Richard Bath: Boy in the bubble

'In a crowd, I'm afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage'

HERE are two Michael Jacksons. One is Wacko Jacko, the flawed but essentially harmless idiot savant. He was a man-child who recoiled from the pressure of super-stardom, finding solace in epic shopping sprees and a fantasy recreation of the childhood he never had, a man only ever completely at ease with guileless children and dumb animals. All this righteous angel was missing was a halo.

Then there is the other Michael Jackson, the sinister predator whose youthful spirit was systematically crushed by his father, and who in turn dominated and abused young boys, regaining his innocence by besmirching theirs. This is the venal, narcissistic manipulator who, far from indulging in bizarre flights of fancy, threw up a carefully-crafted smokescreen of eccentricity in the certain knowledge that it would shield the real him, the self-obsessed materialist him, from view. This was the unrepentant sinner with a God-complex; a man with a cruel, dark heart.

The truth probably lies somewhere between those extremes, but only now that Jackson is dead will the clichés crumble and the wall of silence subside, allowing a more nuanced story to emerge. Only now that Jackson's highly-paid lawyers and private investigators are no longer on the case, and the confidentiality clauses in contracts no longer enforceable, will the story be told by those who knew him best. The dam has burst, we can expect a wave of testimony to follow.

"No one knows the truth," said Jackson in 1987. "No one knows what, or who, I am. And the longer it takes them to discover this, the more famous I will be."

And now a further truth needs to be known – the truth of how the world's greatest entertainer died. What should we deduce about a man whose monthly budget in 2000 included a $10,000 standing charge to a Beverly Hills pharmacy? Perhaps we had an answer of sorts on Friday when a white coffin was loaded into a Los Angeles coroner's hearse and Jackson's personal doctor was questioned about the injection of Demerol, a morphine-like drug, given shortly before the 50-year-old stopped breathing.

After a three-hour postmortem on Friday, the coroner ruled out foul play. Initial reports suggested that after the injection, the singer had collapsed and suffered cardiac arrest. The doctor had been the only person with him yet failed to sign a death certificate and promptly disappeared. He was, however, in touch with the police and coroners yesterday.

Those who surrounded Jackson are not out of the woods just yet. Tests, including a toxicology report, have been ordered and could take up to six weeks. Their results are widely expected to reveal the full extent of his epic drug-taking and colour our perception of Jackson just as details of the sad final days of Elvis, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe indelibly skewed our memories of them.

"When the autopsy comes, all hell's going to break loose, so thank God we're celebrating him now," said Liza Minnelli, Jackson's longstanding friend.

The results of that toxicology report are likely to throw up a dizzying degree of drug use, including several substances capable of inducing a heart attack if taken in large enough quantities. In particular, the report will reveal his use of Pethidine and Demerol, powerful medications similar to morphine, and the opiate Dilaudid, Jackson's favourite drugs in a huge cocktail of painkillers, anti-depressants and stress-curbing medication. An injection of Demerol on the morning of his death will feature prominently in the report, but Jackson also took a range of strong skin-lightening drugs, such as Solaquin Forte, Retin A and Benoquin.

Jackson himself made repeated attempts to kick the habit, booking into addiction clinics in London and America on several occasions. Exactly how and why Jackson became addicted to painkillers remains a subject of conjecture, with family lawyer Brian Oxman claiming that he developed the addiction after breaking a leg and vertebrae while falling from a stage. Other accounts cite the pain from an incident in 1984 when his hair caught light while filming a Pepsi commercial; his biographer and friend J Randy Taraborrelli believes he became hooked when he was accused of abusing 13-year-old Jordy Chandler in 1993.

Whatever the genesis of his addiction, there's a consensus that the pressure of preparing for his make-or-break comeback concerts at London's O2 Arena had placed an intolerable degree of stress on a constitution which had become so frail that he had only managed to attend two of the 45 rehearsals. Yet Jackson, facing bankruptcy and with the option to pull out and face ruin or proceed and risk humiliation, had little choice but to press ahead.

Jackson's relatives are pointing the finger at those around the singer, who they say "enabled" him, a term for those who help a person to continue their addiction. Brian Oxman, a Jackson family lawyer, said the family had shared their concerns about Jackson's drug use with his advisers.

"I do not know the extent of the medications that he was taking, but the reports we have been receiving in the family are that it was extensive," he said. "This is something that I feared. This family has been trying for months to take care of Michael Jackson. The people who have surrounded him have been enabling him. This is a case of abuse of medications."

The singer's extensive drug use was no secret though. According to Vanity Fair investigative reporter Maureen Orth, in the music industry Jackson had a reputation as an inveterate and hopeless user of drugs. "I had always been told he was just so medicated," a former Sony employee told her as far back as 2003, "that half the time you don't know where what he says is coming from."

Where Jackson came from was a home in Gary, Indiana, where pain and cruelty were commonplaces. His irascible father, former session guitarist and crane driver Joseph Jackson, utterly dominated his nine children, ranting at them and beating them for minor misdemeanours. Michael was so scared of his father that he sometimes fainted when he entered the room. "I remember my mother screaming, 'Joe you're going to kill them, you're going to kill them'," Jackson later recalled. "I moved so fast he couldn't catch me, but when he did, oh my goodness. It was bad. It was really bad."

Jackson claimed that his mother Katherine, a Jehovah's Witness who worked at Sears & Roebuck's department store, starved him of affection and insisted he spent all his spare time studying the Bible. According to Jackson, who started singing in public from the age of five, the combination of his father's pushiness and aggression, plus his mother's cold indifference, made for a miserable childhood.

Yet his biographer Taraborrelli, who has known Jackson since they were both children, begs to differ. "Contrary to what Michael insists today, I felt he had a relatively happy childhood," says Taraborrelli. "Michael was very happy and well adjusted and fun-loving and a practical joker who seemed to enjoy his life and career. (Yet] he has demonised his childhood and child stardom in a way that makes it seem he wishes it had never occurred."

According to insiders, Jackson didn't fight the process of becoming a star but enthusiastically embraced it. As one said: "He was building an image for himself at an age when most kids were building treehouses." As soon as he left Joe and the Jackson Five behind to pursue a solo career, the scale of his ambitions became clear. "Michael's passion for world conquest was singular," said legendary record boss Walter Yetnikoff. "I knew all about burning ambition, but Michael's drive bordered on the psychopathic. He lived, breathed, slept, dreamed and spoke of nothing but number one successes. He was possessed."

Jackson was known to insiders as an aggressive businessman with dreams of becoming an entrepreneurial mogul, a would-be visionary who compared himself to Walt Disney. As a child performer, fans would throw money onto the stage, and Jackson would stuff so much in his pockets that he had to wear his belt super-tight to keep his trousers up; as an adult he judged himself by money and pursued it relentlessly. He married Debbie Rowe, the nurse who bore his first two children, only when he was told the Saudi prince he was hoping to do business with would disapprove of children out of wedlock.

Nor was he below base hucksterism. He might have been included in the Guinness Book of Records as the pop star with the greatest number of charity involvements at 39, but tax records in the US and UK showed his Heal the World Foundation and charity Earth Care failed to make any charitable donations. A court case in 2000 also revealed that he not only charged two charity concerts he put on in 1999 in Seoul and Munich for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Unesco, the Red Cross, and his own Heal the World Foundation a $1 million co-executive-producer fee, but also took the sponsorship money, TV and video rights. Only $100,000 went to good causes.

But if money was important to Jackson, the immortality that comes with fame was an even greater priority. The man who married Lisa-Marie Presley, sang on a record with Paul McCartney and bought The Beatles' back catalogue was obsessed with joining The King and the Fab Four to make up pop's Holy Trinity, which perhaps explains why his PR people demanded that interviewers refer to him as The King of Pop. Jackson's desire to follow Elvis and the Beatles' lead and move into film was behind his decision to pay Marlon Brando $1m for acting lessons in 2001.

Jackson, who was for many years a committed Jehovah's Witness and later flirted with the Nation of Islam, had a fully-formed God complex. On his 1984 tour, a disembodied voice told revellers to "Arise, all the world, and behold the Kingdom". Jackson himself told Oprah Winfrey that "I try to imitate Jesus".

His status as a self-proclaimed deity was at the root of some of his more nutty antics. Jackson struggled to accept any imperfections, in particular the broad nose and acne his father had relentlessly ridiculed. He also struggled with what he saw as the commercial limitations of his race – he said Elvis would never have been as popular if he'd been black – and took to referring to fellow Negroes as "spabooks". Being Michael Jackson, he could get anything he wanted, even if it meant changing race.

He chose to have his first two children, Michael Joseph Jr and Paris Michael Katherine, with his white nurse, while his third child Prince Michael II, conceived with an unknown mother, is completely white. He is such an ardent dieter that by the time he died he weighed less than nine stone.

Jackson's rejection of his race and anxiety about his appearance led to an obsession with plastic surgery. Jackson owned up to having two operations on his nose, but experts believe he had up to 50 procedures. The cartilage in his nose was completely cauterised, and as early as 1993 he was wearing a prosthesis on his nose owing to a lack of cartilage caused by extensive surgery. When ordered to remove his surgical mask in court in 2004, those around him gasped at the ravages of surgery on his nose that even thick layers of white make-up couldn't hide. On his body, he was using Benoquin to bleach his skin, although his scalp changed colour after the 1984 accident on a shoot for Pepsi when his hair caught fire.

It was, says his former head of publicity Bob Jones, his addiction to plastic surgery that led to his more outlandish, publicity-seeking excesses. Pretending to sleep in a hyperbaric oxygen tent to help him live to 150, offering to buy the Elephant Man John Merrick's bones, wearing a surgical mask, allowing Bubbles his chimp to sleep in a crib in his room, hanging his nine-month baby over a balcony, dressing his children in burkas, showing up in court dressed in pyjamas or a tuxedo – these were all, according to Jones, the ways in which Jackson tried to draw attention away from his rapidly changing appearance. "Michael Jackson's whole life has been about constructing an image that isn't necessarily true," says Jones.

In reality, Jackson was sick, suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, the psychological syndrome where sufferers become obsessed with how they look, to the point where they lose perception of how they are perceived by others. It didn't help that Jackson was so used to the adulation of his public that he was effectively divorced from real life, a prisoner of his own celebrity.

He was so used to being accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards and flunkies that he trembled if he had to open his own front door. He compared himself to "a haemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way".

"I hate to admit it, but I feel strange around everyday people," he said. "See, my whole life has been onstage, and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations and running after you. In a crowd, I'm afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I'd sleep on the stage."

That withdrawal from the real world saw him sucked into a fantasy world of his own making. Neverland, the Peter Pan-themed ranch in California with its own zoo which cost $4m a year to run, was its most obvious manifestation, but there were darker themes in the background, such as Jackson's addiction to prescription drugs and his heavy drinking. He had, said his former publicist Michael Levine, "a deep militancy to refuse reality at all costs".

The most troubling manifestation of that was his ongoing determination to have relationships with pretty young boys, relations which seem likely to have been sexually predatory in nature. Even after a scare in 1993, when he paid $28m to the parents of Jordy Chandler after they brought charges of child sexual abuse against him after the 13-year-old proved he could accurately describe Jackson's "mottled" genitalia (Jackson tried everything to stop this examination, even striking the examining doctor), he still continued to sleep in the same bed as young boys. Until they reached puberty, that is, at which stage they were jettisoned from his inner circle.

That arrogant recklessness, or perhaps compulsion, was to be his undoing in 2003 when he agreed to an extended interview with English journalist Martin Bashir, recommended to him by illusionist Uri Geller, one of his motley collection of friends. More than 15 million people watched and heard 12-year-old cancer sufferer Gavin Arvizo tell Bashir that: "There was one night I asked him if I could stay in the bedroom and he let me stay in the bedroom. And I said, 'Michael, you can sleep on the bed' and he said, 'no, no, you sleep in the bed'."

Despite Jackson's protestations that "it's not sexual, we're going to sleep, I tuck them in, it's very charming, it's very sweet", the damage was done. The police officers who had been frustrated by the Jordy pay-off a decade earlier swooped and Jackson found himself in court accused of seducing minors. This time the revelations were even more embarrassing, with phrases like "Jesus Juice" (alcohol) and "Duck Butter" (sperm) becoming part of the tabloid lexicon. For once Jackson couldn't pay off the parents, yet his highly paid legal team sowed enough doubts that, against all the odds, Jackson was acquitted.

The verdict was the final straw for many long-time friends, including his former mentor Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. "I saw a man with the potential for great goodness, but he alienated me utterly with his selfishness," he said. "I have no reason to believe that Michael Jackson is a paedophile. I do have every reason to believe, however, that he has led a decadent existence which has utterly alienated him from his fan base and the people who once supported and respected him. His is a putrid existence."

A control freak who tapped phones at a Neverland ranch ringed with armed guards, who made staff sign confidentiality agreements and would pursue them aggressively if they broke them, Jackson was ready to use less legal methods too. Boteach would be less than impressed had he known about Jackson's relationship with private investigator Anthony Pellicano, "the sin-eater of Hollywood" and a man who was once arrested by the FBI for possession of explosives and intimidation.

Just before the trial was due to take place, Jordy Chandler was almost run over. After missing him the first time the driver turned around and tried again. His father was threatened, received a dead rat in a box and had his office ransacked. Chandler's lawyer received death threats and had pornographic graffiti sprayed on his office shortly before they accepted Jackson's offer to settle.

Those who didn't settle fared much worse. Victor Gutierrez, a Chilean journalist who claims to have seen a tape of Jackson having sex with minors and who wrote a scrupulously detailed book about the Chandler case, says he was visited by Pellicano, who told him "consider yourself dead". When Gutierrez was beaten up in the street by three men, Pellicano was on hand, drawing up in his black Lexus and laughing at the bleeding Chilean. There have been plenty of death threats since then.

Perhaps because he endured so much ridicule, Jackson became good at hating. When Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola refused to spend any more money promoting HIStory, the album which cost more to produce than it raised from sales, Jackson and Rev Al Sharpton marched on Sony and accused Mottola – then married to mixed-race artist Mariah Carey and close friend of countless rappers – of racism.

The singer had a list of 25 key enemies, including David Geffen and Stephen Spielberg, who featured in a trip to a Malian witch-doctor called Baba in Switzerland in 2000, when for $150,000 Baba promised they would die within the week, and sacrificed 42 cows to ensure it happened. That wasn't Jackson's only brush with voodoo: he had already undergone a bath in sheeps' blood and paid mysterious Egyptian woman Samia $1 million to ease his chronic debts of $250m.

So, a tortured soul driven by his demons to the drugs that claimed his life? According to some of those who knew him, his freaky preoccupations should fool no one. It is, they say, all about the fame and fortune.

"Michael Jackson is about as crazy as Colin Powell," says Scottish photographer Harry Benson, who has worked extensively with Jackson. "He knows everything he is doing. He holds his baby over the balcony and everybody goes crazy, but he's in every newspaper around the world."