When you consider how frail Michael Jackson was at his death – only 112 pounds, according to his older sister La Toya, 136 pounds in the official coroner’s report – it’s amazing that such meagre remains have provided a rich feast for so many people.
Forbes magazine estimated that in the year following his death, he had revenues of $275-million (U.S.), more than any other pop star on this earthly plane or the next. Michael’s father Joe, with whom he had a famously troubled early relationship, has told CNN that he wants to build a series of theme parks based on his son’s ideals, called “Happyland.” Perhaps “Irony-Free Land” was already taken.
Now La Toya, who used to go door-to-door proselytizing the Jehovah’s Witness faith with her younger brother, has written a memoir whose main, and perhaps only, selling point is its claim that Michael Jackson was murdered. In her book Starting Over, she makes dark insinuations about shadowy forces who are unnamed, but whose dimly described outline strongly suggests the executors of Jackson’s estate and AEG Live, the company promoting his London comeback performances. The reason for her brother’s early death two years ago, at the age of 50? Apparently nefarious players wanted to get their hands on Jackson’s lucrative publishing catalogue.
“He told me repeatedly that he was going to be murdered,” said La Toya, 55, speaking over the phone from New York. “They were going to murder him because they were after his publishing catalogue. I said, ‘You’re Michael Jackson, no one would ever do that to you.’ But he said, ‘You don’t understand what it’s worth.’ ”
She related this conversation rapidly, as if hoping that speaking quickly would gloss over the fact that she never actually names who “they” are, or how “they” ended the King of Pop’s life. “If you read the book,” she said in the small, breathless voice shared by many Jacksons, “it directs you to exactly what he said would happen.” What about Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s personal physician, accused of involuntary manslaughter, who will be tried in two months on charges that he administered the sedatives and surgical anesthetic that led to the pop star’s death?
“Of course he was involved, and yes, he was the fall guy,” said Jackson. “But he was not the only one. This is a conspiracy.” (Murray has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Unfortunately, she doesn’t lay out the exact nature of the conspiracy, perhaps because the siblings, who had been so close as children, encountered each other only intermittently in Los Angeles restaurants toward the end, with their conversation seemingly limited to compliments over each other’s accessories. La Toya didn’t see her brother between his trial on child-abuse charges (he was acquitted in 2005) and May, 2009, a month before his death.
There were forces controlling her brother, she says, who tried to keep him isolated from his family. La Toya recognized her brother’s predicament, because she too was the subject of an abusive and controlling relationship. Much of her memoir is devoted to a chronicle of the torment she suffered at the hands of Jack Gordon, her late husband. It was Gordon, she says, who loathed her family and forced her to make the notorious statement at a Tel Aviv press conference in 1993 when she condemned Michael as a child molester. (Her brother forgave her for the very public betrayal, according to the memoir.) She quotes from a song she wrote about her former husband — but before she does, she adds that it’s available on iTunes: “I should have left you but I had no chance/A profit to you with the size of my pants/You controlled me with my own finance.”
Despite such offerings, La Toya has not had quite the success in the music world as her younger brother. But the picture she paints of Michael is a man who was unable to take comfort from his success, an anxious wanderer in the last few years of his life, surrounded by a coterie of sinister puppet-masters. Toward the end, she writes, Jackson was so sure he would be harmed that he wore a bullet-proof vest in public. He was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to complete the 50 sold-out shows he’d been booked to perform in London.
The last time she saw him was a month before his death, at their parents’ 60th wedding anniversary, when he arrived looking even more fragile than usual, and swathed in layers of clothing so no one would realize just how thin he actually was.
Said his sister, “It’s so sad, because I had the chance to start over again, and Michael didn’t.” Or, she might have added, to tell his own side of the story.