Though Lisa Marie says her marriage to Michael Jackson was real, she also admits that Michael was a master at manipulating the media.
But from the way she sounds, Lisa was definitely hooked… even if Michael wasn’t.
Lisa Marie: He had to make a decision. Was it the drugs and the vampires or me? And he pushed me away.
Oprah: Vampires?
Lisa Marie: Meaning, people that are sort of …
Oprah: Sycophants sucking his blood?
Lisa Marie: Sycophants, yes.
Oprah: So you saw that all around him?
Lisa Marie: Oh, yes.
This is something Lisa Marie says her father, Elvis, faced in his life as well. “[My father and Michael] had the luxury of creating whatever reality around them they wanted to create. They would have the kinds of people who were going to go with their program … and if they weren’t, then they could be disposed of,” Lisa Marie says.
Legendary fame, addiction, prescription drug overdoses—the parallels between the lives of her father and former husband are astounding, even to Lisa Marie. “It blows me away, to be honest with you,” she says. Michael Jackson even died in a house that was across the street from a home Elvis once owned, a place where Lisa Marie says she spent time as a child.
“We were sitting by the fire, and he was telling me that he was afraid he was going to end up like my father,” she says. “[Michael] was always asking me about when he died, how it happened, when it happened and where. He said, ‘I feel like I’m going to end up the same way.’”
That fear might be the reason why Lisa wasn’t Michael’s first baby mama… and he was very determined to be a dad, she says.
From the day they said “I do” in 1994, Lisa Marie says Michael wanted her to have a baby.
“I did want to, but I just wanted to make sure,” she says. “I was looking into the future and thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to get into a custody battle with him.’” Over time, she says her hesitation became a source of contention. Then, two months after their divorce was final, it was announced in October 1996 that Debbie Rowe was pregnant with Michael’s child—an act Lisa Marie calls “retaliatory.”
“She was there the whole time telling him that she would [have his child],” Lisa Marie says. “He would tell me, ‘Debbie said she’ll do it.’ That’s how he knew to handle it, ‘If you’re not going to do it, this person will.’”
Who knew MJ’s personal life was this complex, LOL! MJ was pimpin’ on the low.
When we were together, we were really in love, and then we had the rough patches. And I had to make a decision to walk because I saw the drugs and the doctors coming in, and they scared me. They put me right back into what I went through with my father. That ended it. But we still spent four more years [together] after we divorced.
And here we were thinking their swirl-thing was a publicity stunt!
Lisa Marie came back to the topic of drugs a few times, even blaming Mike’s most notorious interview on his altered mindstate.
Lisa Marie: I didn’t see the Michael I knew in that Martin Bashir interview. He was high as a kite from what I saw.
Oprah: He said some pretty shocking things in that interview. Particularly about how he felt it was okay to sleep with young children.
Lisa Marie: I think he said stuff sometimes to be defiant. He got so angry at having been accused. I think that sometimes he was such a little stubborn rebel and, like a child, he would just say what he felt everyone didn’t want him to say.
Oprah: So you never saw anything, and to this day, you don’t believe that any of those [molestation] charges were true.
And Michael’s last words to his ex?
Before the conversation ended, Michael revealed something chilling to Lisa Marie. “He felt that someone was going to try to kill him to get ahold of his catalog and his estate,” she says.
“So he actually gave you names,” Oprah says.
“He did, and I would like not to say them,” Lisa Marie says. “But he expressed to me his concern over his life.”
Lisa Marie: No. … I was never in that room. I can tell you I never saw anything like that.
And that was in ’05. SMH. R.I.P. Michael.