The Secret Tape Recording
Now that Evan Chandler had filed such damaging court papers against June, there was no way she could trust him. June’s estranged husband, Dave, agreed with her that Evan was a threat. Would he take his claims against June further by claiming that she had been an unfit parent by allowing Jordie’s relationship with Michael to continue? Would he try to obtain complete custody of Jordie?
On 2 July 1993, Evan and Dave met at Rent-A-Wreck to discuss what was going on in the family. During the meeting, Evan made it clear that he wanted Michael’s reign over Jordie’s life to come to an end, and that he was about to start taking action to see to it that it happened. He asked for Dave’s assistance. However, Dave made it clear that he did not agree with Evan and did not wish to interfere with Jordie’s relationship with Michael. June had been monitoring the situation, he said, and he wasn’t going to second-guess her. If he did so, he argued, he would risk a deeper wedge in his marriage to her, and he would probably alienate Jordie, as well.
Over the next week, Evan continued to be a problem. Michael, June and Jordie did not trust him and wanted as little to do with him as possible. They had not returned his telephone calls; it had been almost a month since Evan spoke to Jordie. Now, Evan was pushing for a meeting with the three of them. He knew that June and Jordie intended to accompany Michael on his upcoming tour, and that they would be gone for five months. He didn’t want them to go, felt it was unsafe for Jordie. He called June and left a message on her answering machine during which he insisted that she, Jordie and Michael meet with him on 9 July.
Dave called Evan to ask him what it was he hoped to accomplish by demanding such a meeting. ‘You’re not going to get anywhere that way,’ he told him.
‘Listen, you dumb ass,’ Evan told him. ‘I’m worried about my kid. I want him with me, now. I don’t know what’s going on with you people and Michael Jackson, but I don’t like it.’
The two men then argued for about an hour, hurling insults at one another.
Perhaps in order to learn what Evan had in mind, Dave decided to secretly tape-record a telephone conversation with him. An hour after their argument, he called Evan, again.
During that 8 July conversation, transcripts of which were later filed with the Los Angeles County Court House, Evan said that he was angry because Michael had stopped telephoning him and no longer wanted a friendly relationship with him. ‘There was no reason why he had to stop calling me,’ Evan told Dave. He added that he’d recently had a long conversation with Michael and told him ‘exactly what I want out of the relationship with him.’ (He didn’t say during the conversation with Dave, however, what it was he wanted from Michael.) He also maintained that, in his view, Michael was spending too much time with Jordie, and that something was ‘not right about it’. He was furious with June, he said, who had told him to ‘fuck’ himself, when he tried to discuss Michael with her. When pressed, Evan said that he believed Michael Jackson had ‘broken up the family’ and that Jordie had been ‘seduced by this guy’s money and power’. He didn’t say, during the conversation, that he suspected Michael might also be having sex with Jordie. However, he did allow that he had hired an attorney to start looking into the matter, his friend, Barry Rothman.
As it happened, Barry had been in Evan’s dental chair one day for work when Evan began to confide in him about certain changes in Jordie’s personality. He became so emotional when recounting recent events, he began to cry. There was a wall between him and his son, he told the attorney, and he simply didn’t know how to scale it, or tear it down. He was losing Jordie, he said. As the two discussed the matter, Barry recalls Evan saying that he had begun to believe that Michael and Jordie’s relationship may have become sexual. If that was the case, Barry Rothman suggested, perhaps Evan might need an attorney. They agreed to trade services, dental for legal.
‘I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find,’ Evan told Dave, speaking of Barry Rothman who had, in the past represented Little Richard, the Who, the Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne. ‘All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can,’ Evan continued. ‘He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s smart, and he’s hungry for publicity. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. OnceI make that phone call, this guy [Barry Rothman] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. I’ve given him full authority to do that.
‘Jackson is an evil guy,’ Evan continued, sounding fired up. ‘He is worse than that, and I have the evidence to prove it. If I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no wayI lose. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son] and Michael’s career will be over.’
Evan and Dave then discussed June’s plans to take Jordie on Michael’s Dangerous tour in the fall. ‘Well, they may think so,’ Evan said, ‘but they’re not going anywhere.’
Clearly baiting him for more information, Dave asked Evan how his plan might help Jordie. Evan’s response was disconcerting. ‘That’s irrelevant to me,’ he said. ‘The bottom line is, yes, his mother is harming him, and Michael is harming him. I can prove that, and I will prove that. It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get the information I got, and you know I don’t have that kind of money. I’m willing to go down financially. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want. It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together.
‘I believe Jordie is already irreparably harmed,’ Evan continued. ‘The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. This man is going to be humiliated beyond belief,’ Evan concluded. ‘You will not believe what’s going to happen to him. Beyond his worst nightmares. He will not sell one more record. The facts are so overwhelming, everyone will be destroyed in the process.’
Did Evan Chandler know he was being tape-recorded? Did he also suspect the recording might one day be played for Michael Jackson? Was he being melodramatic and intimidating just for the sake of scaring Michael off? Or, did he really plan to ruin him? Only he knows what was in his head at this time… and he hasn’t said.
The day after Evan Chandler’s inflammatory comments about Michael Jackson were tape-recorded by Dave Schwartz, Evan hoped to have the family conference he had long sought to discuss Jordie. However, no one showed up at the meeting. Now, he was more infuriated than ever. Finally, he got June on the telephone. According to June’s former attorney, Michael Freeman, Evan reiterated his concerns that something improper might be going on between Jordie and Michael. June said that Evan was ‘full of baloney’. Moreover, she told him that she and Jordie still intended to go on tour with Michael, and that Evan would ‘just have to get used to the idea’.
Michael Freeman recalled, ‘Evan then said that he was going to go to the media. Right away, we thought, Why would he do that? If he really believed Jordie was being abused, why would he not go to the police instead of the press?’
That same day, June and Dave decided to meet with Michael to tell him there might be trouble ahead where Evan was concerned. However, Michael didn’t take them seriously. ‘Oh, this kind of stuff happens to me all the time,’ he told them. ‘People are always trying to get money out of me. I’ll have my people work it out. Don’t worry about it.’ However, when they played Michael the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan, Michael became anxious. ‘He sounded so angry,’ Michael told me of Evan Chandler in an interview months later. ‘I knew then and there that it was extortion. He said it right on the tape. So what I did then,’ Michael told me, ‘was turn it over to Bert [Fields] and [private investigator] Anthony [Pellicano] and I decided to try to forget about it.’
‘Were you angry?’ I asked Michael.
‘No,’ Michael told me. ‘I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, so why would I be angry?’
‘Because you believed you hadn’t done anything wrong, yet you were being accused of a horrible crime?’ I offered.
‘I don’t think like that,’ Michael said, bluntly. ‘I don’t live in fear.’ In retrospect, it seems that Michael may have been feigning nonchalance with me, perhaps becauseI was in my reporter’s role and he was saying what he felt was appropriate for an interview. Later, one of his closest advisers told me that he truly was angry when he heard the tape of Evan. ‘He said, “After I’ve been good to him and his family, he says these terrible things about me? After I took his family around the world, after I bought them presents, after I let them into my life, allowed them into my home? Tell him Michael Jackson said he can go to hell.”’ That was his reaction.
‘I asked him if it was true, or not. Was something going on with him and Jordie? “Of course not,” he said. “It’s absolutely ludicrous, and it’s not even the point. Tell Evan that Michael Jackson said go to hell.
That’s
the point.”’
On 9 July 1993, June and Dave Schwartz met with Michael Jackson’s investigator, Anthony Pellicano, in his Sunset Boulevard office to play for them the tape Dave had made of his conversation with Evan Chandler.
A tough, no-nonsense kind of personality, Anthony could be intimidating, always getting his way and representing his clients fiercely. Interestingly, he got his start in 1977 by finding the bones of Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, Mike Todd, under a pile of leaves. Todd’s corpse had been stolen from an Illinois cemetery by mobsters looking for a ten-carat diamond ring, a gift from Elizabeth which they thought had been buried with the deceased.
Today, Anthony’s career is in tatters. In November 2002, he was arrested following a probe into allegations that he had hired a man to threaten a
Los Angeles Times
reporter researching a story about a Mafia extortion plot targeting actor Steven Seagal.
Michael’s attorney, Bertram (Bert) Fields, was also present. Fields is, today, still one of the most daunting and influential attorneys in show business with a client list that has included some of the biggest names in show business from The Beatles to Tom Cruise to John Travolta. He’s never lost a trial in which he was lead attorney. He was determined to represent Michael in as aggressive a manner as possible, especially after he heard the audio tape June and Dave brought with them. ‘I was concerned,’ Bert recalled. ‘It sounded bad. It sounded like extortion.’
The next day, Anthony Pellicano arranged a meeting with Jordie Chandler at Michael’s hide-out in Los Angeles. He asked Michael, June and Dave to leave the room so that he and Jordie could be alone. His intention was to interrogate the youngster about his relationship with the pop star. ‘I decided to be straight with the kid,’ Anthony would later recall. ‘This was serious business. There was no time to be delicate. I asked him, have you ever seen Michael Jackson naked? Has he ever seen you naked? Have you ever done anything sexual with him? The kid looked me straight in the eye and said, “No. No. No.” I believed him.’ Anthony spoke to Jordie for more than an hour and, he says, was convinced that nothing inappropriate had ever occurred between him and Michael.
After that meeting, Bert Fields (working on behalf of June Chandler as well as Michael) and Barry Rothman (Evan’s attorney) negotiated an agreement whereby Evan would have custody of Jordie for a week. Reluctantly, June agreed to the terms, not wanting to keep the boy from his father. Anthony Pellicano and Bert Fields gave personal guarantees that Jordie would be delivered as promised. Barry Rothman then gave his word that Evan would return the boy on schedule.
At the appointed time and place, Evan waited for his son to show up, but he never did. Instead, June decided to take Jordie and his sister, Lily, to Neverland to celebrate Lily’s birthday with Michael Jackson.
While in the limousine on the way from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Michael and company stopped at the beach house of financier Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king who had just been released from prison after serving a couple of years for securities fraud. He was a friend of Michael’s and the two had been in discussions to set up an educational cable TV network for children.
While at Michael Milken’s, Michael Jackson telephoned Anthony Pellicano to tell him of the change in plans: they had decided not to allow Evan to have Jordie for the week. This decision put both Anthony and Bert Fields in difficult positions; they had given their word, and now they appeared to be liars. Anthony was furious; he let Michael have it. ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he recalled telling him, ‘Now you get that kid back here, and you do it right now, Michael. You and Jordie apparently share a brain. So,
use it
. Do you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Listen, you don’t tell me what to do,’ Michael shot back. ‘I tell
you
what to do, Anthony. Not the other way around. Do
you
hear what
I’m
saying?’
As Michael’s side of the telephone conversation became more heated, June became uncomfortable.
Michael continued. ‘Evan gets to see Jordie when I…’ He corrected himself. ‘Evan gets to see Jordie when
we
say so, not when he says so. And we don’t say so. So that’s the end of that. Got it?’ Michael slammed down the telephone. He clenched his fists and made an angry face, so furious he seemed as if he was about to explode. ‘Why does he treat me like I’m an idiot?’ he asked no one in particular. ‘I’m not an idiot. I’m Michael Jackson,
I’m Michael Jackson
.’ He kicked a wall. ‘It’s offensive and insulting, damn it!’
June, Jordie and Lily looked at one another with surprised expressions. ‘Gosh, Mommy, Michael’s so mad,’ Lily said, surprised.
After witnessing Michael’s unexpected tantrum, June no longer wanted to go to Neverland with him, saying she wasn’t in the mood. ‘Whatever,’ Michael told her, annoyed. ‘Do what you want to do.’
June, Jordie and Lily called a cab and went back to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Michael proceeded to Santa Barbara alone. When he finally got to the ranch, he was greeted by his housekeeper, Adrian McManus. ‘Where are the guests of honour?’ she asked. ‘Is there still going to be a party?’
‘There’s not going to be a party,’ Michael said. ‘So, forget it. Throw the food away. Just throw it all away,’ he said. ‘And tear down those decorations, too,’ he added, motioning to colourful streamers hanging from the doorway.
Michael then stormed off to his bedroom and slammed the door.