Traitors! The doctors, the drugs, the paranoid rages and what REALLY happened at Michael Jackson's Neverland
As I drove along the dark, cobbled streets of Castelbuono, my home town in Sicily, I turned on my phone. Text messages started rolling in, one on top of another. ‘Is it true?’ flashed up. ‘Are you OK?’
But I had no idea what they were talking about. I’d spent the evening with friends and around midnight was heading back to the house I’d rented, following my cousin Dario.
Suddenly Dario’s car screeched to halt. He leapt out and ran towards me, shouting: ‘Michael’s dead! Michael’s dead!’
Dario could only have meant one person: Michael Jackson, who had been the centre of my world – as a friend, as his assistant and then his personal manager – for almost 20 years.
I left my car, dazed and numb, and walked alone through the Italian night. I had been part of Michael’s inner circle and had helped him through his darkest hours. Memories rose up, then melted away again. Moments from the past, some happy, some sad, some triumphant, some disastrous. But the figure who dominated them all was Michael Jackson.
I was four when we first met. My father was general manager at the Helmsley Palace hotel in Manhattan and had struck up a friendship with the star who frequently stayed there. Michael gave me a big smile, took off his sunglasses, and shook my hand. He was 27 and his most recent album, Thriller, was already the best-selling album of all time.
I remember driving a toy limo over his head and down his arms. As we left he told us he would call next time he was in New York. A few weeks later, the doorbell rang at our home in Hawthorne, New Jersey, long after I’d gone to sleep. Michael was paying us a visit, the first of many over the next few years.
Once, I opened my eyes to find a chimpanzee making noises in my face.
Then I realised that Michael and my parents were in the room. The chimp was the legendary Bubbles, Michael’s pet. I think, for the busiest man in entertainment, we represented something that he didn’t have: an ordinary life with an ordinary family.
When I was 12, the whole family was invited to visit Neverland. Beautiful music played. There were trees, flowers, fountains, and acres of stunning landscapes. And, of course, the theme park in the garden. Neverland was by far the most magical place I’d ever been. It still is.
The following year, I went to stay with Michael accompanied by my 11-year-old brother Eddie. We were introduced to a lad named Jordy Chandler, who was about my age. Back then, I didn’t notice that Michael’s behaviour wasn’t what people expected to see in an adult. Since we weren’t there with our parents, my brother and I asked Michael if we could stay with him in his room. We all bedded down on the floor.
Michael, Eddie, and I stayed up late that night talking. Michael filled us in on Hollywood gossip, telling us how he’d gone to Eddie Murphy’s house for dinner and an extraordinary tale about how he believed Madonna tried to seduce him.
He put his hands over his face. ‘I was so shy – I didn’t know what to do,’ he confessed.
‘You should have gone for it. I would have done anything for one night with Madonna,’ I told him. I was young, but already girl-crazy.
Michael wasn’t gay. He was definitely interested in women but he was inhibited.
This inhibition was, in part, as a result of Michael performing with the Jacksons from the age of five. Sometimes, after the shows, he and his brother Randy would hide under a bed while their older brothers brought girls back to the room.
When Michael would start giggling, Jermaine would throw him and Randy out. Michael had been exposed to sex at a young age and, as a result, when it came to women it was as if he was frozen in time.
Let me be absolutely clear: odd as it may seem for an adult to have ‘sleepovers’ with a couple of kids, there was nothing sexual about them. Michael was just a kid at heart.
Later, when I was older and joined Michael on tour, fans often visited him in his hotel room. We called the girls fish – because there were lots of fish in the sea – and the most aggressive ones, barracudas.
Michael grew close to some fans and occasionally had girlfriends. We tried to embarrass each other in front of women.
Sometimes we’d be standing in a lift behind an attractive hotel maid, and I’d feel Michael trying to nudge my hand toward the girl’s bottom.
Sometimes Michael invited members of his fan clubs to Neverland. One time I was driving Michael’s Bentley and he was in the back seat, kissing a fan.
‘Easy back there,’ I said.
‘Just keep driving,’ Michael said, in a joking way. ‘Just keep driving.’
Michael tended to like tall, slender women. He knew an Emily, who visited the ranch regularly. She was a nice, cute girl, slender, with brown hair, in her early to mid-30s. It was a romantic relationship and the longest I saw Michael have. Then, in 1993, came the first shock of our friendship.
‘Do you know a guy named Jordy?’ my mother asked me one day.
‘I hung out with him at Neverland,’ I said.
She blurted out: ‘Well, he is accusing Michael of child molestation.’
I was beyond shocked. Later, when I was older, Michael would tell me that Jordy’s father had wanted him to invest in a film he was making. Michael’s advisers were against it. They dismissed Jordy’s father and from this came a resentment, which Michael blamed for the molestation claims.
The accusations were a cause of unrelenting anxiety. He would sometimes say: ‘I don’t think you realise I have the whole world thinking I’m a child molester. You don’t know what it feels like to be falsely accused, to be called “Wacko *****”. 
‘Day in and day out, I have to get up on that stage and perform. When I step off that stage, people look at me as if I were a criminal.’
I visited him in Mexico City that same year while he was on tour, and whether from the mental anguish caused by the Chandlers’ accusations or the physical toll of performing so many concerts, Michael was in extreme pain every night.
A doctor always came before he went to sleep to give him what he called ‘medicine’.
Only later would I learn that it was Demerol, a strong painkiller that he had first been prescribed after his hair caught fire while shooting a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Now, he had turned back to those drugs. It was the first sign of his fatal dependency.
On one occasion Michael suddenly said: ‘Mommy. I want to go to Disneyland and see Mickey Mouse.’ I was taken aback, confused.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked. He snapped back into reality but didn’t seem to realise what he’d just said. A doctor told me Michael’s lapse was a side effect of his medication.
Under pressure from his insurance company, which would bear the cost of the legal proceedings, and his lawyers, Michael settled the Jordy Chandler case for a reported $30 million. He didn’t want to settle – he was innocent. Michael was never the same afterwards.
In 1999, he invited me to work for him as a personal assistant. I was only 19 but ready to seize the day. I flew out to Seoul to meet him and from then on would be his friend and employee for ten years.
The massive Michael Jackson industry was already in a mess, however.
Michael was paying 500 mobile phone bills a month – for people he had never even heard of.
There was another problem: his growing reliance on prescription drugs.
Various doctors prescribed a menu of pain medications including Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax. At times Michael would ask me to bring in one doctor, and then, hours later, a second doctor, to give him more of the same medication. Then an anaesthetist started turning up.
I paid the doctors in cash, because Michael’s medical issues had to be kept from the public. One doctor was straightforward with me.
‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is put Michael to sleep for a couple of hours. Then I ease him out of sleep.’
The doctor would set up equipment including an intravenous drip in Michael’s room and would stay with him for about four hours.
I told Michael: ‘You’re taking too much Demerol.’
‘You think I have a problem,’ Michael replied, ‘but I don’t. You have no idea what it’s like to be in this much pain. I have to work tomorrow. If I don’t sleep, how am I going to go to the studio?’
The drugs added to his paranoia. He became convinced that his management company was out to destroy him.
Once, still under the influence of drugs he called them: ‘I’m the biggest artist in the world,’ he began, ‘and you’re treating me like this? You’re purposely trying to sabotage this album. You’re f****** traitors. Stay out of my life.’
Perhaps his paranoia was not entirely misplaced. Early in 2003, Michael mentioned two people who would cause him untold damage.
The first was journalist Martin Bashir, who was filming a documentary about him on the recommendation of Michael’s friend Uri Geller, famous for his psychic ability to bend spoons. The other was Gavin Arvizo, a ten-year-old boy Michael had helped through cancer treatment. The next day Michael introduced me to Bashir and his handshake was weak – never a good sign.
‘We’re going to show Michael in the best light,’ Bashir said. He was polite, but I didn’t trust him.
The documentary, Living With Michael Jackson, was aired in February 2003. I watched the broadcast with dismay as Bashir appeared interested only in the shallower elements of Michael’s life: shopping and plastic surgery. But most damaging was when Bashir asked about his relationships with children.
What Michael didn’t explain was that his suite at Neverland had a family room downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. Michael didn’t explain that people hung out there, and sometimes stayed over. He didn’t explain that he always offered guests his bed, while he slept in the family room.
Michael said: ‘Yes, I share my bed. There is nothing wrong with it.’
When he was ‘sharing’ his bed, it meant he was offering it to whoever wanted to sleep in it. Michael never spoke to Geller again.
Nearly a year later Neverland was raided by police investigating allegations from the Arvizo family that Michael had committed ‘lewd and lascivious acts’ with a minor under the age of 14. They were lying – they were after money. Michael went ballistic. Just before Christmas 2003, Michael was charged with seven counts of child molestation. The Arvizos’s story was that Michael and I had formed a conspiracy in which I helped him gain access to Gavin, then covered it up.
The lawyers banned us from communicating in the run-up to the trial, which began in January 2005 and finished with Michael’s acquittal on all charges in June. After the verdict, Michael called me. I asked him if he was all right.
He replied. ‘We got through this, but it wore me out, Frank. I want to get out of the country. They don’t deserve me. Every one can go f*** themselves. I’m never coming back.’
He did, of course. Michael was determined to get back to performing, and planned This Is It, a gruelling series of 50 concerts at London’s O2 Arena to start in July 2009. He expected to perform with the same energy as before. And once again he turned to the doctors. Propofol, a powerful medical anaesthetic, was not a safe way to find sleep, but it was the only solution he had found.
Knowing Michael as I did, I can say with confidence that as he waited for that last, fatal dose from his personal doctor, Conrad Murray, all he wanted was to be fresh for rehearsal the next day. That day never came.
The prince and the Presley girl
One spring night in 1994, Michael told me he had just married Lisa Marie Presley. I was incredulous. ‘What? We never even knew you were dating anyone!’
He had told us that when the Jackson 5 were performing, Elvis would sometimes drop by at their shows, bringing Lisa with him. Even as kids, it seemed, Michael had a special place for Lisa in his heart. But I hadn’t seen this coming.
At the time, Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal was his business partner in a newly formed company called Kingdom Entertainment.
According to Michael, the prince and his colleagues liked to do business with family men, so he wanted Michael to be married – especially after the Jordy Chandler allegations the previous year. The prince was investing a lot of money, so Michael had married Lisa Marie. Or so Michael’s story went.
Did he love her? Thinking back, I have to say if he was going to marry anyone, she was the one. He adored her and her young children, Benji and Danielle.
I’m sure he opened his heart to her and they certainly slept together as a married couple. But it wasn’t hard to see the issues he’d brought to the marriage, and the trouble he had being a husband. Michael did not like confrontation. ‘She likes to fight,’ he said. ‘When she complains, I start clapping my hands and smiling.’
‘Does that work?’ I asked.
‘Well, it makes her stop, and then I ask her if she’s done arguing.’
The union lasted until the end of 1995. He did not seem entirely heartbroken.
© Frank Cascio 2011. My Friend Michael, by Frank Cascio, is published by William Morrow, priced £16.99. To order your copy at the special price of £14.99 with free p&p, please call the Review Bookstore on 0843 382 1111 or visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books.
