The Michael Jackson Tapes (6 page)

Professor Wiesel offered to call his personal physician to attend to Michael, and about half an hour later one of New York's most prestigious doctors walked through the door. He went into Michael's room and spent about a quarter of an hour there. When he came out, he looked ashen-faced. He stood by the door of Michael's bedroom and said to us, “Michael has just asked me for a quantity of drugs that would kill a horse.”

I was shocked. I ran into Michael's room. “Michael, the doctor just said that you asked him for enough drugs to kill a horse.” Michael seemed very calm. “Shmuley, he's wrong. I have a very high tolerance. I'm used to this. I'll be fine.” He was defending what he just asked for.

“Look Michael, what you think doesn't matter. Years ago you admitted to an addiction to prescription painkillers. Maybe your tolerance level is extremely high. But even the doctor doesn't want to administer the level of painkillers you're requesting. You're playing with your life here. This stuff is poison. You have to get off it. You're just going to have to get used to the pain. We live with our pain and we grow from our pain. You're not supposed to just medicate it away. You can't pay people to take it away. You can't dull it with doctors. And this doctor
is a
real
doctor and he won't give it to you, and none of us will let you have it.” The doctor departed and Michael did not get the medication he requested.

The next day Michael came to my home for Sabbath dinner with Prince and Paris and made a point of telling me that the reason he was standing, rather than sitting, at the table was that he did not take any painkillers for his back, as per our conversation the night before. He was trying to impress me with his capacity for growth. He wanted to show that he got it.

As the weeks progressed Michael and I continued to work on promoting our Heal the Kids initiative, which focused on inspiring parents to have regular family dinners together, read bedtime stories to their children, and provide them with a loving and protective environment. We met with many dignitaries who could be helpful to the organization and made plans for two major public events right after the New Year. The first was a seminar in parenting that would take place at Carnegie Hall and which would be introduced by Michael, and the second, a joint lecture Michael and I would deliver about a children's Bill of Rights at Oxford University in England.

Just before Christmas, Michael went home to Neverland for the holidays. That's when I got my first real view of how careless Michael was with money. He had a whole floor at the hotel, one of the most expensive in New York. He kept the floor for the three or four weeks he was away. When he came back, I asked him why he didn't give the rooms back. And he said, “What were we supposed to do with our stuff?” I said, “Michael, you pack it in suitcases and put it in hotel storage. Then it's ready for you as soon as you come back.” It was yet another glimpse of the kind of recklessness that was undermining Michael's life and leading him down the road to bankruptcy.

And this financial picture is significant. One of the main factors that killed Michael was the crazy schedule of fifty concerts for 2009 in the O2 Center. Michael was not in the psychological, emotional, or physical position to get through one concert, let alone fifty. But he was forced to agree to it due to his horrendous finances, accumulated through years of reckless spending. And when Michael panicked under pressure, he turned to ever larger doses of prescription drug medication for salvation.

I had always heard that Elvis met with spiritual personalities on a regular basis and his question to them was, “I was a truck driver from Memphis and then I became the most famous entertainer in the world. So why me? What am I supposed to do with this? To what purpose is the fame meant to be consecrated?” It was his inability to find a satisfactory and compelling response to this important question that made fame his incarceration.

When you can't devote your celebrity to a higher cause it becomes a terrible weight. You become a burden to yourself. You're the biggest star in the world, but you're imprisoned and can't even walk outside. To make matters worse, you become Elvis even in your own mind. You can no longer think of yourself in natural, organic terms. Rather, you see yourself from the perspective of your fans. You begin to lose your innate humility and regard anyone who doesn't treat you with due reverence as someone unworthy of your friendship and trust. Those who criticize you are quickly shunted aside. You gravitate toward sycophants. Now if you can liberate yourself by devoting that burden to something higher then you're free. But if you can't you get crushed under its weight. And that's what was slowly happening to Michael.

Michael returned to New York in January and we got into gear for the several major events we'd scheduled for February and March to launch Heal the Kids.

The first, on Valentine's Day at Carnegie Hall, was a large event where Michael and I invited leading childrearing experts, as well as personalities such as Johnnie Cochran, Judith Regan, and Dr. Drew Pinsky, to discuss how the romantic love between husband and wife should lead to the building of a stable family with children being nourished from the foundational devotion of loving parents. Then, less than a month later, on March 6th, we gave a major address together at the main debating chamber of the Oxford Union at Oxford University, where so many luminaries had spoken before him. The speech was largely on the theme of forgiveness and the importance of children refraining from judging their parents. I had written it for Michael
based on our interviews for this book and his own thoughts about his desire to change and heal.

When people first heard that Michael was going to give a lecture at Oxford they laughed. But he received a standing ovation from over a thousand enthralled students and it was extremely well-received in the press. I worked harder writing that speech than almost anything I had ever written because I so badly wanted the world to see Michael in a positive light. Interestingly an excerpt from the speech was used in the opening to Ian Halperin's bestseller,
Unmasked.

To my mind, his words can almost be seen as Michael's and my hope and wish for the new direction in his life. I had decided that the lecture should focus largely on the theme of children refraining from judging their parents so that Michael himself would seek to purge himself of all the unhealthy anger he harbored toward his father. If the broken parent-child bond was to be rebuilt, it could not be done against a backdrop of bitterness, disappointment, and recrimination. Children would have to learn how to put themselves in their parents' shoes, empathize with the challenges they faced as people and as parents, and try and understand why they made the bad mistakes they did as parents.

I told Michael that he would have to embody the lesson by not just preaching it but living it. He would have to reconcile with his father, with whom he had a famously tortured relationship. Michael had on many public occasions criticized his father and I had told him it was inappropriate. He owed his father gratitude rather than hostility, in accordance with the Fifth Commandment, in which God had commanded him to honor his father. Even if he didn't always feel love for him, he still had to honor him.

On the way down to Oxford, while we were just hours away from the lecture, I told Michael that the time had come. His lecture would be meaningless if he did not call his father before the event and tell him that he loved him and that he should never have judged him. That, because he hadn't lived his father's life, he couldn't possibly understand why his father did the things he did. He took a cell phone and called his father and reached him in Las Vegas.

Several of us in the car bore witness to Michael telling his father, perhaps for the first time, that he loved him and that his speech at Oxford
that night would be all about him and how he now recognizes that he had no right to judge him. Michael always called his father Joseph, rather than Dad. When his father first answered the phone, Michael said, “I'm giving a speech at Oxford University tonight. And it's about you.” His father immediately said, “Uh oh!” And Michael corrected his misconception. “No, it's nothing bad. It's to tell the world that I love you.”

Michael's speech conveyed an important message of healing: