Lisa Marie Presley said he was a passionate lover. So what WAS the truth about Jackson's sexuality?
They met as children and for 40 years, he was Michael Jackson's confidant. Now, in this deeply personal series, J. Randy Taraborrelli writes exclusively of the Michael Jackson he knew. Yesterday, he told the story of his friend's fall as he witnessed it first hand. Here, he examines Jackson's sexuality, investigating his questionable relationships with children - and providing a fascinating glimpse into a very passionate marriage with Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie... Michael Jackson's personal maid dashed into his bedroom in the superstar's mock-Tudor mansion at Neverland, his ranch-cum-children's fairground, and frantically snatched up the sheets, pillows, bedspreads, towels and dirty clothes - anything that might implicate him.
Then she loaded all his make-up, eyeliner, lipstick, creams and gels into a box. 'My job was to hide all the bottles of women's perfumes. Michael only used female fragrances, not male, and I guess someone thought that might look bad.'
This was the night in 1993 when it emerged that Jackson, a global icon, was under investigation for the sexual abuse of 12-year-old Jordie Chandler.
The police, armed with a search warrant, were on their way to look for evidence. Everything vaguely suspect was to be taken off the property. 'We couldn't get the stuff out fast enough,' the maid recalled.
Jackson's sexual proclivities had been a matter of speculation since he was a teenager. Even his mother worried that he rarely went out with girls.
The dynamic sex appeal he generated when performing seemed to desert him in the real world with real people.
No one believed he'd had romances with girls such as Tatum O'Neal or Brooke Shields, no matter how much he insisted he had.
Tatum told a friend: 'How can any girl have a relationship with him? When we're together, he's so shy he hardly says two words.
'I know he's a virgin. I wonder if he's afraid to have sex. He doesn't seem very interested.' What he was interested in, however, and was absolutely open about, was his love of children. He made no secret of his feelings.
'One of my favourite pastimes is being with children,' he explained. 'When I'm tired or bored, children revive me.'
Nothing could have been more surprising, therefore, than his marriage to Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, in 1994. From my conversations with both Michael and Lisa, I am convinced this marriage was not a sham. And, according to Lisa herself, Jackson was a wonderful lover. He was, she said, 'very hot' in bed.
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By September 1995, Michael was still pushing Lisa to get pregnant. She, however, was reluctant - sensing that the marriage was doomed For Jackson, the strain of all this was immense. In pain from his heavy performance schedule and unable to sleep, he began taking increasing doses of painkillers and tranquillisers. He was soon seriously addicted.
To be fair to Michael, as his linen was washed in public and the pressure on him grew, his denials never wavered. The problem, he maintained, was people's dirty minds. 'There's nothing sexual going on. Why can't people just get that?' he said.
Michael forged an extraordinary new relationship with Lisa Marie Presley.
From their very first date, at a dinner party staged by a mutual friend, Michael and Lisa hit it off. Raised at her father's impregnable home, Graceland, she had much in common with the world's most famous pop star, cloistered away in Neverland.
Both had been sheltered from the real world, missed out on their childhoods and were mistrustful of outsiders. They believed they were soul mates.
Michael was openly flirtatious, and Lisa was impressed by his private candour and normality. As they talked, she began to feel she was seeing the real Michael, the man behind the mask.
His sexuality, admittedly, still seemed ambiguous, but he was soon kissing her fairly passionately. She was certainly attracted to him. Lisa liked strange guys, with an edge. And who had more of an edge than Michael?
The author, Randy Taraborrelli, with his friend Michael in the 1970s Throughout the time of his obsession with Jordie Chandler, Jackson dated Lisa intermittently. After he was accused of abusing the boy, he sought her support in long, anguished phone calls.
'Yes, I started falling for him,' she explained. 'I wanted to help him, and I felt that I could.'
As he spiralled into drug addiction, she stood by him.
During one of their phone calls, he wanted to know how she would respond if he asked her to marry him. It could have been a joke but, without missing a beat, she replied: 'I would do it.'
A silence followed until Michael said: 'Hold on, I have to use the bathroom.' When he came back on the line, he acted as if everything was settled. Lisa was his fiance.
'My love for you is real,' he told her. 'Please believe me.' ISN'T THAT A SONG LYRIC? OR AM I JUST CRAZY?
At Neverland, the two walked hand in hand and then kissed at the top of the Ferris wheel.
She slept with him in his bedroom. For Michael, it was the first time he had experienced such chemistry with a woman, or with anyone.
He seemed unable to contain his laughter. 'I've never known a person like her,' he said.
He and Lisa appear to have had an intense and active sex life. She told a friend that he was 'hot stuff in bed' and 'amazing' - and she should know, the friend added, because 'she's been around'.
Nevertheless, some of his habits were a little odd.
'Michael liked her to wear jewellery in bed. They were into role-playing games, although Lisa would never say who was playing what kind of role.'
'The first time, she went to turn on the lights afterwards, and he leapt out of bed and ran into the bathroom so she wouldn't see his body. He emerged 20 minutes later, in full make-up and wearing a silk robe. Then they went at it again. ,/strong>
They were married at a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic in May 1994, with no family or friends present. Priscilla Presley, Lisa's mother, was furious, convinced that Jackson was using her daughter to improve his image after the Jordie Chandler affair.
'Can't you see what he's up to?' she asked. 'It's so obvious.'
In fact, Jackson had an entirely different agenda. The man who had previously been adamant that he had no interest in procreation was desperate to have children.
The Chandler business had hurt him deeply, leaving the gnawing, empty space in his heart more terrifying than ever. He was determined to 'start living', he insisted, falling in love with a woman, marrying and having children of his own. He told me at the time: 'I love Lisa. Why won't people believe that? Why won't people let me be happy?'
When Lisa didn't become immediately pregnant, he expressed his disappointment.
'I thought we'd be expecting within a couple of weeks of making love,' he said. 'Lisa says it takes time, but I don't have time. I want it to happen now. I want children so badly.'
Meanwhile, Lisa was realising that her mission to save Michael was not going to be easy. She was amazed by his emotional repression and felt he was resisting her efforts to help. Perhaps, she pondered, he rather enjoyed wallowing in his own pain, playing the victim.
He was 'like a young boy, angry at the world', one of her friends noted, and his self-pity became a strain on the relationship.
'She had no patience at all with the lost childhood routine. "Who hasn't had a miserable childhood?" she would say.'
His moods and habits became infuriating. She clocked up the hours her husband spent in the bathroom, applying and removing cosmetics.
Throughout their marriage, she never saw him without his make-up. When they slept together, in the morning she'd find his pillow smeared with it.
'Lisa would try to surprise him by waking early and tapping him on the shoulder,' a friend recalled.
'He would shriek "No, don't look!" and scamper to the bathroom.'
Other aspects of his behaviour alarmed her. She did not believe that he was a paedophile, but it concerned her that he had not learned his lesson from the Jordie Chandler affair and still chose to spend time with young boys.
She squirmed as she sat beside him during a television interview, when he was adamant he was going to continue having boys come to his home for sleepovers.
It was after this that things started going bad. One of Lisa's friends said: 'The great sex continued but when they weren't in bed making love, they were fighting. Lisa started to wonder if she'd made a mistake in choosing him as a life partner.'
What finished off the marriage was the issue of children - and it happened, in true Michael Jackson style, in the most bizarre of ways.
'When I imagined having a child with him, all I could ever see was the custody battle nightmare,' she said later.
Their physical intimacy had cooled. 'I think we have to have sex in order for me to get pregnant,' she told him, 'and I ain't doin' it.'
But Michael didn't mind. He had a plan. One day over breakfast, he told Lisa: 'My friend Debbie said she will have my baby. If you won't do it, then she will.'
Lisa was stunned. Life with Jackson had been weird from the start, but this was too much. She called his bluff. 'That's fine with me,' she said in a calm, controlled voice. 'Tell her to go ahead and do it.'
Michael got his way. Debbie would bear him two children, though whether they were ever intimate or underwent artificial insemination was never known for sure.
What was without doubt was that there was no future for him and Lisa. It had been the most improbable of marriages and it ended in divorce.
Michael was deeply upset. Never before had he felt uninhibited and physically intimate with anyone.
Despite the maddening friendships with boys and all of the rest of his eccentric behaviour, he was still a human being with emotions, feelings and a beating heart.
And Lisa Marie Presley had been the one to truly touch it.
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