'Is that Macaulay Culkin in his underwear?' It was.

The police, armed with a search warrant, were on their way to look for evidence. Everything vaguely suspect was to be taken off the property. 'We couldn't get the stuff out fast enough,' the maid recalled.

As stacks of magazines and pictures were thrown into crates, one of the staff held up a photograph and asked: 'Is that Macaulay Culkin in his underwear?' It was.

The picture of the 13-year-old star of Home Alone was boxed, along with a lot of others of children similarly dressed down.

The maid heard a colleague mutter: 'This guy is nuts, isn't he?' The maid herself 'felt bad about the whole thing' - and soon the whole world would, too, as the lid came off Michael Jackson's bizarre private life.

Everyone had known the global superstar was weird. But now, it seemed, he was wicked, too, and in an area he had always claimed to be a total innocent - sex.

Jackson's sexual proclivities had been a matter of speculation since he was a teenager. Even his mother worried that he rarely went out with girls.

The dynamic sex appeal he generated when performing seemed to desert him in the real world with real people.

No one believed he'd had romances with girls such as Tatum O'Neal or Brooke Shields, no matter how much he insisted he had.

Tatum told a friend: 'How can any girl have a relationship with him? When we're together, he's so shy he hardly says two words.

'I know he's a virgin. I wonder if he's afraid to have sex. He doesn't seem very interested.'

What he was interested in, however, and was absolutely open about, was his love of children. He made no secret of his feelings.

'One of my favourite pastimes is being with children,' he explained. 'When I'm tired or bored, children revive me.'

He regularly visited sick youngsters. To the world at large, his interest seemed odd, but not necessarily inappropriate. It was part of the way he seemed to shun the world in favour of a fantasy lifestyle.

Mostly, where Michael's personal life was concerned, people felt a sense of sadness. He was an enigma: perplexing and eccentric, but essentially asexual.

They played cowboys and indians and rolled on the lawn. He seemed to be trying to live the childhood he believed he had missed because of his career.

Some found nothing wrong in Michael's behaviour. To his voice coach Seth Riggs, he was just a 'natural, loving person' who went gaga over kids.

Others were not so sure. Michael's manager, Frank Dileo, expressed concern after Michael gave a $100,000 Rolls-Royce to the parents of another friend, ten-year-old Jimmy Safechuck. Dileo was worried how the gift might look. Hurt, the singer told him to mind his own business.

His friendship with Jordie Chandler would make what Michael did or did not get up to with young boys everyone's business.

Whatever the truth about Jackson's sexuality, it was clear - to everyone but him - that, in so openly flouting convention and insisting people trust him, he was playing a dangerous game. He and Jordie had met when Jackson's car broke down in Beverly Hills.

The world's biggest-selling pop star, clad in black turban and veil, stood by the road feeling powerless and utterly alone. He normally had servants to solve this kind of problem - but today he'd left them at home.

The boss of a nearby car-hire business saw his plight and came to his aid.

He brought the star back to his office while the car was fixed and then rang his wife, June, urging her to bring Jordie, her son from her first marriage, to meet the VIP customer.

When the boy, dark-haired and bright-eyed, his face lean and angular, arrived, Jackson peered over his sunglasses at him. Jordie, a huge fan of Jackson, smiled - and his idol smiled back.

In the coming months, the star took the boy and his sister to a toy store and let them load $10,000 of toys into their shopping trolleys.

At Neverland, they all rode in a gondola to the highest point of the Ferris wheel and stopped.

Do you know how much time I spend up here alone?' Jackson mused, looking out over his 2,000 acres, with a lake, statues inspired by Peter Pan and Disney music emanating from speakers disguised as rocks in flowerbeds. 'I have all this, yet I have nothing.'

'You have us now,' Jordie said, putting his arm round Michael's shoulder. Michael smiled. 'My new little family,' he beamed.

June, Jordie's mother, was happy to go along with this. 'I truly don't think there's a devious bone in Michael's body,' she said.

Nonetheless, she was worried one morning when she caught her son coming out of Jackson's room, where he had spent the night.

'Never do that again, Jordie,' she scolded. Reluctantly, Jordie agreed.

Later, he told Michael about his mother's concern, and the singer took her aside. 'How could you think I would hurt Jordie?' he asked.

He then told her his theory that children were sexually innocent until 'conditioned' by adults to be otherwise. It was his desire, he said, that Jordie remain pure and untouched by the adult world.

Then he quizzed the boy. 'Did Michael ever touch your penis?' he asked. Groggily, Jordie said that Michael had.

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June was appeased. She apologised and said she trusted Jackson. The next day, he gave her a $12,000 ruby-and-diamond bracelet from Cartier. 'It's nothing,' he said. 'I just love you.'

With Jordie, he had a pact to 'never grow up' and 'live with me in Neverland for ever'.

Even Jordie's natural father, dentist Evan Chandler, divorced from June, after initial suspicions about what was going on, was won over.

But as time went by he began to have second thoughts. It bothered him that his son was dressing in black hats and sunglasses, and that he and Jackson were always whispering together, sharing private jokes, then clamming up whenever anyone else entered the room.

One day, he had Jordie in his surgery to extract a troublesome tooth and put him under with the so-called truth drug, sodium amytal.

Then he quizzed the boy. 'Did Michael ever touch your penis?' he asked. Groggily, Jordie said that Michael had.

Chandler took his son to see a psychiatrist. In a gruelling three-hour session, the boy told of many incidents of masturbation and oral sex with Jackson.

Within hours, Jordie was being interviewed by the police, and the allegations of sexual activity between the world's biggest pop star and a 13-year-old boy swiftly flashed around the globe.

To try to calm the storm breaking, Jackson's advisers put up people to speak out on his behalf. The two 'friends' they chose were Brett Barnes and Wade Robson - aged 11 and ten!

Brett admitted that he and Michael had slept together on many occasions, but with no sexual overtones. 'He kisses you like you kiss your mother. It's not unusual for him to hug and nuzzle up to you.'

Wade also slept in the same bed as Michael dozens of times, but 'just as a friend and the bed was huge'.

Doubts were not stilled by their testimonies.
Michael Jackson & Wife Lisa Marie Presley before their divorce.

By September 1995, Michael was still pushing Lisa to get pregnant. She, however, was reluctant - sensing that the marriage was doomed

For Jackson, the strain of all this was immense. In pain from his heavy performance schedule and unable to sleep, he began taking increasing doses of painkillers and tranquillisers. He was soon seriously addicted.

To be fair to Michael, as his linen was washed in public and the pressure on him grew, his denials never wavered. The problem, he maintained, was people's dirty minds. 'There's nothing sexual going on. Why can't people just get that?' he said.

When Chandler confronted him, saying 'You and Jordie are having sex, aren't you? Just be a man and f***ing admit it', he stayed composed.

'That's preposterous,' he replied. 'It never happened.'

In the end, there was no police prosecution. Not one witness came forward to corroborate Jordie Chandler's story or to make similar accusations, and without other witnesses the case was weak.

Perhaps Michael had the undying loyalty of the youngsters with whom he'd had sex. Or, maybe, conceivably, he was innocent.

The issues were never aired in court. A civil case against Jackson was settled out of court with a $20million payment to Jordie.

It was not, Jackson's people emphasised, an admission of guilt but simply to draw a line under the whole tawdry affair.

What we do know is that when, 11 years later, in 2005, he stood trial on a series of child molestation charges involving other young boys, he was acquitted on all counts.

In the dark days of his humiliation over the Chandler affair, Michael forged an extraordinary new relationship with Lisa Marie Presley.

From their very first date, at a dinner party staged by a mutual friend, Michael and Lisa hit it off. Raised at her father's impregnable home, Graceland, she had much in common with the world's most famous pop star, cloistered away in Neverland.

Both had been sheltered from the real world, missed out on their childhoods and were mistrustful of outsiders. They believed they were soul mates.

Michael was openly flirtatious, and Lisa was impressed by his private candour and normality. As they talked, she began to feel she was seeing the real Michael, the man behind the mask.

His sexuality, admittedly, still seemed ambiguous, but he was soon kissing her fairly passionately. She was certainly attracted to him. Lisa liked strange guys, with an edge. And who had more of an edge than Michael?




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