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On June 29, 2005, sixteen days after the not-guilty verdicts in his Santa Barbara County child molestation trial, Michael Jackson came to the end of a journey that had taken him across the country, above the Atlantic Ocean, over the Mediterranean Sea, and into the Persian Gulf, where his private jet landed at Bahrain International Airport in Manama, eight thousand miles from his former home in California. He had to go that far to get relief and even there it wouldn't last long.

Those who met him on the tarmac were pleased to see that his appearance was markedly improved from the withered wraith he had become during the final stages of his criminal trial. "Near the end, he went days at a time without eating or sleeping," remembered his lead defense attorney, Tom Mesereau. "He would call us in tears at three or four in the morning, worried about what would happen to his children if he was behind bars. In those last couple of weeks, his cheeks were sunken to the point that his bones looked right on the surface." By the time he arrived in Manama, Michael had put on nearly ten pounds and looked like he could dance to the terminal if he had to. Bahrainis greeting him at the airport agreed he appeared far less strange in person than they had imagined from photographs. And the size of those hands, Allahu Akbar.

Mesereau had been among the crowd of people who gathered at Never-land on the afternoon of the verdict. Michael repeatedly thanked the attorney but seemed capable of little more than hugging his children and staring into space. Some observers described Michael during the trial as sinking gradually into a drug-induced delirium as he raved about the conspiracy against him but Mesereau insisted that it was only on this final day that he encountered a Michael Jackson who seemed "less than lucid."

A handful of people knew how thin the star had been stretched by the jury's deliberations. One was the comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory, part of the crowd that accompanied Jackson from the courthouse to the ranch on what everyone thought might be Michael's last trip to Neverland. The gaunt, white-bearded Gregory had been in and out of Jackson's life for years, but Michael was especially adamant about having Gregory present while he awaited and received the jury's verdict. Later in the evening, after Mesereau and others had taken their leave, Michael asked him to come upstairs to his bedroom, Gregory recalled. Michael clung to him on the stairs, Gregory said, and he could feel the entertainer's bones jabbing through his clothes. "Don't leave me!" Michael had pleaded. "They're trying to kill me!"

"Have you eaten?" Gregory asked. The comic purported to have been the one who taught Michael to fast, claiming he had coached Jackson through forty days without food. A person had to drink gallons of water to go so long without eating, Gregory had instructed him then, but Michael appeared to have forgotten that part of the regimen. "I can't eat!" Michael answered. "They're trying to poison me!"

"When was the last time you drank water?" Gregory asked.

"I haven't," Michael replied.

"You need to get out of here," Gregory told him.

Within an hour, Gregory, along with a small security detail, escorted Jackson to Santa Barbara's Marian Medical Center. Jackson was immediately put on an intravenous drip of fluids and sleeping medication. The doctors who treated him told Gregory that Michael would not have survived another day without medical attention. As his family prepared for his "victory celebration" party at a nearby casino, Michael himself lay in a hospital bed drifting in and out of consciousness, wondering at one point if he was in jail and at another if this was the hereafter. He was released from the hospital only after spending nearly twelve solid hours on an IV.

He made one more trip to Neverland to pack, then left the ranch for the last time. Mesereau had advised his client to get out of Santa Barbara County as soon as possible and not to return. The district attorney's office and the sheriff's department were obsessed with Michael Jackson's destruction, Mesereau believed, and would be especially dangerous now, after being humiliated by the verdicts. "I told Michael that all it would take to open the door to another criminal charge was one child wandering onto the ranch," Mesereau recalled.

Michael spent most of the week following his acquittal recuperating at his friend Deepak Chopra's Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, between Los Angeles and San -Diego. He was joined by his children and their African nanny Grace Rwaramba. Slim and attractive, with an orange-tinted Afro and large, round eyes so dark brown that they appeared black in anything other than direct sunlight, Rwaramba had been Jackson's employee for almost twenty years. Now in her late thirties, she had fled a Uganda decimated by the murderous warlord Idi Amin right around the time she reached puberty and had spent her teens living and studying with the Catholic nuns at Connecticut's Holy Name Academy. Among her classmates, Grace had been best known for her vast collection of Michael Jackson pictures, postcards, T-shirts, and gloves, and for her emotional proclamations of love for the King of Pop. In the 1985 Holy Name yearbook, each graduating senior was permitted a "prophecy." Hers read: "Grace Rwaramba is married to Michael Jackson and has her own generation of the Jackson 5."

It was incredible how close she'd come to living her high school dream. After earning a degree in business administration at Atlantic Union College, she met the family of Deepak Chopra, who personally introduced her to Michael and arranged for her to obtain a position on Jackson's staff during the Dangerous tour. As personnel director, she had been tasked mainly with organizing insurance arrangements, but Grace moved steadily up the ranks at Neverland, becoming Michael's most trusted employee. When Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. was born in 1997, Michael appointed her the infant's nanny. She had taken charge of each of the next two children, Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson, born in 1998, and Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, born in 2001, growing so close to them that all three children called her Mom.

Her relationship with their father was more muddled. Over the years, Grace had developed a certain "be careful what you wish for" cynicism about Michael that strained her devotion to him. The only person on his staff who ever dared to criticize or challenge him, she had been dismissed several times but each time had been brought back almost immediately, mainly because the children cried for her. Tabloid and Internet reports of Michael and Grace's impending marriage regularly surfaced, but a rarely mentioned obstacle was that Grace was already married to someone named Stacy Adair. She had wed Adair in what was described as "a ceremony of convenience" (presumably to protect Rwaramba from problems with the immigration authorities) in Las Vegas in 1995. Adding to the confusion was that those who spent time around Michael characterized Grace in ways that were wildly contradictory. Chopra invariably referred to her as "a lovely young woman" and said she was "devoted" to Michael and his children. Others reported that she was principally dedicated to the power she wielded as Michael's "gatekeeper" and spent much of her energy attempting to insulate him from anyone who might attempt direct contact.

Though she had grown up as one of fifteen children in the Ugandan village of Ishaka, Grace had spent most of her adult life living in either fabulous mansions or the presidential suites of five-star hotels, developing an outsized sense of entitlement along the way. "The most powerful nanny in the universe," was how Time magazine described her, because of the sway she held over Michael's children. Tom Mesereau acknowledged that Grace's self-importance was a contributing factor to his subsequent resignation as Michael's general counsel. "I got really, really tired of dealing with her," he said. Many reports linked Grace to the Nation of Islam but in truth she had undertaken a course of Bible study during Michael's criminal trial and was said to have joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. In the only public comment she made during Michael's criminal trial, Grace replied to a question about who was behind the molestation charges by answering, "Satan, the devil." Jackson's spiritual advisor among the Witnesses, Firpo Carr, said he heard her described as "this woman in the background with all of this power, flexing her muscles," but that in his personal encounters with Grace he had found her to be "one of the most humble people I've ever met."

That mixture of modesty and might was regularly tested in her dealings with Michael, whom she often treated like the fourth of her juvenile charges. When Michael finally gave in to her demands to get his own cell phone, he lost the device within a day, and went back to telling people to call Grace's number if they wanted to speak with him. He and the nanny regularly bickered over Michael's wasteful spending. Nearly all the revenue from Michael's catalog holdings, record sales, and song royalties was going directly to his enormous debt payments. Yet even as he lived hand-to-mouth, Michael continued to insist on booking the most expensive hotel suite in every city they visited. When there was no money to pay the bills, they stayed with one of the many "friends" the star had around the world who offered hospitality. Michael possessed so little grasp of his finances that he had whatever checks came his way deposited into Grace's bank account, then asked that she dole cash out to him as needed. He grew peeved or suspicious whenever she told him the money was gone.

On June 17, four days after his acquittal, Jackson's passport and the $300,000 bond he had posted to meet his $3 million bail were returned to him by Judge Rodney Melville, who had presided over the trial. Two days later, without advising even those who were closest to him, Jackson flew with his children and their nanny aboard a private jet to Paris, then traveled by limousine to the Hotel de Crillon, part of the magnificent palace complex at the foot of the Champs-Elysées. The $300,000 he had pocketed upon his release from bail would cover the cost of ten days at this pinnacle of privilege. Lodging in a presidential suite at the Crillon was almost impossible to obtain on short notice, committed as such accommodations were to the various heads of state and high-ranking government officials who typically occupied them, but for Michael Jackson the Crillon's management had been willing to make adjustments. During these ten days he could not only rest and continue to recover, but also give himself something that he had been denied in recent months-the trappings of royal status. He was still the King of Pop, something more than a mere celebrity, a personage of such importance that he could have the Crillon's fabulous Leonard Bernstein Suite, where his children could frolic on the famous wraparound terrace with its spectacular views of the City of Lights while he tickled the keys of the maestro's piano.

A single item of good news encouraged him: Mediabase, which monitored airplay for the radio and recording industries, reported that spins of Michael's records had tripled in the first two days after the "not guilty" verdict in Santa Barbara County.

Peace and privacy were promised in Bahrain. Upon arrival at the airport in the capital city, Jackson and his children were transported directly to the staggering palace of their host, Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the thirty-year-old, second son of the king of Bahrain. For most of the past decade, Abdullah had been not only the governor of Bahrain's southern province but also the hardest rocking oil sheikh in the entire Middle East. A devotee of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley, the portly Abdullah kept a second home in the Kensington section of London, where he was known for riding around on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, often in flowing robes, occasionally with a guitar strapped to his back. An aspiring songwriter whose family wealth and Islamic faith had imbued him with a sense of transcendent possibility, the sheikh's plan was to revive Jackson's career (and launch his own) through 2 Seas Records, a music label the two would own as partners. Abdullah's palace was fitted with the finest recording studio in the entire kingdom and Michael would have full use of it for as long as he liked, just as the sheikh had assured him during a series of phone calls between Manama and Neverland Ranch during the criminal trial.

The Bahraini prince demonstrated his seriousness during those months of the trial with ample financial largess. Introduced to the entertainer through Jackson's brother Jermaine, who converted to Islam in 1989, Sheikh Abdullah from the first had lent more than a sympathetic ear to Jackson's woeful tale of legal bills that were eating him alive. "He would say, 'What can I do for my brother? What can I give the children?'" recalled Grace Rwaramba. In March 2005, just as the prosecution began to present its case at the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, local utilities had threatened to shut off service at Neverland unless the cash-starved singer paid his overdue bills. Abdullah, who had never met Michael face-to-face, responded by immediately wiring $35,000 in cash to her personal checking account, Rwaramba recalled. She was "flabbergasted," but the sheikh merely apologized for the paltry amount, promising "next time it will be more." A month later, Michael asked for $1 million, Rwaramba said, and "it blew my mind" when Abdullah sent exactly that amount. By the first day of summer, Abdullah had promised to pay the $2.2 million in legal bills Jackson would accumulate by the end of his criminal trial if the singer took up residence in Manama.

Sheikh Abdullah was aching to show off his prize, yet insisted that the media hold Jackson's presence in Bahrain as a sort of open secret for nearly two months. Various publications reported that Jackson was in the country as a guest of the prince, but added only that, according to the royal family, "Michael wants to lead a normal life and does not want to be hounded by the media." The sheikh and his famous guest did not venture out in public together until they traveled to the emirate of Dubai on August 20, and even then they did not make themselves available to reporters until another week had passed.

One Middle Eastern story after another celebrated how "happy and healthy" Jackson appeared in the photographs taken at his first public appearance since the trial, in Dubai on August 27, 2005, two days before his forty-seventh birthday. Dressed in an electric-blue shirt and a black fedora, Michael smiled tentatively but sweetly as he and the jowly, droopy-eyed Abdullah posed with the legendary Arab rally driving champion, Mohammed bin Sulayem, while cameras clicked and rolled all around them.

The photo session took place in the corporate offices of Nakheel Properties, the megadeveloper responsible for several of the projects that had transformed Dubai into the world capital of architectural adventurism. Luxury real estate and appointment shopping were what drove the local economy these days and Michael had contributed his part earlier in the week when he ventured out in disguise and behind blackout windows to the absurdly opulent two-story retail complex known locally as "The Boulevard." When the photo session finished, Nakheel executives took Michael and Abdullah on a boat tour of the Dubai shore, skimming over iridescent blue waters alongside the white shell and coral beaches that had once been the tiny emirate's main attraction. From the water, Jackson could see each of the skyscrapers that sprouted from Dubai's fabled sands like petrodollar silos. The Jumeirah Emirates Towers were the twelfth and the twenty-ninth tallest buildings on the planet, he was told, but mere scratching posts compared to the Dubai Tower, where construction had begun almost a year earlier and which, at 2,684 feet, would be the tallest man-made structure on earth by the time of its completion in 2009.

The destination of that afternoon's cruise was the emirate's ultimate engineering feat, the Palm Islands, where more than a billion tons of rock and sand were being used to create a residential community of artificial islands, each in the shape of a palm tree topped by a crescent. Here a world of make believe was being brought to life on a scale that would make even Neverland Ranch seem quaint by comparison. While Michael once again assured all present that he was serious about settling down in Dubai, Abdullah delighted the trailing reporters with his announcement that "Mikaeel" planned to build a grand mosque here in his "new home," dedicated to English-language instruction in the principles of Islam.

Jackson had not actually become a Muslim, but was "on the verge of converting to Islam," according to the Arab-Israeli newspaper Panorama. The story would soon be picked up by CBS News, then seized upon by New York Sun columnist Daniel Pipes, who observed that "it fits into a recurring and important African-American pattern." That Jackson appeared to welcome being addressed in Bahrain by the name of Allah's great angel, Mikaeel, gave the conversion claim credence in the minds of those who did not know that during his criminal trial the entertainer had several times escorted his children to services at the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah's Witnesses in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and was permitting his mother Katherine to instruct all three kids in church doctrine.

Mikaeel would keep his religious ambivalence to himself while dwelling in the Middle East, and especially when he returned with Abdullah to Manama for a public greeting by the sheikh's father, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. After His Majesty and Mikaeel withdrew behind closed doors, the king's staff announced to waiting reporters that Mr. Jackson had just acquired a "luxury palace" in Manama and was donating "a huge amount of money" for a second mosque to be built in Bahrain's capital city.

The palace was being rented by the royal family, though, and the millions Jackson had "donated" for the two mosques were an empty pledge. The entertainer would live on Abdullah's dole throughout his stays in Manama and Dubai but even the oil sheikh's pockets weren't deep enough to fill the hole that Jackson was in. The vast assortment of problems-legal, financial, personal, and professional-that had chased him to the Persian Gulf were not only following Jackson, but stacking up against his narrow back.

Two weeks before he celebrated his birthday in Dubai, Jackson had been fined $10,000 by a district court judge in New Orleans for his failure to appear at a hearing prompted by a particularly specious sex abuse accusation. A thirty-nine-year-old man named Joseph Bartucci was claiming that, while watching coverage of the trial in California, he had recovered the suppressed memory of an assault on him that had taken place twenty-one years earlier, during the 1984 World's Fair. According to Bartucci's complaint, he had been "lured" into Jackson's limousine and taken on a nine-day ride to California in which he was forced to consume "mood altering drugs" while Jackson performed oral sex on him, cut him with a razor, and stabbed him in the chest with a steel wire. Bartucci could offer not one piece of evidence to support his allegations, while Jackson's attorneys had provided irrefutable proof that their client was in the company of President and First Lady Ronald and Nancy Reagan during some of the days when Bartucci claimed to be his captive. Yet Judge Eldon Fallon allowed the case to go forward even when it was revealed that Bartucci was an admitted bigamist who had been party to eighteen separate civil suits and criminal complaints during the past seventeen years, and was arrested for stalking a woman in 1996. Infuriated that his attorneys in New Orleans had run up a $47,000 bill without obtaining the dismissal of a fabricated lawsuit, Jackson fired them while he prepared for the trip to the Persian Gulf, then simply turned his back on the Louisiana litigation. Now Judge Fallon was demanding that Jackson show cause why he should not be held in contempt and a default judgment entered against him. Jackson would have to answer, even if he did so from halfway around the world.

It was but one legal predicament among many. During the past twelve years, Jackson had paid out almost $100 million in settlements and attorney's fees to deal with the scores of court filings, both frivolous and not, against him, and dozens remained pending. Of all these claims, by far the most expensive-in every sense of the word-had resulted in the payment of more than $18 million to the family of a thirteen-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler back in 1994. According to Mesereau, Michael had come to realize that making a deal with the Chandlers was "the worst mistake of his life." It was the size of the settlement that convinced much of the public and many in the media that Jackson was, more likely than not, a child molester. What sort of innocent man, people asked, would pay that kind of money to a false accuser? "Someone desperate to get on with his life," answered Mesereau. "Michael had no idea how people would interpret his decision to try to make the whole thing go away." The consequences of that decision had multiplied exponentially as one lawsuit after another was filed against him, with various grifters lining up for their piece of the entertainer's rapidly shrinking fortune.

On September 23, 2005, Michael flew to London with Abdullah, Grace Rwaramba, and the children, booking an entire floor at the Dorchester Hotel. It was his standard operating procedure when traveling, he explained to the sheikh, who was footing the bill. Jackson made the trip to deal with what was perhaps the most piercing of all the legal claims currently pending against him: a lawsuit filed in November 2004, in the midst of his criminal trial, by Jackson's former business partner and erstwhile "dear friend" Marc Schaffel.

The thirty-five-year-old Schaffel had emerged as a public figure in late 2001, when he suddenly became the most visible among a crowd of advisors jockeying for position around Jackson, mainly because he had been charged with assembling a choir of superstars to sing with Michael on a charity single titled "What More Can I Give?" The song had originally been inspired by a meeting with South African president Nelson Mandela but was subsequently intended to benefit Kosovar refugees. Then, in the wake of the September 11 atrocities, "What More Can I Give?" was hastily rewritten with the intention to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. The evolving project had turned into an almost perfect example of how and why virtually everything that in recent years had been initiated from within what the media liked to call "the Jackson camp" was destined to end in a fiasco of finger-pointing and litigation.

Schaffel had been popping up in Jackson's life since August 1984. Just eighteen back then, Schaffel was a freelance cameraman for ABC television, which sent him to Detroit to shoot footage of the Jackson 5's Victory tour. Schaffel arrived at the Pontiac Silverdome late and was mortified when the Jacksons' security detail denied him permission to join the rest of the media in front of the main stage. "They put me in a room backstage to wait," he recalled. "So I'm sitting there feeling really stupid when I hear the door open. I assume it's one of the people that's going to usher me outside, but in walks Michael, who closes the door, and it's just the two of us." Jackson took one look at the enormous camera sitting next to Schaffel and stepped over to inspect it more closely. "This was back in the time when they were switching from film to video, and I had one of the first ENG cameras around," the thickly built Schaffel explained. "It was a huge thing with a separate flash for video, and Michael was fascinated by it. He asked, 'Can I look at your camera?' and I was like, 'This can't be real.' He asked, 'Can I pick it up?' and I said sure, but I was a little concerned, because this was one big-ass camera, very heavy. But he just reached over and lifted the camera up like it was made of cardboard. I was amazed by his strength." As Jackson began to fiddle with the camera's lens, Schaffel could hear people shouting "Michael!" outside the door, calling out to the star that he needed to make a costume change. "I don't think Michael even heard them," Schaffel said. "Finally, he says, 'We have another show to do here. Can I call you later and use the camera, try it out?' I said sure, and gave him my number, thinking I'd never hear back. But the next day I get a call asking if I can come by the hotel where the Jacksons were staying. Michael was that interested."

The two ran into each other again in the mid-1990s at a fund-raiser for the AIDS research foundation amfAR in Beverly Hills. "Michael points to me and says, 'You were the guy with the camera,'" Schaffel remembered. "He didn't know my name, but he knew my face." He and Jackson didn't have their first real conversation, though, until the year 2000, when they met at the home of the famous dermatologist they shared, Arnold Klein, a friend of Schaffel's who became a significant figure in Michael's life over the years, involved in aspects of the entertainer's life that ranged from financial management to the conception of his two oldest children. "Michael was staying at Klein's home after a procedure," Schaffel remembered. "He used to stay at Arnie's house quite a bit." The two spent most of that evening in conversation. "Michael testified later that he liked Marc's enthusiasm and ideas," Schaffel's attorney Howard King would recall. "He especially liked that these ideas didn't involve singing and dancing. Michael was intent on finding a way to make money that did not involve being onstage or in a studio."

Jackson's longtime publicist, Bob Jones, recalled that Schaffel had appeared on the scene at almost the very moment when the people who had done Michael's film work over the past several years were breaking with him amid complaints that they weren't being paid. Boasting of his background in film production and flashing a bank account that approached eight figures, Schaffel pledged to organize Michael's various film and video projects through a company the two formed, called Neverland Valley Entertainment. There was talk of building a movie studio at the ranch, of making short films, perhaps producing an animated television series. But Schaffel was swiftly drawn into the preparations for Jackson's "30th Anniversary" concerts, which were scheduled to take place on September 7 and 10, 2001, at New York City's Madison Square Garden.

Pulling together a list of performers Jackson considered worthy of the event had proven a complex task, but Schaffel quickly demonstrated he could contribute. Working as Jackson's liaison with concert producer David Gest and writing a series of checks drawn on his own accounts to cover Michael's cash flow problems, Schaffel helped secure the participation of many of the stars who would perform at the two concerts. Schaffel's talent for massaging Michael's ego would prove as much of an asset to the anniversary concerts project as his organizational abilities. When Michael began delaying his arrival in New York, "David was calling and screaming at me like it was my responsibility," Schaffel remembered. "'You gotta get him on a plane and get him here!' David wanted him to have five days of rehearsal and Michael said, 'I don't need that. I'll do one or two days.' Michael wanted to go on a private jet, and David was trying to get him to fly commercial because they got comp seats on American Airlines. So Michael just waited him out. See, Michael just really wasn't that psyched up to do the show. I mean, he thought it was neat, but…when something is Michael's idea, he's in it 110 percent. If it's not his idea, if it's something he's got to do, he feels it's work, and he starts dragging his feet."

Still, when word came that, despite the highest prices in the history of show business, tickets for the two Madison Square Garden shows had sold out within five hours, Michael wept with gratitude. CBS agreed to pay a licensing fee in the seven figures for the rights to edit the concert footage into a two-hour TV special and Jackson was now guaranteed a take of $7.5 million for his appearance at the two concerts, money Michael desperately needed. VH1 would later calculate that for the time the entertainer actually spent onstage, his pay totaled $150,000 per minute.

Jackson at the time was living on what he described as a "restrictive" budget that had been imposed on him by his record company, Sony, and his main creditor, Bank of America. He complained constantly that because of his huge debt he had no ready access to his enormous wealth. "It was not difficult at that time for Marc to withdraw as much as a million dollars from his bank account," King explained, "so he began to make cash advances to Michael. Generally, they were paid back a short time later, when other funds of Michael's came in." The first sum Schaffel handed over was $70,000, in July 2001, to pay for the shopping excursion with which Michael celebrated the news that he was about to receive a $2 million loan advance to create a charity record. When Michael said he "needed" something, Schaffel understood by then, he was not speaking of necessity as most people understood it, but rather about "a psychological state that he required in order to function."

That first cash advance was repaid in short order, Schaffel recalled. Money was constantly flowing to Michael from sources that were spread all over the globe. He didn't keep a bank account for fear that some creditor might try to attach it, so all payments were made in cash. One of Schaffel's main duties soon became acting as, literally, Michael Jackson's bag man. "Michael's other advisors, associates, business partners, patrons-whatever they were-would get him money by actually transmitting the payment to Marc, who would deliver it to Michael in cash," King explained. Schaffel had made the first such delivery to Michael in a paper sack from an Arby's fast food restaurant. Michael thought that was hilarious and began referring to the money coming his way either through or from Marc as French fries. "They'd have conversations where Michael would say, 'Bring me some fries, will you? And supersize it,'" King recalled.

A month after handing over $70,000, Schaffel wrote a check for $625,680.49 to cure a default on Michael's Bank of America line of credit. Repayment continued to flow into his bank accounts, but the sums were not exactly congruent with what he was paying out. Still, Michael's business manager said the debts would all be evened out over time and Schaffel had no reason to doubt it. "Marc not only adored Michael, he trusted him completely," King explained. Schaffel made two more French fry deliveries to Jackson in August 2001, filling one bag with $100,000 in cash that Michael wanted to shop for antiques, and another with $46,075 that Michael needed to pay for appraisals of a $30 million mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, a property Jackson insisted he could afford to purchase after learning that the Madison Square Garden concerts had sold out. In early September, shortly before the concerts, Schaffel made two more payments, the first a relatively minor sum of $23,287 for the supposedly "free" concert tickets that Michael had promised to his personal guests for the anniversary concerts. The tickets turned out to not be free after all, and to avoid the embarrassment of explaining this to friends and family, Michael paid for them out of his own-that is, Marc's-pocket. The second payment was for $1 million that Michael needed for his "best friend," Marlon Brando, who demanded that sum in exchange for agreeing to make a videotaped "humanitarian speech" to be shown during the first of the two concerts. Michael's other advisors all argued that it was ridiculous to pay Brando so much for a speech no one wanted to hear, but Michael insisted. "Marlon is a god," he said. The naysayers would be proven right when, less than two minutes into the great actor's incoherent comments, the crowd started booing and didn't stop until Brando did. Well, it was only a million dollars, Michael said, not that much money, really.

In the days immediately before the concerts, Schaffel gave Jackson $380,395 to pay for a pair of customized automobiles he wanted, a Bentley Arnage and a Lincoln Navigator, as well as a check to cover the interest on the $2 million loan Michael had taken out to finance the charity record.

By this point he had received reimbursements of $1,750,000, Schaffel recalled, but that amount didn't quite cover the $2.5 million he had paid out. The remaining debt was secured, though, because Michael had signed over the rights to "What More Can I Give?" Schaffel agreed with those who said it was the best song Jackson had delivered in years, with a soaring melody and a lyric that was as moving as any Jackson had ever written. By the beginning of September, the two of them were already talking about using it to produce a charity record that would rival the success of Michael's "We Are the World" project back in 1985. Survivors of the next major humanitarian catastrophe would be the beneficiaries.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks took place just hours after Jackson finished his "Billie Jean"/"Black or White"/"Beat It" medley at the end of the second anniversary concert. Up to that moment, Michael had imagined that the ugliest part of his stay in New York would be the nasty argument he had gotten into with Corey Feldman backstage during the first concert over Feldman's plans to write a book about their relationship. When he was awakened after only an hour or two of sleep in his suite at the Plaza Athenee just in time to watch the World Trade Center towers collapse, "Michael was completely freaked out," Schaffel recalled. "He thought there were terrorists loose in New York and he wanted to get his kids out immediately. We had a lot of police working as security at the hotel he was at, and they helped us get across the Hudson River to New Jersey before the bridges and tunnels were closed." The next day, when Michael insisted he needed $500,000 in case he and the children were forced to "go underground," Schaffel drove to a bank and withdrew exactly that amount in cash. Jackson holed up for two days in New Jersey, then summoned Schaffel and the rest of his entourage to White Plains, New York, where the airport was about to reopen for a few hours. Sony arranged for a private jet at one of the hangars. Michael was en route from New Jersey when a new problem developed. The actor Mark Wahlberg had been shooting a movie nearby and was at the White Plains airport also, with his entourage, trying to get on the same plane. "So we had this big spat over who had priority," Schaffel recalled. The two camps stood on the tarmac shouting at one another until Sony ruled that Michael Jackson was the ranking celebrity. Wahlberg was informed that he would have to wait until another jet could be located, and he stormed off. "But then at the last second Michael decided he didn't want to fly," Schaffel recalled. "He said he was going to go back to California by tour bus. So he told the rest of us to just get on the plane and go, before Wahlberg came back." Within minutes a bus had been hired but by the time it got to White Plains, Michael had changed his mind again. He loaded his mother and other relatives on the bus, sent them off toward 287 West, then got Sony to find yet another private jet, and flew back to Santa Barbara aboard that plane with Grace and his kids plus a pair of bodyguards.

When they reconnected back in California, Jackson and Schaffel immediately began to talk about using "What More Can I Give?" to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. In October, Schaffel rented a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he met with senior executives of the McDonald's restaurant chain to discuss the "What More Can I Give?" charity record idea. It had taken only a couple of hours to strike a $20 million deal, after McDonald's execs calculated they could sell at least five million copies of the record through their U.S. outlets alone.

Schaffel felt like he was surfing a tidal wave of good fortune during those days, when he worked as Michael's main intermediary in setting up the recording sessions at which the likes of Beyoncé Knowles, Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Carlos Santana, Reba McEntire, and Tom Petty contributed their voices and instruments to the "What More Can I Give?" project. It was the most fabulous experience of Marc's life. He had gotten everything on videotape and couldn't wait for the world to see Celine Dion after her first performances of "What More Can I Give?", cheeks bathed in tears as she explained how much it meant to her to sing with Michael Jackson. One great talent after another had reacted similarly. The immensity of it was breathtaking. "Michael was so excited about the project," Schaffel recalled. "I didn't have to beg him to get to the studio, he would come in on his own. He really, really, really wanted to make it happen. He was like a different person when he was like that. He was convinced, and so was I, and so was everyone else, that we had two number one hits here, the English version and the Spanish version, which is actually the better of the two."

Then things began to unravel, as Schaffel would learn they tended to do in the decaying orbit of Michael Jackson. On October 13 the New York Post printed the first story about the "What More Can I Give?" deal. McDonald's was startled, then overwhelmed, by the bombardment of complaints from American moms outraged that a so-called family-food chain would consider distributing the music of a suspected pedophile. McDonald's executives phoned Schaffel two days later to say they were backing out of the deal.

It would get worse. Several of Jackson's financial advisors were upset by their discovery that Schaffel had obtained the rights to "What More Can I Give?" and they contacted John Branca, Michael's longtime attorney. Branca had been a recurring figure in Jackson's business affairs for more than twenty years, negotiating many of the entertainer's most lucrative contracts. At times, he was Michael's closest advisor. Relations between the entertainer and the lawyer had been cooling again recently, as Michael became increasingly suspicious that Branca was using him to profit from other business deals. The attorney imagined that Marc Schaffel might be part of a growing problem with his prize client. Branca, as well connected as anyone in the entertainment industry, needed only a few days to determine that Schaffel had made most of his fortune as a gay pornographer, producing and directing films with titles like Cock Tales and The Man with the Golden Rod, as well as operating several pornographic Internet sites. The attorney promptly phoned Jackson and set up a meeting at which he showed him a tape of Schaffel directing a gay sex scene. Soon after, Schaffel received a letter informing him that his contract with Michael Jackson was being terminated because "information about Mr. Schaffel's background, previously unknown to Mr. Jackson, has just been discovered."

"That was all complete bullshit," Schaffel said. "Everybody knew about my past, including Michael. At Arnie Klein's house, Michael and Carrie Fisher and Arnie all made jokes about it, in front of many people. [Sony Music Group CEO] Tommy Mottola knew, too. He brought Usher to the studio to sing on 'What More Can I Give?' and Tommy was sitting there joking with me about some girl in the porn business he knew, to see if I knew her, too. But now suddenly everyone is acting like they're completely shocked."

He knew Michael had no issue with his homosexuality, Schaffel said, or with Arnold Klein's, or with anyone else's. Still it was a relief, Schaffel admitted, when Michael phoned him a few days after the termination letter was sent and said, "Don't worry, Marc, this will blow over. Just go with the flow."

Unfortunately for Schaffel, Branca and other Jackson advisors were actively lobbying Sony to kill the charity project by refusing permission for any of its stars to appear on the record-at least until Michael was able to recover his rights to the song. "And then Sony and Tommy Mottola became concerned that if they let us release 'What More Can I Give?' Michael wouldn't finish Invincible," Schaffel explained. "And he was dragging his feet about getting that album done. We would go to New York to record, then to Miami, then to Virginia. We would go here and we would go there. And Sony was paying all the bills. What it all came down to was that Michael wasn't into it. Then when we started on 'What More Can I Give?' Michael was one hundred percent into that and zero percent into Invincible. Sony had tens of millions invested in their record, so they decided to shelve ours." To try to ensure that the song stayed on the shelf, Sony put out the bogus story that "What More Can I Give?" had been considered "too weak" for inclusion on Invincible.

Schaffel pressed on, attempting to stage a concert in Washington, D.C., to raise money for the families of the 9/11 Pentagon victims that would be filmed as a video for "What More Can I Give?" Michael failed to show up. On June 13, 2002, Schaffel faxed a letter to the Japanese chairman of Sony Corporation, Nobuyuki Idei, begging Idei to either release the single or permit its release through an alternative distributor. "It would be a tragedy almost as great as the first one to let corporate greed or politics stop the movement of people working together in the healing process," Schaffel had written. He received no answer. Schaffel persisted, selling various rights in the "What More Can I Give?" project to an assortment of partners, contingent upon Michael Jackson's participation, and waited for a chance at rapprochement.

He saw that opportunity in the debacle that engulfed Michael in the months after the late 2001 release of the long-delayed Invincible. Sony had recognized within two weeks that Invincible was going to be the first full-fledged flop of the singer's career. Like all Michael Jackson releases, the new album had gone straight to the top of the charts, but the 363,000 copies it sold in that first week was still less than a fifth of the 1.9 million units that 'N Sync's Celebrity sold in the first seven days of its release that same year. And Invincible's sales had dropped off precipitously. Sony was estimating that it would sell only two million copies of the album in the United States, less than a tenth of what Thriller had done, and only three million copies overseas, less than a fifth of the number Dangerous had racked up. Reviews of the album ranged from lackluster to dismissive. Only one single from Invincible, "You Rock My World," reached even the top ten in the United States. Mottola and Sony believed that Jackson's refusal to support his new album with a world tour had doomed Invincible internationally. The company's executives also complained that Jackson had failed to show up at a series of promotional appearances both in the United States and abroad.

"There were a lot of events scheduled," Schaffel recalled, "and all of a sudden Michael didn't want to do them. That pissed off Tommy, who thought it was all because of 'What More Can I Give?' And a lot of it was. Michael wanted them to use 'What More Can I Give?' to promote Invincible, but Sony thought, 'You'll sell millions of copies of your record but hardly any of ours.'"

Sony was mortified by reports that it had spent $51 million on the production and promotion of an album that was selling so poorly. In early 2002, an unnamed company executive told the New York Daily News, "Charges of pedophilia have really spooked a lot of American record buyers." Within days, Jackson and his record company were locked in a battle that would become both public and vicious.

The opening volley had been fired before the album's release, when Jackson demanded that Sony renegotiate his contract. Michael wanted possession of his master recording catalog within three years rather than the seven specified in the current agreement. Also, he asked that Sony throw another $8 million behind Invincible, with most of that money going to pay for the album's third video. After Sony refused both requests, Jackson contacted his friend, songwriter Carol Bayer Sager, to ask if her husband Bob Daly, the former head of Warner Bros., would investigate whether the record label was cheating him. When Daly reported back that he saw no evidence of this, Jackson not only cut off contact with Bayer Sager and her husband, but proceeded to make what was perhaps the biggest miscalculation of his musical career-accusing Tommy Mottola of being biased against black entertainers.

Al Sharpton was with Jackson when he showed up outside Sony's New York offices in July 2002 surrounded by a chanting crowd bused in from Harlem, waving photographs of Mottola drawn with horns and a pitchfork. Encouraged by Johnnie Cochran, the former O. J. Simpson attorney who represented Jackson during the Jordan Chandler affair, European fans had been bombarding Sony's corporate offices with faxed sheets of black paper in a campaign coordinated to support the racism charge. Speaking to the media assembled outside Sony's offices on Madison Avenue, Jackson not only described Mottola as "very, very devilish," but branded the entire music business as "racist," and announced that he intended to form a black artists union to combat discrimination. Michael was furious when Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who had been egging him on for weeks, began to backpedal. Sharpton actually told the assembled media that he had never known Tommy Mottola to be anything but sympathetic to black causes. By the next day, the backlash against Michael Jackson throughout the entertainment industry was ferocious. Almost instantaneously, Michael found himself despised by the people whose support he needed most.

Schaffel chose that moment to speak up for his estranged friend, telling the Los Angeles Times, "If you ask me, I think there are people who don't want to see Michael on top." Some of those people were at Sony, Schaffel suggested, and had been behind the scuttling of the "What More Can I Give?" project, because they knew it "would paint him in a different light than how they want him to be seen. They don't want Michael to succeed. And they're using my background as an excuse." Jackson, who had almost no one else defending him publicly at that moment, was so grateful that he immediately brought Schaffel back on board. In what was for Schaffel a delicious bit of irony (and for John Branca no mere coincidence), Marc's return to the fold would coincide precisely with Michael's decision that he was done with his longtime attorney. Branca's animus toward Schaffel afterward was considerable, but this bit of palace intrigue had actually been wrought by Michael's new German managers, Ronald Konitzer and Dieter Wiesner. "Dieter and Ronald had brought in an outside auditing firm that did a complete examination," Schaffel recalled, "and the paperwork Michael was shown attacked Branca for his relationships with Sony and Tommy Mottola."

The paperwork was a dossier that had been prepared by the Manhattan-based corporate espionage firm Interfor, Inc. The company's director, an Israeli émigré named Juval Aviv, was regarded as a dubious character in many quarters. The Village Voice had once published an article about him under the headline "Secret Agent Schmuck," debunking Aviv's reported claims that he had been the lead assassin of Israel's state intelligence service, Mossad, in avenging the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Olympic village during the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly, Michael believed the claims in the Interfor report that Branca and Mottola had been involved in transferring funds that belonged to him into offshore accounts at Caribbean banks. It fit with suspicions he had been harboring for years about Branca's too-cozy relationship with Sony. "Michael hated all lawyers anyway, including his own, and he made the decision that Branca should be fired," recalled Schaffel, who was assigned to facilitate Branca's dismissal, and then to replace Jackson's longtime attorney with David LeGrand, the same Las Vegas lawyer who had contracted the Interfor report.

As the long process of Branca's dismissal unfolded, Michael invited Marc to accompany him on a trip to Berlin in October 2002. Jackson was traveling to Germany to be honored at the country's most prestigious entertainment awards ceremony, the Bambis, with a special Millennium prize that recognized him as the world's "greatest living pop icon."

The celebratory trip swiftly turned into a nightmare. First, while being serenaded by the huge crowd of fans gathered outside his Berlin hotel, the Adlon, Michael had impulsively displayed his nine-month-old third child, Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, by dangling the infant over the balcony railing of his third-floor suite. The images of him holding a baby in a blue jumpsuit, its head covered by a towel as its bare feet kicked the air forty feet above a cobblestone sidewalk, shocked and outraged parents worldwide. Child advocacy groups seized the opportunity to join in an orgy of public castigation. The British tabloids that had, for nearly two decades, called the star "Wacko Jacko" now were delighted to change that to "Mad Bad Dad." Several commentators in Germany suggested that perhaps Michael Jackson should face criminal charges. Michael, who had never before been deplored on this scale, was forced to issue the first public apology that he had ever offered for his erratic behavior: "I made a terrible mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children." Later, he even attempted to explain for the first time how his youngest child had become known as "Blanket." It was derived from an expression he used with his family and his employees, Michael told a reporter: "I say, 'You should blanket me or you should blanket her,' meaning a blanket is like a blessing. It's a way of showing love and caring."

Jackson was subdued at the Bambi Awards ceremony and when he was called to the stage to pose with a fellow recipient, actress Halle Berry, he could barely whisper the words, "Berlin, ich liebe dich"-"Berlin, I love you." News reports suggested that the "painfully shy" performance was the result of his humiliation and remorse over the baby-dangling incident. What the journalists didn't know was that, shortly before Jackson took the stage, Schaffel had alerted him that something far worse was coming his way from across the English Channel.

To support the career comeback he hoped to launch with Invincible, Jackson had agreed to cooperate with a documentary by Martin Bashir, a British journalist to whom he had been introduced by their mutual friend, psychic spoon bender Uri Geller. Bashir seduced Michael, according to Tom Mesereau, among others, by boasting that he had been a confidant of the late Princess Diana. "Michael wanted to hear all of Bashir's Diana stories," Geller recalled. Jackson had tried for years, unsuccessfully, to form a relationship with Diana. She and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in fact, were just about the only two famous people he ever met who chose to keep him at arm's length, which had only deepened his fascination with each of them. Bashir's Diana anecdotes had persuaded Jackson to consent to what was about to become the biggest public relations catastrophe of his life.

"Bashir told so many stories about her, and Michael was completely charmed," Dieter Wiesner recalled. "But then I heard from people in the UK that Bashir wasn't Diana's friend at all, that she felt he had tricked her into talking about her affair, and that she felt used by him-as Michael did later. So I was worried."

Footage of Bashir's documentary Living with Michael Jackson had gotten loose in London, and friends were phoning from England, Schaffel said, to warn him that Michael was about to be painted as a freakish pervert. After reading transcripts of the documentary's rough cut, "Marc knew what a disaster this was going to be," Wiesner remembered, "and Michael could see it in his eyes. After that I said, 'Michael, this is going to be terrible.' And he didn't believe me. He said, 'Dieter, Dieter, please. I don't think so. Don't think bad.'"

Almost a month passed before they flew back to Florida, where Bashir was supposed to personally screen the documentary for Jackson. "Michael was still waiting for him, because he should have the last approval," Wies-ner remembered. "More people were calling from UK, telling me this is going to be a bad thing. Then Bashir shows up with the whole camera team. He wanted to show Michael everything, but he wanted to have his reaction on tape, and I knew that would be used against Michael also."

Bashir had arrived for what was to be their final interview shortly -after the first of the year. Within seconds of sitting down with the star, the formerly unctuous director began to confront Michael with a series of acid-laced questions about his physical transformation. It was a particularly sensitive subject for Jackson at that moment in his life. Less than a year earlier, Michael had been preparing to shoot a video for the Invincible album when his then-manager, Trudy Green, sent someone to the star's trailer to make a mold of his face. "She told Michael it was something for the makeup artist to use," Schaffel remembered. "But Michael wanted me to ask her what it was really about. And Trudy told me, 'Well, you know, he's not looking too good right now, and we think we should make this mask for him to wear in this video.' When Michael found out Trudy had said this, he just broke down and sobbed. It was one of only two times I ever saw him do that. I mean he was just heartbroken." Michael stopped production of the video immediately, then fired Green, replacing her a few days later with "the Germans," Wiesner and Konitzer. He was still distraught about the incident, though, which perhaps explained why he blatantly lied to Bashir about the extent of his plastic surgery, insisting there had been only a couple of operations on his nose, nothing more.

Bashir ramped up Jackson's discomfort with an observation that his two oldest children, Prince and Paris, claimed they had no mother, then got Michael to contradict his earlier statement that the mother of his third child was someone with whom he had a relationship by admitting that Blanket was born to a surrogate. When Bashir discussed the subject of children who regularly spent the night at Neverland, often in Jackson's own bedroom, the end was at hand. After admitting on camera that the ill or disadvantaged children he invited to stay on the ranch often slept in his bed (while he slept on the floor) Jackson grew agitated as Bashir pressed the subject. At first he said it was natural that family friends like Macaulay and Kieran Culkin would sleep in his bed; then he blurted out that "many children" had slept in the same bed with him. In his denial that there was any sexual motivation for this, Jackson uttered a line that would be replayed in countless news broadcasts: He told Bashir, "The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone."

Bashir returned to the UK "without letting Michael see a thing," Wies-ner recalled. Jackson was still in Florida when Living with Michael Jackson-introduced by Barbara Walters-was broadcast by ABC on February 6, 2003. "I was sitting with Michael on his bed watching it," Dieter Wiesner recalled. "And he just broke down like I never saw before. He couldn't believe that something like this was coming up again. He looked like he was gonna die. He couldn't talk. He couldn't make a word come out."

The Bashir documentary "rocked his world," said Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon, who by the end of the year would ask a grand jury to indict Jackson on ten felony charges of child sexual abuse. After the documentary aired, Michael was so distraught that he took to his bed-alone-for days. Publicity-seeking Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred and her associate, Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, promptly filed nearly identical complaints with the Department of Social Services to challenge Jackson's custody of his children.

With Jackson incapacitated, Schaffel took charge of damage control. The former pornographer swiftly demonstrated his media savvy by assembling a collection of videotapes about Bashir's time with Michael Jackson that the British director did not control. Before agreeing to cooperate with Bashir, Jackson had insisted that he would have his own camera crew on location to shoot Bashir shooting him. "Despite how he's portrayed," Tom Mesereau observed, "Michael is no fool. He's actually one of the most intelligent people you'll ever meet. And he knew that he should have his own record of what was transpiring during those Bashir interviews. It was probably one of the smartest decisions he ever made."

How smart wouldn't be clear until almost two years later, when Jackson was in the midst of his criminal trial. On the Jackson tapes, Bashir was seen lavishing praise on Michael as both a father and a humanitarian, saying at one point that he had been moved to tears by his subject's sensitive approach to parenting and was even more touched by Michael's kindness to seriously ill and underprivileged children. A juxtaposition of those remarks with Bashir's condemnation of Jackson in his ABC documentary as "dangerous" to children, Schaffel recognized, would be devastating.

Schaffel's own stroke of genius was to set up interviews with a young cancer patient named Gavin Arvizo whose relationship with Michael Jackson had become the centerpiece of the Bashir documentary. A child psychiatrist and a child welfare worker were recruited to interview the boy, his mother, and his two siblings, all of whom defended Jackson vehemently. Gavin himself insisted on camera that he had never been touched inappropriately and that Michael was "completely innocent." His sister Davellin and brother Star supported their brother by saying that during sleepovers at Neverland they always spent the night in Michael's bed while he slept on the floor nearby. Their mother Janet Arvizo told the interviewers, "The relationship that Michael has with my children is a beautiful, loving, father-son and father-daughter one," and threatened to take legal action against Bashir. Schaffel also delivered an interview with Debbie Rowe, the much-maligned mother of Michael's two oldest children, whose generous assessment of her ex-husband's character stood in marked contrast to what was being reported about their relationship in the media.

Though Schaffel was not able to include the interviews with the Arvizo family in what he was calling "the rebuttal video" (the cameraman who had shot those tapes was refusing to release them, claiming he had not been paid-at least not enough), executives at ABC's rival networks were wowed by what they saw. Debunking the Bashir documentary might generate ratings that rivaled or even surpassed those that ABC had garnered. Fox eventually made the highest bid for what it would title Michael Jackson Take Two: The Footage You Were Never Meant to See and broadcast "the retaliatory special," as People magazine called it, on February 23, less than three weeks after ABC aired the Bashir documentary. The Fox special not only stemmed much of the condemnation coming Michael's way, but made him millions of dollars at a time when, as one associate put it, "he was dead broke on a cash basis."

Schaffel put together a deal with Fox for a second documentary, this one titled Michael Jackson's Home Movies, that would be broadcast in April, featuring family and friends such as Liz Taylor describing the sweetly -naive man-child they knew and loved. Schaffel's spreadsheet showed that Jackson would earn at least $15 million from the two videos, and perhaps as much as $20 million. Under the terms of their agreement, 20 percent of that money was Schaffel's.

While waiting for the checks to arrive from New York and points east, Schaffel resumed his cash advances to Jackson. The first was made in February when Michael wanted to celebrate the Fox deal with a shopping spree. The paper bag he gave Michael was filled with $340,000 in cash, Schaffel said, because he knew how pent up Michael was, and knew also that nothing had a more calming effect on him than making an extravagant purchase. Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in March, then wrote Michael a check for $1 million in April. He needed $638,000 to pay for a piece of jewelry that Liz Taylor was demanding in exchange for agreeing to the use of an interview with her in the Home -Movies video, Michael had explained, and another $250,000 that his mother Katherine insisted upon for her appearance in the video. The remainder was required to make the deposit on a new Rolls-Royce Phantom that he absolutely had to have. A week later, Schaffel gave Jackson an additional $130,000 to help him pay off the Rolls.

Of course it all sounded strange to outsiders when their relationship spilled into the courts four years later, Schaffel would say, but you had to understand the extraordinary character of Michael Jackson. Michael's overwhelming charisma was combined with a detachment from conventional reality that made him at once enormously powerful and utterly helpless. During a trip to Las Vegas in 2003 they had checked into adjoining suites at the Mandarin Oriental, then headed to a business meeting in a conference room downstairs. Schaffel recalled: "After the meeting, I had to go to the bathroom, so I told Michael, 'Just wait here a second.' But, of course, Michael doesn't want to wait, so he decides go back to his room on his own. But he doesn't remember the room number or the floor or anything. He probably doesn't even know what city we're in. So he just walks up some stairs and starts knocking on doors, waiting for the bodyguards to open one." As he raced to catch up, Schaffel remembered, he could see the hallway filling with excited people who were following Michael Jackson down the hallway. "I mean, the entire hotel is in an uproar," Schaffel recalled, "and Michael just keeps moving from door to door, knocking on each one, getting more and more frantic to escape the crowd gathering behind him. I finally run up to him and say, 'Michael, my God, stop!' Then I have to lead him to the elevator, with all these people still following us, and get him upstairs. The point is, Michael would have just kept going until somebody showed up to take care of him. Like a lot of people, I wanted to be the one."

Schaffel still trusted Michael implicitly but by May 2003 he was beginning to grow antsy about the wait to be paid his share of the profits from the sale of the two videos. On top of that, repayment of the money he had advanced to Michael was arriving behind schedule. Not wanting to bother the star with such petty concerns, Schaffel took them to Jackson's attorneys. The lawyers at first said the money was coming in from Fox more slowly than anticipated and that nothing had been received so far from foreign distributors and DVD sales. When Schaffel pressed, saying he knew that Michael had received at least $9 million to date, the attorneys answered that Michael had other debts to pay and that they weren't sure Schaffel had a valid contract to collect 20 percent of the video money anyway. Eventually, an agreement was struck that would pay Schaffel $1.5 million for his work on the videos: a $500,000 payment immediately, followed by ten installments of $50,000 each. Less than a month after Schaffel received that first half-million, though, Michael complained that his funds were already depleted, that creditors were hounding him, and that Bank of America was gouging him with a ridiculous rate of interest. What Michael "needed," Schaffel knew, was to spend money; he gave Michael another $250,000 to go antique shopping in Beverly Hills. "Bear in mind that Marc was still receiving repayments and the installments he had been promised from the sale of the videos," King would explain. "He understood Michael's situation as a simple cash flow problem."

"I knew better than anyone how much money was coming Michael's way, just from the deals I made for him," Schaffel said. "Besides the two videos I had done for him, I had signed a deal with one of the broadcast networks to do a one-time concert of all his hit songs that would pay $15.5 million. Plus, I had another deal for Michael to do his own television reality show. This was before the explosion of reality shows. We had an oral agreement with a network to do this show that was basically just about his everyday life. And that was going to be worth $5 million per episode, with the foreign rights and everything. I knew that could become a real money train. So the point is, I wasn't worried about getting my money back, and then some."

Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in August. Periodic repayments continued to be deposited in his bank account, and the $50,000 installment payments for his work on the rebuttal videos were arriving on schedule. On September 18, 2003, Schaffel recalled, Michael's personal assistant Evvy Tavasci phoned to say that Michael needed $500,000, half of which would go to a Beverly Hills antique dealer who was threatening to sue him for nonpayment. Marc delivered another supersize order of French fries.

The late autumn of 2003 was shaping up as a turning point in Jackson's life and career. Michael finally negotiated a break with Sony by agreeing to release a series of compilation albums. The first was to be called Number Ones and would include every song of his that had hit the top of the charts. Sony had also agreed to finance a series of music videos-Michael insisted they be called "short films"-that would accompany the record's release in November 2003. As production for the first of those short films geared up, Schaffel and Wiesner were negotiating with Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, to do a show for him in Las Vegas sometime the following year. The real excitement in the Jackson camp, though, surrounded the six-month trip combining work and vacation that Michael planned to begin on November 22. He and his core entourage-Grace and the kids, Schaffel, Wiesner, and Michael's publicist Stuart Backerman-would -begin by heading to Europe, where, between scheduled events in Germany, Austria, and France, Michael planned to spend the holidays at Elizabeth Taylor's Chalet Ariel in Gstaad, Switzerland. From there, he would be heading to South Africa to participate in the Nelson Mandela Tribute that U2's Bono was organizing, then flying to Brazil. City officials in Rio de Janeiro had given Jackson permission to stage the first nonathletic event they had allowed in years on the grass floor of Maraca?a Stadium, a nighttime performance of "One More Chance" in which Michael would be surrounded by two hundred thousand people holding lighted candles. Rio officials also wanted Michael to perform a concert on the beach for an audience they estimated would number two million people, "and we were negotiating the terms of that even as we prepared to leave for Europe," Schaffel recalled.

Schaffel, Wiesner, and Backerman were all with Michael at the Mirage in Las Vegas during the third week of November, spending hours every day on the phone as they prepared for Michael's departure, completely unaware that they were being listened to the entire time by deputies from the Santa Barbara County sheriff's department. "They knew that Stuart and I would be leaving two days ahead of Michael to help set things up in Europe," Schaffel said. "They probably even knew what had happened on the video with the Cascio kids."

Jackson had come to Vegas accompanied by Eddie and Marie Nicole Cascio, the younger siblings of his longtime aide Frank Cascio. The family had been a big part of Michael's life since the late eighties when he had met patriarch Dominic Cascio at the Palace Hotel in New York, where Cascio was working as concierge to the luxury suites. The Cascios were the sort of big-hearted, full-throated Italians Michael had been drawn to for as long as he could remember. He had fallen in love with the entire clan, recognizing them as the close-knit, loving family he had always wished he came from. The Cascios responded in kind, enveloping Michael in a rare experience of human connection that was at least slightly independent of his celebrity. Dominic and his wife, Connie, allowed Frank and Eddie to travel with Michael from the ages of thirteen and nine. Over the years Frank had worked for Michael in a variety of capacities, ranging from roadie to personal assistant, both on tour and at Neverland Ranch. Eddie and Marie Nicole had visited Neverland often as well, sometimes with their parents, sometimes not.

"There was a level of trust with the Cascios that I don't think Michael had with anyone else," Schaffel recalled. "They were his family." It was the Cascios' home in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, to which Michael had retreated with his children after the 9/11 attacks. "They were who he went to whenever he wanted to feel safe," Schaffel said. With their parents' permission, Eddie and Marie Nicole had been removed from school (to be tutored privately at Michael's expense) while they learned the dance routines that Michael had planned for the first video he would shoot for Number Ones.

"Michael promised the Cascio kids they would dance with him in the video," Schaffel recalled. "The two of them worked so hard and were so excited about it. But after we met with the director and looked at the costumes and stuff, Michael said, 'Ooh, I don't know.' He thought the whole idea lacked originality. He dragged Dieter and I into the trailer and said, 'I can't do this.' We knew why-the director sucked. But then Michael said, 'All right, I'll just get it done and make Sony happy.' Mainly, though, he didn't want to disappoint the Cascio kids. But when he brought the kids in to dance with him, the director said, 'Who are they?' And Michael said, 'They're going to be dancing with me.' So the director left and he got on the phone with Sony. Then he came back and asked if he could speak to me privately. When we were alone he told me, 'We have a problem. Sony says they don't want Michael in the video with kids.' I said, 'Well, I can tell you that these aren't just dancers. These are what Michael considers his family.' He says, 'Are you going to tell Michael?' I said, 'Why am I telling him this? Sony should be telling him.' So a short time later Tommy or someone from Sony calls, and the next thing I hear, five minutes later, is Michael shouting, 'Marc, come to the trailer right now!' Michael was so distraught. I mean he was bright red, he was pacing around the trailer, and then he just started picking things up and throwing them. And he said, 'I am not doing one other thing if I can't have these kids in the shoot with me. I'm leaving. We're not doing this. Tell everyone they can go home.'"

On November 17, Number Ones was released to immediate success. Sony, realizing that the record would sell close to ten million copies worldwide-nearly half of those in the United States-immediately became solicitous, offering to assist Michael in any way it could during his six-month trip abroad. Things looked bright again.

"We were all still at the Mirage in Vegas," Schaffel recalled. "I was in one of the penthouse suites, and Michael was in one of the villas down below. We were having a great time. We did an autograph signing at this novelty store at the Aladdin called the Art of Music, and we did the Radio Music Awards, which was where 'What More Can I Give?' was played in public for the first time. The crowd loved it. Michael was really happy." Then, just as the entourage was preparing to leave for Europe, "the shit hit the fan," Schaffel recalled.

On the morning of November 18, 2003, the Santa Barbara County sheriff's department staged a massive raid on Neverland Ranch looking for evidence that would support charges of child molestation. A warrant was issued for Michael Jackson's arrest that same day. At the Mirage, "it was absolute chaos," Schaffel remembered. "Michael went nuts. I could hear it even up in my penthouse suite. Michael absolutely destroyed the villa he was in. I mean he threw everything in the place. He broke lamps, he broke furniture, he broke the art on the walls, you name it. He threw things through windows. He made so much noise that the Mirage sent its security, which got into it with Michael's security. It was completely insane. And that, I would say, was the beginning of the end for Michael. I mean, that was the worst I'd ever seen him, by far. No comparison. Michael was a very strong person, very resilient. I'd seen him be upset, seen him cry, but he would bounce right back up. This time there was no bounce back. This time, I saw him break. Not just break down, but break. After the scene in the villa he didn't even have the energy to get angry again. I'd have to call it a mental breakdown. He literally just lost it. You could wave your hand in front of him and he couldn't see it. And it wasn't drugs, not at first. The drugs came later, of course."

So did the Nation of Islam. "They arrived on the scene pretty quickly and just took over," Schaffel recalled. "One of Michael's brothers called them. Leonard Muhammad came, and then Louis Farrakhan himself showed up. And they were feeding Michael this line that, 'The Nation will never let anything happen to you. We will protect you.' And Michael was so helpless that he just put him himself in their hands. It was a huge mistake."

Schaffel flew back to LA that night. "When it first came out that they were talking about 'a complainant,' we knew who it would be," Schaffel explained: Gavin Arvizo, the featured child in the Bashir documentary. "I knew I had video of Michael and [Gavin Arvizo] and his family, and I figured there was stuff on it that would help. But meanwhile Michael has to get out of the Mirage. They're calling the cops to throw him out," Schaffel said. Michael and his security staff were in Schaffel's Lincoln Navigator, driving around Las Vegas, being followed by camera crews in satellite trucks, with TV helicopters whirling overhead. It was all over the television, even in LA. "He was like a hunted animal," remembered Schaffel, who found Michael and his entourage a place to stay. Marc had become friends with the owner of the Green Valley Ranch, a hotel and casino resort just south of Las Vegas, in Henderson, while scouting the place as a location for one of Michael's videos. "I called, and the guy was as nice as could be," Schaffel remembered. "He extended every courtesy to Michael for the next three days." Michael phoned him a couple of times from Henderson, but was incapable of conversation, Schaffel recalled. "He still sounded completely broken, completely hollow. All he could say was, 'How can they do this? How can they say this?' I don't know if the Nation was talking to him, or telling him not to talk to me, but he was completely distracted by whatever was going on around him. I had a real sinking feeling."

Grace Rwaramba and Dieter Wiesner phoned later that evening to ask if Schaffel would wire $30,000 in cash because the security guards were threatening to quit for nonpayment of their wages. "You have to send the money to me, not Michael," Grace told him, according to Schaffel, "because Michael will use it to go shopping instead of paying the guards." Schaffel wired the cash but it was the last order of fries he ever delivered to Michael Jackson.

By the end of that week, Jackson was forced to report to Santa Barbara County for arrest. Schaffel would not see him again until almost three years later, in London. Michael did phone him one more time, though, from some place where he was staying in Los Angeles. "He said, 'The Brotherhood'-he always referred to the people from the Nation as the Brotherhood-'the Brotherhood feels that-no offense to you, Marc, I love you very, very much-but the Brotherhood feels that I need to only communicate with other people in the Brotherhood. But it's just temporary, and it's something I need to do because they're going to protect me. Don't take it personally.' I got pretty concerned when he told me what they were telling him. Michael said, 'You know, I'm not going to have a problem.' And I said, 'Why is that?' And he said, 'Because the Brotherhood said that if they indict me, and if they try to find me guilty, that every black person in the country will riot in the streets.' I said, 'Michael, I really think you need to reconsider this advice that you're getting.' But he said good-bye and hung up on me a moment later, and he never called me again."

Dieter Wiesner ran into similar problems with the Nation of Islam. "For the first days, I was still with Michael every day and every night," Wiesner recalled. "I even brought him to the police when he had to be arrested, but then the Nation of Islam took over. Michael was scared and they used that. Leonard Muhammad had complete control of him for a while. They wouldn't let me see him or even speak to him. So I went back to Germany. And Michael called and said, 'Dieter, did you hear from my mouth that you are out?' I said no. And he said, 'You should come back.' So I did. But then Muhammad and his people brought him to different places and wouldn't let me go to Michael. It was worse than Sony. So I went back to Germany again and I didn't get to talk to Michael after that. I was his manager. I had the contracts. But I couldn't even speak to him."

Schaffel bided his time for months while still collecting the $50,000 installment payments he was owed for the rebuttal videos. "Marc honestly thought that Michael was just waiting for the smoke to clear, and that he'd be in touch when he could," Howard King explained. In June 2004, though, Michael's brother Randy Jackson became Michael's new "chief financial advisor," and immediately stopped the payments to Schaffel. By that point, according to Schaffel's accounting, he had received a total of $6,283,875 from Jackson, which left him $2,275,889 short of the $8,559,764 he had given Michael out of his own bank accounts.

"We filed our lawsuit almost reluctantly," King said. "Marc was convinced that Michael didn't know they weren't paying him." Be that as it may, Schaffel demonstrated that he intended to get his money back, whatever it took, in November 2004, when he lodged a $3 million claim against Jackson. The timing was what gave the court filing such a sharp edge: Michael had just been indicted by the grand jury in Santa Barbara. In Schaffel's lawsuit, he charged that "Jackson's frequent excessive use of drugs and alcohol impelled him into irrational demands for large amounts of money and extravagant possessions."

It was King's idea to have Marc go on Good Morning America for an interview by Cynthia McFadden during which a series of taped phone messages Michael Jackson had left for Schaffel would be played to the American public. "We were trying to make people aware that Marc wasn't just some guy who passed through Michael Jackson's life in a week," King explained. "And that he was seriously involved with Michael. We had thirty phone messages in all. Most were Michael asking Marc for money. 'Marc, I really need…' 'Marc, I really want to buy…' Some were very strident, very militant, very contrary to the soft-spoken high-pitched voice we know. 'I'm insisting that we must do this. We must capture this opportunity.' He sounded a lot more like a high-powered business executive than the meek and mild superstar." The ones ABC preferred were those that had Michael pleading for money. "Hello, Marc, it's Michael," one message began. "Please, please, never let me down. I really like you. I love you…Marc, I really need you to get, um, seven million dollars for me as soon as possible…Seven, seven and a half, um, as an advance."

Now that Michael knew he hadn't been paid, Schaffel insisted to King, the money would arrive. There was no reply to Schaffel's TV appearance, though, and all the filing of the lawsuit brought was a cursory denial of the allegations by Jackson's attorneys at the courthouse in Santa Monica where King had positioned the case. "Michael didn't even show up at the first two depositions we scheduled," King recalled. "So we go to court to get an order. Mesereau is there, and suggests to the judge that if we would go to where Michael was at they would pay all the expenses. The judge sends us out into the hallway to talk, and I tell Tom, 'Look, I'm Jewish. I'm not going to Bahrain. But I'll go anywhere in Europe that has a nonstop flight so long as we're talking four first-class tickets so that I can bring an assistant and Marc can bring an assistant. And you guys pay for everything.'"

It was agreed they would meet in London. The "assistant" King brought with him was his wife Lisa. Schaffel's traveling companion was Dieter Wiesner, someone "who adored Michael more than anyone alive, including Marc," as King described him. It was intimidating, King admitted, to step off that elevator at the Dorchester and realize that he was about to depose a person who had an entire floor of one of the world's great hotels all to himself. "They usher us into this absolutely spectacular suite," the attorney recalled, "and I learn that Michael's own suite is right next door. He comes in just a moment later, dressed all nice, and sits at the table, but then begins to complain about the lighting. He doesn't want the sunlight on his skin or in his eyes. So it takes about five minutes to get the drapes adjusted the way he wants, and then we're ready to go." But first Tom Mesereau insisted that Dieter Wiesner could not be in the room. "Dieter has come all the way to London, and the whole way there all he can think about is what it will be like when he finally gets to see Michael again," King said. "I mean, he still loves the guy."

"We knew Wiesner was probably going to file a lawsuit against Michael at some point," Mesereau countered, "so it just wasn't appropriate to have him listening in."

"Dieter had to go down to the lobby and sit there drinking coffee for the next ten hours," King recalled. "It broke his heart." Upstairs, Jackson was cool to Schaffel. "He said hello, but didn't shake Marc's hand," King recalled. Schaffel grew especially glum when Jackson answered a question about his "discovery" that Marc had directed and produced gay porn films. "I was shown a videotape by the lawyer [Branca] and I was shocked," Michael said. "He was in that whole circle, and I didn't know."

"I saw Marc was hurt," King remembered, "and told him, 'It's war, baby.'"

Schaffel had imagined that when the two of them saw each other again, all the good memories would come flooding back and somehow everything would be put right. "We had so many great times together," Schaffel explained. "Michael used to stay at my house in Calabasas all the time. Grace and the bodyguards would come with him, get him set up, then leave, and either Michael by himself or with the kids would stay there alone for days." Michael used to love to stroll over to the Commons, a large mall lined with restaurants, theaters, and shops that was just down the hill from Schaffel's home. He wore disguises, but not the kind that would call attention to himself. "No veil or surgical mask," Schaffel said. "Just a baseball cap he wore with his hair tucked up into it, and sunglasses. Part of why it worked was that no one would expect to see Michael Jackson in a place like this. He would go into that movie theater right over there, all by himself, walk all around here, all by himself. He loved being able to do that."

His favorite memory of having Michael at the house, Schaffel said, was the time he stepped out into the backyard and saw Michael with his head thrust into the shrubbery on the border of the property. "The neighbors below me were having a birthday party for one of their kids and Michael was snooping through the bushes," Schaffel remembered. "All of a sudden I hear some kid scream, 'Hey, Mommy, look, it's Michael Jackson!' And Michael backs away from the bushes like a little kid who's in trouble. I hear the kid still telling his mom it's Michael Jackson. So I look through, and the mom says, 'Oh, no, that's just our neighbor Marc.' Michael laughed for an hour afterward."

It was all business, though, around the table in the suite at the Dorchester. "I don't think [Michael] even looked at Marc," remembered King, who was asking all the questions. He tried to fight it, King said, but found himself being much more impressed by Michael Jackson as a witness than he had anticipated. "Michael is very poised, very charming, very aware of the camera," King recalled. Jackson insisted that he be allowed a break every hour to change his shirt and "refresh." "The guy spent the first three shirt changes knowing nothing," King recalled. "But then I had all these phone messages he'd left, plus all these documents and letters he signed. I will say that Michael, to his credit, said right off the top that if Marc was owed money he should be paid. He said he just didn't know if Marc was owed. And Marc believed him, still believed him. I didn't. I had recognized by then that Michael is way smarter than he's made to look in the media. No way he didn't know. Still, he handled the questions really well, and was very witty throughout. I have reading glasses and when I took them off to look at him, he said, 'Howard, I know when you take off the glasses you're really serious.' He's very charming, and of course, he's Michael Jackson. It affects you."

Mesereau thought King was oblivious to the poignancy of the situation. "The thing that struck me in that deposition, as Marc Schaffel sat across from us, was the sadness in Michael's eyes," the attorney explained. "It really hit me then that Michael went through life knowing that anybody he developed a relationship with was eventually going to sue him. And yet he kept hoping it would turn out differently each time."

During one of the breaks, King's wife pulled him aside and said, "I think you don't want women on that jury." When her husband asked why, Lisa King answered, "The whole time, I felt the need to hug him and be his mother. He looks so sweet and vulnerable sitting there that you want to take care of him."

For King himself, the moment of insight came during the last break of the day. While Michael was off changing his shirt and refreshing himself, the attorney happened to look down at the floor beneath the chair where Michael had been sitting. "And I saw that with his feet he had chewed up that carpet mightily," the attorney recalled. "I mean he had literally dug a hole in it with his heels. And it sort of shocked me. Because all day he had looked as cool and calm and collected as you could imagine. That was absolutely how he appeared on camera. But, like us, the camera had only seen what was above the tabletop. Somehow, Michael had managed to channel this tremendous amount of tension he had in his body into his legs and feet, every last bit of it, so that from the waist up he looked perfectly serene." He stared in wonder at that fist-sized ball of carpet nap beneath Jackson's chair for several moments, King recalled, "and I thought, 'Wow, this guy is good.'"

2

He had been performing almost as long as he had been alive. -Michael Joseph Jackson, born August 29, 1958, was still in diapers when he began to entertain his mother by shaking and shimmying to the rhythm of the washing machine at the family home in the sooty industrial city of Gary, Indiana. As a five-year-old, he brought down the house at a Garnett Ele-mentary School pageant with an a cappella rendition of the Sound of Music tune "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" that made his kindergarten teacher weep. By age six, he was the lead singer of a group called "The Ripples and Waves Plus Michael," which included his four older brothers. The Ripples and Waves had become the Jackson Brothers by the time they answered an advertisement in a local newspaper for musical groups to perform at a fashion show for a local modeling school. More than two hundred groups showed up at the audition, but six-year-old Michael Jackson stood out even in a crowd that size. "All of the brothers were talented, but Michael was magical," recalled Evelyn LaHaie, the school's owner, who chose the Jackson Brothers to perform as her modeling students walked the runway at the Big Top department store in Gary. On Michael's seventh birthday in 1965, his song-and-dance routine during a performance of "Doin' the Jerk" led the Jackson Brothers to a first place finish at Gary's "Tiny Tots' Back to School Jamboree." A little more than six months later, what was now the Jackson 5 won the annual talent show at Gary's Roose-velt High School behind a lead singer who was in the second grade. Even at that age, Michael Jackson was an astounding mimic who could produce eerily exact replications of Wilson Pickett's shouts and James Brown's yowls.

The Jackson 5's first real gig was at a local club called Mr. Lucky's, where they earned seven dollars for their performance. Not quite eight years old, Michael was fronting a band that now performed regularly at small black clubs, strip joints, and the occasional private party all over northwest Indiana and East Chicago. The group was still obscure enough to enter amateur contests and in early 1967, when Michael was eight, won the biggest talent show in the midwest at the Regal Theater in Chicago for three consecutive weeks. In August 1967, the Jackson 5 was awarded first prize at the biggest talent contest in the country, Apollo Theater's "Amateur Night." Within a year they were signed to a contract at Motown Records, and a year after that delivered a debut record that shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

The father that drove this success was a shrewd, vain, domineering brute who in the process of advancement so wounded the most sensitive of his six sons that the controlling force of Michael Jackson's adult existence became a determination to be as little like Joseph Jackson as possible.

Up until the time he found a way to live off his sons' talent, Joe had been a busted-out boxer and bluesman who supported his sprawling family by working the four-to-midnight shift as a crane operator amid the grime and grit and blast furnace heat of the Inland Steel Mill. He earned just over $8,000 in his best year, barely enough to sustain the Jackson family home-a tiny, aluminum-sided cube without landscaping or a -garage-in which eleven people shared a single bathroom. In the spring of 1964, when the Jacksons began performing publicly, Joe's five older boys had the smaller of the home's two bedrooms, where they slept in a triple bunk bed, with six-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Marlon squeezed together on the middle mattress, while nine-year-old Jermaine squirmed to make space on the upper bunk he shared with ten-year-old Tito, so that the oldest son, thirteen-year-old Jackie, could sleep alone on the bottom. The two oldest girls, Maureen (called Rebbie by her family), who was not quite fourteen, and eight-year-old La Toya made their beds on a convertible sofa in the living room, with two-year-old Randy asleep on a loveseat nearby. The youngest Jackson, Janet, would not be born until two years later, in 1966, and joined her sisters on the sofa as soon as she left her crib.

Thirty-five years old in 1964, and already the father of eight children, Joe Jackson was an inch and a half shy of six feet tall, with heavily muscled shoulders and a cheek mole; he was handsome in a heavy-lidded way, and more ambitious than anyone outside the immediate family realized. Determined to mold his sons into a musical act that would achieve the success he never did, Joe pushed them relentlessly. Michael's memories of those early rehearsals all centered on the father/manager who brandished a belt and bellowed at them constantly, smacking his sons on their backsides or throwing them into walls if they made a mistake. Being locked in a closet was the punishment for repeated failure.

Joe's own rhythm and blues band, the Falcons, had disbanded a couple of years earlier after failing to obtain more than a handful of bookings in local bars. The guitar Joe loved more than anything else he owned sat on the shelf of a clothes closet that little Michael considered "a sacred place," mainly because he and the other children were strictly forbidden from entering it. Their mother Katherine would take the guitar down from time to time when Joe was out of the house to teach the children her favorite country and folk songs. Tito was seven when he began sneaking into his parents' bedroom to borrow Joe's guitar, playing it for the oldest brother, Jackie, who had just turned ten, and six-year-old Jermaine, who harmonized as Tito picked and strummed. The three of them were learning at least one new song a week until Tito broke a string on the guitar and was discovered by his father. The whipping he got for that "tore me up," Tito remembered. It was a phrase all the Jackson boys used to describe the beatings their father gave them when he was in a fury. As he sat crying on his bed afterward, Tito insisted to his father between sobs, "I can play that thing." Joe demanded that the boy prove it, and Tito did just that, with Jackie and Jermaine sliding in beside him to sing along. In that moment, Joe Jackson decided that the steel mill would not be the end of his road. He brought home a new red guitar for Tito the next day, then told all three boys they were going to "rehearse," which they would swiftly learn was not at all the same as "playing."

Five-year-old Marlon was soon added to the group, at his mother's insistence, even though he possessed little if any musical talent (though he was a terrific dancer), but nearly two more years went by before Michael was let in and changed everything for everyone. None of them, especially Joe, wanted to acknowledge that it was the sublime talent of the band's youngest member, and that talent alone, which would make the Jackson 5 a star attraction.

Michael figured it out, of course, and by the age of nine he was the only one of Joe's children who dared to fight back against his father-"just swinging my fists," as he remembered it. "That's why I got it worse than all my brothers put together…my father would kill me, just tear me up." The other boys would say that Michael deserved the beatings he got. He was defiant, they said, and brought a bad attitude to rehearsals, demanding to know why they had to do things this way instead of that one. Joe's other sons followed their father's lead-right into adulthood-but Michael never would, not even as a very young child. Once, when he was three and had just received a spanking, Michael pulled off one of his shoes and threw it at his father's head. Joe responded by snatching the boy up by one leg and holding him upside down as he administered a whipping so severe that it became a family legend. During his first couple of years with the Jackson 5, Michael caught the back of Joe's hand more times than he could count, and was regularly whipped with a strap or a switch. The older boys were increasingly baffled by their little brother. On the one hand, it was obvious that Michael took the abuse their father dished out far more personally than any of them did, and that he was much more deeply hurt by it. On the other hand, he refused to stop saying and doing the very things that he knew would result in another beating. It wasn't a lack of fear, Michael would say: He was so afraid of his father for most of his childhood that he could taste vomit in his mouth whenever Joe came near him. Anger welled up beneath that fear, though, and fermented into hatred. Shamed by a sense of powerlessness, he found only one weapon he could use against his father-the threat that when it was time to take the stage he would refuse to sing. It worked once in a while, when Joe could see that Michael truly meant what he said, but more often the result was a beating worse than the one before it.

For all that, Michael never failed to admit as an adult that there had been two main ingredients in the success of the Jackson 5: his own ability and Joe's will. By the time the Jacksons began performing professionally, Joe had choreographed their movements down to the smallest detail. "He told me how to work the stage and work the mike and make gestures and everything," Michael recalled. The price of Joe's attention to detail, though, was that, "If you didn't do it the right way, he'd tear you up."

Like his own father, an Arkansas schoolteacher named Samuel Jackson, Joe was a humorless taskmaster who discouraged-even disallowed--socializing with anyone outside the family. He wasn't going to allow any "bad associations," as he put it, to distract his sons from their primary mission of showbiz success. The Jacksons were among the few children in their neighborhood who looked forward to going to school, because lunchtimes and recesses were the only opportunities they ever got to play with other kids.

As it had been for Samuel, the distinction between discipline and cruelty was largely lost on Joe. On more than one hot summer night he popped through the boys' bedroom window wearing a grotesque fright mask that left Michael and Marlon crying in bed long after he'd pulled the disguise off, chuckling at its effectiveness. His purpose, Joe would explain, was to make sure they didn't put themselves at risk by leaving the damn window open. He was protecting his boys.

Joe never stopped working on his sons' act and wouldn't allow the boys to slack off either. During the week, he rehearsed his sons twice a day: in the morning before school and in the afternoon when they got home. Kids from the neighborhood who already despised the Jacksons for shunning them would stand outside throwing rocks and taunts at the house, telling them they thought they were special but really, "You ain't nothin'!"

Once they began to get bookings at talent contests and in dive clubs, Joe would have the boys doing as many as five shows a night on weekends, all over the Gary and East Chicago area. There were lots of nights that ended when Joe would roust them out of bed at three in the morning to go to work. "I'd be sleeping and I'd hear my father-'Get up! There's a show!' Michael would recall thirty-five years later. "We'd have to perform." He would whine sleepily the whole drive there, but once he took the stage Michael always seemed fully awake. He loved performing that much, and loved it almost as much when people threw money at the stage afterward. He and his brothers would run around madly collecting coins from the floor and stuffing them into the pockets of the pants they had learned to wear with belts cinched tight to help support the weight of all that money. He spent most of his "earnings" on candy, Michael would remember. Joe kept the fees, which were becoming the family's main source of income.

Weeknights, when the kids went to bed, Joe would be in the audience at nearly every performance of every important musical act that came through the Chicago area, always sitting with a notebook in his lap, jotting down a description of each dance step or act of stagecraft that was worth stealing. The next morning, he'd make his sons learn this new move or that one. They had to get it right, of course, or out came the belt. He'd use the buckle on anyone who made the same mistake twice.

By the time Michael was eight, the Jacksons were good enough to play what was known as the "chitlin' circuit," a loose association of two- or three-thousand-seat theaters located in inner-city neighborhoods that stretched from Kansas City to D.C. As soon as school let out on Friday afternoon, the boys would "line up for inspection" next to the Volkswagen bus where their equipment was piled into the luggage rack on top, then depart for a weekend of work that often wouldn't end until they rolled back into Gary early Monday morning, just in time to eat breakfast and head off to school. They were opening for acts that included the Temptations, the O'Jays, Jackie Wilson, and Bobby Taylor. Sam & Dave became big supporters. On the chitlin' circuit, it was Michael who studied the other entertainers. Joe, like his older boys, loved to socialize backstage, but Michael hated that even as a boy. "It makes me shy," he would explain. "I don't know what to say." Instead, he would stand at the back of the theater, watching the acts he most admired. James Brown was at the top of that list, a performer who left puddles of sweat on the stage and a state of ecstatic exhaustion in the crowd. Timid as he was offstage, Michael constantly probed the adult performers for tips or advice. He pestered the notoriously prickly Etta James in her private dressing room, persisting even when she told him to scat. I just want to learn from the best, Michael would say, and, like James, most of the chitlin' circuit's stars couldn't resist the compliments of such a cute kid.

The Jacksons were catching more and more eyes. Some of the other opening acts grew resentful of the group, complaining that those kids wouldn't be so popular if they didn't have a damn midget as their lead singer. It seemed the only way to explain Michael Jackson, who at the age of eight was already using his voice to convey an impossibly complex range of adult emotions, from love and loss to hurt and betrayal to disillusion and yearning. He had no idea where it came from and neither did anyone else. Yet he got no compliments from Joe. "If I did a great show, he'd tell me it was a good show," Michael recalled. "And if I did an okay show, he'd tell me it was a lousy show." His father also never told him, not even a single time, that he was loved, Michael remembered. He was aching for something he didn't even know existed, until he began to see it among some of the families they met in hotels.

Sam & Dave did say they loved him, though, and the kings of call-and-response finagled a spot for the Jacksons in the country's most prestigious and competitive talent contest, the "Superdog," held at the Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Harlem. Backstage, the boys touched the fabled "Tree of Hope," a pedestal-mounted log that had been cut from the tree that stood outside the most famous restaurant in Harlem, the Barbecue, where Louis Armstrong and Count Basie had used the rehearsal halls upstairs. Then the Jackson Brothers went out and won the Superdog to a standing ovation. It was August 13, 1967, two weeks before Michael's ninth birthday.

Their triumph at the Apollo helped the Jacksons land their first recording contract. Gordon Keith, one of five partners in Gary's Steeltown Records, arranged for an audition at the family home. "They set up right in the living room," Keith recalled. "The furniture was pushed back. They and their equipment took up pretty much the entire room. The whole family was there; Janet was a babe in arms. They were getting ready and there was a thick cord stretched between two of the amps Michael was near. It came up to his chest. From right where he was standing, without a running start, he jumped straight up from a flat-footed position right over this cord to clear it. He had all my attention from there on. I knew I was looking at a boy who was superhuman. When they sang, Michael sang like an angel…but when Michael danced, all while singing, he blew away James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Fred Astaire, and anyone else you can name…I was flabbergasted. Knocked out. Blown away. Speechless." On January 31, 1968, Steeltown released the Jackson 5's first single and one week later the whole family sat around the radio in the living room, stunned and giggling as they listened together to the first time "Big Boy" was played on WWCA, unable to quite grasp that they'd come to this. By the summer of 1968, the Jacksons were opening for the Motown acts Gladys Knight & the Pips and Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers at Chicago's premier venue, the Regal Theater. After watching Joe Jackson's boys from the wings, both Knight and Taylor phoned Detroit, urging Motown's executives to take a look at these kids.

Even though Joe hated white people, he hired one-a lawyer named Richard Arons-to help him manage the group. Others had already contributed to the Jacksons' development, people like Shirley Cartman, the junior high school orchestra teacher who persuaded Joe to replace the weak drummer and lead guitarist he'd recruited from the neighborhood with a couple of talented local musicians named Johnny Jackson (no relation) and Ronnie Rancifer. At Cartman's urging, Tito moved up to lead guitar, while Jermaine switched from rhythm to bass. The result was a band that was tight enough to give Michael's soaring boy-soprano vocals the structural support they needed, yet fluid enough to accommodate the dramatic pitch changes that the child seemed to pluck out of thin air. And it was that local talent agent in Gary, Evelyn Lahaie, who had convinced Joe to change the group's name to the Jackson 5. "So many groups at that time that had names that ended in 'Brothers' or 'Sisters,'" LaHaie remembered. "It was too common. I knew that they should have something different."

Joe never surrendered even the tiniest percentage of control over his sons until Berry Gordy came into their lives. Joe had shown the boys just about everything you could get done in business when you combined ruthless with rough. Berry Gordy taught them how much more effective a man might be when he knew how to mix ruthless with smooth.

Like Joe, Gordy had a parent who was a schoolteacher, had tried to make his mark first as a boxer and, failing at that, had joined the blue-collar labor force. Gordy was still working on the assembly line at a Lincoln-Mercury plant when he opened a store called the 3-D Record Mart that featured jazz music. When that went under, he was reputed to have worked briefly and unsuccessfully as a pimp before going partners in a company called Rayber Music that recorded cheap demos for aspiring musicians. He was also writing songs by then, and one of them, "Reet Petite," became an R & B hit for Jackie Wilson in 1957. That was the same year he discovered a group called the Matadors (later called the Miracles), whose lead singer, Smokey Robinson, encouraged Gordy to invest his songwriting royalties in music production. By 1959, Gordy had coauthored four more songs that were recorded by Wilson, including "Lonely Teardrops," which not only topped the R & B chart, but rose as high as #7 on the pop chart. He founded what became Motown Records in a bungalow on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard in December of that same year. One of the first records the company produced, "Shop Around" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, not only hit #1 on the R & B chart in 1960, but climbed to #2 on the pop chart. A year later, Motown's release of "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes reached the top of both the R & B and pop charts.

By the summer of 1968, when the Jackson 5 auditioned for the company, Gordy had a roster of talent that included the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder. Motown's artist development division, which educated performers in subjects like etiquette, grooming, and fashion, had helped make the label's black acts more successful in white America than any before them, and the Supremes' lead singer, Diana Ross, was in a class by herself as a crossover talent. Nothing Gordy accomplished so amazed the rest of the music business, though, as his uncanny ability to create a sense among his artists that they were members of "The Motown Family" while at the same time effectively robbing them blind with the stingiest royalty rates in the business.

Gordy wasn't even present at the Jackson 5's Motown audition on July 23, 1968. After all the child labor law headaches he had suffered for signing Stevie Wonder, Gordy was reluctant to take on another underage act. When he saw the 16 mm black-and-white film his aides had made of the Jacksons' audition, though, Gordy sent back word to sign them immediately. The contract Joe Jackson executed on his sons' behalf paid each of the boys slightly more than 1 percent of what their records earned, which would come to about two cents apiece per album. Berry Gordy made a lot more from their music than the band ever would during the years the Jackson 5 recorded for his label.

This disturbed Joe far less than Gordy's insistence that Michael was the star of the show and that his brothers were merely a supporting cast. The Motown chief had made his position clear from the moment of the Jackson 5's public debut during the late summer of 1969 in Southern California, where Gordy was determined to relocate both his primary residence and his company. The press release-slash-invitation that announced the event was prepared by Gordy personally, even though it was "signed" by the young woman who had become Motown's signature asset: "Please join me in welcoming a brilliant musical group, the Jackson Five, on Monday, August 11, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Daisy, North Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills," it read. "The Jackson Five, featuring sensational eight-year-old Michael Jackson, will perform live at the party. Diana Ross." Joe fumed, concerned that singling out Michael would not only create dissension among his boys, but further undermine his authority over them.

The major impact Gordy made on Michael with this event, though, was what he taught the boy about the malleability of so-called reality. When Michael tried to tell Gordy and Ross that they'd made a big mistake in the press release because he was ten years old, not eight, Gordy explained that it wasn't a mistake, and it wasn't a lie, either, because a lie wasn't a lie when you told it for the purpose of public relations. "It's for your image," chimed in Ross, who was already going along with Gordy's story that she had "discovered" the Jackson 5 at a benefit concert for the campaign of Gary's first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. "I thought I was going to be an old man before being discovered," Michael had breathlessly confided to one interviewer after his performance at the Daisy. "But then along came Miss Diana Ross to save my career. She discovered me." When a suspicious reporter told the young performer she had heard that he was almost eleven (his birthday was in eighteen days), Michael vehemently denied it. So how old are you, the interviewer asked. "I'm eight," Michael answered.

Whatever his age, Michael's performance at the Daisy wowed the crowd. Soul magazine's reviewer hailed the Jackson 5's lead singer as "an eight-year-old boy who became a man when a microphone was in his hand."

Gordy was already finding other ways to separate Michael from his family. Joe and his sons endured Gordy's cheapskate accommodations for more than a year after their signing with Motown, sleeping on the floor of Bobby Taylor's apartment while they recorded fifteen songs during weekend sessions at the company's studios in Detroit, driving up from Gary every Friday evening, then driving back during the predawn hours of Monday morning, all at their own expense. When Gordy moved them out to Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, he put them up at Hollywood's most notorious palace of sleaze, the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where most of their neighbors were hookers and drug addicts. After a month, he moved them into an even more run-down motel on Sunset Boulevard. Gordy was himself ensconced at his stupendously opulent mansion in Bel Air, where the walls were covered with paintings of him dressed as Napoleon and Caesar.

A little more than a month after the Daisy show, though, Gordy arranged for Michael to begin living with Diana Ross at her lovely home in Beverly Hills. Gordy was just about to release the Jackson 5's first single and, confident it would be a hit, urged Ross to help Michael understand that a star had to think of himself differently than other people. "Wherever you go from now on," Ross told the boy, "people will be watching you." Though Michael meant far less to Diana than the boy wanted to believe, she instructed him simply by letting herself be observed. When they were alone in the house, she usually wanted the boy to draw pictures and leave her alone.

Michael was still spending his days, and many of his evenings, with his brothers at Motown's West Coast studios, where the five of them were working under the command of Deke Richards, the songwriter and producer who, as Motown's creative director of talent, was running the company's West Coast operation. With A-list songwriters Freddie Perren and Fonce Mizell, Richards and Gordy had formed what they called "The Corporation" to craft the songs and package the performances that would make the Jackson 5 a hit. Gordy and Richards, along with their producers, invested a remarkable amount of time and money in the recording and engineering of the song that would be the group's first release, "I Want You Back." The demands on his older brothers were not nearly those made of the group's eleven-year-old lead singer, who was spending as many as twelve hours a day in the studio. His strongest memories of that time, Michael would say later, were of falling asleep at the microphone, and of staring out the windows between takes at the children on the playground in the park across the street: "I would just stare at them in wonder-I couldn't imagine such freedom, such a carefree life-and wish more than anything that…I could walk away and be like them."

Gordy and Richards and just about everyone else at Motown, though, were mesmerized by the seventy-pound boy standing in front of them. Watching Michael step to the microphone and summon up emotions that seemed to befit a forty-year-old man who had done a lot of hard living, then as soon as the song was finished go looking for somebody to play hide and seek with, was both eerie and enthralling. Gordy would talk to the press about Michael's "deep and intuitive understanding" of things, but not even he seemed to have a clue about what its source might be. The things Michael did onstage were obviously practiced-anyone could see that he had copied and combined the moves of James Brown and the stage drama of Jackie Wilson-and yet he somehow owned the result entirely. Diana Ross had taught him about the power of the "oooh," especially when it was used to put an exclamation mark on a lyric, something everyone agreed Diana did better than anyone ever had-until they heard Michael do it.

"Never seen anything like him," Smokey Robinson would observe of Michael. And the whole world seemed to agree, in October 1969, when "I Want You Back" was released and shot straight to the top of both the Billboard and Cash Box pop charts. Shortly after the song's release, the Jackson 5 made its national television debut on an ABC program called The Hollywood Palace. For Michael's brothers, and for his father in particular, the experience was one more hard lesson in the reordering of their reality. Diana Ross was the special guest host for that episode of the show, but whenever she came backstage, Ross spoke only to Michael, whispering encouragement that was for him alone, and entirely ignoring the other boys. She introduced the group by saying: "Tonight, I have the pleasure of introducing a young star who has been in the business all of his life. He's worked with his family, and when he sings and dances, he lights up the stage." Sammy Davis Jr. came bounding out from behind a curtain wearing an excited smile, only to be politely rebuffed by Ross, who explained to the audience that she was talking about "Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5." Stepping onstage in the lime green suits they wore with matching gold shirts and green boots, the same outfits they had appeared in at the Daisy, the other Jackson brothers looked stunned. Joe was incensed, demanding to know if Berry Gordy was trying to rename the group. Not at all, said Gordy, who stood with him backstage, but Michael was "obviously the star." Surely Joe could see that. "They're all stars," Joe retorted, but what he thought really didn't count anymore and deep inside he knew it.

The older Jackson sons absorbed another blow to their pride when their first album was released a month after "I Want You Back" came out. Under the title-Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5-the other boys were pictured holding instruments they had not been allowed to play, on an album to which they had contributed little more than a chorus of backup vocals. The truth was that Jackie and Tito possessed only modest musical talent, and Marlon had none at all. No one had ever told them this, though, until they were about to become big stars. The process by which Michael had been separated out from the others was perhaps hardest on Jermaine, who had a perfectly adequate singing voice but just not one that was remotely in the same league as Michael's. Jermaine had suffered at the age of nine when he was replaced as the group's lead singer-his family believed the spell of stuttering that followed was a direct result-but tried to accept that he was, as his father put it, the group's "second soloist."

Diana Ross wrote the liner notes for the Jackson 5's first album. She began with the declaration that, "Honesty has always been a special word for me-a special idea," then repeated the lie that the Jackson 5 was "five brothers by the name of Jackson that I discovered in Gary, Indiana." By this time, Michael seemed to actually believe this was true, and more than a few of those who promoted the album were unnerved by the boy's capacity for blending fiction and reality so seamlessly that lines of demarcation seemed utterly erased.

His brothers were back on their game by December 14, 1969, four days before their album's release, when the Jackson 5 made its first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show wearing huge smiles and swaying in perfect rhythm behind their little brother as he took the stage in a crimson cowboy hat and delivered a performance of "I Want You Back" that had the girls in the audience pulling their hair from the first note to the last.

Satisfied that his investment would pay off, Berry Gordy moved the Jacksons out of the motel where they had been living and into a home he had leased on Queens Road in the Hollywood Hills, with a living room that offered more floor space than their entire house back in Gary, and a view of the Los Angeles Basin that after dark looked like diamonds spilled on sable. At Fairfax High School, where they had begun attending classes in September, Jackie and Tito were all but worshiped. Fourteen-year-old Jermaine saw the junior high girls from his classes literally fighting to sit next to him. It was not so difficult to nurse a bruised ego, the other boys found, when the whole world loved you.

In February 1970, the Jackson 5 released its second single, "ABC," which also went to #1 on the pop charts, displacing the Beatles' "Let It Be." Like "I Want You Back," it sold more than two million copies. The Jacksons' third single, released that May, was "The Love You Save." It hit #1 too, bumping the Beatles' "The Long and Winding Road" from the top spot. They had become the first band of the rock era to send their first three songs to #1. Their second album, ABC, was released that same month and was even more successful than the first had been. In July, the Jackson 5 concert broke every attendance record at the Los Angeles Forum, and a screaming crowd that was largely composed of young black women got so out of control that the boys were hustled off the stage before they could finish their set for fear that the security staff would not be able to protect them. On October 10, 1970, just as their fourth single, "I'll Be There," was being released, the Jackson 5 sang "The Star Spangled Banner" at Game 1 of the World Series in Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium. "I'll Be There," would provide a further revelation of Michael's gifts. Even white critics who had dismissed the Jackson 5 as "bubblegum soul" loved "I'll Be There," which sold more than any of the three singles before it, and made the Jackson 5 the first group ever to send its first four releases to the top of the pop charts.

Michael Jackson, a twelve-year-old pretending to be ten, had become all but iconic in what seemed the blink of an eye. When he and his brothers flew back to visit Gary, it was for a ceremony at which the street where they once lived was renamed "Jackson 5 Boulevard." That April, Michael had become the youngest person to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, with a headline that read, "Why does this eleven-year-old stay up past his bedtime?" He was four months from his thirteenth birthday, but the delayed onset of puberty helped the lie about his age remain viable. "Here you have the chief child, the new model, the successor to James Brown and the Tempts and Sly, the cherubic incarnation of their sum," Ben Fong-Torres had gushed inside the magazine. The most memorable anecdote from Torres's article was about Michael telling a concert audience that he could sing the blues because he knew all about them, then describing how his heart had been broken by a girl he met in the sandbox, only to see it all go downhill after "we toasted our love during milk break."

He kept his cover by holding fast to the enthusiasms of childhood, far more excited about the premiere that September of a network cartoon show called The Jackson 5ive than he was about the cover of Rolling Stone. Even though the voice of the animated character named Michael Jackson was not his, "I woke up every Saturday morning" to watch, he would remember. "I felt so happy, you have no idea…I think I felt more special about that than the records and the concerts and everything."

The Jackson 5 kicked off its first big national tour that October in Boston, where, even with a large security staff and a twelve-foot-high fence protecting them, the boys had to be pulled offstage before they were mobbed by an audience of young women who had gone completely berserk. At Cincinnati Gardens, thousands of girls who had been turned away when the concert sold out staged a near riot outside the stadium, while those who got inside the gates crammed the aisles and shrieked themselves into a near delirium, even as local disc jockeys took turns pleading for calm. Fourteen girls had to be carried outside unconscious after fainting. Girls collapsed in the aisles at every stop after that, and by the hundreds clamored and chanted afterward outside the Jacksons' hotels.

Michael seemed to enjoy the attention at first, but his pleasure quickly diminished. Halfway through the tour, he didn't want to leave the hotel except to perform, and what he seemed to love most about their stopovers were water balloon and shaving cream fights with his brothers. That stopped when first Jackie, then Tito, and then even Jermaine, grew more interested in the girls gathered at the stage door after a concert than they were in fun and games with their little brother.

When the Jackson 5 left the United States in October 1972 for a twelve-day European tour, they discovered that the white girls there were just as crazy for them as the black girls in America. A full-scale riot erupted in the streets of Amsterdam when it was announced that the Jacksons would perform only one night in the Dutch city. On their way to a command performance before Queen Elizabeth in London that would launch the tour, the boys were nearly crushed by the screaming mob of girls who awaited them at Heathrow Airport. Plugs of Tito's Afro were ripped from his scalp within seconds of his stepping off the plane. The shrieking inside the terminal was so intense that it brought tears to Marlon's eyes. The five brothers were swiftly separated by the surge of the crowd and had to scramble and shove their way separately to the limousine waiting at the curb outside. Michael, still not five feet tall, was nearly strangled by girls who grabbed opposite ends of the scarf he wore, and had to work the fingers of one hand up under the scarf to push it off his larynx, using the other hand to protect his eyes from the fingernails that clutched and slashed at him from every direction.

"Sheer pandemonium," was how a release issued by the delighted executives at Motown described the scene. Their English fans barricaded the entrance to the Churchill Hotel, where the Jacksons were staying in London, and had to be dispersed by bobbies firing water cannons. The next day, a nine-year-old girl tried to force her way into Michael's room at knifepoint. Dozens of other girls brandished knives at the police outside the hotel; one girl swung a sledgehammer to try to get inside. The Rolls-Royce limo that carried the group to their performance that evening was dented and scraped in dozens of places as it crawled through the swarm of young girls who scratched at the windows with their fingernails, smashing their faces against the glass. While the boys were performing inside the Talk of the Town nightclub, the limo was stripped to its frame and they had to ride back to their hotel in taxis.

The older Jackson brothers surveyed the mad scene that surrounded them with fear and wonder, but for Michael only the fear was real. He was a prepubescent boy standing four feet, ten inches tall and weighing less than eighty pounds-"round eyes, round dimples on a round face, under a round Afro," was how Ben Fong-Torres had described him in Rolling Stone-who had no way of understanding the sexual frenzy he elicited from the young women who charged and clutched and clawed at him. "They were so big," his mother Katherine would explain. "And he was so small."

3

In London, Michael had decided to turn the trip forced on him by Marc Schaffel into a three-week holiday for his children. Prince and Paris got a taste of their father's London experience when they ventured from the Dorchester with him on October 7, to visit Abbey Road, the studio where the Beatles recorded the majority of their songs. A relatively small crowd of fans and photographers outside the hotel had done their best to create a mob scene, pushing up against Michael's security team in a crush of clutching arms and contorted faces that terrified his kids. When they got to St. John's Wood for a tour of the studio, Michael recalled recording "Say Say Say" here with Paul McCartney back in 1981, but the children were a lot more excited about their father's promise to take them to see the movie Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

First, though, they would meet up with Michael's old friend Mark Lester and his family to see the musical Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre. Almost forty years later, Lester was still best known to the world as the young actor who had played the title character in Oliver!, the musical that had won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture. Back in the days when he and his brothers were just beginning to become recognized as recording stars, Michael explained, he used to open teen magazines and see pictures of himself and Mark on opposite pages, as if facing off against one another, "the positive and the negative, the black and the white." They had not actually gotten to know one another until late 1982, shortly before the release of Thriller, when Lester got a call from someone who said Michael Jackson would like to meet him, and arranged an introduction in a suite at the Montcalm Hotel in Park Lane. Lester had ceased acting as a young adult and was now almost completely obscure outside Gloucestershire, the county west of London where he worked as an osteopath and ran an acupuncture clinic in the spa town of Cheltenham. He and Michael, though, had remained in close contact for the past two decades and rarely went a year without seeing one another. Mark was godfather to all three of Michael's children, as Michael was to at least two of Lester's four kids-who had made multiple trips to California for stays at Neverland that were the envy of their schoolmates.

The Lester kids seemed as excited as ever about seeing Michael in London, but their father was distracted by the thought that he might be the biological father of at least one of Michael's own children.

Back in 1997, while married to Debbie Rowe, Michael had asked Mark to donate sperm at a clinic in California. Lester had wondered ever since if his sperm had been used to impregnate Rowe with her daughter Paris, he said. And now, in London, he was struck by the "uncanny likeness" between seven-year-old Paris and his own eleven-year-old daughter Harriet. He chose not to press the subject, though, and accepted that living with doubts was the price one paid for a relationship with Michael Jackson.

Lester knew far better than most people how "traditional" Michael's avowed value system was, but even he had been taken aback by his friend's reaction to Billy Elliot. The foul language was totally unacceptable, said Michael, and he would never have brought his children to see it if he had known how bad it was. At age forty-seven, Michael still refrained from cursing. While he no longer insisted that people not use swear words in his own presence, he demanded that they refrain when his children were around. He was a far better father than he was given credit for by the -media, in Lester's opinion, not only refusing to let his children be spoiled but dealing with them very firmly when he saw some sign that they thought they were above ordinary folk.

Still, the Jackson kids did have the run of an entire floor at the five-star Dorchester and were used to such special treatment as having Madame Tussaud's wax museum closed to the public so that they could join their father on a private tour. They marveled at the figure of him twenty years younger, frozen in the middle of a dance step and outfitted in the sequined black suit, white V-neck T-shirt, and red-banded black fedora. When they went shopping at Harrods three days later, the kids were greeted by the store's then-owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed, "Princess Diana's father-in-law," as Michael preferred to call the father of the boyfriend who died with Diana in the 1997 Paris car crash. Prince, Paris, and Blanket were allowed to sit with a crowd of regular people when they saw Wallace and Gromit but only after being ushered into the theater during the opening credits to seats that had been saved for them in the back row. Two days after that, they were loaded onto a private jet and flown back to Bahrain. For all the children knew, this was how everyone lived.

On the same day he left London, Jackson's attorneys filed a countersuit against Marc Schaffel in Santa Monica, alleging that he had misappropriated funds, had failed to pay production costs for "What More Can I Give?" and had continued to represent himself as Michael Jackson's business partner long after the relationship was "terminated." The suit also accused Schaffel of keeping $250,000 worth of sculptures and paintings that belonged to Jackson.

The answer to Jackson's court filing came swiftly and painfully. In November, Schaffel's attorney Howard King provided Good Morning America with a recording of Michael Jackson that would paint him as an anti-Semite: "They suck-they're like leeches. I'm so tired of it. [Recording artists] start out the most popular person in the world, make a lot of money, big house, cars, and everything, end up with-penniless. It is conspiracy. The Jews do it on purpose."

It was an area of vulnerability for Michael and the entire Jackson family. He had been beset by allegations of anti-Semitism since 1995 upon the release of his album HIStory. The controversy was ignited by the lyrics of his song "They Don't Care About Us," which included the verse: "Jew me / sue me / everybody do me / Kick me, kike me / don't you black or white me." Even as he insisted the song was a protest against racism and ethnic discrimination, the Anti-Defamation League had mounted protests that forced Michael ultimately to add percussive sound effects that obscured the words "Jew" and "kike" in subsequent issues of the album.

Many in the entertainment industry had heard, as well, the stories of an anti-Semitism that ran rampant in the Jackson household; based largely on quotes attributed to her by her daughter La Toya (who later retracted these claims), Katherine Jackson had been accused in particular. Jermaine's public conversion to Islam, combined with the family's involvement with Louis Farrakhan and Michael's move to the Middle East after leaving the United States, further cemented the impression of anti-Semitism many had.

Howard King admitted his doubt that Jackson truly disliked Jews: "I think at the end of the day Michael was pretty tolerant of everybody." The attorney seemed only too happy, though, to see his legal adversary pilloried once again by the Anti-Defamation League, which on the morning after the "leeches" recording aired on Good Morning America demanded a public apology from Michael Jackson "to Jews everywhere."

What it all meant, at a minimum, was that Michael would not be returning to the United States in the near future. By the middle of November, Sheikh Abdullah had invested more than $5 million in Michael Jackson. That included paying the entertainer's numerous attorneys who were attending to assorted civil matters. Abdullah's own attorney Ahmed al Khan was helping Jackson handle his negotiations with assorted major creditors. The sheikh had covered all the costs of Michael's living and travel expenses since his arrival in Manama and had spent a substantial sum to arrange and coordinate recording sessions that linked Jackson with studios in Los Angeles. He provided his guest with the use of both a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes Maybach, and bought him jewelry, watches, and a statue made of solid gold.

Abdullah still seemed to believe it would all pay off. The Bahraini media swallowed Sheikh Abdullah's latest press release whole, turning it into a series of rapturous stories about how, days after his arrival in the country, Michael Jackson had recorded Abdullah's original composition "He Who Makes the Sky Gray." The people of his country would be hearing the song "very, very soon," according to the sheikh, who promised that "proceeds will go to relief efforts in different parts of the world to help victims of wars and natural disasters." What he and Mikaeel would offer was "a song created in Bahrain," Abdullah went on, "to show the world that this region is not about wars and conflicts."

Jackson "thrilled the nation" when he traveled to Dubai with Abdullah in mid-November to attend the Dubai Desert Rally Awards, according to the November 14 edition of the Khaleej Times. Mikaeel had tried to be inconspicuous while he ate lunch with the managing director of the Dubai International Marine Club, Saeed Hareb, according to the newspaper, but those in attendance were beside themselves when he stepped forward to present the trophies to the winners in the Desert Rally's automobile and motorcycle categories. "Reports have surfaced," the newspaper account added, that Jackson had just paid $1.5 million for a lot at Bahrain's man-made Amwaj Islands, where he planned to construct the palace that would replace Neverland Ranch as his primary residence.

The Persian Gulf's pride in Jackson was torpedoed the very next day when the UAE's largest afternoon daily, Evening Post, ran a banner front-page headline announcing that "Wacko Jacko" had been caught inside a ladies' toilet at Dubai's Ibn Battuta Mall. Jackson had been costumed in an abaya, the black full-length gown, face veil, and head covering traditionally worn by Arab women, when he ducked into the bathroom and removed his headdress to apply what the newspaper described as "much-needed" makeup. A woman emerging from a toilet stall squealed in horror at the sight of Jackson's "mangled" face and began snapping photos of him with her cell phone. Shoppers at the mall heard shouts and screams, then saw Jackson's bodyguards wrestling with the woman outside the bathroom as they forced her to hand over the cell phone. Jackson was then driven off with his bodyguards in a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

One day after the Post report, Arab newspapers were filled with demands that Jackson receive "appropriate punishment." A Syrian housewife was quoted as saying, "This man shows his immoral character pretending to be a woman. He should be punished severely." Jackson must go to jail, chimed in a Sudanese nurse who promptly changed that to "a place worse than jail, so that it would set an example." A young Egyptian mother declared that Jackson had insulted not just Muslim women, but the entire Muslim world and demanded "stern action."

The Al Khalifas responded by getting Michael out of the country. Rather than address the mall incident directly, though, Sheikh Abdullah explained to Jackson that his uncle, the king's brother, was returning from overseas and would need the use of the home in which Michael and his children had been staying. Along with Grace, they were sent off to neighboring Oman, where a dinner had been arranged at the home of the U.S. ambassador. The traveling party had just checked into the Al Bustan Palace hotel when word came that Jackson's longtime chief of security, Bill Bray, had died in Los Angeles. Bray, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer, had begun protecting Jackson when Michael was the ten-year-old lead singer of the Jackson 5. In the years that followed, Bray became the fiercely protective father figure Michael yearned for, literally carrying the young singer through the shrieking, scratching crowds of young women that so terrified him as a preadolescent. A breach had opened between the two during the Bad tour, though, when Bray, in an attempt to secure his financial future, prevailed upon Jackson to sign a document that for a few weeks made the aging bodyguard the CEO of MJJ Productions, Michael's principal business arm. Bray surrendered the title after Jackson realized what he had done, but for the first time doubts about Bill's motives had been seeded in Michael's mind.

Those seeds sprouted a year later when Bray became involved in the so-called "Moonie Fiasco." A representative of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon named Kenneth Choi had been assigned to persuade Michael to join the other Jackson brothers in a series of concerts to be staged in Seoul, South Korea, under the auspices of the Segye Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies. Choi had gone to absurd lengths to make what he called "The Jackson Family Reunion Concerts" happen, spending money in prodigious amounts along the way. Michael's parents, Katherine and Joseph, were flown twice to Korea, once with their oldest daughter Rebbie, and shown the most extravagant level of luxury that Seoul could provide. Michael's manager Frank Dileo was offered two cashier's checks totaling $1 million by Choi if he could convince Michael to participate in the concerts (and he was fired three days after he discussed the situation with Jackson). Joe and Katherine's representative Jerome Howard got a new Mercedes as an incentive bonus to make the "Family Reunion" concerts happen. After complaining that "these are my boys, not Jerome's," Joe Jackson received a Rolls-Royce Corniche and $50,000 cash, while another $35,000 cash went to Katherine. Jermaine Jackson got a Range Rover for being (supposedly) the brother Michael trusted most, and the Moonies sent the star himself not only a new Rolls-Royce but also a truckload of artwork and $60,000 cash. He would receive $10 million if he performed at the four concerts, Choi promised Michael, in addition to his share of the $7.5 million that was to be split among the Jackson brothers. Eventually, the Koreans were buying expensive gifts for seemingly anyone who claimed to be able to influence Michael Jackson. The farce hit bottom when Bill Bray's girlfriend persuaded Choi to hand over the keys to a 560 SEL Mercedes, simply for claiming she had Michael's ear. Bray himself somehow came out of it all with $500,000, and when Michael heard about that, things were never the same between the two of them. Bray was not invited to live at Neverland when Michael moved to the ranch, and in 1995 his position with MJJ Productions was terminated.

The press release issued on Michael's behalf after Bray's death was brief: "I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear and longtime friend, Mr. Bill Bray. As I traveled the world, Mr. Bray was there by my side. Bill Bray will forever have a special place in my heart." He hadn't been able to face seeing Bill old and shriveled and dying, Michael admitted to those who were with him, then cried alone in his room.

Michael was still recovering from the news of Bray's death when two days later he learned that his former manager, Dieter Wiesner, had just filed a $64 million lawsuit against him in Los Angeles. Wiesner had spent nearly a decade at Jackson's side, beginning with the HIStory tour in 1995, when he traveled with Michael to 120 shows around the world. Much of the bond they formed during that time, and after, resulted from Wiesner's sympathy for Michael's wish to escape the music business. "He said on the HIStory tour that he would never do this again, that touring was over for him, forever," Wiesner recalled. "He said, 'I don't want to be doing the moonwalk on stage when I'm fifty.'"

4

On March 6, 2001, Michael Jackson traveled by car from London with his friends Uri Geller and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to add his name to the list of illustrious and celebrated figures (including several U.S. presidents, the Dalai Lama, author Salman Rushdie, and actor Johnny Depp) who have addressed the Oxford Union Society. He opened his remarks with an observation that he had been making in one form or another for going on twenty years: "All of us are the products of our childhoods, but I am the product of a lack of a childhood."

It was the central fallacy of his adult life. He had had a childhood, just not the one he wished for. This dissonance between what he imagined and what he had was the primary source of both his creativity and his unhappiness. It made him rich and famous and lonely all his life. He owed his mother Katherine for it every bit as much as he owed his father Joe, but of all the truths Michael avoided, that was at the top of the list.

Katherine Jackson was born Kattie B. Scruse in Alabama, to a family that on her father's side had been listed as "mulatto" in an early twentieth-century census. Stricken at eighteen months with polio, she either wore braces or walked with crutches until she was sixteen, and suffered merciless teasing by her classmates in East Chicago, where her family had moved when she was four. She grew up as a child apart, painfully shy and quiet except when she got the chance to sing or make music. She and her sister Hattie were each members of their high school's orchestra, band, and choir. Kate, as her family called her, played both clarinet and piano, and possessed a sweet and rich soprano voice that more than one person told her should be heard on records. She and Hattie adored a Chicago radio program called Suppertime Frolic that played nothing but country and western music. The two sisters adored especially the songs of Hank Williams, and it was an early dream of Kate's to become the first black female country star.

By the time the braces came off and the crutches fell away, Kattie B. Scruse had grown into a lovely young woman who dreamed of a career in show business, either as an actress or a singer, but never found the self-confidence to strive for such a life. Instead, at nineteen, she was terribly smitten by the dashing local ladies' man, recently divorced twenty-year-old Joseph Jackson. They married only a few months after meeting. She had legally changed her name to Katherine Esther Scruse not long before the wedding, but never quite got over the feeling that a poor crippled girl like "Kattie B. Screws" (as the other kids had called her) was lucky to land a man so many other women admired. The whispers of Joe's infidelity started early but Kate ignored them for as long as it was possible.

She seemed far more accepting of their lot in life than Joe did, making many of the children's clothes herself or shopping for them at the Salvation Army store. She worked at Sears part-time as a saleswoman to supplement Joe's earnings at the mill. Religion was the anchor of her life. She was raised Baptist and became a Lutheran but abandoned both churches when she discovered that the ministers of her local congregations were conducting extramarital affairs. Right around the time that Michael made his famous kindergarten performance at Garnett Elementary, Kate was converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses by a pair of proselytizers who were going door-to-door through the neighborhood. She was determined to get the entire family involved, forcing them all to dress up each Sunday morning and walk with her to the local Kingdom Hall. Joe lasted only a few weeks, and her older sons fell away soon after that. Only Michael and her two older daughters, Rebbie (who was an ardent Witness) and La Toya, fully embraced the principles of Kate's faith. The others, though, all accepted the tenets that separated the Witnesses from American society. There were no birthday celebrations in the Jackson home, and no celebrations of the "pagan" holidays Christmas and Easter, either. Even Jackie and Tito refused to engage in the idolatrous practices of saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, but none of the Jackson boys made a display of their defiance.

Though indifferent to the religious practices of the Witnesses, Joe appreciated the discipline and structure that his wife's faith imposed on their children. Witnesses were taught to think of themselves as sheep, and of those who surrounded them as goats. When the battle of Armageddon was fought (any day now), the goats would be slaughtered and only the sheep would survive, resurrected to a life on earth as subjects of the Kingdom of God, ruled over by Jesus Christ. Joe had no interest at all in the spiritual dimensions of his wife's faith, but it pleased him immensely to have his children indoctrinated into the belief that they must remain separate from the "goats" of their depressed and declining community.

Rebbie, La Toya, and Michael would accompany Katherine when she went door-to-door through the neighborhood each week to witness her faith and distribute copies of the Watchtower magazine. Perplexed by his father's refusal to attend services at the Kingdom Hall, Michael was more deeply bonded to his mother than ever by their shared beliefs, and became in some regards her special favorite by being the only one of the boys who would join her in regular Bible study. Katherine had always given him the love and affection he craved, though she was also quite willing to smack any of her children across the face if they talked back to her, or in some way offended God. The only real trouble between Katherine and Michael had arisen out of his habit of filching pieces of jewelry from her dresser drawer to give as presents to his favorite teachers at Garnett. His mother had him whipped for that, and yet covered up for some of his other transgressions, especially when she knew that Joe was in the mood to administer a truly terrible beating.

A strange, even insidious ambiguity developed out of Katherine's enthusiasm for Joe's push to make his boys into a successful singing group. Early on, she would sew the boys' costumes and drive them to their local engagements when Joe was unavailable. Later, she seemed to relish their success every bit as much as her husband did. They all could see that she loved the money and the attention, and yet she was constantly reminding them that wealth and fame weren't what mattered-that only preaching and proselytizing were important in the eyes of God. An implicit and troubling hypocrisy became an undercurrent of Katherine's character; what she said and what she did seemed to grow further and further apart.

This was nowhere more evident than in the blind eye she turned to Joe's infidelities and in the exposure to the more sordid aspects of sexuality she permitted her six-year-old son after he became the Jackson Brothers' lead singer. Many of the clubs the Jacksons played in the early days were strip joints. Michael's memories of those dates were a large part of why he was so uninterested in clubbing when he got older: "Fights breaking out, people throwing up, yelling, screaming, the police sirens." He stood in the wings watching women undress before a rowdy mob of drunken men any number of times as he waited to go onstage and sing for the same crowd. Forty years later, he could still vividly recall "the lady who took off all her clothes." Rose Marie was her name, remembered Michael, who watched her at the age of seven with a stricken fascination as the young woman twirled the tassels attached to her nipples, lashing with them at the men who groped her from the front of the stage, then stepped out of her panties and threw them into the audience, where "the men would grab them and sniff them." Returning home in the predawn light with a father who had enjoyed Rose Marie's show as much as any man in the audience, to a mother who preached that such licentiousness was satanically inspired and would result in exclusion from the Kingdom of God, Michael defended his soul with a prudish romanticism that in years to come would not merely inhibit his sexuality, but simultaneously crush and distort it.

Michael saw less and less of his mother when the Jackson 5 hit the chitlin' circuit and began to travel throughout the Midwest and Northeast with their father. Those absences became prolonged after the signing with Motown, and Michael went weeks and months without seeing his mother-"the only person who made me feel loved"-at the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve. An early experience of severe turbulence made him terrified of flying and his father had to carry him onto the airplane kicking and screaming when their concert schedule forced the Jackson 5 to take off in a storm. Joseph "would never hold me or touch me," Michael remembered, "and the stewardesses would have to come and hold my hand and caress me." He cried all day before their first trip to South America, Michael remembered. "I did not want to go and I said, 'I just want to be like everyone else. I just want to be normal.' And my father found me, and made me get in the car and go, because we had to do a date."

He had long been denied the right to make friends outside the family, and now, constantly on the move, he began to experience all new relationships as fleeting. "You meet people on the road, somebody on your floor, could be a family," he recalled, "and you know you have to have as much fun as you can in a short time, because you are not going to see them again."

Michael was shocked and appalled by the attitudes of the groupies who swarmed around the Jackson 5 when they became a big act. They bore no resemblance at all to what his mother had told him about the fairer sex. He was every bit as shocked, and even more appalled, by how his father and his brothers took advantage of young women who would do anything for a little attention from a famous family. From the first, Joe made no effort to hide the way he reveled in all that available young flesh, saying good night to his sons in their hotel rooms with both arms full of girls half his age, at once showing off his boys to the girls and the girls to his boys, then cackling as he headed off down the hall to enjoy the sweet fruits of success. Michael and Marlon, the two youngest members of the Jackson 5, were especially wounded by the constant betrayal of their mother, and in some way felt betrayed themselves by her unwillingness to hear about it. The older Jackson brothers, though, learned well from their father, and in almost no time Joe was accepting sloppy seconds from his strapping, handsome oldest son, Jackie, while Jermaine stood third in line. The hurt and shame and impotent angst were all still audible in Michael's voice twenty-five years later when he described what it was like for him as a prepubescent, pretending to sleep in his hotel room bed while his brothers thrust away at groupies who lay on their backs or bellies right next to him. On more than one occasion he tried to convince the girls who gathered at the backstage door that they should go no farther, warning that they would be used and discarded. When they went ahead anyway, he was confused and frightened at first and then, over time, disheartened.

Between tours, Joe and his sons returned home to a two-acre estate on the north face of the Santa Monica Mountains, with a private driveway off Hayvenhurst Drive just below Mulholland in the affluent enclave of Encino. It had become the new Jackson family home in the spring of 1971, a five-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion that was supposed to be Katherine's dream house. Her sons' friends called it "The Big House," more because it felt like a prison than because of its size. Janet Jackson's first husband, James DeBarge, gave the Hayvenhurst mansion its most resonant nickname: "The House of Fears." Their new home was as far removed from the house the Jackson boys had grown up in as their former neighbors in Gary could have imagined. There was an Olympic-size swimming pool, basketball and badminton courts, an archery range, a guest house, a playhouse, and servants' quarters, all contained within a gated compound that overflowed with citrus trees and flowering shrubs. The driveway was filled with luxury automobiles and the walls of the family room were lined with gold and platinum records.

Joe's already nasty personality darkened during those years. He bitterly resented that Berry Gordy now seemed to have more control over his sons' careers than he, the father who had molded them into a professional act, and he went to maniacal lengths to remind the entire family that he and he alone was the boss around the house. A five-minute limit was imposed on phone calls and Joe enforced the rule with a leather strap that he used on even his teenage sons. He had refused for years to be addressed as "Dad" by his children, demanding that they call him "Joseph." Some imagined that it was his way of instilling a professional attitude in his brood, but Michael saw through that to the truth: "He felt that he was this young stud. He was too cool to be Dad. He was Joseph." The boys were regularly reminded that Joe thought of himself as their manager first, and as their father only when all else failed. Michael would remember the chill that went through them all when Joseph told them, "If you guys ever stop singing, I will drop you like a hot potato." Inside the Hayvenhurst compound, what Joe called "discipline" became more ritualized and sadistic. He would make you strip naked first, Michael remembered, then slather you with baby oil before bringing out the cut-off cord from a steam iron that he was using now instead of a leather strap, and crack it across the back of your thighs, so that when the tip struck it felt like an electric shock. "It would just be like dying," Michael remembered, "and you had whips all over your face, your back, everywhere…and I would just give up, like there was nothing I could do. And I hated him for it, hated him. We all did."

Their Bible-reading mother did little to stop it. "She was always the one in the background…I hear it now," Michael recalled. "'Joe, no, you're going to kill them. No! No, Joe, it's too much!' And he would be breaking the furniture. It was terrible." They would all beg Kate to divorce him, but, "she used to say, 'Leave me alone.'" Katherine's defenders would describe Mrs. Jackson as an abused woman who had been constantly bullied, threatened, and intimidated by her husband, and whose religion taught her that breaking up a marriage-any marriage-was a transgression against God.

Terror would run through the Hayvenhurst house the moment they heard Joe's car in the driveway, Michael said: "He always drove a big Mercedes, and he drives real slow. 'Joseph's home! Joseph's home! Quick!' Everybody runs to their room, doors slam." More than a few times, he either fainted or retched when forced to be in his father's presence. "When he comes in the room, and this aura comes and my stomach starts hurting, I know I am in trouble." Michael and his little sister Janet used to play a game of closing their eyes and picturing Joseph dead in his coffin, Michael remembered, and when he would ask if she felt sorry, Janet's answer was always the same: No.

It was worse when they were on tour. The scene Michael dreaded most was the one Joe created after a performance, when he would send his sons into the room where a buffet dinner was set up, then bring in perhaps a dozen girls that he had selected from the group at the stage door. "The room would be just lined with girls giggling, just loving us, like, 'Oh, my God!' and shaking," Michael remembered. "And if I was talking and something happened and he didn't like it, he'd get this look in his eye like-he'd get this look in his eye that would just scare you to death. He slapped me so hard in the face, as hard as he could, and then he'd thrust me out into the big room, where they are, tears running down my face, and what are you supposed to do, you know?"

The more Motown elevated Michael above the others, the angrier Joe seemed to become. There was nothing he could do, though, to prevent Gordy and his executives from launching the solo career that they saw in Michael's future. Michael's first solo single, "Got to Be There," was a sweetly innocent love song that was released in October 1971 and by Christmas had hit #1 on the Cash Box chart. The song became the title track of an album that was released in January 1972 and sent two more singles into the top ten. One of them, Michael's chirpy cover of "Rockin' Robin," actually sold better than "Got to Be There," rising to #2 on the Billboard pop chart.

The first Michael Jackson solo track to become a Billboard #1 was, in essence, a love song to a rat. Released only a few months after the Got to Be There album, "Ben" was the theme song for the movie sequel to the popular horror film Willard, about a meek social misfit whose strange affinity for rats leads ultimately to his being devoured by them. The leader of the rats, Ben, returned in the sequel, adopted by a character with whom Michael would identify: a lonely boy without friends who finally finds a companion in the superintelligent rodent. Michael, who kept pet rats himself, delivered a haunting, sentimental theme song for Ben that was both weirdly moving and astoundingly successful, not only reaching #1 on the Billboard chart, but nominated for an Academy Award as well. Michael sneaked into theaters on at least a dozen occasions to watch the film from the back of the audience, waiting until he could hear his song during a credit roll that included his own screen-size name.

The "normal life" that Michael repeatedly said he longed for was slipping further and further into impossibility. He had tried to follow Marlon to Emerson Junior High but being mobbed in the hallway made that difficult. Girls lined up outside his classrooms, trying to get a look at him through the tiny glass windows in the doors. A jealous boy made a death threat and that was the end of Michael's public school experience.

He had turned fourteen the month the album Ben was released and finally hit puberty around the same time. Reporters began to catch on to the lie about his age. Rumors about his sexuality were spreading by the time he turned fifteen. Publicly, Joe and his other sons countered with the laughable story that Michael was so promiscuous they had to keep the groupies away from him. The other male members of the Jackson family persisted in trying to convince Michael it was time to surrender his virginity. According to his sister Rebbie, one of them had tried to shake Michael's sexuality loose with some Jackson-style shock therapy, locking him in a hotel room with two adult hookers who left him scared, shaken, and still a virgin. The prostitutes were pretty rattled themselves; Michael had resisted their attempts to undress him, they said, by picking up his Bible and reading passages from Scripture aloud to them.

The loneliness that would become an increasingly chronic condition for Michael worsened year by year. He felt abandoned by his older siblings, who were all using marriage as an excuse to get places of their own and escape Joe's oppression. Rebbie had been the first to go, just eighteen when she announced that she intended to marry another Jehovah's Witness named Nathaniel Brown. Joe was adamantly opposed. Rebbie was a looker who had the biggest voice of all his children, and the richest, except for Michael's. She possessed everything she needed to be a star, Joe said, but instead the girl wanted to marry a man who was even more religious than her mother and become a housewife. For one of the very few times in her life, Katherine had opposed her husband and supported the marriage. Tito left in 1972, marrying at age eighteen-just like his older sister-a pretty seventeen-year-old of mixed black and Hispanic background named Dee Dee Martes. The wedding of nineteen-year-old Jermaine one year later made big news because the bride was Berry Gordy's oldest daughter Hazel. The year after that, twenty-three-year-old Jackie married Enid Spann, a mixed black and Korean beauty whom he had been dating since she was fifteen. In August 1975, shortly before Michael's seventeenth birthday, his eighteen-year-old brother Marlon secretly married a young fan from New Orleans named Carol Ann Parker, but didn't tell his parents about it until four months later.

The Jackson 5 was by then in an increasingly steep professional decline. After scoring consecutive #1 hits with their first four single releases, the group's fifth release, "Never Can Say Goodbye," would peak at #2. The Jacksons sent one more song to the top of the charts later in 1971 with "Mama's Pearl," but the group managed to chart in the top twenty only three times in the next several years, with 1971's "Sugar Daddy," 1972's "Lookin' Through the Windows," and 1974's disco number "Dancing Machine." Both at Motown and throughout the record industry, the Jackson 5 were regarded as a dwindling resource. Joe and his four oldest sons all blamed Motown's refusal to let the members of the group mature as artists. Though they played their instruments onstage, the music on their albums was still being made by either Motown's sizzling in-house studio band, the Funk Brothers, or by the Wrecking Crew at Hitsville West. The Jacksons had produced at least an album's worth of material at their home studio in the Hayvenhurst compound but Gordy's reluctance to let them perform their own songs either in the studio or onstage meant that not one of those songs had been heard by the public.

The group was being squeezed between Gordy's money-grubbing resistance to sharing songwriting royalties with his artists and the opinion of the man who was really running Motown, Ewart Abner, that the Jackson 5's time had passed. Michael was becoming as frustrated as his brothers. His third and fourth solo albums, Music & Me and Forever, Michael, had peaked on the pop charts at 93 and 101. Joe was furious that neither Michael's solo albums nor the newest Jackson 5 albums were receiving much promotional support from Motown and began to tell his sons they should leave the label. The executives and producers at Motown insisted that Joe's obnoxious attitude and clumsy incompetence were the problems; nobody wanted to work with the Jacksons because nobody wanted the stress and irritation of having their father around.

Amid the mounting tensions, sixteen-year-old Michael amazed everyone by phoning Berry Gordy personally and demanding a meeting, at which he let the Motown chief know just how unhappy he and his brothers had become. Gordy flattered and cajoled but made no promises. Joe and the other Jackson brothers were indignant when they learned that Michael had "gone behind our backs." Though outwardly apologetic, Michael was inwardly thrilled. He had asserted himself as never before and in the process won more respect from Gordy than his father ever did. It was the first of many indications to come that, for all his apparent social and sexual timidity, he could be as aggressive as necessary when it came to business. Things were different between him and his brothers-and especially between him and his father-from that day forward. Still, Michael went along with Jackie, Tito, and Marlon when they voted to leave Motown and let Joe look for a better deal at another label. Jermaine was excluded from the vote, and not just because he was out of town at the time: His marriage to Hazel Gordy had divided his loyalties and his brothers feared that he might stick with his father-in-law if things came to a head.

By the summer of 1975, Joe had negotiated a deal with CBS Records that provided the Jacksons a ten-fold increase in their royalty rate, a $750,000 signing bonus, and a $500,000 "recording fund," plus a guarantee of $350,000 per album, more than they had received for their most successful releases at Motown. The Jackson brothers were also given the right to choose three of the songs for each album, and to submit their own compositions for consideration, something Gordy and Abner had never permitted. Still, Michael said, he only signed the CBS contract after Joe "cajoled" him "with the promise that I'd get to have dinner with Fred Astaire…My father knew that I loved Fred with all my heart. He knew I would sign without reading the contract…It broke my heart that he did that. He tricked me."

Jermaine, though, not only refused to sign the CBS contract but immediately informed Gordy that the brothers were leaving Motown. He would be the president of the company some day, Gordy told his son-in-law. "I believed in Berry, not Joe," Jermaine explained to a reporter. At Gordy's insistence, Jermaine left the Jackson 5 thirty minutes before a scheduled performance at the Westbury Music Fair. Michael was nearly as upset as Joe when they learned that Gordy had successfully separated one of the brothers from the family. The difference was that Michael believed some of the blame was his father's.

Berry Gordy wasn't done making his displeasure felt among the Jacksons. His opening salvo was the announcement that a clause in the group's Motown contract gave him ownership of the name "Jackson 5" and the brothers would not be allowed to use it at CBS. Gordy also enlisted Jesse Jackson to raise whatever fuss he could about CBS "stealing a black act from a black record label." Finally, he sued Joe Jackson, the Jackson 5, and CBS for $5 million. Gordy let it be known that Motown would also begin compiling albums from some of the 295 unreleased Jackson 5 recordings that were still held in Motown's vaults. Joe and Richard Arons were convinced that Gordy would go as far as having them killed; the two actually began checking under the hood for bombs before they would start their cars and took roundabout routes whenever they drove in Los Angeles in order to avoid Gordy's supposed assassins.

Now recording for CBS subsidiary Epic Records as "The Jacksons," the brothers replaced Jermaine with fourteen-year-old Randy, and one year after signing with the company they celebrated the announcement that the five of them, along with their three sisters, were about to become the stars of the first television variety show in American history hosted by a black family. The Jacksons would run on CBS television for less than a year and was ranked last in the Nielsen ratings at the time of its cancellation in March 1977, but the show was seen as seminal nonetheless, launching the career of the one Jackson who showed any ability as a comic actor, ten-year-old Janet. She was subsequently hired by Norman Lear to play the role of Millicent "Penny" Gordon Woods on his sitcom Good Times.

The Jacksons was also the title of the brothers' first album for CBS. It went no higher than #36 on the charts, possibly because Gordy had confused the public by releasing his own Jacksons album, the weak Joyful Jukebox Music, at almost the same time. Jermaine's first solo release for Motown, My Name Is Jermaine, did far worse, peaking at 164 on the top two hundred. Billboard called the album a bomb. Disgusted that Joe reveled in Jermaine's failure, Michael began to look for some way to get time away from his family and his father to think about where his career was headed. The opportunity to do just that came along in the summer of 1977 when he was offered the role of the Scarecrow in the all-black cast of The Wiz, a musical film based on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that would be directed by Sidney Lumet. Shooting would take place in New York at the Astoria Studios in Queens.

Production of The Wiz was burdened from the start by the casting of Diana Ross as Dorothy, a role most of the public identified with Judy Garland's performance in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. Ross was thirty-three, twice the age that Garland had been when she played the twelve-year-old Kansas farm girl. Stephanie Mills, the young actress who had been Dorothy in the Broadway production of The Wiz, had just signed a recording contract with Motown and was the preferred choice for the part, but Ross wrested the role away from her, overcoming even the resistance of the film's producer, Berry Gordy.

The Wiz was a commercial disaster but not due to any fault on Michael's part. He'd pushed himself hard during the 1978 production, collapsing with a burst blood vessel after nearly dancing himself to death on set-the critics took notice and Michael was credited with the film's one really strong performance. Joe had vigorously opposed Michael's decision to act in The Wiz, fearful that becoming a movie star would set the Jacksons' lead singer even further apart from his brothers. Michael's decision to go to New York and work on the film anyway was the boldest declaration of independence that he had made up to that point in his life.

Michael was now openly questioning his father's abilities as a manager. Joe's abrasive personality was already making relations difficult with the producers and executives at CBS, whose help the Jacksons needed if the group was to make a comeback. Lots of people in the record business by then didn't like Joe, in part because he refused to hide his disdain for people with light complexions. That bothered Michael almost as much as Joe's tendency to repeatedly go for the short money, the sure thing, instead of planning for the long term. His father's foremost concern continued to be the Jacksons franchise, even as it was becoming increasingly clear to everyone at CBS that Michael's solo career was the future. Jermaine's absence from the group was making that fact obvious. The pretense that the brothers were a package of major talent had gradually dissolved as Jermaine's solo career at Motown floundered. His second album, Feel the Fire, had performed even worse than the first, evidence for many that backing his little brother was the best use of Jermaine's singing voice. Jackie's sweet but thin high tenor had been exposed in the one solo album he was allowed to record for Motown, Jackie Jackson, which failed to chart. Tito continued to be no better than a journeyman guitarist, and everyone knew that Marlon, the funniest and friendliest of the Jackson brothers, was just along for the ride. Joe wanted that ride to continue for all his sons, but especially for himself, and had never offered more than lukewarm support for Michael's solo career, which he foresaw as the demise of the group. Joe did battle with CBS to win the company's approval for a new album that the Jacksons would write and produce, but for him that meant all the boys, equally. CBS executives, though, were beginning to recognize that Michael wasn't simply the best singer and dancer among the Jacksons, but also the best writer. The one notable song on the Jacksons' second album for CBS, Goin' Places, had been "Different Kind of Lady," a jittery R & B/disco hybrid penned by Michael that was hugely popular in the dance clubs in both Los Angeles and New York. Even as CBS's new president, Walter Yetnikoff, confided to other company executives that he was inclined to drop the Jacksons from the label, he was urged by some of them to let Michael put together a solo album of his own compositions.

Michael's increasing confidence in his abilities as an artist was undercut by the shame he felt about his appearance. Around the time of his fifteenth birthday, he had begun to suffer severe acne. He was already self-conscious about his looks, especially his wide nose. Nothing wounded him more during this period than the expression of disbelief he so often saw in the faces of those who were introduced to him at the Hayvenhurst house. Strangers "would come up and ask if I knew where that 'cute little Michael' was," he explained to the Los Angeles Times music writer Robert Hilburn. People actually shook their heads when they realized that "cute little Michael" had been replaced by this awkward teenager with erupting skin. He began refusing to leave the house when he didn't have to, and was unable to look people in the eye when he was forced to go out in public. His mother would say that the difficulties of this period, in particular the blooms of acne that circled his face from forehead to chin, actually changed her son's personality: "He was no longer a carefree, outgoing, devilish boy. He was quieter, more serious, and more of a loner."

Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, it struck Michael hard that he had never in his life made a real friend. His attempt to rectify that confused everyone around him, especially the members of his family. At the 1974 American Music Awards ceremony, Michael and Donny Osmond had served as cohosts with six-year-old Rodney Allen Rippy, a child actor who had appeared in several feature films, including Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, but was best-known for a series of sickly sweet Jack in the Box commercials that had featured his frustrated attempts to get a grip on a Jumbo Jack. The boy had been taken aback when Michael asked for his phone number, and was stunned when the pop star began to call him -every Saturday morning, at exactly ten o'clock. They were buddies, nothing more, as Rippy would take pains to make clear later: "Michael would give me advice about how to handle myself in show business, about smiling at people and shaking their hands. It was just stuff like that we talked about. Very ordinary. It absolutely amazed me that Michael Jackson was interested in what was going on in my little world."

Even among those who did not know that Michael's best friend was a boy who had just started elementary school, questions about his sexuality were proliferating, and he took these more and more personally. He was especially stung by the false rumor that his father was having him injected with female hormones to keep his voice high. In the months before moving to New York to work on The Wiz, he had attempted to normalize his image by dating Tatum O'Neal, then a thirteen-year-old Oscar winner for Paper Moon with a woman's body and a wild thing reputation. They'd "taken up," as Michael would put it, after an encounter at On the Rox, a small satellite club attached to the Roxy on Sunset Strip, where they happened to be seated at adjacent tables one evening in the spring of 1977. Without warning or introduction, Tatum had reached out to hold Michael's hand as she sat with her father, actor Ryan O'Neal, while Michael chatted with a pair of publicists from Epic Records. For him, this was "serious stuff," Michael would explain: "She touched me." Their first date was the next evening, when Tatum invited Michael to a dinner party hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, where the girl suggested they go hot-tubbing together-naked. Michael insisted on swim suits. "I fell in love with her (and she with me) and we were very close for a long time," Michael would write later in his "autobiography" Moonwalker. That wasn't exactly how O'Neal recalled the relationship. Tatum told friends that Michael could barely bring himself to speak to her, let alone make sexual contact. The affair, to use the term loosely, would finish in an infamous fizzle during a party at Rod Stewart's house in Beverly Hills. According to a story that was repeated throughout Hollywood and reported later in the tabloids, O'Neal and a female friend of hers had tried to pull Michael into bed with them. He had not only refused sex, it was said, but dashed from the house blinking back tears, chased by the taunts and jeers of other guests. Whispers about the young man's sexuality grew into a murmur of innuendo and ridicule that would increase in volume over the next decade.

The worst part for Michael might not have been how he left the party, but his realization that he had nowhere else he wanted to be. The closed circle of his family was making him feel more and more claustrophobic and life at the Hayvenhurst house had become all but unbearable. His brothers had married, but their brides were never really admitted to the Jacksons' inner circle. Katherine referred to them collectively as "the wives," as if to make clear they weren't quite the same as those she called "the family." Michael was still phoning Rodney Allen Rippy every Saturday morning but longed for someone to share his thoughts with on the other days of the week. Instead, he was forced to substitute the rats and snakes and birds he kept in cages in the playhouse.

In New York, he had discovered the joy of being in disguise. Concealing his identity (and perhaps more important, covering his acne) with the full makeup that transformed him into the Scarecrow while he was working on The Wiz had allowed Michael an opportunity to hide and hold his head up high at the same time. He reveled in the discovery of how freeing it could be to meet people when you were wearing a mask. Members of the crew would say later that they had to literally drag him off the set each evening. When he went out at night as Michael Jackson, he now at least had a ready explanation for his bad skin-all that makeup he had to wear. And he was going out a lot that autumn in New York.

Michael became a regular at Studio 54 just as the disco club was reaching the crest of its popularity. Watching the floor show there was the closest he had ever come to forgetting he was a Jehovah's Witness. People were shoveling cocaine up their noses at Studio 54, spilling more on their shoes than could be found in some small American cities, then following the coke with chasers of amyl nitrate. Upstairs, the "Rubber Room" was the stage for a disorganized orgy, with people having sex of every conceivable variety under no more cover than a darkened corner, and lots more having sex on the catwalks overhead. Michael came in many nights with Liza Minnelli, who had befriended him at the club and took him regularly to the so-called VIP room in the basement, a dingy little space bordered by chain-link fences where celebrities sat in white plastic lawn chairs laughing about what the people who couldn't get in imagined it must be like down there. On the main floor, Michael was often seen at the same table with Andy Warhol, who like him was much more interested in watching sex than having it, and who didn't expect him to make conversation. Truman Capote, another companion, described Michael and his sister La Toya as "oases of innocence" amid the debauch of Studio 54. The two didn't drink, didn't use drugs, and certainly didn't have sex. Michael would watch people acting out sexually, Capote recalled, but did it the same way that he watched James Brown dance, like he was studying what he saw in order to put it to use at some later time.

Michael's greatest breakthrough in New York had come when he secured a promise from the executives at Epic Records that he would have creative control of his next solo album. He wanted to start work on it as soon as he returned to Los Angeles. But the brothers all insisted he had to wait until they had finished the next group album, Destiny, and outvoted him four-to-one. They proceeded with apprehension, though, deferring to Michael's opinion in ways they never had before. Even Joe was walking softly, fearful of alienating the one group member they all knew was indispensable.

Michael had come back from New York skinnier than anyone had ever seen him, speaking in a peculiar breathy falsetto that made people lean in close to hear him. At the same time, he exuded a new authority and seemed reluctant to share his thoughts with anyone in the family. He was itchy and irritable around the house, snapping at even his mother for the first time any of them could remember. Joe responded to Michael's moodiness by demanding that CBS and Epic give his boys the same sort of control of the Jacksons' new album that had been promised to Michael as a solo act. He knew how much was riding on Destiny. Joe was concerned enough about the Jacksons' future, in fact, to hire a couple of white comanagers, Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann, to ensure not only that CBS kept its promise about letting his sons write their own material but also that the company would push for crossover promotion, giving just as much attention to securing a white audience for the boys as it did to satisfying the Jacksons' black fans.

The result was the best album the brothers Jackson had so far released, either at Epic or at Motown. Throughout the music industry, it was agreed that there wasn't a weak song on Destiny and that Michael Jackson had delivered a tremendous performance on the album. The range of his voice, combined with his ability to adapt to varying styles and tempos, was what most amazed people. Ever since passing through puberty Michael had been dealing with questions about whether he had a voice that would work for him as an adult. Ben Fong-Torres observed how skillfully Michael was coping with his vocal slippage "by switching registers in the middle of phrases and by changing the keys," but there was still a feeling that his best performances as a singer might have been delivered before he turned fourteen. On Destiny, though, Michael had transitioned with seeming effortlessness from the lush ballad "Push Me Away" to the snap and crackle of "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)," handling each masterfully. The latter song, written by Michael with his younger brother Randy, was a huge hit, hailed from the first as one of the handful of truly great disco numbers ever released. There was perhaps more to Michael Jackson, several reviewers observed, than anyone had previously realized.

Michael, though, was more embarrassed by Destiny than proud of it. He was especially upset by a jacket photo in which his brothers, egged on by Joe, had posed behind the studio control board as if they were writers and producers of the album. Mike Atkinson and Bobby Colomby had actually produced the album, but only Michael among the five brothers voted to give the pair credit. Atkinson and Colomby (the latter more responsible for persuading Walter Yetnikoff to give the Jacksons another chance than anyone at CBS) had to obtain affidavits from the engineers and musicians who worked on Destiny in order to win their executive producer credits.

The disappointing release of The Wiz in the midst of the Destiny tour was little more than a footnote in the swirl of discontent that surrounded Michael in early 1979. The depth and intensity of his wish to become a movie star was something Michael would not share with his brothers or with Joe. He agonized in private over the one plum part he was offered after the release of The Wiz, that of the transvestite dancer in the film version of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. Michael turned down the role, concerned he would be seen by the public as "that way." It was an old wound. Jet magazine reported as fact the gossip that he was considering a sex change operation so that he could marry actor Clifton Davis (who had written the Jackson 5 song "Never Can Say Goodbye"). When J. Randy Taraborrelli, the Soul magazine reporter who would become the chief chronicler of Michael's youth, had felt compelled to ask him if he was homosexual, it upset him further. "I am not homo," Michael snapped in reply. "Not at all." As a devout Jehovah's Witness, he was required to see homosexuality as an abomination. "What is it about me that makes people think I'm gay?" Michael demanded. "Is it my voice? Is it because I have this soft voice? All of us in the family have soft voices. Or is it because I don't have a lot of girlfriends?"

Michael worried also that his movie star ambitions would be hindered by his appearance, a subject that made him even more uncomfortable than questions about his sexuality. He was still fighting severe acne outbreaks and increasingly bothered that he had the darkest skin among his siblings, who teased their brother during Taraborrelli's visit to the Hayvenhurst estate a week before Michael's twentieth birthday by calling him "Big Nose" and "Liver Lips." He was most deeply injured, though, by one his father's typically cruel remarks. "I was going through an awkward puberty when your features start to change, and he went, 'Ugh, you have a big nose. You didn't get it from me,'" Michael recalled in a conversation with Rabbi Boteach. "He didn't realize how much that hurt me. It hurt me so bad, I wanted to die."

By the time Michael returned home to Los Angeles from the Destiny tour in the spring of 1979, the tension created by a constant effort to counter deep insecurities with towering ambitions was fueling an obsessive focus on the solo album he had deferred for nearly a year now. His brothers wanted to work on the album with him, but Michael refused, even when Katherine attempted to convince him that he owed them. The balance of power had shifted for good. This new record was nothing to worry about, Joe assured his other sons. Michael's first two solo albums, made when he was still a prepubescent boy soprano, had charted well enough, but the two made after his voice changed were miserable failures, and this new one would most likely be the same.

Michael was receiving a good deal more support from Quincy Jones, the musical director from The Wiz, whom he had chosen to produce his new album. He had asked if he could produce Michael's next solo album, Jones would recall, while they were preparing to begin principal photography on The Wiz. "At rehearsals with the cast, during the part where the scarecrow is pulling proverbs from his stuffing, Michael kept saying 'So-Crates' instead of 'Socrates,'" Jones recalled. "After about the third time, I pulled him aside and told him the correct pronunciation. He looked at me with these big wide eyes and said, 'Really?' and it was at that moment that I said, 'Michael, I'd like to produce your album.' It was that wonderment that I saw in his eyes that locked me in. I knew that we could go into completely unexplored territory, a place that as a jazz musician gave me goose bumps."

The young man's oddities and uncertainties were on full display when they began work on the new album in Los Angeles nearly one year later, but Jones could see that they were more than matched by his effort and ambition. Michael was coming into the studio better prepared than any artist he had ever worked with before, Jones said. "Driven" and "determined" were the two adjectives the album's producer would most often use to describe his young star. On top of that, Michael was more willing to accept criticism than any other performer he had seen, Jones said, even when distraught over the announcement that only three of his own compositions had been selected for the album's final cut. Throughout the production, "I saw his sensitivity and his focus," Jones recalled. "There was such an innocence, but he didn't miss a thing."

Anyone associated with the record who would later claim they knew it was going to be a big hit was "a flat-out liar," Jones would say thirty years later. "We had no idea Off the Wall was going to be as successful as it was, but we were thrilled. Michael had moved from the realm of bubble-gum pop and planted his flag square in the heart of the musical pulse of the '80s."

The three songs from Off the Wall that Michael had written would turn out to be among the albums most successful numbers. Michael's falsetto funkfest "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," in fact, was the biggest hit of an album stocked with them, becoming his first recording to reach #1 on the pop charts in more than seven years. The pulsating "Rock With You" (written by Rod Temperton) also hit #1, while two other cuts from the album, "Off the Wall" (also by Temperton) and "She's Out of My Life" (written by Tom Bahler), reached the top ten, making Michael the first solo artist in pop history to put four singles off the same album into the top ten. Reviewers were almost unanimous in praising the record, agreeing that there wasn't a weak number on it. The buying public agreed: Off the Wall would sell nearly five million copies domestically, and another two million in the foreign market.

Jackson had his publicist send a letter to Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's editor and publisher, suggesting that Michael should be on the magazine's cover in light of Off the Wall's success. Wenner wrote back, "We would very much like to do a major piece on Michael Jackson but feel it is not a cover story." Furious, Michael said it was because editors believed that putting a black person on the cover resulted in fewer sales at the newsstand and vowed to prove them wrong. When Off the Wall won only a single Grammy, for best R & B album, Jackson sobbed around the house for weeks, then repeated his vow to deliver another solo album as soon as he could, to "show them."

Michael turned twenty-one shortly after the release of Off the Wall and celebrated his legal adulthood by announcing that he intended to hire his own attorney to examine his business affairs and explain to him where all the money was going. Joe was incensed and confronted his son but Michael refused to budge, and the two stopped speaking to one another. Katherine tried to intervene, urging her son to believe that his father was working in his best interest, but Michael held firm.

His search for new representation was a short one. Michael had been deeply impressed by the very first attorney he interviewed, a thirty-one-year-old corporate tax specialist named John Branca, who was at that time best known for being the nephew of Ralph Branca, the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who had given up the playoff-deciding "Shot Heard 'round the World" to the New York Giants' Bobby Thomson in 1951. Branca offered to organize Michael's finances and promised to renegotiate his contract with CBS. The attorney proceeded to do just that and was soon reporting back to Michael that from this day forward he would receive the highest royalty rate in the business as a solo artist, 37 percent, the same as Bob Dylan. Not only that, Branca added, but CBS had agreed to let Michael leave the Jacksons any time he wanted, without affecting his brothers' relationship with the company.

Branca would say later that he had motivated himself during his negotiations with CBS by recalling something Michael told him right at the start of their first meeting: "I intend to be the biggest star in show business, and the richest."

"Thriller Time" was how Michael Jackson would refer to the two-year period of his life that followed the release of his seminal album, as if recalling an alternate dimension of temporal reality. Thriller Time changed everything, certainly, and just as certainly, changed nothing at all. In those twenty-four months, and in the twenty-four years that followed them, Michael Jackson would demonstrate as completely as any person ever has that the central truism of the celebrity experience is that getting what you want will never make up for not having what you need.

All Michael knew for sure in early 1980 was that the success of Off the Wall had not satisfied him. His next record, he assured everyone around him, would sell twice that many copies. He would have to wait to prove that, though, because his family had already made sure that the next Michael Jackson record would belong to them.

Released in July 1980, the Jacksons' Triumph was, all things considered, a major success for the group. Critics called it the strongest album the brothers had ever put out, and the public was only slightly less enthusiastic. Three songs (all either written or cowritten by Michael) from Triumph charted in the top twenty and the album itself was certified platinum within six months of its release. Michael sang lead on nearly every number, but even during those recording sessions had scarcely concealed his frustration at being forced to delay work on a new solo album. His brothers, on the other hand, could barely contain their excitement about the impending Triumph tour, scheduled to visit thirty-nine cities beginning in July 1981, in spite of Michael's reluctance to accompany them.

He certainly didn't need the money; Off the Wall had made him wealthier than the rest of his family put together. For the first time in his life, he was acquiring assets, among them the house his parents lived in. Joe surrendered his interest in the Hayvenhurst estate to Michael in February 1981. In his determination to prove to the world (and to Berry Gordy in particular) that he could stand on his own as a businessman, Joe had dug himself a hole so deep that in the end there was nothing to do but cry out for help. It had started in 1974 when he formed his own record company, Ivory Tower International Records, planning to build the business around a female quartet from Ohio that called itself M.D.L.T. Willis. The group and the label went nowhere. Joe would sign, manage, and produce several other singing groups during the next seven years, and they all fizzled as well. By the beginning of 1981, he was hugely overleveraged and so desperate for cash that he offered Michael half of the Hayvenhurst estate for $500,000. It wasn't long after that before Joe sold Michael half of the half of the property that the parents had tried to keep for themselves, leaving Katherine with just a 25 percent interest in the estate and Joe with the understanding that he was now his son's tenant.

Joe still had his share of the management fees from Triumph coming in and would receive about 5 percent of the net profits from the Triumph tour-if Michael agreed to participate. As usual, Joe counted on Katherine to make that happen. Despite having filed her second divorce action against Joe just a few months earlier, Katherine did what her husband and her other sons begged her to do and persuaded Michael that he owed the family a piece of his enormous success. Half of whatever Joe got out of the deal, after all, was hers.

It was understood from the beginning that Michael would be the stand-alone star of the show on the Triumph tour. The grandest productions and the biggest applause at each stop came whenever he performed one of his solos from Off the Wall. The last number of every show would be "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," which ended with Michael disappearing into a giant smoke screen created by Doug Henning, the magician who was accompanying the Jacksons on the tour. Neither the audience nor his brothers would see him after that. Michael not only refused to socialize with anyone connected to the tour but issued strict instructions that no one was to use swear words, make sexual references, or tell dirty jokes while in his presence. Still upset that he had ended the Destiny tour with a bad case of laryngitis, Michael declined to speak except when he had to, sipped a brew of lemon and honey constantly, and insisted that air conditioners be turned off whenever he was in a room-even if it was ninety-five degrees outside. All he wanted, Michael made clear, was for this tour to be over. "I will never do this again," he told Soul magazine's Taraborrelli. "Ever."

Robert Hilburn interviewed Michael in the back of a tour bus after the show in St. Louis and found the star to be quite different in person from "the charismatic, strutting figure" he had seen onstage. The Michael Jackson he met face-to-face was "anxious," the Los Angeles Times writer recalled, "frequently bowing his head as he whispered answers." At one point Hilburn asked Michael why he didn't live on his own like his brothers. Unbeknownst to the writer, Michael had bought a condominium near the Hayvenhurst compound back in February 1981, but rarely slept there. "I think I'd die on my own," Michael told Hilburn. "Even at home I'm lonely. I sit in my room and sometimes cry. It is so hard to make friends and there are some things you can't talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home."

Michael was making such admissions more often in interviews, as if he wanted people to understand how strange he was, how strange his life had been, and how strange the world they lived in was to him. "See, my whole life has been onstage," he explained to Gerri Hirshey when she interviewed him for Rolling Stone, "and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations, and people running after you. In a crowd, I'm afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage."

CBS president Walter Yetnikoff had been quick to recognize Michael's vulnerability and quicker still to exploit it. "He had no social skills," Yetnikoff would recall later. "Sometimes I felt like he was still six." On his first visit to the CBS corporate headquarters, Yetnikoff remembered, Michael interrupted a meeting to say, "Walter, I have to tinkle. Can you take me to the potty?" At another meeting, Michael confided how hurt his feelings had been by Joe. "He said, 'You know, I've accomplished a lot,'" Yetnikoff recalled. "'And my father has never told me that he's proud of me.' And I became Daddy, and I said, 'Come here, Michael, let me give you a hug and tell you how proud everyone in the pop music field is of you.'" Soon after, Yetnikoff began to point out that if he really wanted to show Joe who he was, breaking away from the Jacksons to continue his solo career was the way to do it. It was exactly what the young star wanted to hear.

Michael returned to Los Angeles in spring 1982 prepared to impose his will. The Hayvenhurst house had been demolished at his instruction during the Triumph tour and rebuilt into a Tudor mansion with beveled glass windows and clinker brick chimneys. On the grounds, he assembled his first full-scale menagerie, buying black and white swans for the ponds out back, a pair of peacocks named Winter and Spring, two llamas named for Louis Armstrong and Lola Falana, a couple of deer he called Prince and Princess, a giraffe he dubbed Jabbar, and a ram he named Mr. Tibbs. All the animals slept in a stable at night but were free to roam during the day. Neighbors would complain about the stench when summer came.

The centerpiece of this early attempt to create an environment tailored to his fragile psyche was a small-scale version of Disneyland's Main Street U.S.A. (with its own candy store) next to the garage. Even as he fussed over every detail of the Hayvenhurst house reinvention, though, Michael's bedroom on the upstairs floor of the house continued to look as if he had just moved in or was about to move out. Books and records remained stacked in knee-high piles and clutter was everywhere. He never bothered to put a bed in his room, preferring to sleep on a thick green rug by the fireplace. His one effort to personalize the space was a multicultural collection of five life-size, female mannequins-one white, one black, one Asian, one Latina, and one Middle Eastern-all of them elaborately dressed in the latest fashions. He gave the mannequins names and introduced them as his friends.

His mother complained that Michael never seemed to eat and La Toya, whose room was just down the hall, swore that he never turned the lights off at night. Michael was up reading long after she went to sleep and she was often awakened at two, three, or four in the morning by the sound of him laughing hysterically at a Three Stooges video he had seen ten times before. He was working in there all the time, too, though, filling the notebook he carried with lyrics, humming melodies into a tape recorder, or studying the songs other writers had submitted to him, like a mad scientist locked up in his laboratory.

The recording of the new album began at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles during April 1982. He and Quincy Jones gradually winnowed a list of thirty songs down to the nine that would appear on the album. Michael had decided that "Thriller," a spooky, feral number enlivened by the catchy hooks that were songwriter Rod Temperton's specialty, would be the title track. "This is going to be a big album," Jackson declared more than once during the engineering sessions, and Jones suspected that might be true. "All the brilliance that had been building inside Michael Jackson for twenty-four years just erupted," Jones told author Alex Haley in an interview for Playboy magazine. "I was electrified, and so was everyone else involved in the project." Musicians and engineers were so caught up in the drama of it all that during one recording session they kept cranking the volume up higher and higher until suddenly the speakers overloaded and burst into flames. "Only time I saw anything like that in forty years in the business," Jones said.

Yet immediately before Thriller's release on November 30, 1982, Jones was among those who warned Michael not to expect too much. The country was in the midst of the worst recession in more than twenty years and record purchases, like every other form of discretionary spending, had dropped off dramatically. Selling two million units would be a big success in this market, Michael's comanager Ron Weisner advised him one day when engineers were putting the final touches on the album. Michael sputtered in fury for a few moments, then stalked out of the studio. The next morning, he phoned Walter Yetnikoff and said that if the people he trusted had so little faith in him, he didn't want to even release the album. Yetnikoff played him perfectly: "Who cares what they say?" the CBS Records president told Michael. "You're the superstar."

Thriller's release two weeks later was a tsunami that caught the entire music industry by surprise. The first song from the album released as a single was the weakest cut on it, Michael's sugary duet with Paul McCartney on "The Girl Is Mine," which rose to #2 on the Billboard Top 100. The second single, "Billie Jean," was a song into which Michael channeled his disturbances with astounding skill and unnerving passion. Randy Taraborrelli popularized the notion that "Billie Jean" was inspired by an obsessed female fan who had tried to convince him to join her in a double suicide. Plastic surgeon Steven Hoefflin claimed that "Billie Jean" had been inspired by a beautiful young woman Michael spotted in a crowd gathered at the gates of the Hayvenhurst compound. Hoefflin said that Michael told him he'd been in a car with two of his brothers and wrote the entire song during that drive, later sketching the girl's nude form and giving it to Hoefflin as a gift.

Michael himself would insist that he wasn't thinking of any one girl in particular when he wrote "Billie Jean" (in three minutes, according to Hoefflin), but had created a composite of the especially persistent groupies whom he and his brothers had encountered while touring over the years. This claim probably had some truth to it, but in the end "Billie Jean" was more about Michael himself, as if he'd observed his own impending nervous breakdown and responded by creating the most danceable therapy imaginable. Katherine was as much a catalyst of the lyric as any groupie or fan, the mama who warned him to "be careful who you love." The girls Joe and his brothers had used and discarded on the road floated like ghosts through the lyric and so did the young women who had tempted Michael along the way.

"I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it," Michael said of "Billie Jean." He was so consumed by the song, Michael recalled, that he failed to notice his Mercedes catch fire on the freeway one day while he was driving to the recording studio, and was alerted only when a young motorcyclist waved him over. Quincy Jones didn't get "Billie Jean," though, and wanted to keep it off the album. When a stunned Michael insisted it remain, Jones suggested changing the title to "Not My Lover," because he worried that listeners would think Michael was referring to the tennis player Billie Jean King. Jones then demanded that Michael cut the song's lengthy percussive introduction. That was the part that made him want to dance, Michael said; it stayed. The dispute between the two turned nasty for a couple of days, but might ultimately have served "Billie Jean." Jones instructed engineer Bruce Swedien that if Michael insisted upon opening the song with thirty seconds of drumbeats, then they had to be the most memorable drumbeats anyone had ever heard-a "sonic personality," as Jones described it. Swedien, who usually mixed a number just once, mixed "Billie Jean" ninety-one times in order to create the percussive platform from which the song arose, adding a bass drum cover that came in after the first four bars of kick, snare, and hi-hat, then taps on a flat piece of wood that were filtered in between the beats. Swedien's removal of reverberation from the opening drum sequence gave "Billie Jean" a stark, emotionally naked quality that grew gradually into a kind of euphoric hysteria as notes were doubled by a distorted synth bass that turned sharply staccato, underlaid by a deep echoing throb.

Michael's voice came in softly, accompanied by finger snaps as it increased steadily in volume and intensity. By the time the violins and guitar solos entered, a seemingly random series of shouts, screams, and spectral laughs (overdubs made by Michael singing through a cardboard tube) began to sound in the spaces between notes, like a sort of viral insanity trying to gain entry to the listener's mind. Michael accompanied the eerie, disembodied chatter with a series of what sounded like musical hiccups, as if he were trying to cough up some evil spirit, while the propulsive bass line just kept moving ahead toward some inexorable reckoning that everyone who heard the song knew would not have a happy ending. Michael would never again deliver a song that was either so relentless or so revealing.

People moaned and shrieked when "Billie Jean" first began to be played in the clubs of Los Angeles, as if the song had infected them with a compulsive fusion of madness and glee, pouring onto dance floors and demanding that it be played again. The level of sexual display it inspired was unprecedented. Reviewers called the song "scary," "bizarre," and "eccentric," then added that they absolutely loved it. "Billie Jean" went to #1 on the pop charts almost overnight and stayed there for weeks, followed shortly by "Beat It," the first true rock song Michael had ever recorded, a cut included on the album because he wanted to prove that no genre was beyond his grasp. Quincy Jones had suggested trying the song and recruited Eddie Van Halen to contribute a guitar solo that sounded like the flapping wings of a metal bird in a wire cage. By March 1983, Michael was among the handful of performers who had ever placed two songs in the top five at the same time. The critical mass that created would sustain Thriller commercially for sixteen months, as seven of the album's nine songs were released and became top ten singles, from the edgy "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" to the symphonic "Human Nature" to the sassy "P.Y.T.," which was the biggest hit among black audiences. By April 1983, Thriller was selling as many as 500,000 copies per week and putting up numbers the music business had never seen before, recession or no recession. Michael became, as Rolling Stone put it, "quite simply, the biggest star in the pop music universe."

That star was about to go supernova. On March 25, 1983, two weeks after "Beat It" reached #1 on the pop charts, an invitation-only audience at the Pasadena Auditorium was present to watch the taping of the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever NBC television special. Like Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye, Michael had nearly refused to participate in the program, which was meant to honor Berry Gordy. The gradual realization of how poorly he'd paid them had alienated many of Gordy's Motown stars, forcing the proud mogul to make a series of pleading phone calls. Michael withheld consent until he was promised a solo spot after he performed with his brothers, and even then refused to sing one of his Motown hits, insisting instead that his solo would be "Billie Jean." Much as he wanted to say no to that, Gordy knew he couldn't. He would be glad he didn't.

Jermaine was back with his brothers when the Jackson 5 went on before an audience that had already sat through performances by Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. The Jacksons' "reunion" began with Michael singing lead on "I Want You Back" and built momentum right up through his moving duet with Jermaine on "I'll Be There." The brothers exchanged hugs before the adoring crowd, then trotted offstage-all except Michael, who seemed to hover in darkness for a moment, until the spotlight settled on him. He looked different than people remembered him. He had always been slender, but now he was lithe. The macrobiotic diet he'd adopted and whatever dermatology treatments he was receiving had vanquished his acne. His skin was lighter, but still dark, his nose a little narrower, but not altered in a jarring feminine way. His high, stiff Afro had settled into soft curls.

The costume he wore would become a trademark ensemble, but that night was the first time anyone had seen the sequined black jacket (borrowed from his mother's closet) with spangled silver cuffs that matched his shirt and the black tuxedo pants hemmed above the ankle to show off his glittery white socks and shiny black Bass Weejuns. And of course there was the rhinestone-studded glove worn on his left hand. He seemed diffident at first, as if unsure what to say or do, speaking softly as he paced the stage, restlessly shy, and thanked the audience for letting him share those "magic moments" with his brothers. No one watching could have imagined that every bit of what he did or said was rehearsed. "Those were the good songs," Michael said, as he approached a curtain at the edge of the stage and grabbed a black fedora from someone's hand. "I like those songs a lot," he continued, moving back toward the center of the stage. "But especially I like…the new songs."

Louis Johnson's splatting bass guitar riff from "Billie Jean" kicked in at that moment, as Michael stuck the fedora on his head and began a rhythmic pumping of his pelvis so pronounced that it looked almost cartoonlike. An audience that consisted mostly of music executives, music writers, and music makers sat rapt, mouths open, palms on cheeks as they watched Michael Jackson translate the language of his song into dance. There were people present who would swear that he levitated when he brought his performance to a climax with his unveiling of the "moonwalk," a reverse toe-to-heel glide that moved him-magically it seemed-backward across the stage, before he finished by spinning into a pose balanced on the very tips of his toes. What he got in return was more than a standing ovation. People actually climbed onto their chairs to applaud him. Weeping and laughing, members of the audience congratulated one another for having been there to see it.

The rapture of the crowd was palpable even through a television screen when Motown 25 aired on May 16, 1983. The day after Michael Jackson's performance was seen by an audience of fifty million Americans-more than had ever viewed a musical special before-he found himself standing atop the Mount Everest of adulation, alone at a summit of fame and fortune that no solo performer other than Elvis Presley had reached before him. And he wouldn't have to come down for at least another year.

Billboard listed Thriller as the #1 record in the country for an unprece-dented thirty-seven weeks and the album remained on the charts for two solid years. Everyone who was anyone wanted to meet Michael Jackson. The matinee idols of his youth reached out to him from every direction. Fred Astaire wanted Michael to come over to the house and teach him the moonwalk. Elizabeth Taylor phoned to ask for tickets to his next concert appearance. Marlon Brando invited him to drop by for lunch.

The crazy velocity of it all kicked into a still higher gear in December 1983 when the "Thriller" video premiered. The project had been initiated when Michael saw the film An American Werewolf in London, then phoned the movie's director John Landis to say, "I want to turn into a monster. Can I do that?" Landis brought makeup artist Rick Baker along to his first meeting with Michael and the two showed the star a big book of Holly-wood creatures. Michael was frightened by the images, Landis would recall-"he hadn't seen many horror films"-but nevertheless asked the director to write something that featured a combination werewolf–cat person character. CBS balked at the extravagant script for the video that Landis submitted. Nearly a year after its release, the Thriller album was beginning to slip down the charts and shooting from this script would cost a fortune. Landis persuaded Showtime and MTV to ante up the money for the video's budget and began putting together his cast and crew.

MTV's participation in the production was yet another triumph for -Michael. Only a few months earlier, he had broken the young cable network's de facto apartheid when MTV began playing his "Billie Jean" video, one of the first starring a black performer it had ever aired in heavy rotation. Now MTV was cofinancing his new production. Along with Rick Baker, the creative team assembled by Landis included choreographer Michael Peters, composer Elmer Bernstein, and horror film veteran Vincent Price. Landis wanted Playboy centerfold Ola Ray to play Michael's sexy, strutting date in the video, but knew he would have to run the idea by his star, who seemed confused when the director asked if it was okay to cast a centerfold in the part. "I don't think he even knew what I was talking about," recalled the director, who was amazed once again by Michael's na?veté, but relieved to obtain his consent. The most difficult conversation Landis had with Michael came when the director explained a scene in which Michael asked Ray to go steady, then presented a ring, warning her, "I'm not like other guys." Michael didn't understand his dialogue was supposed to be a laugh line.

The premiere of the fourteen-minute "Thriller" video at the end of November 1983 was a Hollywood event that rivaled the release of the biggest budget theatrical film, with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, and Cher all in attendance. Made on a budget of about $500,000, "Thriller" became the highest selling music video ever, eventually shipping nine million copies, and continued to hold that position for the next quarter century. Music videos were never the same after its release and neither was MTV, which began to play more and more black performers. Sales of the Thriller album climbed again after the video's release and Michael Jackson's stardom seemed to have crossed some sort of cultural threshold. There had never been a success on the order of the one he was experiencing.

Yet in the weeks before the video's release, Michael was demanding that it be destroyed. The elders at the Encino Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses had gotten wind of the "Thriller" video's concept and summoned Michael to a meeting at which they expressed concern about "the state of Brother Jackson's soul." He at first resisted their attempts to force him to change the video, but when the elders threatened him with a "defellowship" that would have resulted in expulsion from the church, Michael wilted. His membership among the Witnesses was, he believed, the most stabilizing force in his life, both the strongest link he had to an experience of ordinary life that he craved and the fundament of his relationship with his mother. Even at the height of Thriller's success, what he looked forward to most each week were the "pioneering" expeditions he made with the Witnesses. Michael loved everything about it, including the disguises he wore when visiting the shopping malls and suburban neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley. His favorite getup combined a fake mustache and beard, a pair of glasses with clear lenses and thick black rims, and a wide-brimmed hat that he pulled low on his forehead, all worn with a pullover sweater and a neatly knotted necktie. The adults on whose front doors he knocked almost never recognized him when he offered a copy of Watchtower, Michael said, and neither did the grown-ups he approached at the malls. Kids, though, often spotted him right away. "Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin," he recalled, "I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn't reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides." Michael also continued to forswear alcohol, tobacco, and profanity, as a devout Witness was expected to do, and accompanied Katherine to the Kingdom Hall four times each week when he was in Los Angeles. "Church was a treat in its own right," he would explain. "It was a chance for me to be 'normal.' The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else."

That became a problem, though, after he admitted the "occultism" of the "Thriller" video. He was already on shaky ground with some of the church elders, who were not only critical of the "worshipful attitude" shown by his legions of fans, but concerned as well about the increasingly provocative queries he was making during the question and answer sessions at the end of services. Michael had been particularly obstinate on the subject of the Genesis story, saying repeatedly that he didn't understand why Adam and Eve should have been tested with forbidden fruit. If God was God, Michael reasoned, then He must have known the choice that Adam and Eve would make. And if God knew their choice, then why would He be angry at them for choosing it? It didn't make sense. Furthermore, he wondered if Cain and Abel were the products of incest. "And they were two boys," he noted, "so how did they have children, anyway?" He was unsettled as well by what he had begun to recognize as a sort of, well, contradiction in his mother's adherence to their religion. Like her, Michael continued to reject Christmas and Easter as pagan holidays, even though he always found himself aching to participate in the festivities when they rolled around. He had also accepted for his entire life that he should enjoy no birthday celebrations. So it troubled him that each May 4, Katherine would accept birthday gifts, as long as they were presented in brown paper bags rather than wrapping paper. But she was so good otherwise, "a saint, really," as he would often say, that this seemed a minor transgression. And he did not want to lose the connection the two of them had formed around their faith, or his place among the one group of people he knew who treated him like a regular human being.

The morning after his meeting with the church elders in Encino, -Michael phoned John Branca and demanded that the tapes of the "Thriller" video, now held at a local processing plant, be shredded and discarded. The befuddled attorney pointed out that Jackson had already spent half a million dollars of other people's money on the video but Michael refused to be dissuaded. By the time Michael phoned his office the next day, Branca had the tapes sitting on his desk and an idea that he hoped might preserve them. He'd been reading a book about Bela Lugosi, the most famous of the movie Draculas, Branca said, and was surprised to discover that Lugosi was a devout Roman Catholic who believed that playing a vampire in the movies had no effect on his personal faith. With that set up, Branca suggested a disclaimer at the beginning of the video explaining that nothing in it reflected Michael's religious beliefs. Grateful to be offered a way out of this corner he was in, Michael quickly agreed. John Landis, though, refused-at least until Branca convinced him that without the disclaimer the video would never be released. It was Landis himself who eventually wrote the sentence that was inserted at the video's beginning: "Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way expresses a belief in the occult.-Michael Jackson."

The disclaimer only added to the swirl of rumor, innuendo, and mystique that surrounded Michael at the beginning of 1984. "If 1983 wasn't the year of Michael Jackson," Dick Clark had observed during his annual New Year's Eve television special, "then it wasn't anyone's." He was -being given a level of public permission to live in his own world that had never before been extended to anyone, celebrity or not. The dissonances of his personality actually contributed to the fascination with him. People marveled at the sexual energy that this twenty-five-year-old virgin generated onstage, especially when he danced. "Aided by the burn and flash of silvery bodysuits, he seems to change molecular structure at will," a short article in Rolling Stone observed, "all robot angles one second, and rippling curves the next. So sure is the body that his eyes are often closed, his face turned upward toward some unseen muse. The bony chest heaves. He pants, bumps, and squeals." Michael would later describe it this way: "I am like caught up in a trance with it all. I am like feeling it, but I don't hear it. I'm playing everything off feeling…It just empties you out. You are above it all. That's why I love it, because you are going to a place of nothing nobody can do. It's gone, the point of no return. It's so wonderful. You have taken off." His need for the experience had become an addiction he had to feed even when he wasn't touring. Each Sunday he would not only fast in accordance with the requirements of his religion, Michael explained to Rolling Stone, but also would lock himself up alone in his room to dance to the point of physical collapse, until he was laid out on his back, bathed in sweat, laughing and sobbing uncontrollably, utterly spent, and finally free. Free of what, the magazine's reporter had asked. Free of myself, Michael answered: "I love to forget who I am."

That was becoming more and more difficult. On February 7, 1984, Michael was the guest of honor at the Guinness Book of World Records induction ceremony staged at New York City's Museum of Natural History, where Thriller, with twenty-seven million copies sold already, would be certified as the biggest selling album of all time. Wearing one of the quasi-military jackets, replete with sequins and epaulets, that had become the staple of his wardrobe, Michael arrived with actress Brooke Shields on his arm. It was their first date-and her idea. The centerpiece of the party was an eight-foot world globe studded with lights that spelled out, "Michael Jackson-The Greatest Artist in the World." Walter Yetnikoff read a telegram sent by President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. The First Couple had saluted Michael by writing: "Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us."

Three weeks later, on February 28, the Grammy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles was the Michael Jackson show from start to finish. Brooke Shields was again Michael's date, but this time had to share him with Emmanuel Lewis, the twelve-year-old, three-foot, four-inch-tall star of the hit TV show Webster, who spent most of the evening perched on Michael's lap, while Shields sat next to them wearing a dazed expression. The crowd was giddy to the point of delirium with the weird charm of it all, as Michael was summoned to the stage again and again, accepting a record-tying eight of the gilded gramophone statuettes in all. Each time Michael's name was mentioned, or even when his image appeared on the studio monitors beside the stage, the fans in the balcony erupted into a cascade of applause that was more frenzied and sustained than anything those in the orchestra seats had ever witnessed at an awards ceremony. The biggest stars on the planet were like extras in his home movie. For the first time in his life, Michael seemed beyond caring what anyone thought about him. Backstage, the press eagerly asked him what was his favorite song and Michael promptly answered, "'My Favorite Things' by Julie Andrews." The reporters began to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but then in the next instant realized he was serious, and stood with frozen grins as he literally skipped off down the hallway, singing the song at the top of his lungs. The after-party was held that year at the downtown restaurant Rex il Ristorante, where Michael and Brooke looked down from their balcony table on a crowd of commoners who included Bob Dylan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Murphy.

Michael was the main attraction even at that April's Academy Awards ceremony. When he showed up with Liza Minnelli at the most exclusive annual affair in Hollywood-legendary agent Swifty Lazar's party at Spago-"The stars were reduced to mush," as a USA Today columnist who was there put it, "as if the evening hadn't been about the movies, but about Jackson instead." The world-famous celebrities in attendance literally stepped on one another's feet trying to get close to him.

Even after the Grammys and the Oscars, even when he had been worshiped by fans who seemed to regard him as a sort of walking, breathing deity, he still had to go home alone at the end of the evening and wonder why he was so unhappy. "I was so lonely I would cry in my room upstairs," he would remember of that time. "I would think, 'That's it, I'm getting out of here.' And I would walk down the street. I remember really saying to people, 'Will you be my friend?' They were like, 'Michael Jackson!' I would go, 'Oh, God! Are they going to be my friend because of Michael Jackson? Or because of me.'"

"Michael Jackson" was now somebody else, the character he played in public. "I hate to admit it, but I feel strange around everyday people," he told Gerri Hirshey. Alone, in private, he was nameless, a little boy lost. The only relief from the overwhelming sense of isolation he felt at that time, Michael would remember, came when he made his way down to Encino Park and sat in a swing among the kids on the playground. They didn't know who he was and, more important, they didn't care.

Those walks to the park were ended by the crazed fans who literally camped in the bushes outside the gates of the Hayvenhurst estate. The expressions on some of their faces terrified him. "Oh, no, I can't go out there," he told one journalist who asked if they could conduct their interview at a nearby restaurant. "They'll get me for sure. They're around the corner, and they want to get their hands on me." More and more often he was surrounded by bodyguards when he ventured forth from the Hayvenhurst house, burly men who were instructed to let no one who was not a child get near him.

He tried to explain himself, as best he could, to the occasional interviewer who seemed sincerely interested. "I am a very sensitive person," he told Robert Hilburn at the Los Angeles Times. "A person with very vulnerable feelings. My best friends in the whole world are children and animals. They're the ones who tell the truth and love you openly and without reservation." And he was more and more wary of adults. He explained his increased reclusion to Rolling Stone's Hirshey by describing himself as "just like a hemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way." When Hirshey asked about being on tour, Michael let her know precisely how unlike other pop stars he was: "Girls in the lobby, coming up the stairways. You hear the guards getting them out of elevators. But you stay in your room and write a song. And when you get tired of that, you talk to yourself. Then let it all out onstage. That's what it's like." He disliked parties and hated clubs. "I did that when I was a baby," he would explain. "Now I want to be a part of the world and life I didn't have. Take me to Disneyland, take me to where the magic is." He made trip after trip to Walt Disney's original park in Anaheim, where the security staff would usher him through the secret passageways that connected rides, so he could avoid the people in lines. Pirates of the Caribbean was his favorite attraction at Disneyland. He would cruise through those dark grottoes again and again, in disguise, praying that no one would shout, "There's Michael Jackson!" and wishing at the same time he could join the laughing children in the boat next to him. He was yearning desperately, Michael told one interviewer, for something he could identify only as "playtime and a feeling of freedom."

Emmanuel Lewis continued to be his closest companion. When he wasn't giving him piggyback rides, Michael enjoyed carrying the twelve-year-old dwarf in his arms like a toddler. Visitors to the Hayvenhurst estate stood stunned, forcing polite smiles as they watched Jackson and the boy playing cowboys and Indians on the front lawn like a pair of five-year-olds. Those who knew him couldn't help but be touched by the fact that there was at least one thing in his life that seemed to make him happy.

Michael's determination to retreat into a second childhood was never more evident than when he visited the White House in May 1984 as the guest of President and First Lady Reagan. Promised that he would be meeting just Ron and Nancy and a few children of staff members, Michael was dismayed when he stepped into the Diplomatic Reception Room and found it filled with excited adults. He immediately fled down a hallway to a bathroom just off the White House library, locked the door, and refused to come out until a White House aide ordered his assistant to round up some kids and make most of the grown-ups leave. "It's all so peculiar, really," Nancy Reagan would remark. "A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand, and sunglasses all the time."

He still didn't know a single adult he could call a friend and it was becoming more difficult for him to connect to his family. The joint management contract with their father and Weisner and DeMann that Michael shared with his brothers had expired back in March 1983 and he had been formally without representation ever since. The brothers were waiting to see what he would do next, and Joseph was hanging in there, hoping to hold on to some percentage of the family superstar's future. Joe tried to distance himself from Weisner and DeMann, but in the process only deepened the contempt Michael felt for his father. "There was a time when I felt I needed white help in dealing with the corporate structure at CBS," Joe explained to an interviewer. "And I thought Weisner and DeMann would be able to help. But they never gave me the respect you expect from a business partner." Weisner and DeMann responded with a statement that they had "no problem with Michael or the Jacksons"-other than Joe. "True, we don't have a good relationship with him," DeMann conceded, "but I don't think he enjoys a good relationship with anyone whose skin is not black." Michael weighed in with the most public expression of scorn for his father he had ever permitted himself, telling Rolling Stone, "To hear him talk like that turns my stomach…Racism is not my motto."

Any doubt about Joe's future was erased in June when he received a letter written by John Branca that informed him that he, Joe, no longer represented Michael Jackson and should refrain from suggesting that he did in any further business contacts. The brothers, nearly as upset as Michael that Joe had responded to Katherine's most recent divorce filing by deliberately concealing assets, followed suit with letters from their own attorneys telling their father that he was no longer their manager. It was the first time anyone in the family saw Joe cry.

Michael had already spoken to Frank Dileo, the promotions director at Epic Records, about leaving the label to work as his manager. The squat-bodied, staccato-speaking Dileo had been credited by many for orchestrating the release of singles from Thriller in a sequence that resulted in songs appearing among the Billboard top ten at the same time, creating much of the synergy that lifted the album to its stratospheric success. Frank was a Technicolor character whose hardscrabble hustler persona provided an odd sort of balance to Michael's image of ethereal weirdness. Dileo cast himself as a roly-poly phoenix raised from the ashes of multiple disasters, including the death of his uninsured father when he was a teenager, a misdemeanor conviction for working as a bookie for college basketball games, and a house fire that cost his family everything they owned. Sporting a skinny ponytail and a fat cigar, the big-bellied, loud-voiced Dileo was affable but not easily intimidated, especially by the likes of Joe Jackson.

Joe still had some steel in his spine, though, and was as canny and calculating as ever. He knew from past experience that playing the boys against one another was a winning strategy, five against Michael. What a great idea it would be, he suggested to Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy, to capitalize on the tremendous success of Thriller by including Michael in a "reunion tour" that would celebrate Jermaine's return to the group. Michael still hadn't made plans for a Thriller tour, Joe pointed out, and could fold his solo performances into the Jacksons' stage show, turn it into something really huge financially for them all.

Jermaine was in the moment the idea was put to him, but Michael resisted more tenaciously than before. He was tired of touring, he said, tired of all the attention, tired of travel and hotel rooms-tired of his family, period. What he didn't say was that there was nothing he could gain by continuing to associate professionally with his brothers. Much as they needed him, he didn't need them at all. The brothers first tried using guilt to sway him. Marlon was going through a nasty divorce, was in real financial difficulty, and couldn't even make his mortgage payments. Maybe he should sell that house and buy a smaller one, Michael suggested. The brothers then called a meeting at which they showed up with a life-size poster of Michael and told him they were going to put it onstage in his place. Michael still wouldn't relent. It was time to play their ace in the hole.

Katherine was still the only woman in Michael's life. The dates with Brooke Shields were just a show. Brooke had tried to kiss him a couple of times, Michael confided to one of his brothers, but he was grossed out when she put her tongue in his mouth. With Katherine, though, it was true love. And true love was the only thing that could change Michael's mind. During a private meeting Katherine requested with Michael, she implored him to join his brothers on the reunion tour. They needed the money, badly in a couple of cases, she told her son. This was family. Finally, when all else failed, she pulled out the big gun: "For me, Michael, please?"

It was a choice between the only two things Michael had, his mother's love and his career. He chose his mother's love, of course, but did not fold completely. He insisted that his involvement in Victory, the album that would launch the tour, be kept to a minimum: two songs that he would write and sing. One of them, a duet with Mick Jagger titled "State of Shock," would be the only hit the album produced. That was fine with the brothers; this album and the tour that followed were about money for them and they intended to fill their pockets with as much of it as possible.

An unanticipated problem developed when several promoters said they were afraid to book the Jacksons into the large outdoor stadiums they planned to pack with paying customers for fear of the crush of fans who would try to get to Michael. "I could not guarantee the safety of those in front of the stage," New York promoter Ron Delsener told reporters. "I don't think anybody can-if they do, they're liars." "Michael Jackson whips people to a fever pitch," chimed in Atlanta's Alex Cooley. "His fans are the root of the word 'fan'-they're fanatic about it. So, yeah, there're problems." Joe and Katherine joined forces to suggest a promoter who was not troubled by such concerns.

Best known for his electroshock hair style and for staging championship boxing matches (including the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier "Thrilla in Manila"), Don King had served four years in an Ohio prison for killing a man in a Cleveland street fight. He was loud, coarse, controversial, given to outrageous and racially loaded statements. King had showed up for his first meeting with the family wearing a white fur coat and a gold necklace with a pendant on which a gold crown was topped by the name DON. Michael despised the man from the moment he met him: "Creepy," he called King, and let everyone know he wanted the promoter kept away from him. After King forked over a $3 million cash payment he called "good faith money"-a pittance to Michael but a fortune to his brothers-King said the forty shows he had planned would gross at least $30 million, which, after expenses and the 15 percent management fee that he and Joe agreed to split, would leave about $3.4 million apiece for the brothers. King's next coup was the negotiation of a deal with the Pepsi-Cola company to sponsor the tour for $5 million dollars, ten times what the Rolling Stones had received from the same company for their 1981 tour. Michael resisted, saying he didn't drink soda, didn't need the money, and didn't want to appear in a commercial. Once again, the family pressured him into accepting.

The dreaded Pepsi commercial was filmed on January 27, 1984, at LA's Shrine Auditorium, which was filled with a crowd of 3,000 to simulate the atmosphere of a live concert. With his brothers, Michael was to sing the lyrics of a jingle titled "You're a Whole New Generation" set to the music of "Billie Jean." Paul McCartney warned Michael that appearing in a TV commercial would leave him "overexposed" and hurt his career in the long run. Bothered by the idea of shilling for a product he didn't believe in and filled with a sense of foreboding about the shoot, Michael agreed to only a single four-second close-up.

At 6:30 that evening, the Jacksons were beginning their sixth rendition of "You're a Whole New Generation," the highlight being Michael's descent down a staircase to the main stage through a pyrotechnic arc of brightly colored explosions. He was posed at the top of a platform above the staircase when a magnesium flash bomb went off about two feet from his head. As he descended through the smoke and began to spin at the bottom of the stairs, he felt a hot spot near the crown of his head, but assumed it was the stage lights. As he finished his third spin and rose onto his toes, Michael realized his hair was literally on fire and fell to the stage floor, pulling his jacket up over his head as he shouted for help.

Amid the screaming chaos, many of those in the audience believed that there had been an attempt on Michael's life. Jermaine, standing less than ten feet away, thought his brother had been shot. Videotape of Michael -being loaded into an ambulance, with one sequin-gloved hand poking out of the blankets, led all three national news broadcasts that evening. (Michael had told the ambulance attendants to leave the glove on so people would know it was him.) At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, doctors found a fist-size second-degree burn on the back of his head near the crown, with a spot of third-degree burn about the size of a quarter in its center. For his recuperation, he was transferred to Brotman Medical Center, which recruited six volunteers to answer phone calls about Michael's status. Tens of thousands of cards and letters arrived, including one from the president of the United States. Pepsi paid Michael $1.5 million to avoid a lawsuit, all of which he donated to Brotman to establish the Michael Jackson Burn Center, earning an incalculable amount of goodwill from the city of Los Angeles in the process.

Two negative effects of the accident on the Shrine Auditorium set, though, would endure far longer than the good publicity. His hair never grew back in fully on the spot where the third-degree burn had been. More important, after first refusing to take painkillers, Michael swallowed a Dilaudid pill that was the first narcotic ever to enter his system. His discovery that the drug not only eased the pain on the surface of his body but numbed an ache deeper inside would change him over time in ways that no one then could have imagined.

His more pressing problem in the summer of 1984, though, was the runaway greed of his father and brothers, and Don King's encouragement of it. The brothers and King had decided that tickets for the Victory tour concerts would be priced at $30 apiece and be made available to the public only by mail order in lots of four. This was at a time when the highest priced concert tickets in the country, for shows by Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, went for $16 a seat. News that no one who couldn't afford to shell out at least $120 would get into the Jacksons' shows not only roused the media to charges of gouging, but shocked and angered the group's core fans: inner-city youth. Michael had opposed setting the ticket prices so high and objected to making them available only by mail order, but was again outvoted five to one.

As the star of the tour, Michael suffered the brunt of the negative publicity. In the end, he had no choice but to threaten his brothers and King that if they refused to change the ticket policy he would refuse to perform. Shortly after they yielded, Michael announced that he would be donating all of his earnings from the tour to charity, dividing approximately $5 million between the United Negro College Fund, a foundation for cancer research, and Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times.

The tour itself was sheer indignity from start to finish. At the first stop in Kansas City, Jermaine told a reporter, "Even though Michael is very talented, a lot of his success has been due to timing and a little bit of luck. It could have been him, or it could just as easily have been me." Michael steadily distanced himself from his brothers as the tour progressed, refusing to stay on the same floor with them at their hotels and insisting his attorneys be present at the business meetings that, within the first few dates, became the only conversations he had with his siblings. The other Jacksons traveled to their concerts in separate vehicles before the tour was half finished and insisted upon collecting their payments immediately after each show. The brothers saw a chance to double their money when a producer offered millions for the right to tape the tour and edit Michael's footage into a home video, but Michael threatened not to perform at one more show if his brothers agreed. By the time the tour arrived at its final stop-six dates at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles-the stress was so great that Michael had all but stopped eating, his weight falling to an all-time low of 110 pounds. Joe and Don King were already negotiating a deal to take the Victory tour to Europe, but when Michael learned of it he informed them there was no chance. No one in his family, though, was prepared for the shout-out Michael gave from the stage on December 9, 1984: "This is our last and final show. It's been a long twenty years and we love you all." Michael looked at the shocked expressions on his brothers' faces and couldn't quite suppress his smile.

Michael was still flush with the phenomenal success of Thriller in 1985, well on his way to earning more than $200 million from sales of the -album alone, when he taped a sheet of paper printed with "100 million" on his bathroom window that would remain in place during the two years he spent recording his follow-up to Thriller, 1987's Bad. The note would become the artifact of a self-inflicted curse that shadowed the remainder of his career. "This has to be bigger than the last one," Michael repeatedly told the musicians who were working on the album with him. "If it sold a hundred million copies, I don't think he'd be totally satisfied," Bad's coproducer Bruce Swedien confided to Rolling Stone. "But he'd hold still for that."

Jackson was no less determined to create a private life that corresponded to the scale of his public success. Having grown up in a world where indulging one's whims was the license of stardom, he increasingly insisted upon living without limitation. During the Bad world tour, he demanded that a bus, a plane, and a helicopter be available to him at all times, regardless of cost. Michael hired Martin Scorsese to direct the "Bad" video after Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola proved unavailable, then spent an unprecedented $2 million on the project. Such grandiosity could be justified when Bad went on to become the first album ever to produce five #1 records and racked up domestic sales of seventeen million units, plus another thirteen million internationally. The Bad tour grossed $125 million and the star of the show walked away with $40 million of that. Bad was an astounding success by the standards of almost anyone else, but a crushing disappointment for Michael Jackson. Rolling Stone's review argued that Bad was "actually a better record than Thriller," but other critics were less enthusiastic.

The "Bad" video was greeted with outright derision. Scorsese shot from a script by gritty New York City novelist Richard Price, based on the story of Edmund Perry, a young black man from Harlem who had gone to prep school on a scholarship, only to be shot dead by a plainclothes police officer who claimed the kid had tried to mug him. Scorsese, Price, and Jackson all envisioned the Perry character as a solitary figure struggling to maintain footholds in two very different worlds where his isolation was bracketed by snobbish preppies and menacing street toughs. The story would come to a climax with the young man's transformation into a rebellious badass intent on dishing out every bit as much pain as he had absorbed. Jackson and his dancers spent hours watching West Side Story and Michael intended to model his performance in the video on the one delivered by George Chakiris, who in the movie had played the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.

The project appeared to be shaping up into a music video that would be every bit as big as "Thriller," but the reaction of most viewers when Michael strutted onscreen in his tough guy getup had been to nearly suffocate on a simultaneous eruption of gasps and giggles. It wasn't simply the black leather that encased the star from head to toe but a blinding array of metal accents affixed to every tuck, fold, and surface. The absurd silver heels and buckles on his boots were the most understated part of the costume, outshined-literally-by the glinting studs, buckles, and numerous zippers that decorated his wristband, belt, and jacket. Radio stations across the country held contests that challenged listeners to guess just how many zippers and buckles there were on the jacket. More startling was Jackson's appearance. Pale-tone pancake makeup was slathered onto the surgically altered features of an androgyne who bore little resemblance to the young black man who had gazed pensively from the cover of Off the Wall only eight years earlier. The general public's response to the star's new album and video was encapsulated by the headline on the cover of People magazine: "Michael Jackson: He's Back. He's Bad. Is This Guy Weird or What?"

The world's reigning pop star had officially become a freak. Recognizing what he was up against, Jackson had taken the stage at the following year's Grammys to deliver a blistering live performance of "Man in the Mirror," then spent most of the rest of the evening sniffling in a front-row seat, barely able to blink back tears as he was shut out of the awards and watched the ceremony turn into a coming-out party for U2. By then his plastic surgery makeover and "Wacko Jacko" image (the nickname had become a staple of the British tabloids) were alienating more and more music lovers. In the United States, Jackson issued instructions that photographers at press conferences use only a medium telephoto lens with a shutter speed of 1/125, an f-stop of four, and film compatible with tungsten lighting, rules that were meant to disguise Jackson's multiple plastic surgeries but only served to infuriate and disgust the media.

In 1988, even as his three-and-a-half-octave tenor reached the peak of its power, Rolling Stone's readers voted him "worst artist" in almost every category of the magazine's annual poll. Still the biggest selling recording artist on the planet, Jackson felt massively unappreciated, especially by music critics. Bruce Springsteen ("He can't sing or dance") was called "The Boss," while various newspaper and magazine polls were naming Madonna ("That heifer!") Artist of the Decade. Don King, whom Jackson initially despised, finally got Jackson's ear by telling him, "The white man will never let you be bigger than Elvis."

5

A week before Christmas, in 2005, a group of Sony executives flew to Dubai to meet Michael Jackson face-to-face. Along with several of Sheikh Abdullah's financial advisors, the execs assembled in Jackson's $9,000-per-night suite at the emirate's sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel. Sony CFO Robert S. Wiesenthal endured only a few minutes of chitchat before explaining to Jackson that he was on the brink of a bankruptcy that threatened the corporation's bottom line.

Late in 2003, concerned that Jackson had missed several seven-figure payments he owed, Bank of America sold his loan to Fortress Investment Group, an "alternative asset" management company accused of being one of the most predatory on the planet, specializing in the exploitation of financial distress. As Fortress began to ratchet the interest rate on Jackson's debt up past 20 percent per annum, both Neverland Ranch and, more important, Jackson's half of the Sony/ATV catalog were put into play. Then on July 11, 2005, just two weeks after his arrival in the Persian Gulf, Jackson was sued for $48 million by Prescient Acquisitions Group, a New Jersey financial services company that claimed it had brokered the deal with Fortress.

What compelled the Sony executives' trip to Dubai was their discovery that Fortress was about to call in Jackson's loan. If that happened, Wiesenthal and the others gathered in the suite at the Burj Al Arab explained, Michael would be forced into bankruptcy and his half of the song catalog thrown up for grabs to the highest bidder. Sony, which for years had been maneuvering to take complete control of the catalog, could not let that happen.

Jackson was remarkably subdued and compliant, with little to say beyond a few marveling murmurs about how the ATV catalog was saving him once again from financial ruin. It was quite a change from the Sony executives' last encounter with the star. Although Jackson's music had generated as much as a billion dollars in profits for Sony since the 1980s, the performer was increasingly seen by the company as more liability than asset, and the public relations catastrophe that had followed the release of Invincible encouraged that point of view. Sony had permitted Jackson to record eighty-four songs at the company's expense-from which he selected the sixteen that appeared on Invincible-and in the process to run up production costs that were more than double that of any album ever before released by the company. Jackson had then called Sony Music Group's CEO a racist for refusing to spend even more money on Invincible.

Relations between the company and its erstwhile recording artist improved after Number Ones was released in late 2003 and sold ten million copies. Sony had been prepared to negotiate new agreements for loan guarantees and other compilation or anniversary albums when suddenly Jackson's life and career disappeared into a two-and-a-half-year-long crisis of trauma and catastrophe. Sony watched Martin Bashir destroy most of what was left of Jackson's reputation, then saw Tom Sneddon put him through the ordeal of a criminal trial that had left Michael, in Tom Mesereau's words, "psychologically shattered." The not-guilty verdicts at the end of that trial had done little to restore the entertainer's public standing.

What was now at stake was not simply the most valuable asset Jackson owned, but the most valuable asset ever owned by any recording artist. Jackson had purchased the ATV/Music Publishing Catalog in 1985 for what then seemed an astounding price of $47.5 million. Twenty years later, it was worth a billion dollars.

As would be the case with his later purchase of Neverland Ranch, Paul McCartney was the catalyst for Jackson's acquisition. McCartney's impact on Jackson's life was far out of proportion to their relatively brief relationship. The former Beatle's fascination with cartoons and animation had served for Jackson as an enormous source of validation and encouragement. The revelation that a cultural icon of McCartney's magnitude cherished and collected Woody Woodpecker cartoons not only eased Michael's embarrassment about the hours he spent watching animated shorts but offered the first solid evidence he had seen that a determination to remain childlike was shared by other geniuses. Jackson's later discovery that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were also major cartoon collectors pleased him tremendously, but it was McCartney who had provided Michael with a retort to the taunts he had endured for years from his father and brothers. Michael especially enjoyed telling his family that he and Paul had written their duet "The Girl Is Mine" while watching cartoons together.

During the summer of 1981, Michael was staying at McCartney's house in London while the two worked on their duet "Say Say Say" for McCartney's album. Over dinner one evening, McCartney revealed that not only had his cartoon collection proved a solid financial investment but added that his collection of song rights (he owned titles that included such standards as "Stormy Weather" and "Autumn Leaves," as well as most of the Buddy Holly catalog) were incredibly profitable, spinning off hundreds of thousands in profits each and every year. Music catalogs were the best way he knew to make "big money," said McCartney, who was then forced to admit that he didn't own the rights to his own Beatles songs. He and John Lennon had sold those when they were young men, and now 251 titles-including "Yesterday," "Hey Jude," and "Let It Be"-were included in a catalog of more than four thousand songs held by the Australian Robert Holmes à Court's ATV Music. McCartney had tried to buy the ATV catalog earlier that year but failed to persuade John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono to go in as partners with him and was unwilling to put up the entire $47.5 million cost alone. If it became available a second time, though, McCartney added, he intended to make a bid. He had no idea, Paul would say later, that Michael, who mostly listened silently, was looking for ways to put this tip to use.

When Jackson returned to the United States, he instructed John Branca to look for song copyrights he could purchase. By the end of that year, Branca arranged for Jackson to buy the entire Sly Stone catalog, which included his classics "Everyday People" and "Stand!" (a song Michael had performed with his brothers the first time the Jackson 5 appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show). Branca later helped Michael purchase the copyrights to Dion's two biggest hits, "The Wanderer" and "Runaround Sue," as well as Len Barry's "1-2-3" and the Soul Survivors' "Expressway to Your Heart."

In September 1984, Branca phoned Jackson to say the Beatles song catalog was back on the market. After a bidding war that lasted eight harrowing months and involved a series of tense conversations with McCartney and Ono, Branca closed the deal in May 1985. McCartney was furious when he learned that Jackson now owned most of the songs he had written as a Beatle. It was "dodgy," he complained, to "be someone's friend and then to buy the rug they're standing on." Michael was "the kind of guy who picks brains," Paul said and didn't make that sound like a compliment. Jackson then began to license Beatles songs for commercials, beginning with the use of "Revolution" in a Nike sneaker ad. "I don't want 'Good Day Sunshine' to become an Oreo cookie ad," McCartney protested, "which I understand he's done. I think that's real cheesy." McCartney was equally incensed when Jackson collected $240,000 from Panasonic for the rights to use "All You Need Is Love" to sell "a friggin' loudspeaker system." Not my fault that Paul was too cheap to buy the catalog himself, retorted Michael, who then hired people to begin developing a series of films based on four Beatles songs: "Strawberry Fields," "Back in the USSR," "Eleanor Rigby," and "The Fool on the Hill." He also intended to design a series of musical greeting cards and music boxes that featured songs from the Beatles catalog, Jackson announced.

After several years of sniping and estrangement, Jackson and McCartney met in 1990 to discuss what Paul described as "this problem" between the two of them. The very next day, McCartney's attorney phoned Branca to say that Michael had agreed to pay Paul a higher royalty rate for his songs. No way, Jackson told Branca: "He's not getting a higher royalty unless I get something back from him in return." McCartney threatened to sue, but in the end decided that his only recourse was to cut off contact with Jackson. The "problem" continued to irk him, however. As late as 2006, McCartney would tell an interviewer, "You know what doesn't feel very good is going on tour and paying to sing all my songs. Every time I sing 'Hey Jude,' I've got to pay someone."

What neither McCartney nor most other people understood about Michael Jackson, Branca would explain, was that beneath the breathy voice and halting manner, he was as shrewd a businessman as any artist who had ever lived. "Part of him may be a ten-year-old, with all the enthusiasm that implies," Branca told a London newspaper, "but the other part is a sixty-year-old genius." Frank Dileo described him to the same paper as "a cross between E.T. and Howard Hughes."

Branca and Dileo had made those observations back in the 1980s, in the halcyon days when the ATV catalog was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of Michael Jackson's financial empire. No one imagined then that it would become the crown itself. Securing the ATV catalog was crucial for Michael. During his criminal trial, he had raved that the charges stemmed from a conspiracy between Sony, Tommy Mottola, and Tom Sneddon, among others, to gain control of the catalog. He was surrounding himself with Nation of Islam guards, Jackson told a number of people, because he was terrified that Mottola would put out a contract on his life.

At their meeting in Dubai, Wiesenthal informed Jackson that Sony had set up a preliminary deal with Citibank that would refinance Michael's $300-million-plus ATV debt on much better terms than Fortress was likely to offer and that Sony was willing to agree to a new dividend policy from the publishing company that would cover much of the interest on the ATV loan. In exchange, Sony would require greater freedom to make investment decisions without Jackson's approval, a right of first refusal on any sale of Michael's stake in the ATV catalog, and an option to buy half of his half of the catalog for approximately $250 million. Also, he would have to drop the demand to reclaim his master recordings. Negotiations would drag on for more than two years but the deal in principle seemed to offer the glimmer of hope for a life beyond Dubai and Bahrain. At the height of the holiday season, Michael was suddenly in a mood to celebrate.

Christmas had almost been ruined on December 9, when the National Enquirer ran a story that Jackson had nearly killed himself with an overdose of drugs and alcohol and was "in a critical condition in Bahrain." Quoting an e-mail from "a high ranking police official" in Santa Barbara who stated that the entertainer had overdosed at least twice since arriving in the Middle East, the Enquirer cited "sources who said Jackson was shooting himself in his leg with a syringe filled with Demerol." Michael's PR spokesperson Raymone Bain denied the story, telling the Enquirer, "I spoke to Michael on the phone today (Friday) and I can tell you he sounded fine. He is not abusing any drugs. He is continuing to work from Bahrain on his Katrina relief song." When the mainstream media neglected to pick up on the story, Michael heaved a sigh of relief and happily prepared for what he described to his children as "a family gathering."

On December 21, 2005, Sheikh Abdullah gave Mikaeel $250,000 to shop for Christmas gifts and to entertain his guests, who would be arriving within days from England and the United States. The sum raised his investment in what Abdullah continued to call their "partnership" to more than $5 million. Michael hurried to Ashraf's Department Store in Manama the very next day, spending $40,000 in what was little more than a walk-through. He bought $35,000 worth of high-end electronics at Manama's Panasonic store the following day and awaited the arrival of Mark Lester's family from London that evening. They would have an old-fashioned Christmas in Bahrain, Michael had decided, with a big tree, piles of presents, and lots of excited children to open them. He was overjoyed when Frank Cascio and his family arrived from New York a short time later.

Now twenty-four, Frank had been part of Jackson's life since he was in elementary school. During those years he had become, among other things, Michael's favorite "pranking" partner. When they were on tour, Cascio was put in charge of the arsenal of stink bombs and water balloons that Michael regularly set off in meetings or threw at cars from hotel balconies. Frank loved, almost as much as Michael did, the water balloon fights at Neverland, which were always organized into a red team and a blue team and usually ended with a bunch of fully dressed people in the swimming pool. He got a kick, too, out of Michael's superlong-range laser pointer, capable of shooting a red dot from a hotel suite on a high floor to the sidewalk in front of an unsuspecting pedestrian a mile away. Once, when they were in New York at the Four Seasons, police officers had followed the laser's strobe all the way back to the suite and Michael had to hide the thing to keep the cops from confiscating it.

In 2004, Tom Sneddon attempted to make the case that Michael had served wine to Frank's fifteen-year-old sister Marie Nicole and twelve-year-old brother Eddie. Only when Dominic and Connie Cascio made it clear they were ready to testify that any wine their kids drank at Neverland had been served by themselves and that as Italian Americans they had been taking a sip of wine at the dinner table since they were very young-it was part of their culture-did Sneddon drop the matter. The Cascios insisted they loved Michael Jackson as much as they ever had and that he was welcome in their home, where he had visited many times, whenever he wanted to stop by. Tom Mesereau questioned just how loyal the family really was after the Cascios refused to let their younger children testify for Michael at his criminal trial, and for a time let it be known that he thought a lot less of them than his client did. Still, in the run-up to the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, Frank spoke to the media on Michael's behalf, telling reporters that he had spent many nights in Jackson's bedroom as a boy and that it was like crashing with a buddy in a college dorm room, not even remotely sexual. On television, he came across convincingly as a no-nonsense New Jersey guy who was sick of all the sleazy opportunists trying to make a quick buck, denouncing Michael's accuser and the two other boys who, over the years, had claimed to be molestation victims as "nothing but liars." And in spite of his attorney's reservations about them, Michael still enjoyed the company of the Cascios far more than he did that of the Jacksons.

What the Lesters and the Cascios understood better than anyone else was how much it meant to Michael to be able to share a sense of extended family with his children. They traveled in a party of eighteen to the Seef Mall on Christmas Eve to see Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, then took a trip to the International Italian Circus courtesy of Abdullah's money.

His guests had to return home on New Year's Day, though, leaving Michael not only lonely but facing the problem of Sheikh Abdullah's mounting impatience. Many projects had been initiated, ranging from a so-called "comeback album" to what was planned as the first release of 2 Seas Records, featuring Michael singing a duet with his brother Jermaine. Nothing had moved forward.

The most pressing issue was Michael's much-ballyhooed "Hurricane Katrina song," now four months overdue. Katrina devastated New Orleans on Michael's birthday, August 29, and eight days later he announced that he would release an all-star charity single within two weeks to provide relief for the Big Easy's huddled masses. By the end of 2005, quite a few people were wondering where that record might be. Not to worry, said Abdullah, who spoke for Jackson in a telephone interview with the Associated Press: "The record is coming along great. We've been taking our time to perfect it."

Aware that his toxic reputation made it impossible to assemble the polyglot choir of superstars who had collaborated with him on "What More Can I Give?" Michael decided to use only black performers on his Katrina record, which was to have a "gospel feel." The two biggest names among those who had thus far contributed vocals belonged to a pair of performers quite familiar with criminal charges and bad press: Snoop Dogg and R. Kelly. Ciara, Keyshia Cole, and the O'Jays were among the singers who had recorded sections of the song in a Los Angeles studio in November, with Jackson producing it by phone from Bahrain. A number of the other voices promised back in August-including those of James Brown, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, and Missy Elliot-were still missing from the mix. The main reason for the delay, Abdullah insisted to the wire service, was that more artists had come forward to ask if they could contribute. Asked to name those artists, the sheikh demurred: "I'd like to keep that as a surprise." Abdullah quickly added that Michael had already laid down "a wonderful track" that would serve as the baseline of the song. "His voice is phenomenal," enthused Abdullah, who added that the working title was "I Have This Dream." Asked if the Katrina song was the harbinger of a new Jackson album, Abdullah replied with a laugh, "I will just say we've been very busy. This is a raindrop before the thunderstorm. He's getting ready to come out with a lot of bells and whistles. He's so energized. It's explosive." Abdullah promised that "I Have This Dream" would be delivered before the end of February.

It had now been more than six months since Michael's arrival in Bahrain and nearly six million dollars of the Al Khalifas' money had been spent on him and his various projects. Abdullah's father, the king, was beginning to wonder what exactly the family was getting in return for all their generosity to Mikaeel.

Increasingly restless and dissatisfied with life in Bahrain after his friends from England and America returned home, Jackson abruptly departed with his children for Orlando, Florida, explaining that he intended to secure the production facilities he needed to finish his Katrina song. "I'll be back," he told the sheikh, who certainly hoped so.

As a regular visitor to Disney World, Michael had been renting houses in Orlando for years. He made no concession to cash-strapped circumstances on this trip, leasing a twelve-bedroom, nineteen-bathroom mansion owned by timeshare mogul David Siegel that featured a sixty-foot pool bordered in real gold. Located on a four-acre private island inside the guarded gates of the Isleworth enclave, the home featured 1,700 feet of shoreline and rented for $15,000 per week. Michael's presence would rouse media snoopers in ways that neighbors like Shaquille O'Neal and Tiger Woods never would, so privacy was key. Siegel agreed not to tell a living soul but was taken aback when Michael appeared in plain sight on the roof of the house with his children one day after moving in. "He said he'd take it under the condition that nobody knows he's here," Siegel recalled. "I didn't tell anybody. He moves in. Within a day he's up on top of the house waving at boaters."

Jackson was in Orlando mainly to meet with boy band impresario Lou Pearlman, whose success with the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync had financed the construction of his state-of-the-art Trans Continental Studios out on Sand Lake Road. Pearlman had been supportive during Jackson's criminal trial, telling CNN that Michael should "get back to the music" as quickly as possible: "What I'm saying is, ignore the personal side of it…because he's never going to eradicate the good, bad, or indifferent of what's been happening in the media. Let's talk about the King of Pop. Let's talk about how he dances, great songs. That's where he's got to go."

Monitoring the Orlando meetings was no doubt stressful for Sheikh Abdullah, who received reports that Jackson and Pearlman were talking about a deal to record Michael's "comeback album" in Florida rather than in Bahrain. About all Michael would accomplish during his brief stay in Orlando, though, was to dodge a bullet. Lou Pearlman was about to be exposed as one of the all-time monsters in an industry famous for them.

Federal investigators were already putting together a case that would charge Pearlman with swindling more than a thousand investors out of $315 million, in addition to $120 million fraudulently taken from banks. Within a few months, the impresario would flee the country to avoid arrest and remain on the run for nearly a year before being captured in Bali, then detained in Guam and extradited back to the United States. Facing a federal fraud trial scheduled to begin in March 2008, he would plead guilty and accept a sentence of twenty-five years in prison.

For Jackson, of course, a greater concern was the steady leak of allegations that Pearlman had committed dozens of sex crimes against the members of his boy bands, many of whom were living at his Florida mansion when the molestations took place. None of the teenagers were ever formally identified, but Jane Carter, the mother of teen idols Nick and Aaron Carter, told Vanity Fair magazine: "Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers. I tried to expose him for what he was years ago." Being in business with a man who had been so publicly outed as a pedophile would have been catastrophic for Jackson. Aside from the fact that both Carters had performed with Michael on "What More Can I Give?" Aaron Carter had been a regular guest at Neverland while in his early teens.

Michael got wind of the sex abuse claims within days of arriving in Orlando and immediately broke off what Pearlman had described in the media as "negotiations." Jackson returned quickly to Bahrain, knowing he was lucky to get out of Florida before the media learned that he and Pearlman were meeting. Abdullah welcomed him with open arms, relieved to learn that the recording of the Katrina song would be completed in Bahrain after all.

Or perhaps not. Michael seemed to be dragging his feet about finishing "I Have This Dream." What concerned him most was that the legacy of "We Are the World" would be tarnished. The success of his first great humanitarian anthem was something he treasured but at the same time felt haunted by. "In the same way he doubted he could ever make another album as good as Thriller," Dieter Wiesner explained, "he also didn't think he could do a record as important as 'We Are the World.' And he knew that everybody would compare."

"We Are The World" was Michael's real follow-up to Thriller. The pinnacle of success he had achieved with the album created a daunting level of public expectation about what he would do next. Early in 1985, Rolling Stone published an article that described recent months as "a black hole for Michael watchers, who witnessed the most spectacular disappearing act since Halley's comet." Kids were already trading in their sequined gloves for Masters of the Universe action figures, the magazine reported, as "remainder tables groan beneath unsold Michael calendars and a Fifth Avenue store was palming off clothes for the Michael Jackson doll as outfits for Ken."

The unveiling of "We Are the World" in March 1985 would not only put Michael front and center again but elevate him to savior of mankind status. The song made pop stars the point persons in global humanitarian efforts. An initial shipment of 800,000 records sold out in three days. In all, three million copies of "We Are the World" were purchased before the end of the year, and the song raised almost $40 million for the starving people of Ethiopia. As much as this success inspired him, Michael wanted to make sure he got credit for it. When Ken Kragen put together a domestic antipoverty program called "Hands Across America" and commissioned a theme song that was to debut at halftime of the 1986 Super Bowl, Michael objected, and eventually convinced Kragen that his own song "should always be the anthem" of celebrity relief projects. He was overjoyed when "We Are the World" was declared the front-runner for Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards ceremony, scheduled to take place one month later, but annoyed to discover that Quincy Jones had been chosen to accept the prize. He promptly concocted a plan to upstage Jones. A young woman was hired to play the part of an adoring fan who would run in from the wings while the award was being presented to throw her arms around Michael as he stood next to the producer. It would make the front page of every newspaper in the country, Michael enthused, and nobody anywhere would remember Quincy's acceptance speech.

The core of essential beneficence in him was increasingly covered over by the accretions of egomania. Ever his enabler Walter Yetnikoff grew tired of it. "I could not have a conversation with him that did not revolve around Michael Jackson and his records and his shows and how wonderful he was." He grew so out of touch with the world around him that he often did not recognize newly minted celebrities. When he showed up on the set of the movie Space Jam, which featured Michael Jordan at a time when the NBA star was at the apex of his fame, Michael found it very difficult indeed to believe that a basketball player might be more famous than him. Jackson needed one of the young boys who accompanied him to explain just who exactly this other Michael was.

6

He had become convinced that it was time to "take control of my own life," Michael Jackson announced as the end of the 1980s approached. Almost immediately, he began to shed the very people who had been the architects of his enormous popular success. Among the first to go was Quincy Jones, the producer of his three previous solo albums. Jackson resented the credit Jones had taken for Thriller, especially since Jones had tried to keep "Billie Jean" off the album. Jones believed there was a simpler explanation: "I think at one point he felt I wasn't in touch with the market anymore," Jones would tell CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric in 2009. "I remember when we were doing Bad I had DMC in the studio because I could see what was coming with hip-hop. And [Michael] was telling Frank Dileo 'I think Quincy's losing it and doesn't understand the market anymore. He doesn't know that rap is dead.' This is 1987. Rap hadn't even started and by 1992 it was all rap and at that time Michael was going after all the big rappers, Teddy Riley, all the rap producers, to spend five times what they were paying me to produce his records."

Michael then discharged Dileo. As his manager, Frank was adept at massaging Jackson's ego at the same time he emerged as one of the very few people who could disagree with Michael and make it stick. The best-known story about the two involved Jackson chasing his manager around a hotel room by brandishing his pet boa constrictor; Dileo reportedly pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot the damn snake if Michael didn't put it down.

The five-year run of success that Jackson and Dileo enjoyed together ended with a thud, though, in early 1989. The media reported that Dileo had been fired for botching the domestic release of Michael's ninety-minute video Moonwalker, which would not be distributed theatrically anywhere but in Japan. The Jackson family was furious with Dileo for letting Michael spend $27 million on the project; twenty-five people had worked for a solid six months on a four-minute-forty-five-second section constructed around "Leave Me Alone." Dileo was prominently featured on the Bad album jacket, appearing with Michael in a large photograph that bore the caption "another great team." When Bad failed to become "the biggest record ever," as Michael had predicted publicly and often, he began to divest himself of everyone associated with it, Jones and Dileo among them.

John Branca was the next to go and his departure foreshadowed Jackson's future even more ominously than the exits of Jones and Dileo. David Geffen was the agent of this specific dismissal, but the pattern was perhaps more important than the particulars. Again and again, Michael would allow a new and exciting voice not only to catch his ear, but also to cancel out the advice of a proven familiar. Anyone who knew how he had been raised understood that loyalty was of little value among the Jacksons. Branca, though, had been instrumental to Jackson in securing the ATV music catalog. He had a handshake agreement with Robert Holmes à Court in the spring of 1985, Branca would recall, but then the Australian "fucked me" by making a more lucrative deal with rival bidders Charles Koppelman and Martin Bandier. Branca maneuvered behind their backs with a phone call to Irving Azoff, chief of MCA, which was putting up the money for that deal, convincing Azoff that a favor to Michael Jackson at this particular moment would be repaid many times over. When Azoff pulled the funding for the Koppleman-Bandier deal, the catalog was sold to the next highest bidder, Jackson. The only concession Branca had to make to Holmes à Court was an agreement that the Australian's daughter would retain rights to "Penny Lane" as what, according to Branca, Holmes à Court termed a "souvenir." Five years later, though, Geffen began whispering that Michael should have a better deal at CBS Records and that Branca's close relationship with Walter Yetnikoff was the main reason he didn't. In the years since closing the ATV deal, Branca had made Jackson tens of millions in various sponsorship and merchandising deals. The copromoter of the Victory tour, Chuck Sullivan, had paid Michael $18 million in 1985 to develop a clothing line. A year later, Branca negotiated a deal with Pepsi that paid his client $15 million for the rights to sponsor a Michael Jackson solo tour. In 1988, Branca secured an advance of $10 million from a company called L.A. Gear to endorse its sneakers. A year after that, he salvaged the Moonwalker debacle by negotiating a ridiculously lucrative contract for Michael on rentals and sales of the video, a deal that resulted in Jackson's actually earning a profit on the seemingly doomed project. Michael began to resent the attorney, though, when Geffen and others explained to him how much of that money Branca was putting in his own pocket, and how he was using his relationship with Michael Jackson to feather his nest with other clients. In late 1990, it was announced that John Branca was being replaced as Jackson's lawyer by a team of attorneys who were closely associated with Geffen. Yetnikoff was fired by CBS Records' parent company, Sony, a short time later.

All of this had occurred while Michael was sinking deeper and deeper into a self-imposed isolation. He had separated from both his family and the city he had called home from the age of ten when he purchased Never-land Ranch in 1988 and left Los Angeles to live in the Santa Ynez Valley, more than a hundred miles up the coast, just north of Santa Barbara. He had first admired the property while Paul McCartney and his wife Linda were staying there during the filming of the "Say Say Say" video in 1982. It was called Sycamore Ranch back then, nearly three thousand acres where Figueroa Mountain Road wound through lush rolling hills to an estate that had been built to the lavish and exacting standards of a wealthy California developer named William Bone. The 13,000-square-foot main residence, set among one of the most beautiful groves of live oaks in all of California, was a hybrid Tudor mansion and Dutch farmhouse, with brick and masonry walls built around massive wooden beams that framed leaded glass windows, topped by a beautifully gabled roof. There were seventeen rooms on the first floor, sixteen rooms upstairs, and an enormous wine cellar below ground. Branca had handled a lengthy negotiation with Bone, eventually reaching a deal that allowed Jackson to buy the estate for $17 million, a little more than half the asking price. Jackson rewarded his attorney with a Rolls-Royce convertible. Almost immediately after taking possession of the property, Jackson renamed the place Neverland Valley Ranch and made it over into a signal declaration of wealth, success, and the power to create a private world in his own image.

The ranch in Santa Barbara County, just a short drive from Ronald Reagan's "Western White House," was far enough removed from the home he had grown up in-for his first ten years, anyway-to support the Jackson family's rags-to-riches story's most mythic dimensions. By the time the Bad tour was over, Michael's personal fortune had grown to considerably more than $100 million and he was looking for something that would awe his visitors in the same way he had been awed when he first saw Berry Gordy's staggeringly luxurious Bel Air palace, or Paul McCartney's stunning spread in East Sussex. Neverland Ranch would amply serve that purpose.

Branca warned Jackson that he was unlikely to recoup the $55 million he had invested in "improving" Neverland if or when he sold the place, but Michael was by then indifferent to such concerns. Reporters invited to tour Neverland during its 1990 public unveiling most often began by inspecting the towering statue of Mercury (the Roman god of profit, trade, and commerce) in the driveway outside the mansion, then climbed a hill out back that led to a near replica of the Main Street train station at Disneyland, with a floral clock that was barely less magnificent than the one Walt Disney had designed for his own park. There, they caught a C. P. Huntington–style train out past a two-story fort outfitted with water cannons and a nearby Indian village replete with teepees, a totem pole, and full-size-replica Native Americans, to the amusement park where a carousel with custom-made hand-painted animals awaited young visitors. There was also a Ferris wheel, a bumper car arena, a three-story-high slide, and Michael's favorite, a roller coaster called the Zipper. Nearby was a zoo where horses and zebras ran together, and buffalo roamed among ostriches, deer, llamas, and giraffes. The "rec building" housed two floors of arcade games, while Neverland's private lake offered kids the choice between a swan boat, a canoe, and a red dinghy. The train's final stop was the $2 million Neverland Cinema, with a fully stocked candy counter and a glassed-in viewing booth with reclining beds to welcome seriously ill youngsters.

"Michael Jackson is very fond of children," Rolling Stone's Michael Goldberg observed in his report of the trip to Neverland, without a hint of hidden meaning. Goldberg was shown a room on the upstairs floor of the main house where a canopied bed was covered with dozens and dozens of dolls along with jack-in-the-boxes featuring each of the major characters from The Wizard of Oz sitting on shelves beside it. Another room was jammed full of children's games and toys, coloring books, and crayons. The "train room" featured an enormous and elaborate Lionel set, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Bart Simpson, Roger Rabbit, and E.T. A pile of Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse, and Bambi quilts lay on the floor, in case the kids staying over wanted to have a slumber party. Goldberg was clearly more captivated by the "exquisitely furnished" first floor, which included an oak-paneled library stocked with rare editions of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling, a living room anchored by a custom-made Bosendorfer rosewood piano, and a den warmed by a stone fireplace. Rolling Stone's reporter refrained from mentioning the numerous life-size paintings of Michael that hung on the interior walls of the main house. Nearly every one showed him striking a heroic pose while costumed in brightly colored but vaguely military uniforms that suggested the dandified garb of nineteenth-century European royalty, replete with cape, sword, ruffled collar, and, very often, a crown.

Goldberg was among those who insisted that one couldn't fully appreciate the magic of Neverland unless you saw it at night, when the whole place looked as if it had been "sprinkled with a kind of high-tech fairy dust." Strands of white bulbs ran up the trunks of the oak trees and out the limbs to the branches, blinking on and off at intervals so that the glittering trees seemed to materialize out of thin air one moment, then vanish the next. The sound of music was nearly deafening. After its release in 1995, Michael's song "Childhood" played constantly on the carousel, while cartoon soundtracks blared from the speakers astride a JumboTron the size of a drive-in movie screen. Songs filled the air even when one wandered off to explore the grounds; on lawns and in flowerbeds, speakers disguised as gray boulders poured forth show tunes until nearly midnight. A winding yellow brick road illuminated by recessed gold-color lights led to an amusement park that was lit against the night sky, while the main house, the lake, the bronze statues of young boys beating drums, playing accordions, or shaking tambourines were lit with strobes that lent the entire scene a sense of Brigadoon-like appearance and disappearance.

Michael's favorite place in Neverland was the three-turreted tree house that could be entered only by climbing the trunk. It was there, at a spot overlooking the lake, that he had written most of the songs for his new album, Dangerous. The entire music industry was in shock at a report that Jackson had spent $10 million of CBS Records' money on the production of Dangerous, five times what it cost even the most profligate bands to make a record. Michael publicly reveled in the commercial success of Dangerous, even as he privately winced at the mixed critical reception. The attempt to replicate his earlier successes was painfully obvious to those who panned the album. The song "Who Is It" was filled with sonic hooks almost identical to the ones Michael and Quincy Jones had used on "Billie Jean," they said, while "Heal the World" seemed like little more than a rewrite of "We Are the World." The New York Times called Dangerous Jackson's "least confident" solo album. The Los Angeles Times asked, "How dangerous can a man be who literally wants to please everyone?" Still, Dangerous debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart and remained in the top ten more than a year later. Record company executives were most impressed that more than three-quarters of Dangerous's sales had been made outside the United States.

Michael Jackson was the most international music star ever and in recognition Sony had secured his future with a contract that was the most lucrative in the history of the entertainment industry. The $65 million guarantee was but an advance on a deal that could be worth $1 billion to Jackson, according to the Sony press release that announced it. Jackson had become the first artist in any medium to be given 50 percent of profits, or even close to that amount. That was on top of the 25 percent royalty he would receive for each retail sale, plus a signing bonus of $4 million and $1 million per year to run his own record company. Sony had also agreed to put up an additional $2.2 million per year in "administrative costs," plus more than $10 million to pay for music videos, and honored the singer's ambition to be a movie star by including provisions that guaranteed him a fee of $5 million for every film he appeared in, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts. "Michael is the greatest superstar in the music industry," Sony senior vice president Ron Wilcox told the Los Angeles Times, "and the contract is justified by his past achievements, existing talent, and future potential."

Jackson was now wealthy almost beyond imagining. The ATV catalog was doubling in value annually, spinning off millions in earnings. Dollars were flowing out of his accounts in prodigious amounts, but still not nearly as rapidly as they were flooding in. Michael was watching his fortune grow, keeping a constant eye on cash flow, and paying close attention to accounting statements. "The bookkeeper we hired during Invincible was the same bookkeeper Michael had back in the Thriller days," said Marc Schaffel, "and she told me that back then Michael would check the complete balance down to the dollar in his bank account, every day. That she would write the checks and deliver them to Michael and he would sign each one personally. She said there were times he would see a bill and he wouldn't sign the check, that he would call the vendor and ask them, 'Why is your bill $50,000? You're charging me too much.' And then he would go back and tell her to make the check for $40,000. She said he knew every dollar that was going in and out. It amazed me because he was so far removed from that when I met him."

Michael was in Asia, near the end of the Dangerous tour in the summer of 1993, when word came that he had been accused of sexually molesting thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler, and that authorities in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties had initiated criminal investigations. He canceled his remaining dates and soon after checked into a rehabilitation facility to deal with what was said to be a prescription drug addiction, then returned to the United States several weeks later to discover that the floor had fallen out from under his entire life.

It was Michael's misfortune that this first "child sex scandal" had broken the year before O. J. Simpson cut his wife's throat, at the very moment when cable news and tabloid culture were recognizing their perverse synergy. Jackson's singular strangeness seemed to make anything possible, and the dollars dangled by various editors and producers attracted a slew of "insiders" who sold the entertainer out for whatever they could get. Two former Neverland security guards received $100,000 to tell Hard Copy that they were fired because they knew too much about the singer's relationships with young boys. Later, in court, both men admitted they had made up most of their story. Jackson's former maid Blanca Francia took $20,000 for telling Hard Copy that she had seen Michael naked with young boys, including her own son, then contradicted that claim in interviews with the police and Jackson's attorneys. Francia later threatened to file a lawsuit that squeezed a $2 million settlement out of the singer. Jackson's former secretary Orietta Murdoch and his ex-head of security Robert Wegner sold separate stories suggesting that Jackson had been sexually involved with a pair of Australian kids, who each adamantly denied it.

Being stabbed in the back by those he let close to him changed Jackson in ways that would prove profoundly destructive. He began to lose faith in everyone around him, and to reach out for the kindness of strangers who wanted only to get their fingers in his pockets. In a search for reassurance that grew as ceaseless as it was unsuccessful, he became prey to every sort of charlatan. Inspecting his bank statements and reviewing his accounting reports was now next to impossible. He cycled in and out of an addiction to the synthetic opiates he had begun to take while recovering from the Pepsi commercial fire in 1984. His need to numb himself became consuming in 1993, after he endured the most mortifying experience of his life, being forced to strip naked from the waist down so that police could photograph his genitals. The purpose of the exercise was to compare the results to pictures and descriptions provided by Jordie Chandler. Now, even the short length of this painfully shy celebrity's pubic hair was part of the scandal that engulfed him.

Jackson found it more and more difficult to work. He was paying out huge fees and making enormous settlements to try to contain an avalanche of litigation, and was billed tens of thousands every month by the PR consultants he hired to counter bad publicity. He was increasingly susceptible to flatterers and enablers. Millions of dollars were still pouring in each year but now even more was pouring out.

He did manage to complete his double album HIStory for a 1995 release but was not encouraged by the reception. Worldwide sales were barely more than half of what Dangerous had done. HIStory was the first album ever to sell twenty million copies and be considered a failure. Some major critics were openly dismissive. The New York Times's Jon Pareles built his review around the assertion that, "It has been a long time since Michael Jackson was simply a performer. He's the main asset of his own corporation, which is a profitable subsidiary of Sony."

At Sony they were starting to wonder about that last part. Jackson had spent most of the millions allotted for his future video productions on the "teaser" he shot for HIStory in Hungary. "The production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, 'Michael wants more troops,'" his marketing executive Dan Beck told the Times. By the end of that year, Jackson found himself so short of cash that he was forced to sell Sony a half-interest in the ATV catalog for $100 million, about a quarter of what it would be worth a few years later. He had been able at least to retain 51 percent of the catalog and control of the most profitable part, the Beatles songs, and in the years that followed Sony added any number of classic songs to the package, material that reached across a range stretching from Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" to Joe Diffie's "Third Rock from the Sun." Sony also guaranteed Jackson a minimum income of $6.5 million per year from the licensing rights to the catalog's songs. In 2001, when 1, a collection of the Beatles' #1 hits, sold more than twenty million units worldwide, Jackson's share of the profits was $9 million. It still wasn't enough to keep him afloat.

His dreams of movie stardom had died in the Jordan Chandler drama but Michael refused to accept it, writing one six- or seven-figure check after another to pay for video projects such as a thirty-five-minute film called Ghosts that he cowrote with Stephen King and shot in 1997 with special effects wizard Stan Winston, only to see it dismissed by critics as a "vanity project." All told, he would spend an estimated $65 million on video productions during the 1990s and receive little in return but more bad press. Despite a net worth that had been estimated as high as $1 billion, he was struggling to service an increasingly massive debt. Branca made a deal with Sony that netted Michael a quick $25 million in cash, but the price was a reversal of their ownership positions in the ATV catalog. Now the company owned 51 percent of the song titles and Jackson was the minority partner. By 1998, Michael had depleted a $90 million loan from NationsBank taken out two years earlier and was forced to bring Branca back to negotiate a new $140 million loan from Bank of America. That money was gone before a year had passed so Jackson negotiated a $30 million line of credit with the bank that was maxed out within a few months. In 2000, he managed to have his B of A loan raised to $200 million, but now the bank was taking advantage of his financial distress by demanding higher rates of interest.

He began to oscillate wildly between a series of financial advisors, many of them either inept or on the make. One of those who tried to organize his affairs was Al Malnik, a superrich Florida attorney who was best known for his past association with organized crime kingpin Meyer Lansky. Even Malnik, though, couldn't convince Michael to curb his spending. "There was no planning in terms of allocations," Malnik would explain in a deposition connected to one of the many lawsuits filed against Jackson. "For Michael it was whatever he wanted, at the time he wanted." Jackson seemed "bewildered" whenever he tried to discuss money matters, said Malnik, who had tried to explain to Michael that flying to London for a weekend of shopping was one thing, while renting a private jet to carry an entourage and renting an entire floor of a five-star hotel to house them while he did so was quite another. By Malnik's estimate, Michael was spending about $8 million per year just on travel and antiques.

At Neverland, it was costing the star $4 million per annum to keep employees who ranged from carpenters to snake handlers on the payroll. Michael's advisor Rabbi Shmuley Boteach got what was for him a shocking display of Jackson's extravagance in December 2000 when he learned that Michael, who was staying with his entourage at the Four Seasons in New York, had continued to rent an entire floor at the hotel during a nearly month-long trip to Neverland for the holidays. Why didn't you vacate the rooms while you were gone and save yourself a few hundred thousand dollars? Boteach asked. "What were we supposed to do with our stuff?" Michael wanted to know.

Shopping and spending had become for Michael as addictive as any opiate. Those who worked for him described seeing Jackson leaf through a magazine and order every single product advertised in it. He ran up a bill at Celebrity Costumes for just under $100,000 in a single year. In 1998, he reportedly became the first to place an order for a $75,000 per bottle "limited edition" perfume being licensed as "the ultimate symbol of indulgence." The "heavenly scent" confected from roses, chocolate, and musk would be sold in a flask made from platinum, gold, and diamonds, packaged in a walnut box manufactured by the same company that did the woodwork for Rolls-Royce interiors, a container that could be opened only with one of the gold, diamond, and ruby keys that Graff jewelers was crafting for that sole purpose, according to the press release announcing that Michael Jackson had already placed a deposit on two bottles, one for himself and one for his dear friend Elizabeth Taylor.

In 1999, Michael paid $1.54 million at auction for the Oscar that producer David O. Selznick had received for Gone with the Wind. Less than a year later, Beverly Hills jeweler David Orgell sued Jackson for nonpayment on a $1.9 million Vacheron watch. The entertainer tried to return the timepiece but Orgell said it was scratched. They settled in 2001, and the very next day Jackson used the Vacheron as collateral on another loan from Bank of America. Soon after this, he submitted the winning bid at auction on a pair of nineteenth-century French paintings but was forced to return the art when Sotheby's sued him for the outstanding balance of $1.6 million.

Jackson had shown such remarkable business acumen as a young man, skillfully selecting collaborators, representatives, and advisors. Now approaching middle age, he seemed irresistibly drawn to projects that most of the press and much of the public found laughable. In 1996, Jackson flew to Paris to meet the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and join him in the announcement of a "family values" global entertainment empire whose projects included plans to create a theme park home for all British bovines afflicted with mad cow disease. Soon after, the singer showed up in Warsaw, where he announced the $500 million World of Childhood amusement park he planned to build with the cooperation of the Polish government. According to Malnik, Jackson's serial advisors managed to lose $50 million of his money in the 1990s alone on a series of "bizarre" projects that never came to fruition. Two of those advisors were Dieter Wiesner and Ronald Konitzer, who had collaborated with Jackson on a series of grandiose near misses that began with the marketing of a sport cola they called "Mystery Drink." Wiesner and Konitzer went on to use the singer's name in promotions for a giant resort near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and for a huge "Majestic Kingdom" theme park in Detroit. By the end of 2000, the press openly mocked any announcement that involved Michael Jackson.

For years, virtually every contract involving Jackson had been freighted with assorted side deals in which various "representatives" pocketed enormous fees for persuading him to sign this or that agreement. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands, almost always under the table, while huge fees were taken off the top by a carousel of attorneys and managers.

In 2001, when Michael LaPerruque became Michael's new chief of security, he discovered that most of the guards at Neverland were doubling and tripling their salaries by offering to go shopping for Jackson, using Michael's name to purchase duplicates of the high-end items he wanted, ranging from electronics to jewelry, then having the seconds sent to their own homes. After LaPerruque left Neverland in 2004, he was replaced by Chris Carter, a handsome young African-American man whom the entertainer had spotted while strolling through a Las Vegas casino. As his new head of security, Carter was principally useful to Jackson for his ability to obtain the antianxiety drug Xanax under an assortment of fictitious names. Within the year, Carter's next-in-command was an eighteen-year-old surfer named Joey Jeszeck whom Jackson hired upon meeting him in a skateboard shop near Neverland. After Jackson dismissed Carter, Neverland's former security chief readily agreed to testify for the prosecution at the 2005 criminal trial, but was unable to answer when called, having been arrested in Las Vegas on an assortment of felony charges that included armed robbery and kidnapping.

The atmosphere around Jackson grew murkier still when his brother Jermaine introduced the Nation of Islam into his life after the filing of the criminal charges in 2003. Various insiders who found themselves suddenly on the outside claimed that Louis Farrakhan's son-in-law Leonard Muhammad had not only taken charge of Jackson's security detail (forcing out LaPerruque), but was also managing his business affairs. The tensions this created boiled over in late 2003 when Jackson's "chief spokesperson," Stuart Backerman, abruptly quit his job, citing "strategic differences." It was widely believed that Backerman had refused to work with Muhammad and the NOI. Later, the PR man admitted this to a London tabloid, the Sun: "I quit because the Nation of Islam had infiltrated Michael's world. I was the only one who was left standing at this point, because Michael wasn't in his right mind."

Stories linking Jackson to the NOI and suggesting he shared Farrakhan's anti-Semitism further eroded the singer's shrinking public support. In the media, mentions of Jackson's career were now almost always coupled with the word "decline." What may have been Michael Jackson's saddest career moment came in August 2003, three months before the raid on Neverland, when he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday with a public event that only served to emphasize his reduced status. While hundreds of young people from South Central, East LA, and the San Fernando Valley paid upward of $30 per ticket for seats in the old downtown Los Angeles movie palace where the concert celebration was held, nearly every one of the spots inside the velvet ropes up front reserved for A-list guests remained empty. Instead of Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross, Jackson's fans found themselves being entertained by obscure performers who lip-synched his greatest hits. And when the birthday boy himself took the stage at the end of the evening to lead a rendition of "We Are the World," he was accompanied not by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles, but by an assortment of Michael Jackson impersonators.

Unable or unwilling (even those closest to him weren't sure) to generate any fresh stream of income, Jackson was falling further behind financially. More and more of the people he did business with were not getting paid. Some of those who said he stiffed them not only took the singer to court, but also used the media to gain leverage. No one did more damage in that regard than Myung Ho Lee, the South Korean–born financial advisor who claimed to have managed Jackson's business affairs from 1997 to 2001, and sued the singer in early 2003, demanding $13 million in back pay. In papers filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court, Lee described Jackson as "a ticking financial time bomb waiting to explode at any moment." The singer fought back with a countersuit against Lee in which he claimed his signature had been forged on a contract and that it was Lee who owed the millions, siphoned from Jackson's bank accounts. Michael complained to those around him that Lee had made unauthorized and disastrous investments in various dot-com ventures (most notably the gaming company Tickets.com) that cost him a fortune when the boom went bust. Lee answered by collaborating with Maureen Orth on an article for Vanity Fair that convinced hundreds of thousands of upscale readers that Jacko really was Wacko. In the summer of 2000, Lee told Orth, Jackson had paid an African witch doctor named Baba $150,000 to conduct a "voodoo ritual" in Switzerland that was intended to result in the deaths of twenty-five people on an "enemies list" topped by the names of David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. Though Orth didn't report it, quite a few people in the entertainment industry knew that Jackson had fallen out with Geffen and Spielberg and this added an undercurrent of credibility to the story. Baba's curses had been sealed with the blood of forty-two ritually sacrificed cows, according to Lee, who claimed to have wired payment for the slaughter to a bank in Mali.

Though Jackson nearly had Lee's lawsuit thrown out, the Korean's attorneys successfully scheduled a deposition of Michael Jackson in June 2003, at which the singer's finances would be fully explored. The day before he was to be questioned, Jackson settled out of court for a sum said to be "well into seven figures." He refused payment, though, to European concert promoter Marcel Avram, who had filed a $22.1 million suit against Jackson for backing out of two 1999 "Millennium Concerts" in Sydney and Honolulu. At the end of a 2003 civil trial in Santa Barbara County, a jury of Jackson's neighbors awarded Avram $5.3 million, but the concert promoter was still chasing his money two years later.

A "forensic accountant" appointed by the Santa Barbara County Superior Court to examine Jackson's finances reported that the entertainer's annual budget was $12 million for personal expenses and the maintenance of Neverland, but this amount was a pittance compared to the $54 million a year it was now costing him to service his enormous debt. Yet Jackson continued to stay in $10,000 per night hotel suites and to rent an entire floor of standard rooms for his entourage.

"Michael would believe somehow that Sony was paying for it all," Schaffel explained, "and they were. But they were charging it to him. Anything he did, whether it was hotels or private jets or whatever, they paid, but they charged him for it. So he was using up more and more of his income and going deeper and deeper into debt with Sony. Sony never really said no. Anything Michael wanted, Sony would say fine, but they would just keep racking up the bill. They had no reason not to, because they had the catalog to cover the cost. Michael was losing more and more of the catalog instead of gaining more and more. And he wouldn't want to hear about any of that. All he wanted to know was how much cash was in his pocket that day. He would say to me, 'Look, I don't want to work my ass off and get nothing out of it.' That was a lot of the problem with Invincible. The expenses were so high, he owed so much, and he was so far behind on his payments to the catalog, that he felt he'd never see a dime out of the album when it was released. I would say, 'Michael, if you make $20 million on this deal, you're paying down your debt to Sony.' He said, 'That's not my money. Everybody's putting their hands in-the lawyers, the accountants.' He'd say, 'They all take their piece of my money and what am I left with?'"

Of course, Michael Jackson tended to look at money a little differently than other people, Schaffel acknowledged. "I remember this time in -Vegas when he wanted to buy something that cost a hundred grand and he wanted me to get him the money. So I went to the Mirage and some casino manager called me back and said, 'For you, because we know you, we can give you fifty thousand if you want to come down and get it. But because of the time of night and we're not a bank, we can't give you a hundred.' So he gives me the fifty grand. Dieter is with me, and we hurry up to Michael's suite, because we know he's antsy and wants to go buy something. He had the Cascio kids with him, and a couple other kids who were traveling with him. And he said, 'Oh, did you get my money?' And I said, 'Well, I have fifty grand. It's all I can get late at night like this.' And he looked, kind of not happy, through these stacks of ten thousand apiece. He's pouting, and he says, 'It's no good. I need a hundred.' And then says, 'Oh, forget it.' And he says, 'Kids, come here.' All the kids come over, and he hands each of them a stack of ten thousand and says, 'Go out and entertain yourself for an hour.' Dieter and I just looked at each other like…'Only Michael.'"

7

By late January 2006 Sheikh Abdullah could sense in Mikaeel a new restlessness, a mounting dissatisfaction with life in Bahrain. And Abdullah was more and more uneasy. He had planted a story in the Gulf News that was intended to show that the star was settling into his new life and had paid $8 million for a home in Sanad (about ten kilometers south of Manama) where he and his children were now living. The house, of course, was provided by the sheikh. Abdullah got the same newspaper to report on Mikaeel's surprise appearance at a traditional Arabic wedding involving a member of the prominent Al Gosaibi family who had befriended him during his months in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Jackson had watched from the sidelines, the Gulf News reported, for fear of distracting from the nuptials, and requested that no one take photographs of him. Only the Lebanese pop singer Ragheb Alama, who had performed at the ceremony, was allowed to have his picture taken with the King of Pop. Abdullah confided to the Gulf News reporter that Mikaeel would be vacating the mansion in Sanad soon but planned to keep it for his relatives and friends when he moved into a more impressive home by the sea.

Just five days after the wedding story ran, Michael again departed from Bahrain, bound this time for Hamburg, Germany. He and his children were headed for what they hoped would be a private visit with the Schleiter family, whose twenty-three-year-old son Anton had been a special friend of Michael's for more than a decade. Jackson had dedicated a song on Invincible, "Speechless," to Anton and his younger sister.

Anton Schleiter was frequently mistaken by the American media for Michael's other Anton, Anton Glanzelius, who at one time had been the best-known child actor in all of Scandinavia. Shortly after his appearance in Lasse Hallstr?m's 1987 film My Life as a Dog, Anton Glanzelius received a phone call at his parents' home in Gothenburg, Sweden, from someone in America who identified himself as Michael Jackson. He wanted to let the boy know how much he had enjoyed his work in Hallstr?m's movie and invited him for a visit to California. The Swedish Anton had no idea who Michael Jackson was, but judging by the reaction of his family knew this must be someone important and ran to a neighbor's house to ask if they had any Michael Jackson albums because he wanted to see what the star looked like. Anton Glanzelius and his mother made the trip to Los Angeles later that year and visited the Hayvenhurst estate, but only got to spend a couple of hours with Michael, whom the boy described as "very polite" but also very quiet. The biggest thrill of the visit, Swedish Anton said, was meeting Michael's pet chimpanzee Bubbles, who came downstairs wearing a diaper and shook his hand. A year later, Anton Glanzelius received a second call from -Michael, who said he would be in Sweden the next week and invited the boy to spend the day with him at Liseberg, the largest amusement park in Scandinavia. He had visited Liseberg several times before, the boy said, but never like this. The park's management closed Liseberg to the public for the day so that he and Michael would have the entire place to themselves. They rode Michael's favorite ride, a roller coaster called the "Loopen," twelve times and spent nearly an hour driving bumper cars, where Michael was "laughing constantly," the boy remembered. It was so much fun that after a while he barely noticed the photographers who lined the roofs of nearby buildings. He spent that night in Michael's hotel room. When recalling the sleepover twenty years later, Anton Glanzelius said there wasn't the slightest hint of a sexual advance. Instead they talked "about everything from football and fame to girls and love." He had been amazed at how "kindhearted and humble" Michael was during that day and night, and even more amazed that Michael kept in contact afterward, regularly sending packages filled with presents and videos. Then, in 1993, when the Jordan Chandler scandal broke, Michael had cut off all contact.

The German Anton, Anton Schleiter, had entered Michael's life two years after the Chandler affair, when he met Michael during a taping of Germany's hugely successful Saturday night television variety show Wanna Bet? That Michael had appeared on Wanna Bet? several times over the years was a testament to both his popularity in Germany and his comfort level with the country. No fans in all of Europe adored him so passionately as the Germans. When the Jordan Chandler accusations first surfaced, thousands of his German fans organized sign-waving "solidarity marches" in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. An astounding number inked themselves with -"Michael" tattoos to express the depth of their support. Jackson answered their love by returning to Germany again and again, visiting the Phantasialand amusement park near Cologne in consecutive years during the late nineties. One of the most touching, disturbing, and emblematic photographs of him ever taken was shot when he attempted to ride the park's carousel. Michael's stricken expression as he had tried to sit astride a hand-carved wooden horse that was far too small for him was pathetic to some people, heartbreaking to others. Jackson's relationship with the German media changed after the baby-dangling incident at the Hotel Adlon; when criminal charges were filed in California one year later a number of the country's columnists took to calling him "the King of Flop."

His German fans, however, demonstrated their continued fervor when the nation's biggest newspaper, Bild, published a front-page story on January 26, 2006, reporting that Michael Jackson and his children were ensconced at an ordinary redbrick house on Garstedter Weg in Hamburg's middle-class Niendorf district. Michael was in fact making one of his regular attempts to vacation in "normal life," and had hoped to give his children the private experience of a happy, healthy suburban family. The Schleiter household didn't fit so snugly into that category these days, even without the fans and police outside. Anton's father, Wolfgang Schleiter, an executive at the Sony subsidiary BMG who refused to offer support for Michael when contacted by reporters after Jackson's 2003 arrest, had recently separated from his wife.

When word circulated that the Bild story was true the crush of fans that surged into the snow-covered streets of Niendorf created an unprecedented level of chaos. Squads of police were dispatched to put up a barricade and restrain the screaming fans who stood outside the Schleiters' house begging for Michael to appear. Some in Hamburg demanded to know why Jackson wasn't being made to pay for the extra security, as many visiting celebrities were required to do, but a police spokesman explained that neither the pop star nor the Schleiter family had "encouraged the public to come."

Shortly thereafter, Anton left with Michael, Grace, and the three children for Venice, Italy. The young German was still among the traveling party when Michael checked them into the Excelsior Hotel in Florence. Because of its exquisite antique shops, the city had long been Michael's favorite shopping destination. He was unable to bear staying there for more than a couple of days at a time when he didn't have money to spend, so the group moved on to stay for five nights at the Villa Savarese on the Amalfi Coast. The six of them stopped over for two nights in Rome after that, then flew to London so that Mark Lester and his family could be with them on February 13, when Michael hosted a large gathering at storied Cliveden House for Prince's ninth birthday.

Returning to Manama on March 11, Michael had exhausted both his allotment from Sony and the remainder of the $250,000 that Abdullah had given him for Christmas. Several emerging controversies back in California had distracted from his holiday during that last week in England and Michael came back to Bahrain more convinced than ever that the American media was out to get him. Tom Mesereau had withdrawn as his attorney on February 23, and reporters in Los Angeles were doing their best to frame the announcement as yet another case of Jackson wearing out the loyalty of an indispensable ally. In fact, Mesereau said, "there was no problem at all with Michael." He just couldn't bear dealing with Raymone Bain for another day.

Bain was a curvy, micro-miniskirt-wearing PR powerhouse from Washington, D.C., who, before becoming involved with Michael Jackson, had been best known for her professional relationships with Marion Barry and Mike Tyson. She was prone to labeling adversaries as racists and her insistence on doing so during Michael's criminal trial in California was what led to the first falling-out with Mesereau. "Raymone is all about Raymone," Mesereau said. He wasn't terribly fond of Grace Rwaramba, either, Mesereau admitted, and found watching Grace and Raymone battle for control of Michael almost as grating and tedious as dealing with them individually. By early 2006, Mesereau was fed up with it. "But I still felt fond of Michael," insisted the attorney, who had done what he could to convince a disbelieving media.

In Manama, Sheikh Abdullah was working feverishly to protect his family's investment in Michael Jackson. Jermaine, meanwhile, was maneuvering desperately to get a piece of 2 Seas Records, on the one hand promising Abdullah he would deliver Michael, and on the other urging Michael to remember all the sheikh had done for him. Worried by Michael's obvious restiveness, the sheikh imported John Legend and Chris Tucker to Bahrain. Michael was interested in working with Legend as a producer. Tucker, best known for the Rush Hour movies, had been, along with Macaulay Culkin, the most loyal of all Michael's celebrity friends during his criminal trial; they were the only two who had agreed without hesitation to take the stand on his behalf. He was suitably impressed by Abdullah's palace in Bahrain, Tucker said, and absolutely awestruck by the sheikh's mansion in Dubai. "Even Michael was blown away by the place," Tucker said. "They had to kick me out." He was encouraged by how much better Michael's condition was than when he had last seen his friend, Tucker told Playboy shortly after returning from the trip: "Michael is a genius, a creative being in a whole other reality…We're going to see a lot more from Michael."

Abdullah wanted badly to believe just that. The sheikh's final attempt to put Michael back to work on the Katrina record came when he flew Tony Buzan in from Singapore. Buzan was an intellectual hustler of the highest order, a cofounder of the international Memory Games competition who now sold his services as a motivational guru to a global assortment of wealthy dilettantes. He had been working in Singapore when Abdullah ("an old friend") phoned him one evening and said, "A fan of yours would like to speak to you." After a short pause, Buzan heard someone with an American accent say, "Hi, it's Michael." It had taken Buzan some time to realize that it was Michael Jackson, mainly because the masculine voice he heard was nothing like the wispy murmur that the entertainer used when he spoke in front of television cameras. Jackson had just finished reading one of Buzan's books and was enthused about applying some of the concepts in it. "I'd love to have you explain your ideas to my children," Michael said, "and teach them how to think." After Abdullah got back on the line, letting him know that Michael would be his primary student and that he, the sheikh, would be paying, Buzan caught a first-class flight to Bahrain, checked into a suite at the Burj Al Arab, then spent the next nine days commuting to Michael's mansion in Sanad.

Buzan was frequently identified in the media as the inventor of mind mapping, but that was hardly the case. Mind maps had been around since at least the third century, when Porphyry of Tyre began using them to try to illustrate the concepts of Aristotle. The American psychologists Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian created extensive mind maps in the early 1960s. Buzan's innovations were so dramatic, though, that he had virtually reinvented the field, as he told it, by incorporating such elements as the semantics of Alfred Korzybski and the science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein. What he did for his clients, Buzan said, was help them create a diagram of their individual consciousness in which words, ideas, tasks, or goals were arranged around a central word or concept. The result was a kind of "graphic note taking" that encouraged people to solve problems by using the brain's vast, untapped potential, the 99 percent of mental ability that most of us waste. Buzan charged his clients $37,000 per session, a fee that Abdullah paid without hesitation.

The sessions would proceed, of course, as Michael Jackson wished them to. Jackson mainly wanted to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. Michael was fascinated by geniuses and by the whole idea of genius. He wanted to imagine what a map of da Vinci's mind must have looked like, and how it would be different from the mind maps of Alexander the Great or Charlie Chaplin, two other figures he was especially obsessed with at the moment. Since he understood that Michael had been raised as a Christian, Buzan found it unusual that in their discussions of the great historical figures, his host never once mentioned the name Jesus. Yet for all Michael's eccentricity, Buzan considered him to have been "probably the best pupil I've had."

Buzan was only slightly less impressed by Jackson's two oldest children, Prince and Paris, whom he described as "fast learners like their father," with the same ability to focus intensely on whatever engaged their attention. While it appeared obvious that Michael bore no biological relation to the two light-skinned older children, he suspected Michael might be Blanket's natural father, because the youngest child had a much darker complexion than Prince and Paris. All three kids, though, were remarkably attached to their father, Buzan observed: "I would watch them coming and going from the international school every day. They left happy, and came back happy. On their return, those three kids could not run any faster from the car to get to hug their daddy."

The children were "greatly amused" by the larger-than-life-size photo-graphs of themselves that their father had hung among the prints of portrait paintings by various Renaissance masters who included Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael that covered the interior walls of the house. Buzan noticed there were no photographs of the Jackson family in the house, not even a picture of Katherine.

In the long days and evenings he spent with Jackson, Buzan said, Michael made only a single reference to the scandals that had engulfed him in recent years, the baby-dangling incident in Berlin: "Michael was indignant. He said, 'I'm a dancer, one of the fittest, strongest people in theater. I lift and carry adults with no difficulty.'"

Buzan saw no signs that Michael was abusing drugs except once when they were making a trip by car and the sun struck him at an angle that bypassed the dark lenses covering his eyes. "Michael cried out in pain and involuntarily ducked his head." Such hypersensitivity to sunlight, Buzan knew, was among the more common side effects of regular opiate use, caused by the shrunken pupils such drugs produce. Just a few days later, a person identified as Michael's "aide" was stopped at the Manama airport carrying a suitcase stuffed with synthetic opiates that included hundreds of OxyContin pills. The ensuing scene was an enormous embarrassment for Sheikh Abdullah, who was forced to involve his father in suppressing a criminal investigation, freeing Michael's drug courier and keeping the arrest out of the newspapers. Once again, Abdullah swallowed his anger, even helping Michael to arrange a lavish party for Paris's eighth birthday on April 3.

The sheikh's apprehension spiked again on April 13, when the New York Times published an article under the headline "Michael Jackson Bailout Said to Be Close." "After months of talks that spanned the globe, with meetings from Los Angeles to New York to London to Bahrain," the Times reported, Fortress Investments had reached a rough agreement with Sony on a deal to refinance Jackson's debt at an interest rate of around 6 percent, only a little more than one-fourth of what they had been forcing Michael to pay since buying his loan from Bank of America. That deal wasn't quite as close to a conclusion as the Times suggested, but the agreements in place were solid enough to suggest that within a matter of months Michael would be enjoying a level of solvency-and cash flow-he hadn't known in several years. Among the many questions it raised was whether he would see a continuing need to remain in the Middle East.

Abdullah pressed as he never had previously for a public agreement to secure the future of 2 Seas Records. On April 18, Michael obliged, dispatching Raymone Bain to announce that Guy Holmes, the former chairman of Gut Records, a successful UK indie, had been hired to serve as 2 Seas CEO. "I am incredibly excited about my new venture, and I am enjoying being back in the studio making music," Michael had said, according to Bain, who promised reporters that on November 21, 2 Seas would release a new Michael Jackson song, coproduced by Bruce Swedien, under the title "Now That I Found Love." Michael's first album for 2 Seas would follow in "late 2007."

The problem was that Michael wasn't really "back in the studio." He seemed, in fact, even less interested than before in working on his new album, and did little more than tinker with the Katrina song. For the first time, the sheikh let his annoyance show, pointing out that he had now "advanced" Michael more than $7 million and needed to see him get serious about his work. What was the point of the $343,000 he had paid to Tony Buzan, Abdullah wanted to know, if Michael was still as lacking in motivation as he had been before the mind mapper's arrival? Michael answered with his own complaint that Abdullah had taken advantage of his exhaustion at the end of a long and grueling criminal trial by manipulating him into agreements that weren't really in his best interest and quite possibly violated his contracts with Sony.

Tensions between the two mounted all during the first two weeks of May. Michael had been asking Abdullah to build him a house in Bahrain since his arrival in the country, but now he began to demand it, insisting to the sheikh that he couldn't continue to move his children from one Al Khalifa property to another, that both they and he needed something more permanent, a home they could call their own. Abdullah replied that Michael first needed to demonstrate that he intended to honor his promises. In response, Michael announced that he would be forced to fly to London to give a second deposition in the Marc Schaffel case on May 22. From London he would be traveling to Japan to accept a "Legend" award at the MTV Music Video Awards ceremony in Tokyo, Michael told the sheikh, and when he returned he expected to have a home of his own waiting for him. Abdullah swallowed his indignation and made an effort to part as friends, embracing the singer as he said good-bye, wishing him safe travel and securing a promise that he would return to Bahrain soon in order to finish what they had started.

It was the last time the prince of Bahrain ever saw Mikaeel.