The truth about Michael Jackson’s sexuality

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…

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.

As stacks of magazines and pictures were thrown into crates, one of the staff held up a photograph and asked: ‘Is that Macaulay Culkin in his underwear?’ It was.
The picture of the 13-year-old star of Home Alone was boxed, along with a lot of others of children similarly dressed down.

The maid heard a colleague mutter: ‘This guy is nuts, isn’t he?’ The maid herself ‘felt bad about the whole thing’ – and soon the whole world would, too, as the lid came off Michael Jackson’s bizarre private life.

Everyone had known the global superstar was weird. But now, it seemed, he was wicked, too, and in an area he had always claimed to be a total innocent – sex.

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.’

He regularly visited sick youngsters. To the world at large, his interest seemed odd, but not necessarily inappropriate. It was part of the way he seemed to shun the world in favour of a fantasy lifestyle.

Mostly, where Michael’s personal life was concerned, people felt a sense of sadness. He was an enigma: perplexing and eccentric, but essentially asexual.
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.

But the allegations being fired at him by Jordie Chandler and his family were like a bomb going off. ‘Peter Pan or pervert?’ asked a headline in the New York Post.

It was a question that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

He was a contradictory figure. From being the youngest who always had to do what he was told, he had taken a firm control of his career and even sacked his father as his manager.

He was now the adult in charge. But in every other area of his life, instead of growing up he seemed to be regressing: buying toys, playing childlike games and, for the first time, surrounding himself with children.

Young fans who gathered at the gates of the Jackson estate in Encino were invited to spend time with him.

Asked about the possibility of having children of his own, he shook his head. He might adopt, but he would not procreate. ‘I don’t have to bring my own into the world,’ he said uneasily.

Instead, he began to develop friendships with young boys.

The first was with Emmanuel Lewis, a 12-year-old actor, just 3ft 4in tall, whom Michael liked to carry in his arms as if he were a toddler.
They played cowboys and indians and rolled on the lawn. He seemed to be trying to live the childhood he believed he had missed because of his career.

Some found nothing wrong in Michael’s behaviour. To his voice coach Seth Riggs, he was just a ‘natural, loving person’ who went gaga over kids.

Others were not so sure. Michael’s manager, Frank Dileo, expressed concern after Michael gave a $100,000 Rolls-Royce to the parents of another friend, ten-year-old Jimmy Safechuck. Dileo was worried how the gift might look. Hurt, the singer told him to mind his own business.

His friendship with Jordie Chandler would make what Michael did or did not get up to with young boys everyone’s business.

Whatever the truth about Jackson’s sexuality, it was clear – to everyone but him – that, in so openly flouting convention and insisting people trust him, he was playing a dangerous game. He and Jordie had met when Jackson’s car broke down in Beverly Hills.

The world’s biggest-selling pop star, clad in black turban and veil, stood by the road feeling powerless and utterly alone. He normally had servants to solve this kind of problem – but today he’d left them at home.

The boss of a nearby car-hire business saw his plight and came to his aid.

He brought the star back to his office while the car was fixed and then rang his wife, June, urging her to bring Jordie, her son from her first marriage, to meet the VIP customer.

When the boy, dark-haired and bright-eyed, his face lean and angular, arrived, Jackson peered over his sunglasses at him. Jordie, a huge fan of Jackson, smiled – and his idol smiled back.

In the coming months, the star took the boy and his sister to a toy store and let them load $10,000 of toys into their shopping trolleys.

At Neverland, they all rode in a gondola to the highest point of the Ferris wheel and stopped.
‘Do you know how much time I spend up here alone?’ Jackson mused, looking out over his 2,000 acres, with a lake, statues inspired by Peter Pan and Disney music emanating from speakers disguised as rocks in flowerbeds. ‘I have all this, yet I have nothing.’

‘You have us now,’ Jordie said, putting his arm round Michael’s shoulder. Michael smiled. ‘My new little family,’ he beamed.

June, Jordie’s mother, was happy to go along with this. ‘I truly don’t think there’s a devious bone in Michael’s body,’ she said.

Nonetheless, she was worried one morning when she caught her son coming out of Jackson’s room, where he had spent the night.

‘Never do that again, Jordie,’ she scolded. Reluctantly, Jordie agreed.

Later, he told Michael about his mother’s concern, and the singer took her aside. ‘How could you think I would hurt Jordie?’ he asked.

He then told her his theory that children were sexually innocent until ‘conditioned’ by adults to be otherwise. It was his desire, he said, that Jordie remain pure and untouched by the adult world.

Then he quizzed the boy. ‘Did Michael ever touch your penis?’ he asked. Groggily, Jordie said that Michael had.

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June was appeased. She apologised and said she trusted Jackson. The next day, he gave her a $12,000 ruby-and-diamond bracelet from Cartier. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I just love you.’

With Jordie, he had a pact to ‘never grow up’ and ‘live with me in Neverland for ever’.

Even Jordie’s natural father, dentist Evan Chandler, divorced from June, after initial suspicions about what was going on, was won over.

But as time went by he began to have second thoughts. It bothered him that his son was dressing in black hats and sunglasses, and that he and Jackson were always whispering together, sharing private jokes, then clamming up whenever anyone else entered the room.

One day, he had Jordie in his surgery to extract a troublesome tooth and put him under with the so-called truth drug, sodium amytal.

Then he quizzed the boy. ‘Did Michael ever touch your penis?’ he asked. Groggily, Jordie said that Michael had.

Chandler took his son to see a psychiatrist. In a gruelling three-hour session, the boy told of many incidents of masturbation and oral sex with Jackson.

Within hours, Jordie was being interviewed by the police, and the allegations of sexual activity between the world’s biggest pop star and a 13-year-old boy swiftly flashed around the globe.

To try to calm the storm breaking, Jackson’s advisers put up people to speak out on his behalf. The two ‘friends’ they chose were Brett Barnes and Wade Robson – aged 11 and ten!

Brett admitted that he and Michael had slept together on many occasions, but with no sexual overtones. ‘He kisses you like you kiss your mother. It’s not unusual for him to hug and nuzzle up to you.’

Wade also slept in the same bed as Michael dozens of times, but ‘just as a friend and the bed was huge’.

Doubts were not stilled by their testimonies.
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.

When Chandler confronted him, saying ‘You and Jordie are having sex, aren’t you? Just be a man and f***ing admit it’, he stayed composed.

‘That’s preposterous,’ he replied. ‘It never happened.’

In the end, there was no police prosecution. Not one witness came forward to corroborate Jordie Chandler’s story or to make similar accusations, and without other witnesses the case was weak.

Perhaps Michael had the undying loyalty of the youngsters with whom he’d had sex. Or, maybe, conceivably, he was innocent.

The issues were never aired in court. A civil case against Jackson was settled out of court with a $20million payment to Jordie.

It was not, Jackson’s people emphasised, an admission of guilt but simply to draw a line under the whole tawdry affair.

What we do know is that when, 11 years later, in 2005, he stood trial on a series of child molestation charges involving other young boys, he was acquitted on all counts.

In the dark days of his humiliation over the Chandler affair, 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?
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.’

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.
‘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.

‘He 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.’

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.

He had one grown-up friend, Debbie Rowe. She had been a ‘biker chick’ in black leather when she was younger, swore like a sailor, drank beer and tequila and, despite having wealthy parents, was always penniless.

‘When I imagined having a child with him, all I could ever see was the custody battle nightmare,’ she said

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She was the nurse at his dermatologist’s, and he had met her ten years earlier when his skin first came out in mysterious blotches and he was certain he had skin cancer.

He had been in touch with her again after he bleached his scrotum with a special cream and it burned him. Debbie attended to him, and to show his gratitude, he gave her a car.

By September 1995, Michael was still pushing Lisa to get pregnant. She, however, was reluctant – sensing that the marriage was doomed.

‘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.