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Michael Jackson may have been the King of Pop, but he could barely buy a friend.
In journalist Randall Sullivan’s shocking new book, “Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson,” out this week, family and “friends” take the superstar for all he’s worth — demanding payment for favors and looting his house after his death.
In one instance in 2001, two tribute concerts were planned at Madison Square Garden for Jackson’s 30th anniversary in music.
The Jacksons sought to profit from the event, demanding $250,000 each to attend, even for those who would simply be watching from the crowd.
And even that wasn’t enough.
When Michael’s brother Jermaine learned that Michael’s take from the shows would reach $10 million, he convinced his parents that they should demand another $500,000 each.
After hiding out from his family for several days, Michael stopped at the Neverland Ranch with his kids to pick up a few items before the trip to New York. Almost as soon as he arrived, his family turned up at the gate.
Michael tried to have them sent away, the book reports, but they claimed that Michael’s mother needed to use the restroom. As soon as they barged their way inside, “they literally ransacked the place” searching for Michael to get him to sign the contracts.
The singer, meanwhile, “retreated with the kids to a hiding place concealed behind a secret door at the back of his bedroom closet.”
In tears, he called an associate and cried, “You see what they do to me? Do you understand . . . why I hide from them?”
His family weren’t the only ones whose love was for sale. Jackson’s “good friend” Marlon Brando, whom the singer took acting lessons from for years, charged him $1 million for his rambling video tribute — an awful investment, it turned out, since the Madison Square Garden crowd wound up booing Brando’s nonsensical ramblings.
By comparison, his famously close relationship with Elizabeth Taylor came cheap. When Taylor was once asked to participate in a video to help counter some horrible press Jackson received, all she demanded for her time was a $638,000 necklace.
Another of the book’s themes is Jackson’s inability to deal with normal life. During a 2003 trip to Las Vegas for a business meeting, Jackson’s partner needed to use the bathroom and asked him to wait, but the pop star decided to return to his room. Problem was, he didn’t remember where that was.
“He just walks up some stairs and starts knocking on doors, waiting for the bodyguards to open one,” says the partner, Marc Schaffel.
The space around him was “filling with excited people who were following Michael Jackson down the hallway.”
“The entire hotel is in an uproar,” Schaffel recalled, “and Michael just keeps moving from door to door, knocking on each one, getting more and more frantic to escape the crowd gathering behind him. Michael would have just kept going until somebody showed up to take care of him.”
This wary relationship with the adult world also led to Jackson’s many plastic surgeries, which Sullivan lays out in detail. While the first two, starting in 1980, occurred after Jackson broke his nose in a fall, they continued, driven by insecurities propelled by the horrendous acne he had suffered as a teen, and childhood taunts by his father and brothers, who called him “big nose” and “liver lips.” Jackson told one of his doctors how he was “upset by photographs of himself standing next to Diana Ross; her nose was so thin and his was so fat.”
(Jackson told one of his doctors how he was “upset by photographs of himself standing next to Diana Ross; her nose was so thin and his was so fat.”)
He began bleaching his skin as early as the late 1970s and had many surgeries throughout the ’80s, including “permanent eyeliner tattooed around his eyes . . . and a pink tattoo [that] defined the perimeter of his lipstick.”
While many felt Jackson sought to make himself look less black, the likely truth was more heartbreaking — that he wanted to look less like his father.
“If he couldn’t erase Joe from his life,” said one family friend, “at least he could erase him from the reflection in the mirror.” Another friend said, “Michael insisted upon having white children because ‘he did not want to take the chance that a child of his would look like Joseph.’ ”
Although Jackson was having surgery done about every two months by the 1990s, it’s possible he had fewer than he thought, as one of his doctors was accused by four of his nurses of staging “elaborate hoaxes” in which he’d place Jackson under anesthesia, “but only pretend to perform an operation,” waking the singer with a bandaged nose.
By the early 2000s, Jackson barely had a nose left — one doctor said he was down to “two blow holes” — and so he “made do with prosthetics,” keeping “a big jar of fake noses” in his closet, “surrounded by tubes of stage glue.”
Within his whirlwind of chaos, Jackson sought some refuge. Some of his few happy moments came when he stayed with a family of longtime, non-celebrity friends in Franklin Lakes, N.J. Jackson would visit with his kids and revel in the mundanity of household tasks such as loading the dishwasher and dusting the furniture, taking “delight” in vacuuming the floors.
For him, “normal” was an escape.
As Jackson himself told the friend on the phone as he hid from his family in his panic room: “Do you understand now why I am the way I am? How else could I be?”