Michael Jackson wanted to marry Emma Watson when she was eleven
Just when you thought the twisted star couldn’t shock any more, a new book by his doctor reveals ...
HIS CRUMBLING face hidden in a surgical mask and his spindly frame in pyjamas, the King of Pop would conceal his identity from visiting call girls by pretending to be a rich Arab stroke victim. Other times, he’d dress up as a clown. These scenes sound grotesque enough, but what was going on in Michael Jackson’s mind in the later years of his life was apparently far more depraved. The superstar singer planned to marry his 12-year-old British goddaughter, and if — perish the thought — that didn’t work out, he also had his eye on the actress emma Watson, then just 11 and at the beginning of her Harry Potter career. To those who felt that the Jackson saga couldn’t possibly get any more disturbing, his former doctor and confidant has come along to put us right.
The twilight years of the late singer, who for years used his wealth and power to fend off repeated allegations of paedophilia while surrounding himself with children, have been revealed in all their ghastly glory by Conrad Murray. It was Murray who became Jackson’s personal physician in his later years, supplying him with the prescription painkillers with which the singer, aged 50, fatally overdosed in 2009.
Murray, widely blamed for the performer’s death, served two years of a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors described how the Grenada-born cardiologist negligently left Jackson unmonitored and unattended during nightly infusions of the surgical anaesthetic propofol.
However, it was clear even at his trial that the grasping Murray — facing severe financial difficulties as the reported father of seven children by six women — became more than just Jackson’s doctor, but his willing confederate and enabler.
Now out of prison, his medical career destroyed and his notoriety no doubt shunned by conventional publishers, Murray is bringing out This Is It, a digital book about Jackson next week.
Murray has told the Sunday Mirror that Jackson would have wanted him to reveal what the singer confided about his warped sexual passions.
But one can hardly imagine the performer, who spent tens of millions of dollars buying off his accusers or fighting them in court, would have thanked Murray for this last service.
Jackson always craved the company of children but, says the doctor, admitted to Murray — and him alone — that he fell in love with blonde Harriet Lester when she was just five.
Harriet is the daughter of Mark Lester, the young star of the 1968 musical film Oliver!
Jackson loved the child-packed film and engineered a meeting with Lester, the pair becoming friends as they bonded over their shared problem of coping with child stardom.
Lester has four children, including Harriet, and he and Jackson became reciprocal godparents.
In fact, Lester provided his friend with a sample of his sperm and has offered to take a DNA test to prove that — as he suspects and as Jackson’s friends have claimed — he is the biological father of at least two of the star’s three children.
Lester has noted how Jackson’s daughter, Paris, looks just like his own daughter, Olivia, and is remarkably similar to how he looked as a child.
If Lester really is Paris’s father, that would make what Murray calls Jackson’s ‘terrible crush’ on Harriet all the more twisted.
Harriet, born in 1993 and now a fashion model in London, is Lester’s second daughter by his first wife, Jane. Lester, who gave up acting to become an osteopath, has described how the Lesters and the Jacksons were ‘like one big, happy family’.
They would stay together in an isolated cottage at Cliveden House hotel in Berkshire or at Jackson’s Neverland ranch in California.
THE idea that, despite bringing up her half-sister as his own daughter, Jackson coveted Harriet as his future wife seems particularly sordid — but probably nothing worse than we have come to expect from Wacko Jacko.
According to Murray, Jackson had become ‘fixated’ on Harriet, his goddaughter, by the time she was 12.
The doctor claims he pointed out the girl was far too young to marry legally and that Jackson — surely mad if he thought it was even a possibility — said he’d have ‘someone review the legality and ramifications of marrying someone as young as Harriet’.
Murray says Jackson was still obsessed with marrying the ‘tall, ultra-thin’ Harriet in 2009 — when she would have been 16 — and wanted the doctor to accompany him to discuss ‘plans for matrimony’ with Mark Lester while he was in London for his This Is It comeback concerts.
Jackson died shortly before that happened, but Lester himself revealed Jackson had invited Harriet to join him on stage at his first concert for a song called Dirty Diana. The song is about an enticing female groupie, but it appears no one smelled a rat.
Though Lester refused to comment on Murray’s claims, there is no suggestion that he or Harriet ever knew about Jackson’s obsession, let alone that the singer ever tried to act on it physically.
SuPreMeLy detached from reality as he had become in his superstar bubble, even Jackson accepted he needed a back-up plan, according to Murray. That was emma Watson. Jackson spotted her playing the young witch Hermione in the first Harry Potter film and instantly became infatuated, Murray told the Sunday Mirror, displaying a lifesize cardboard cutout of the young Watson in his rented home in Los Angeles.
‘Michael told me he was almost as consumed with British actress emma Watson,’ says Murray. ‘emma was his second choice for a bride if things did not work out with Harriet.’
Murray makes clear he always suspected Jackson had paedophile inclinations, but never dared challenge the star about it as he knew he’d clam up about ‘very sensitive’ subjects.
The doctor was convinced, however, that ‘the way Michael spoke about the young girls was not an innocent crush, but an unrequited love’.
Murray claims to have cleared up another lingering mystery about Jackson — his ever lightening skin. The singer attributed it to a medical condition, vitiligo, but Murray says the star was using bleaching cream.
According to the doctor, Jackson, who underwent years of painful plastic surgery that distorted his features, wanted to be white. It became Murray’s duty to apply the skin lightening cream every day and, Jackson told him, when the doctor was away, the singer’s daughter, Paris, did it.
When an alarmed Murray warned him that if the toxic cream was carelessly applied without wearing gloves, Paris’s skin would lighten, too, the singer promised not to ask her again. Murray admits he doubted Jackson kept to his pledge.
On another occasion, says Murray, Paris fractured her toe after stubbing it against a piece of furniture. under strict instructions not to disturb her father, she spent the night in agony.
By then, her father was even locking himself away from his children to hide the wreck he had become.
Murray believes Jackson was suffering from anorexia and, in a further sign of the star’s frailty, describes how he would wake every night drenched in urine, banning staff from cleaning the sheets for fear of their discovering his problem.
Paris, now 18, remains the most loyal protector of her father’s increasingly dimmed flame.
Last month, she implored fans to ignore disturbing new evidence of Jackson’s pornography collection. ‘The
most pure people are always torn down,’ she complained.
What she will make of the latest attacks on his ‘purity’ remain to be seen, but if Murray is telling the truth, she must remember that Jackson was at least lying about his skin treatment.
The doctor says he first met Jackson in 2006 in Las Vegas, where he had a private practice and the star had a home, when the singer asked him to treat one of his children for a minor illness.
They became close and Murray says he became Jackson’s only confidant in his final years.
As the performer’s private doctor for three years, he spent much of that time as his live-in companion.
The singer was reportedly demanding Murray be paid £120,000 a month by the end of his life. While we shouldn’t discount the possibility that he may be lying about the star in a bid to make one final buck off their tawdry connection, it seems more than feasible that Jackson, aware Murray was acting unethically in his medical treatment, saw a crony who could be trusted to keep quiet.
The image-obsessed singer would have had to trust Murray if — as the disgraced medic insists was the case — he asked him to arrange Jackson’s sessions with call girls.
It has long been hotly debated whether Jackson — a huge sex symbol for many fans, asexual to others — had a normal sex life.
His first marriage to Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, lasted less than two years and, despite her insistence the union was ‘sexually active’, it was widely dismissed as a sham to bolster his public image amid a child molestation scandal.
Murray confides that the singer told him he was never intimate with his second wife, Debbie Rowe, a dental surgery nurse who gave birth to his two older children by artificial insemination.
However, Murray insists Jackson did, indeed, exhibit sexual urges to adult women — though they sound warped even by the standards of Las Vegas escort agencies.
Murray recounts how he would accompany Jackson, the star assuming bizarre disguises such as dressing as a clown, on forays into the sleazy underside of Sin City.
Describing Jackson as a ‘crazy, wonderful lunatic’, Murray recalls the singer once ‘moaning’ that he had never been to a strip club and asking the doctor to ‘get a few girls to come over to my house’.
Worried that they couldn’t trust call girls, even after making them sign a standard non-disclosure form given to people working for Jackson, Murray says he suggested they instead meet them in a hotel.
PASSIng up the huge casinos where Jackson would be more likely to be spotted, they chose the more obscure gold Coast Hotel. With the singer wearing pyjamas and a surgical mask and pretending to be a ‘drooling’ stroke victim, while Murray followed in green medical scrubs, they reached their room unrecognised, he says.
With Jackson stipulating that the women had to be ‘pencil thin’ and ‘mixed race’, Murray ordered a pair of strippers from an escort agency. Jackson, he says, ‘seemed like a kid in a candy store’.
As the two men, pretending to be Saudi Arabian brothers, gabbled away in fake Arabic, the girls — stripped down to their knickers — danced around Jackson.
‘I had decided to leave the girls to Michael,’ says Murray, who recalls his main job that night was to keep supplying Jackson with money. The call girls had to tell the apparent innocent where to slide the notes into the elastic of their underwear.
He doesn’t reveal how the evening’s entertainment went from there.
So was Jackson genuinely aroused by grown women — albeit only ones who were rake-thin — or was this just another masquerade to hide far darker appetites?
What is certain is that Murray paints a portrait of a deeply disturbed man.
Jackson’s skin transformation, in his eyes, reflected the singer’s attempt to erase troubling memories from his past. The star had even talked about achieving the same end with a brain transplant, claims the disgraced doctor.
Yet if even half of what he says is true, we now realise that Michael Jackson was more disturbed than was ever suspected.