From
their very first date, at a dinner
party staged by a mutual friend,
Michael and Lisa hit it off. Raised in
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
fiancé. '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. '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.
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. 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
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,
in 2005, Michael Jackson stood trial on a series of
child molestation charges involving
young boys and was acquitted on
all counts.
Michael Jackson Death
Lisa
Marie Biography | Lisa
Marie Pictures | LMP Lingerie
Lisa Marie Pre-Nuptial
Agreement | Lisa
Marie Japanese Wedding
Lisa Marie & Michael
Lockwood | Photos
Lisa Marie Twin Girls
Inside Jackson's Neverland
|
Lisa Marie on Marriage
to Jackson
