While the case against him for the alleged sexual abuse of 12-year-old Jordie Chandler brought out his bizarre lifestyle and love for proximity to children out into the open, no one really believed him when he insisted he had romanced girls like Tatum O'Neal or Brooke Shields.
In fact, according to extracts from a book published in a UK tabloid, 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.'
And when Michael Jackson was growing up, his mother too worried that he rarely went out with girls. As people settled into seeing the star as an eccentric, but essentially asexual, came his marriage to Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, in 1994.
Writes Randy Taraborrelli in Michael Jackson: The Magic And The Madness, Jackson’s friend and confidant of 40 years, “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.”
Michael and Lisa hit it off on their very first date, at a dinner party of a mutual friend. They believed they were soulmates. Michael flirted openly, and as they talked, Lisa felt she was seeing the real Michael, the man behind the mask.
Throughout the time of his obsession with Jordie Chandler, Jackson dated Lisa intermittently and after the case began, he took her support in “long, anguished phone calls”, writes Taraborrelli.
Lisa is quoted as saying, “Yes, I started falling for him. I wanted to help him, and I felt that I could.” She stood by him as he spiralled into drug addiction. During one phone call, he asked how she would respond if he proposed marriage. Her reply was instant: “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’,” Taraborrelli writes.
The two walked holding hands in Neverland and kissed at the top of the Ferris wheel. She slept with him in his bedroom and for Michael, it’s said to be the first time he 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',” shares Taraborrelli. However, certain things bordered on the bizarre. '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.
Throughout the time they were married, she never saw him without make-up on. When she woke in the morning, she'd find his pillow smeared with it. Her husband spent hours in the bathroom, applying and removing cosmetics.
'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.'
The book says, “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'.”
They were also reportedly into “role-playing” games and he liked Lisa to wear jewellery in bed.
‘If you can’t give me a baby, Debbie will’
And while Lisa’s mother Priscilla Presley fumed that the marriage was a cover-up for the child abuse charges, Jackson had another agenda altogether. Previously adamant that he had no interest in having biological children, he was now desperate.
He told the author, “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'.”
She was also alarmed at his behaviour and though she didn’t believe he was a paedophile, she was concerned when he still chose to spend time with young boys. At this point, things soured between the two. 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.”
By September 1995, Michael was pushing Lisa to get pregnant and she could sense the marriage was doomed. She later said, “When I imagined having a child with him, all I could ever see was the custody battle nightmare.”
The marriage ended after Michael announced that he had a plan to get himself a baby. “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’.”
Debbie went on to bear him two children, but his marriage was well and truly over. It left Michael deeply upset — never before had he felt uninhibited and physically intimate with anyone and Lisa Marie Presley had been the one to truly touch his heart.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
12:28 PM
savcenko
