The Michael Jackson Tapes

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Also by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

 

 

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

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

THE SAME MICHAEL JACKSON IN CONVERSATION
WITH RABBI SHMULEY

The Morality Tale, Our Friendship, His Demons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principal tragedy of his life was to mistake attention for love, fame for family, material acquisition for true spiritual purpose. I will never forget how, when we first began our conversations that are the
soul of this book, Michael said the haunting words that I used for the epigraph of this book: