The Michael Jackson Tapes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Michael Jackson as I Knew Him

  A Note About the Interviews and This Book

  A SETTING THE STAGE

  PART 1 - CHILDHOOD FAME AND JOE JACKSON

  Childhood, Loneliness, Cartoons, and Brothers

  The Father-Manager

  Michael’s Appearance: An Ugly Man in the Mirror

  Michael’s Fear of His Father

  Protective of Janet

  A Painful Blessing: All I Wanted Was to Be Loved

  Rose Fine: Michael’s Childhood Tutor

  PART 2 - JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES YEARS AND RELIGION

  Rejection by the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church

  Did Michael See Himself as God’s Chosen? Did He Have Special Healing Powers?

  Feeling Godlike, Connecting to the Divine

  Michael’s Relationship with Religion

  Religion and Finding God in Rituals

  Karma and Justice

  Racism, Religion, and Anti-Semitism

  Following the Golden Rule—With All People

  PART 3 - FAME IN ADULTHOOD

  Thinking About Ambition, Success, and Honesty

  The Pain of Performing, the Pressure of Staying on Top

  The Master of Mystery

  Advice on Fame

  Sexuality and Modesty

  Fears

  Life in a Fishbowl

  Ambition and Patience, Jealousy and Forgiveness, Anger at the Press

  Michael and His Fans’ Love: A Two-Way Street

  PART 4 - THE KATHERINE JACKSON INTERVIEW

  On Her Children’s Fame and Talent

  Religion in Katherine’s and Her Children’s Lives

  When Michael Left the Jehovah’s Witnesses

  Providing a Sense of Safety

  Being Michael’s Mother

  PART 5 - DOES AN IDEAL WOMAN EXIST ?

  Relationships and Wannabe Girlfriends

  Crushes and Puppy Love

  Thinking About the Perfect Woman

  Motherly Figures

  PART 6 - ROMANTIC RELATION SHIPS AND GETTING HURT

  Women and Trust—Lisa Marie Presley and His Brothers’ Wives

  Celebrity Relationships Gone Wrong—Madonna and Others

  Loneliness, Wanting Children, and Lisa Marie Presley’s Second Thoughts

  PART 7 - FRIENDSHIP WITH CHILD STARS

  Looking for True Friendship

  Michael and Shirley Temple Black: Kindred Spirits

  Elizabeth Taylor: A Special Bond

  PART 8 - ON CHILDREN AND INNOCENCE

  Can Children Teach Us Love?

  Why Michael Remained Childlike

  God Heals Through Children

  Do Black People Have Greater Musical Talent than Whites?

  Michael’s Relationship with His Accuser and Other Children

  Knowing Ryan White and Other Children Battling Cancer

  Being Dad with Prince and Paris

  Playfulness

  Practical Jokes

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Also by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

  The Blessing of Enough

  The Kosher Sutra

  The Broken American Male

  Shalom in the Home

  Parenting with Fire 10 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children

  Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex

  Face Your Fear

  The Private Adam

  Judaism For Everyone

  Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with your Spouse

  Why Can’t I Fall in Love: A 12-Step Program

  Confessions of a Psychic and a Rabbi

  Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments

  Kosher Emotions

  Kosher Sex

  Wrestling with the Divine

  Moses of Oxford: Volume I and II

  Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge

  The Wolf Shall Lie with the Lamb

  Dreams

  To Prince and Paris, who were my children’s playmates, and Blanket whom we never met.

  May you be inspired by your father’s virtue, be cautioned by his excess, and be the living fulfillment of his unrealized dream of Healing the World by living lives of selflessness, kindness, and compassion.

  God watch over you and protect you always.

  I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.

  MICHAEL JACKSON IN CONVERSATION

  WITH RABBI SHMULEY

  I am like a lion. Nothing can hurt me. No one can harm me.

  THE SAME MICHAEL JACKSON IN CONVERSATION

  WITH RABBI SHMULEY

  Michael Jackson as I Knew Him

  The Morality Tale, Our Friendship, His Demons

  The Morality Tale

  How This Book Came to Be

  This book is being published because it was Michael Jackson’s desperate wish that it be so. It contains the most intimate, authentic, raw, painful, and insightful conversations for public disclosure that Michael ever produced. There is nothing like it, and since Michael has tragically passed well before his time, there will never be anything like it again.

  In publishing this book not only have I not broken any confidences, I have fulfilled the desire of a man who wanted his heart to be known to a public whom he understood was deeply suspicious of him. The transcripts this book is based on come from tape recordings of approximately thirty hours of conversations that Michael Jackson and I conducted between August 2000 and April 2001 with the express purpose of having them published in book form and shared with the public.

  The conversations focused on a wide range of topics all with the intent of revealing—and explaining—the man behind the mask.

  So eager was Michael to have people understand who he was that for many of these conversations he held the Dictaphone we used directly to his mouth so not a single word would be lost. On other occasions he made me stop our conversation so he could turn down the air conditioning in his hotel room, because he was afraid the noise would drown out his voice on the recordings. If his children Prince and Paris, who were about three and two when we began and present for many of the recordings, got loud, Michael made sure to gently shush them so not a word would be missed.

  Michael asked me to write the book because we were very close friends and because I was already an experienced author and values-based broadcaster and lecturer, and more importantly because the conversations would naturally parallel the steps he needed to take, with my direction and encouragement, to regain his health and equilibrium and redeem himself not only in the eyes of the public but also in his own eyes. In the months ahead it became a desperate spiritual journey to consecrate his celebrity to a higher end. He wanted to share a deeper side of himself that our friendship had begun to uncover.

  I completed a working draft of the book in the year or two after our conversations ended. People who read it said they never knew Michael could be such a deep and inspiring personality. Many of my most well-read friends told me they cried through the manuscript. Like many others, they had earlier dis
missed Michael as a mindless and shallow celebrity materialist who was hopelessly weird. The sensitive personality revealed in the conversations, however, was introspective, knowledgeable, forgiving, and deeply spiritual.

  But events overtook the making of the book and I withheld it from publication. My relationship with Michael had deteriorated because I no longer felt I could influence him positively. He was closing off from his deeper soul and returning to the profligate ways of the self-destructive superstar the world had determined he already was. I felt he was losing the battle between dissipation and excellence, between going to waste and making a contribution, between being a caricature of himself and being an artist.

  If an opening still existed to publish these interviews, it was slammed shut when, in November 2003, Michael, who had settled sexual abuse allegations out of court in 1993, was accused for a second time of child molestation. There was no way his views would be taken seriously on any subject.

  It would be impossible for Michael to be heard talking about his views on the needs of children, innocence, and the childlike spirit he believed contributed to the greatness of so many people without his thoughts simply being dismissed as the rationalizations of an accused pedophile. Plus, anything that was published would simply become more fodder for the publicity frenzy surrounding the case, defeating the purpose of the interviews, which was to cut through the hype and hysteria to reveal the deeper man beneath the (albeit extreme) public image.

  And then, eight years after the interviews, Michael suddenly and tragically died. My dormant feelings of sadness, anger, resentment, disappointment, and even love were awakened and intensified by the insanity surrounding his death and the distorted portrayal of his legacy. I was spurred to finally publish this book. Michael’s wish should be fulfilled. The tapes needed to see the light of day. Whatever people think of Michael, there was good in him and it deserved to come out.

  Michael was far from a saint and I for one have never whitewashed his sins. But there was a gentility and nobility of spirit that I found humbling and inspiring in a man so accomplished. I realized that the extraordinary things Michael shared with me in these conversations would serve to fill the three giant holes left open by the often tabloid and circuslike media coverage: The first, who was the real Michael Jackson? The second, what pain did he live with that he tried so hard to medicate away and which ultimately consumed him? And the third, what moral lesson could be extracted from his tragic death that could bring redemption to a life cut short?

  The final question especially tugged at me. I watched only parts of his memorial service at the Staples Center. I dismissed it as an outrage, a moral affront. Here was a man who had almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Yet, rather than convey even a fragment of the degree of the tragedy, they made his funeral into a concert.

  America had to read our conversations and learn about the real Michael Jackson. They had to understand he was never a freak. He was not born to be weird. Rather, fame—his drug of choice—and a rudderless life had destroyed him completely. His was a terrible loss of both innocence and talent. His senseless death cried out for redemption.

  The principal tragedy of his life was to mistake attention for love, fame for family, material acquisition for true spiritual purpose. I will never forget how, when we first began our conversations that are the soul of this book, Michael said the haunting words that I used for the epigraph of this book:I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.

  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.

  The Eulogy That Wasn’t

  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 bei
ng 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.”