else. They were primarily crimes against himself, a departure from the way of light, a detour into an ever-thickening darkness.

He could never see that a man who spends tens of millions of dollars on himself per annum, sulks in the most lavish lifestyle, and even has his security people holding his umbrella for him while he is on trial (where you would think he might finally have learned to exhibit some humility) is hardly the Messiah. He's just another damaged and self-absorbed celebrity.

Michael confused his afflictions of soul with ailments of the body. But whereas once upon a time the light of celebrity was hot enough to make him feel better, he had reached a stage where even that no longer warmed him. Drugs became the only balm by which to dull pain. As time went on I understood why things like painkillers or plastic surgery were so attractive to Michael.
Michael knew nothing but pain
.

Michael's drug use was difficult to detect because of how spacey and out-of-it everyone expected him to be. Plus, it was easy to assume that Michael took strong painkillers only when he was in physical pain. In the time that I knew him, he always seemed intent on me having a positive view of him and nothing untoward was ever done in my presence.

In retrospect, there were more signs that he was on something than I or anyone around him recognized or acknowledged. Michael was very forgetful. He sometimes seemed woozy. His head once drooped completely at the home of a friend that I had taken him to meet. But I just thought that with the kind of crazy hours he kept—Michael was going to sleep at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning—he was just always tired. Michael often called me and spoke as if he was either tremendously inspired or a bit off. “Shmuley, I'm just calling to tell you that I love you.
I looovvveee you. IIII llloooovvveee yooouuu. . .
” “I love you too, Michael,” I would say. But by and large, those conversations were very short, and I thought to myself, yes, that's strange, but that's Michael. He's different. He's eccentric.

What perhaps should have made me most suspicious was Michael's constant physical ailments. He was always complaining that a part of his body was hurting or had been injured. This, of course, became a central staple of his trial. But the Angel Ball was my earliest exposure to it. Michael claimed that he had been slammed against a wall by fans and fellow celebrities trying to get his autograph. But even if that had happened, it seemed as though the smallest knocks could completely incapacitate him. And that was either true—Michael did have a very fragile disposition—or he was using these ailments, which in his mind were real, as an excuse to take more painkillers.

A few weeks before the major address Michael was to give at Oxford, when he was back in California and I was in New York, Michael called to tell me he had broken his foot while practicing dancing at Neverland. “Are you going to cancel Oxford?” I asked. “No,” he said. “It's way too important.” In due course, Michael arrived in Britain in a foot cast and on crutches. I heard him give a number of conflicting stories about how he had broken his foot, but again, I made nothing of it, thinking that Michael was forgetful.

A doctor traveled with him to England from the United States and stayed in Michael's hotel. Whenever he would complain of terrible pain from his foot, they would go together into his room and emerge, about a half-hour later, with Michael looking glassy-eyed. I asked the doctor about his background and his practice, and as I recall he seemed to give inadequate responses. He was a personal physician who practiced in New York. I wondered why he had accompanied Michael all the way from overseas just because of a broken foot. There were doctors in England if Michael needed one. But if he was being administered more painkillers for his broken foot, which is what I suspected, Michael was still nowhere near being so out of it that he couldn't function.

Michael did come three hours late to Oxford, which meant that he did not attend the dinner that was staged by the Oxford Union in his honor, and he did arrive three hours late at our mutual friend Uri Geller's wedding ceremony the next day where I officiated and Michael served as best man. But other than that, the trip to Britain went off without a hitch.

As I was about to embark on my return flight home, Michael, who was staying on in Europe, reached me on my mobile phone. “
Shmuulleeeey
,” he dragged out the word, partially slurring it, “yesterday at the wedding, I was just staring at you conducting the ceremony. I was staring at you because I love you, because you're my best friend.
I just loooovveeee you
.” I responded as I always did, “I love you too, Michael.” “But no,” he said, “you don't understand.
I loovvveeee yooouuuu
,” dragging out the words for effect. It was a flattering phone call, but it made me alarmed that Michael was on something very strong. I would continue having conversations with him about staying off the poison of prescription drugs. He never fought me and always agreed.

When Michael was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that March, he invited me and my wife, Debbie, as his guests to the dinner at The Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Although he was still on crutches, he seemed completely lucid. I spent a few hours in his suite helping him write his acceptance speech and he seemed cheerful and in good spirits. The next time we did a public event together was a few weeks later when we went to Newark, New Jersey. Michael's foot had healed and he was out of the cast. On that day, Michael seemed fine. Confident, chewing gum, and irritated with me as I explained earlier, but nothing more. I was certain that whatever medication he was taking had been connected with his broken foot and was now in the past.

It was a few months later, after I had severed all contact with Michael, that reports started to filter back to me from one of Michael's closest confidantes that he was hooked on prescription medication and imbibing large quantities of them. It was getting much worse, this friend said, and it was destroying his life. Demerol and Xanax, among others, were mentioned. “Is there a quack doctor giving this stuff to him?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “The doctors around him seem okay. He seems to be getting his own supply; no one knows from where. Michael is injecting himself with the drugs intravenously.” “Well,” I said, noting that Michael and I had no interaction and I could therefore offer little assistance, “you guys better do something and save him before he completely self-destructs.”

Michael's parents, Katherine and Joseph Jackson, were also concerned and invited me to their home in Encino, where they asked me to
reinvolve myself in Michael's life. Michael's parents related to me that Michael had deteriorated significantly since I had last seen him. His state was bad enough for them to have attempted a family intervention to break the drugs' hold on him. Michael's brothers, a few weeks earlier, had arrived at Neverland unannounced to try to get him into rehab, where he had gone almost ten years earlier after admitting to an addiction to prescription drugs. Michael, however, had heard that they were coming and fled.

His parents were concerned, and I felt for them. But this just reinforced my decision. Not only was I sure that Michael would not listen to me, I knew next to nothing about helping people in this situation except to get them into rehab. Perhaps I could inspire Michael to make that decision, and his parents thought I could at least help. But I knew they were wrong. Michael had long since ceased taking my counsel. He found my advice too demanding. I was an irritant and was treated as such. Katherine, who was the anchor of Michael's life and whom I knew from the long interview I had done with her for this book, and Joseph Jackson, who I was meeting for the first and only time, had much more sway with their son than I did, and it was imperative
for them
to save their son's life by becoming available parents in his greatest hour of need. And if his own parents could not persuade him to get help, how could I?

Joseph Jackson also raised the subject of Michael's management with me. He said he didn't approve of the people running Michael's career at present and that he wished to reinvolve himself in Michael's management. I told him sternly, if respectfully, “Mr. Jackson, your son doesn't need a manager right now. He needs a father. You should relate to him as the father he feels he never had.”

I left that meeting shaken. How tragic for Michael, and how similar this was all beginning to sound to Elvis, a fallen star, in terrible emotional and mental anguish, turning to drugs for relief, until they eventually destroyed him. Would Michael end up dead at an early age as well?

According to someone very close to Michael, the year before his arrest, Michael got clean. This person told me that Michael had, by himself, “gotten off the stuff. . . he's completely clean.” I was incredulous. “He didn't go for rehab?” I asked. “You're saying he got himself clean
on his own?” “Yup,” he said, “We're really proud of him. He's clean. I swear it's true.” Well, that was good news.

I was therefore extremely troubled to hear, from the same person again, that shortly after the arrest Michael had gone back on “the same stuff. He's delusional. That's how he's coping with the case. He's out of it a lot of the time.”

“Have you tried to get him to stop?” I asked. “Yeah, I had a meeting with him. I told him I was positive he was back on the stuff. He denied it, but I know what he's like when he takes that stuff. But he responded by sort of cutting me off from him. Now, I can't get access to him.”

This, sadly, was a typical response to Michael hearing people criticize his behavior. He just shut them out. “Do the people around him know?” I asked. “I don't see how they can't,” he responded. “He's drinking a lot of wine and mixing it with all this stuff.” This last comment especially surprised me, because, to my knowledge, Michael never drank alcohol. Indeed, even when he came to our home for the Sabbath meals, he would reject the tiny quantity of sacramental wine I offered him, telling me that he never drank “the Jesus juice.”