Femeile din viata lui Michael

astrojunkie spune:

CONTINUED


Lisa was torn. Part of her was in “turmoil,” recalled Brett, “on her mind was ‘I have my kids,’ and she was in turmoil with her husband and what should she do? If she wanted to be a star, she had to really want to live and breathe that.” Michael Jackson also advised Lisa similarly: If she wanted to pursue a singing career, she would have to dedicate herself to it. During the following weeks, Brett found herself the hapless man in the middle, caught between a balking and busy Michael, and an ambivalent yet driven Lisa. Brett made arrangements for Lisa to visit Michael in Japan while he was on the tour for Dangerous, and tried to facilitate other plans, some of which occurred while others dissipated. According to Brett, Lisa was, “in relentless pursuit of Michael Jackson,” and phoned [Brett] constantly to find out whether the deal would occur. Michael, in Brett’s characterization, was obviously intrigued by the thought of signing Lisa Presley, “but there was more desire on Lisa’s part for something to happen.” Lisa, he recalled, finally said to him, “It doesn’t seem like I can make that deal with him, and I don’t want to push him too much.” Brett, who was still hoping to bring them together for a record deal, finally arranged for a representative from Michael’s office to send a formal letter to Lisa stating that Michael was still interested in keeping things going. At the same time, Prince also began pursuing Lisa to sign a recording contract.

Lisa celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday with a huge party, planned by Priscilla, at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Prince was among the guests, along with a sprinkling of celebrity Scientologists such as Kirstie Alley, Nicole Kidman, and Juliette Lewis. Lisa invited Michael Jackson as her special guest, “and he would have loved to have gone,” said Brett, “but he had other things.” Brett suggested to Michael that he should at least send Lisa a birthday gift, “so he told me, ‘Well you go get it!’ ” Brett selected, as Michael’s gift to Lisa, an art book on Michelangelo and a silver picture frame in which he placed a photograph of Michael and Lisa’s original meeting in his living room. Brett, attempting to be gallant on Michael’s behalf, wrote sweet birthday inscriptions in the art book and on the birthday card, making them appear to be from Michael. “I was just trying to be a good friend for him,” said Brett. “I went to the party with my son Jason, and when I got there, Lisa was like, ‘Oh! Where’s Michael? I hope it’s all right that Prince is here.’ I said, ‘Michael just couldn’t make it, but here is a gift from him.’ And I didn’t say anything [else].” Lisa, he recalled, “latched onto the gifts excitedly and immediately opened them to check them out.”

He later figured out, said Brett, that he had inadvertently played matchmaker to Michael and Lisa by buying the birthday gifts, for Lisa, seeing the card and the inscription in the art book, both of which she believed to have been written by Michael, misinterpreted Brett’s affectionate words as an indication that Michael Jackson had feelings for her. “I wasn’t trying to bring two people together to get married. I look back on it now as a sign that [she was thinking], Wow! He really cares about me. And she secretly wanted a relationship with him, because I always talked about him as a passionate man [who was] extremely loving…and that attracted Lisa, that loving part, and loving children.” Lisa never knew that Brett wrote the birthday card and signed her book. “I can’t recall what I wrote exactly in the book or card,” said Brett, “but that might have been something she read over and over again and thought, Jeez! And afterwards, Lisa kept calling me, and eventually, after the many calls and pursuits and my little bit of fairy dust that I sprinkled about the place, hey, those guys [got] together, and I thought, ‘Maybe they’ll record something,’ And I remember Lisa saying, ‘Brett, what do you want out of this?’ and Michael Jackson asked me the same thing, and I thought, ‘Boy, there must be something happening here.’ I told Lisa, ‘You can give me whatever you think is fair,’ and I told Michael the same. I thought up the idea and executed it, and I stayed on top of it. Any other business person would be claiming something, but since I am an artist, I told them, ‘If you do record something, give me a job at art direction instead of hiring somebody else.’ So we didn’t think anything else or more about that other than that it was going to happen.”

In late February, a few weeks after her 25th birthday, Jerry Schilling received a mysterious phone call from Lisa. “Something is going on,” she told Jerry, “but I can’t tell you what. And it has nothing to do with you, but I’m not going to continue with this record contract right now.” Lisa told him, said Jerry, that she was busy with her new baby and wanted to put the Epic deal on hold. Jerry, who had no idea Lisa had even met with Michael Jackson, simply said fine and puzzled over what might be happening in Lisa’s life.

Mike Edwards, who had also remained close to Brett after his breakup with Priscilla, began getting phone calls from an amazed Brett about this time. “He’s saying, ‘Gosh, Lisa’s calling me and Lisa’s really interested in Michael!’ ” Brett’s impression, said Mike Edwards, was that Michael was absorbed in his work, but that Lisa was really interested in him. “And I said, ‘Come on! What do you mean?’ [Brett] said, ‘You haven’t met him, but he’s very charismatic.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I can’t believe it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, she’s kind of pursuing him.’ And I went, ‘My God! What’s gonna happen?’” “I could see that Lisa fell in love with him,” confirmed Brett. What attracted her in part, he felt, was that Michael was not after her money. “I think she didn’t know him very well, though. She didn’t know his quirks and eccentric lifestyle, and she thought, This guy is going to be great. A stepfather for my kids.”

Lisa, according to Brett, was the one who was in pursuit. “I think it was the passion of a woman who fell in love. And Michael wasn’t even interested at all. And he is a gentleman, he wouldn’t have wanted to pull her away from her marriage to Danny. And she pursued him. Family friend Bob Wall, who heard about it after the fact, confirmed this. “I know that Lisa is the one who pursued the relationship.” She did it, Bob felt, to create an identity separate from the Presley name, to be known as something other than “the daughter of.” “Lisa really wants to be credible,” said Bob. “You’ve got her father, who’s a genius. Her mother’s done incredibly well. And all she’s got is a lot of money. So maybe that’s important to her, to create her own identity.”

Brett, seeing the progression of the friendship, suggested that Michael take Lisa to the Oscar ceremony that March, just as he had escorted Madonna the year before, but Michael balked, since Lisa was a married woman. The relationship intensified on Michael’s part that fall however, after 13 year-old Jordan Chandler accused him of child molestation, causing a scandal to erupt worldwide. Later, Michael would quietly escort Lisa to the Jackson Family Honors. Lisa, who was then spending time with Myrna Smith, a childhood friend who use to sing with Lisa when Lisa was a child, told Myrna about her secret romance with Michael Jackson. Myrna perceived that Lisa felt sorry for Michael because of the sexual molestation charges and the devastating effect the scandal had had on his career and his image. Myrna also believed Lisa had sincere feelings for Michael. “Yes, she did, according to what she told me. She did. She’s like her father—they like the underdog…she did it for her own reasons, but she didn’t do it because Michael coerced her. She genuinely cared about him and she thought he cared for her.” Myrna, who knew and knew of Michael through music circles, tried to warn Lisa about the relationship, which she considered both dangerous and absurd. “I can only guess what his motives were, and I could only tell what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me he was.” Lisa did not tell Myrna whether she and Michael had sex, though Brett believed they did. “Yeah, sure, I think, because of what happened. I didn’t want to ask any questions. I could have asked Lisa the nitty-gritty.”

By Christmas 1993, Lisa was discussing with Myrna the possibility of marrying Michael Jackson. “He told her,” said Myrna, “that she was the only woman he could see himself marrying. And I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ ” Myrna recalled that Lisa responded, “Myrna, you don’t understand.” Myrna reminded Lisa that she was married and tried to convince her that Michael’s motives were not, in her opinion, pure. “When she was telling me what was going on, I was thinking: This is a plan. He’s got this calculated plan, and [he has] thought this all through—‘This is the girl who is going to make me....Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll, and I’m going to be bigger than that.’ And that was his whole purpose. And she did not want to believe it.” Lisa asked Myrna not to tell Jerry or her mother about her romance with Michael. Priscilla did not have a clue that her only daughter was being courted by Michael Jackson.

In February 1994, Lisa and Michael stayed at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Springs with Donald Trump and Marla Maples. Then they moved into one of the millionaire’s luxury condominiums at the Trump Tower in New York while Michael cut a new album. There were a few Michael-and-Lisa sightings in the press that early spring, but no one thought much about it, for no journalist would have imagined there was a romance. The next step in the strange progression of the relationship was Lisa’s public announcement in April that she was ending her marriage to Danny Keough. That very same month, Michael’s Beverly Hills attorney Robert Kaufman, reportedly placed a call to a judge in the Dominican Republic, inquiring about the procedure for his client to be married on the island. Divorce papers for Lisa and Danny were quietly filed and finalized in Santo Domingo in early May. On May 24, 1994, Lisa and Michael flew on Sony’s private jet to La Romana in the Dominican Republic and checked into the Casa de Campo resort accompanied by Lisa’s brother and sister-in-law, Thomas and Eva Keough, both Scientologists like Danny. Lisa and Michael checked into separate suites. That day, Michael’s lawyer telephoned Francisco Alvarez Perez, the same judge he had spoken to earlier, to confirm plans for the wedding, which would take place at Perez’s house on May 26. His client, Kaufman told the judge, had requested the ceremony to be “short and fast,” like Elvis and Priscilla’s.

Lisa’s marriage to Michael took place in La Vega, as her mother’s had been in Las Vegas, in a ceremony performed, as Priscilla’s had been, by a judge arranged through a third party. By mid-July rumors were flying wildly in the press about a suspected wedding between Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, who were reported to be—and were—ensconced in the Trump Tower in New York. Priscilla, who knew nothing of her daughter’s marriage, questioned Brett Strong about the newspaper accounts, for she knew he and Michael were friends. “And I told Priscilla that Michael had told me once when I was at his home years ago, that he always wanted a son and a daughter, but didn’t know how he was going to get it, because who was he going to marry? But he always wanted that, and had a room full of dolls and other toys…He had a train set rigged up so that you thought he already had a kid somewhere.” Priscilla, Brett recalled, laughed nervously and said, “Oh my God! He’s going to get his son and daughter by marrying my daughter!” Priscilla seemed embarrassed, said Brett, and “didn’t want to let on to anybody that she didn’t know anything.” Lisa informed her mother she was married to Michael two weeks before she announced it publicly. Priscilla, by everyone’s account, was appalled at the news of her daughter’s marriage. Priscilla’s boyfriend, Marco Garibaldi, would later compare Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and his and Priscilla’s feelings about it, to “a mole on the end of somebody’s nose. Everyone knows it’s there, and nobody’s happy about it, but you just don’t say anything about it.” Although upset about her daughter’s marriage, Priscilla found some comfort in the fact that Lisa and her ex-husband, Danny, still kept in touch, even continuing to vacation together in Hawaii throughout her marriage to Michael, and afterward, patterning their relationship, said Priscilla, on “my relationship with Elvis. They are very good friends. [Danny’s] around a lot. He’s always around the children, which is great.”

In the ever unusual world of Elvis and Priscilla—and now Lisa, there were some bizarre parallels between Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and Priscilla’s marriage to Elvis. In addition to their similarly secretive weddings in Las Vegas and La Vega, Lisa married a man she would discover had little interest in taking her to bed, just as Elvis rarely had intercourse with Priscilla. Lisa had wed, by an obvious Freudian motive, the Nineties equivalent of her staggeringly successful superstar father: Elvis was the King of Rock; Michael was the King of Pop. Both singers, oddly, had pet chimpanzees at one time; both shared an interest in UFOs. Elvis lived in semi-seclusion at an estate called Graceland. Michael lived a reclusive life at Neverland. Elvis often rented amusement parks, one of his favorite forms of entertainment; Michael had re-created Disneyland on the grounds of his estate, and took Lisa, incognito, to the California them park on their honeymoon. Both men had married to avoid scandal in their careers: Elvis, either to erase the stigma of his live-in relationship with 17 year-old Priscilla, or to avoid the revelation of her parents’ illicit arrangements for Priscilla to live with him; Michael, to rehabilitate his shattered image following the molestation charges. Michael and Elvis entertained small groups of fourteen-year-olds in their bedrooms for slumber parties. The two music legends were notorious eccentrics trapped in an arrested adolescence, existing on unorthodox diets.

As Lisa and Michael prepared to do their much-publicized, hugely anticipated and widely watched July 14, 1995 interview with Diane Sawyer on Primetime Live answering questions about their bizarre marriage, Lisa was seen coming out of the president’s office at the Celebrity Centre in the Hollywood Hills the afternoon before, where she was being advised on how to handle the questions and answers. Another one of Lisa’s childhood friends, Dana Rosenfeld, watched the interview, along with most of America, and was stunned. “My only take on that is that for so long she was hidden from everybody and nobody knew anything, and what better way to just catapult yourself to the center of the media’s attention than to marry someone like that?”

Brett Strong’s response to Michael and Lisa’s Primetime Live interview was, quite simply, anger, for both created the illusion—the lie—that they had been friends for years, ever since their initial meeting at a Jackson Five concert when they were children. Michael and Lisa did not even name the correct city where the concert was held: They said Las Vegas, when in fact it was Lake Tahoe. Michael and Lisa told the world, on television, that Michael had lusted after Lisa ever since she was six, that they had been in frequent contact over the years, and that it was always in his mind to marry Lisa one day. Brett, who knew the truth—that he had orchestrated the meeting not two years before, for the express purpose of getting Lisa a record contract with Michael’s company—was deeply offended, particularly since Scientology is founded on truth. The interview was, he realized, classic media manipulation. “Michael thought that was the way he should present it, as if it had always been in the background, whereas…the truth [was] that I did it as a business thing….He was trying to defend his life [after going] through this traumatic period of being a child molester, and now [he’s] married to Lisa Marie Presley—and is that a beard or what? So he says, ‘Well, I’ve known her all my life,’ when the truth of the matter is that they had briefly met one another, but Lisa had never considered it a real meeting, and Michael exaggerated it out of all proportions.”

Lisa’s ill-founded marriage to Michael came tumbling down within six months of the Diane Sawyer interview, when Lisa filed for divorce in January 1996. The inside word was that, before the marriage, Michael had promised Lisa a recording contract with his company and had later reneged. “That’s what he might have been promising her,” commented Myrna, who disapproved of the marriage from the outset, “but that might not have been his intention.” Lisa, she revealed, was devastated by the experience. Both Myrna and Brett believed that Michael did not want the competition from his wife. “He’s very much top of the pile in his world, and that’s probably one reason why Lisa filed for divorce,” said Brett. “And the things she asked for from Michael, he wasn’t willing to do.”

Priscilla’s response when she heard that Lisa had filed for divorce, said Rick Stanley, Elvis’ stepbrother, was “Praise the Lord!” Marco said simply, “The mole has been removed.”

purple_blue spune:

Aici deja nu mai inteleg cine minte si cine nu.
In interviul lui Oprah cu Priscilla si Lisa-Marie, Priscilla a spus ca Michael a rugat-o sa o aduca pe Lisa la cina cu ei, cand avea 16 sau 17 ani.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvYygjcMDdQ" target="_blank">You are the cry that turns to laughter,
the sweetness and the morning after, Mrs. Purple Jackson

www.misformichael.blogspot.com" target="_blank">I know enough to believe...

astrojunkie spune:

...pai priscilla a spus si ca a refuzat, deci nu se bat cap in cap povestile, nu?