Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

In February 2002, I stood on stage in front of the assembled great and good of British television, accepting a second BAFTA, for Best Presenter for the When Louis Met . . . series, with a peculiar mixture of gratitude, despondency and fraudulence. ‘I’d like to thank the Metropolitan police for arresting the Hamiltons during our filming,’ I joked, then shuffled off stage and re-joined my mum – who I’d brought as my date – and spent the rest of the evening wondering how quickly I could get home.

It’s a strange feeling getting an award for completed work knowing your work-in-progress – or more accurately work-in-stoppage – isn’t going well. Like seeing the light of a star that you know to be extinct. And the star is . . . you-oo-oo-oo. (Echo continues as we crash-zoom into eyeball.)

Another relationship ended with a girlfriend I’d been seeing for about a year, which wasn’t helping my frame of mind. I was famous in a way I’d never wanted to be, but more confused than ever about what I was supposed to be doing in my programmes.

One day in the spring of 2002, exhausted by the dissonance of treating him in a friendly way while taking notes any time we spoke, I found myself on the phone to Jimmy, telling him that I was writing a book in which he figured. He reacted in typical Jimmy style. His advice was that I should come up to Leeds and we could work on the manuscript together. Well, that didn’t happen. I was confused but not that confused. I spoke to my editors and said I’d changed my mind about the celebrity diary.

For me, whatever happened next couldn’t help but be an improvement: failure on my own terms being preferable to the feeling of helplessness that went along with trying to base a TV programme on the lottery of trying to book celebrities. At the same time, I felt out of step with my own collaborators – my producer and his higher-ups – for whom my increased visibility, more coverage, and higher ratings for the shows was an unalloyed good. More and more I felt like walking away from television.

In early 2002, the production went into a phase of attempting to figure out what to do next. We had a story meeting at David’s house in Acton, west London.

‘We need to have the Hamiltons programme as a benchmark of the kind of impact we are looking for,’ David said.

This worried me. I’d never regarded ‘impact’ as something to aim for. Rather, it was something that sometimes happened when you followed your instincts.

‘Well, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to research stories based on how likely someone is to be accused of rape,’ I said.

‘I accept the Hamiltons may not teach us anything in terms of process,’ David said. ‘I am just talking about how many people watched and talked about the programme.’

I found myself growing irritated, feeling as though I’d been served a great steaming helping of pressure when I was already full up.

‘I realize we are unlikely to necessarily get the really big names,’ David went on. ‘But we are at a stage now where that may no longer be important. We can take the leap of faith that the audience will come with us, if we show enough ambition in our choice of subjects.’

He asked what subjects I would do if, in a dream universe, I could cover whatever I wanted. Without needing to think very hard, I said, ‘Michael Jackson and the Church of Scientology.’

And that was that. Without really knowing how it would work, in a spirit of build-it-and-they-will come, we went into production on a concept that was in essence When Louis Didn’t Meet . . .

The Michael Jackson project – which aired under the title Louis, Martin, and Michael, for reasons that will become clear – ended up taking more than a year from conception to completion. It was either a qualified triumph or an interesting failure – or something between the two.

Like the rest of the world, and the tabloids in particular, I’d been interested in Michael Jackson on almost every conceivable level for almost as long as I could remember: a peerless talent – singer, dancer and performer for the ages – and also a human curiosity: a self-created sculpture of ambiguous sexuality and ethnicity. His face was a battleground, bearing witness to one man’s refusal to be limited by the body he’d been born with. A crime-scene report in which the victim was also the perpetrator. An elegy on man’s mastery over nature and its limitations.

It was a story full of grace notes – the messianic pop videos, the Neverland compound that, with its joy rides and the demented and uncared-for animals, befitted a Roman emperor. And at the heart the question of Michael’s sexual interests: the unlikely relationships involving grown women – Lisa Marie Presley, Debbie Rowe – and the all-too-plausible romances with young boys who slept in his bed at his Neverland Ranch and travelled with him on tour.

I’d been living in New York in 1993 when Jackson had been accused of molesting thirteen-year-old Jordy Chandler. He’d ended up paying what was said to be $23 million to buy the boy’s silence. Later I’d read Michael Jackson Was My Lover by Victor Gutierrez, which included documents from the investigation, with drawings Jordy allegedly made of Jackson’s penis. The book made a persuasive case that Jackson was a paedophile. Weirdly, it made this argument from a pro-paedophilia perspective.

Firmly of the view that Jackson had predatory sexual interests, I hoped one of the boys – some of whom were now men – might agree to talk to us. Then came the reality check of who we would realistically film with. Without access to the man himself, we thought we might embed with some of his fans. Jackson had just released an album, Invincible, which was selling less well than expected. Jackson and his supporters blamed lack of promotion by the record label, Sony. Fans were being encouraged to demonstrate against Sony at its London headquarters.

We flew to Germany – Will, me, and an AP called Natalie – then rode back to London overnight in a convoy of coaches filled with rabid German Jackson fans who were taking part in the demonstrations. We got zero usable material. Deranged German Michael Jackson fan sounds funny as a phrase. But in the flesh it was simply depressing: a motorcade of Untermenschen in trilbies, one glove each, moonwalking in desultory petrol station forecourts.

Michael was staying at the Renaissance Hotel in Holborn, so Will and I booked a room there. For several days I talked to the fans and impersonators camped outside and to visitors who were coming and going from Jackson’s suite, including Mark Lester, who as a child actor decades earlier had played the title role in the film Oliver! I wrote MJ a short letter and left it with a bodyguard seated outside his door – nothing came back – and then on day two or day three Michael hired an open-top double-decker bus and drove around the West End as the fans went into a delirium of excitement. The closest I got to the man himself was on his last day in London, chasing after a limo and sticking my hand in the crack of the window and for a moment holding his feminine ungloved hand. Then he flew back – I assume – to Las Vegas, where he was living with his children – Paris, Prince, and baby Blanket.

It wasn’t a promising start. Remember when I spent the night in Jimmy Savile’s mum’s bed? I thought. Remember when I was inside the Hamilton’s country pile during that media frenzy? I was the king of access. Now I’m chasing limos like a sad fan . . . Still, we persevered. Will and I flew to Las Vegas with a vague idea we might hang about outside Jackson’s apartment block, or whatever it was, Nick Broomfield style. With leads thin, I interviewed an impersonator called E’Casanova, who was promoting an inspirational song with the unintentionally comic title ‘The Laughter in We’ and it was then we had a small break in the case. We discovered E’Casanova’s manager, Majestik Magnificent, had once been Jackson’s personal magician and remained a friend and helper to Michael’s father, Joe. For a fee of $5,000 Majestik would set up an interview with Joe.

If we couldn’t get to Michael, it seemed a reasonable consolation prize.

A failed musician-turned-manager to The Jackson 5, Joe occupied a central and somewhat controversial position in Jackson family mythology. He was credited with recognizing the musical potential of his children, forming them into a group, shaping their career and driving them to succeed. But it was also said he’d been physically abusive. Michael in particular had viewed him as a terrifying figure. He had once commented in an interview he was so fearful of his father he would ‘regurgitate’ before seeing him. It was also claimed that Joe had teased Michael about the size of his nose – supposedly he would compare it to a pepper. Some speculated that the teasing might partly explain Michael’s obsessive plastic surgery.

We met Joe late one evening outside a hotel-casino, the Golden Nugget, in downtown Las Vegas. In his seventies, slow-moving and soft-spoken, he had a louche reptilian air. He was wearing earrings, a necklace and bracelet, and had a pencil moustache. He looked somehow too groomed to inspire complete confidence.

He was with Majestik, who was acting as personal aide. We took them up to a suite we had booked, then just as we started the interview, the phone rang. A Filipino Michael Jackson tribute group called The Front Page that Joe was managing were in reception and wanted to come up. Then another protegé of Joe’s arrived, a lissom teenage singer called Krystal.

And so it went on, with more false starts and disruptions. I kept losing the train of the conversation, and after two hours of filming almost nothing of substance had been gained from our $5,000, and it was hard to shake the feeling that instead of a step forward the entire ‘didn’t meet’ format was a major downgrade. Especially once it became clear that at the same time as we were not filming with him, MJ was providing all-singing, all-dancing access to the ITV journalist Martin Bashir. When Bashir’s film, called Living With Michael, duly appeared, it was an extraordinary piece of work, with scenes of Jackson climbing trees at Neverland, running up a huge bill in a toy store, and shouting ‘Yoo-hoo!’ in a high-pitched voice. It also featured a creepy interview with Michael and one of his young friends, a cancer-stricken child named Gavin Arvizo. The scene was so troubling it led to molestation charges being brought against the star. That was ‘impact.’ So much so that we abandoned our own project. The material of me riding in coaches with fans and interviewing his personal magician suddenly looked very lame.

Now, about ten programmes behind on delivery, I felt like a striker who’s been signed for huge sums and can’t find the back of the net.

For a few months we persevered with the Scientology idea. If I’d been looking for a way to waste more time, I couldn’t have picked a better subject. The websites and online databases dedicated to Scientology are so labyrinthine and detailed that you can lose entire weeks reading up random accounts from disaffected ex-members with allegations of ill-use: polishing floors with toothbrushes, running around trees until they collapse, and descriptions of Scientology rituals, walking around touching walls for hours at a time and saying ‘thank you’. (Is this a good place to say that the Church of Scientology disputes these characterizations? Lawyers – will that do?)

I watched some old documentaries. Most followed a similar formula involving interviews with ex-members who describe having naively joined out of a spirit of selflessness, then found themselves pressured either to keep paying for more services (therapy, classes) or to join the Scientology clergy, the ‘Sea Org’, sign a billion-year contract, live communally, work endless hours for very little money. Sometimes reporters went undercover and made secret recordings of Scientology ‘registrars’ trying to upsell them on more expensive courses and classes in communication. In a few there were testy interviews with senior Scientologists, which the members of the Church filmed with their own cameras. This had the effect of making the Scientologists look, if anything, even weirder. Almost always there was a visit to a fence at the edge of a base and quite often the crew would film itself being tailed by PIs in blacked-out cars.

Then, to my surprise, one of Scientology’s LA-based PR people – Linda Simmons Hight – expressed some interest in speaking to us. We sent over a copy of When Louis Met the Hamiltons and made arrangements to meet up.

At the beginning of 2003, with a director and AP, I flew to Los Angeles. For a week or so we holed up in the Roosevelt, a beautiful old hotel in the heart of Hollywood, and tried to strategize our way into the world’s most secretive religion. I had an inkling it was probably a fool’s errand. I spent the mornings doing laps in the pool and push-ups in my room to keep my sanity. I bought time in an Internet cafe on Hollywood and La Brea and did research online about other examples of religious weirdness to see if I could find an alternative subject if the Scientology story fell down, as I suspected it soon would.

One morning Linda Simmons Hight invited us to visit the Church’s Celebrity Centre. The centre had once been a long-term hotel for West Coast jetsetters, the Château Élysée – a beautiful 1927 building, on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, with turrets and high windows and precipitously sloping roofs, redolent of a seventeenth-century French castle. But it fell on hard times, and in 1973 it was bought by the Church of Scientology and was now its VIP facility for the religion’s frequent fliers. I know there are other more serious misdeeds imputed to the Church of Scientology but, still, it’s worth thinking for a moment about a spiritual organization that advertises that it affords better amenities to those of its believers who are famous.

Linda, small and chirpy, toured us around the gardens and a high-windowed orangery, and showed us upstairs to the rooms where the therapy, called ‘auditing’, took place. I have a recollection of saunas downstairs, where adepts would take mega-doses of niacin and sweat out impurities in their system as recommended by Hubbard in his ‘Purification Rundown’, but at this distance it is all a little vague in my mind.

‘Write up a wish list of what you feel you would need for the documentary,’ Linda said at the end. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

We went back to the hotel and wrote a wholly unrealistic pie-in-the-sky list: interview Church leader David Miscavige; ride on motorbike with Tom Cruise; visit secret base near Hemet. ‘But these are just opening thoughts and we are completely open to any ideas you may have.’ The conversation fizzled out soon afterwards, the whole episode disappearing like a half-remembered fever dream with almost nothing to show for its ever having been real. I never heard a peep out of Linda Simmons Hight ever again, nor have I ever seen her in any subsequent coverage, although she does still appear on a Church website. I sometimes worry that she may be pumping bilge at a Church punishment camp somewhere or polishing doorknobs on the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds. (The Church denies these allegations, etc.)

For some reason, what stayed with me after that was a conversation on the phone in which Linda spoke about watching the Hamiltons film. ‘I saw the HA HA HA! show you made about the politician and his wife and I just HA HA HA! thought it was great, it was HA HA HA! very funny but I couldn’t see how that kind of tongue-in-cheek irreverent sending-up approach would ever fit with our Church.’

‘Well, it was basically an affectionate portrait,’ I burbled. ‘Obviously a very different sort of subject.’ But what I was thinking about was her laugh: there was something about it that was off, it felt artificial and willed, almost as though it were part of some training she’d done on how to use chuckling to build rapport.

It was now a year since I’d a made a show. We were Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, decimated, drinking horse piss for hydration, an emaciated remnant with nothing to show for all our pain and effort. Now, finally, we saw sense and either I or David called time on the ‘Didn’t Meet’ concept. With no choice – I think the higher-ups were bearing down on David by this time, wondering what exactly we’d been doing with the licence-payers’ money for the previous twelve months – we retreated to familiar terrain: American weirdness, more or less. I made a show about a legal brothel in Nevada and another on neo-Nazis in California. These films were less antic in tone than Weird Weekends. We took the more organic and less plotted approach of the When Louis Met . . . programmes and applied it to weightier but still strange American subjects. We didn’t plan a narrative. No cards on the wall. We just called and got access and then jumped in.

Though they were conceived in a spirit of desperation and of ‘making shows that we can make’, Louis and the Brothel and Louis and the Nazis remain among my favourite programmes. I took it as a lesson: that sometimes good work arises from the absence of other options and that fate rewards those who hold their nerve when things aren’t going well.

Having shot those, late in 2003 we still needed to deliver another programme. An idea about the proprietor of a topless magazine called Perfect 10 starting a boxing league of glamour models had – amazingly – turned out not to have the weight and complexity to sustain sixty minutes of TV. So I dusted off the Michael Jackson material. The feeling was that we were far enough now from Martin Bashir’s film for ours not to appear too embarrassing. I got back in touch with Majestik Magnificent, the magician, who put a call in to Joe Jackson. They agreed to a second interview – Majestik conceded the first one had been a fiasco, or at least suboptimal – and we flew to New Jersey, meeting them at a rundown mall where Joe was appearing as himself in an ultra-low-budget movie. After several hours of hanging around, Will and I repaired back to our hotel with Joe and Majestik.

It was now close to midnight. With time short, and exasperated from all the waiting around, I found myself taking a more confrontational approach than usual. I asked Joe about Michael’s claim that he would regurgitate with fear whenever he knew he would be seeing him. He and Majestik seemed familiar with the topic. From off camera, Majestik said, ‘All the way to what, Joe?’

‘He regurgitate all the way to the bank,’ Joe said as Majestik giggled.

I paused to take this in.

‘I’m not quite sure I know what you mean when you say that,’ I said. ‘You mean you don’t believe that he does or you don’t care?’

Joe tapped his finger on the side of his easy chair. ‘Do I really care? I really don’t.’

‘Michael’s on record as saying you beat him with switches and belts,’ I said.

‘I never beat him,’ Joe replied. ‘I whipped him with a switch and a belt. I never beat him. You beat somebody with a stick.’

‘It’s also been written that you would tease Michael and call him big nose.’

‘Did he say that? I don’t recall calling him big nose. If I did it was out of a joking situation. So, you know. Whatever.’

With each question, the atmosphere was becoming more strained, but after my failure to pull off the interview in Las Vegas, I knew this was my only chance to get something usable for our film, and so I ploughed on through the bad vibes.

I talked about Michael’s bizarre qualities. His apparent inability to relate to people his own age. His friendships with children. I said he seemed in need of help. Joe batted all of this away with languid disdain. ‘I will get up and walk if I have to talk about Michael’s nose on the BBC,’ he said. ‘’Cause he wouldn’t like that.’

Then he said: ‘Michael is sorta like a kid himself. He never really grown up.’

We talked some more about Michael’s nose until Majestik said, ‘Don’t ask that question again.’ This led to a conversation about the perception of Michael’s eccentricities. Finding a theme he could warm to, Joe momentarily came to life, decrying the tabloid moniker his son had been saddled with, which he slightly misremembered as ‘Jacko Wacko’. ‘You need to stop that,’ he said.

And then, with the inevitability of a hit man whose time has come to finish the job, I raised the subject of Michael’s romantic interests.

‘Would you like to see Michael settled down with a partner?’ I asked.

‘What’s a partner?’ Joe said.

‘A loved one.’

‘A wife?’ Majestik asked from off camera.

‘A boyfriend or girlfriend,’ I clarified.

‘A what?’ Majestik said. ‘You tryin’ to say Michael’s gay now? Turn the camera off.’

A verbal squabble ensued, with Majestik saying several more times, ‘Turn the camera off,’ as Will, who was filming, protested and I persevered.

‘You askin’ me the wrong question,’ Joe said. ‘If I’d known this was going to be talked about I would never give you the chance to do this. Never . . . We don’t believe in gays. I can’t stand ’em.’

There were more expressions of outrage and dismay. Joe seemed to be struggling with the basic concept of homosexuality. ‘Are you saying having a boyfriend as a girlfriend?’

I wasn’t sure how to answer this. ‘No,’ I said. Or was I? A boyfriend as a girlfriend. I supposed I might be. ‘I don’t know what Michael’s romantic interests are,’ I said. ‘I don’t know which way he goes.’

‘Well, certainly I’m tellin’ you right now it’s not with no boys,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not that. OK?’

Then he said, ‘Anyway, Majestik, I’m going to have to end this.’

‘I tried to warn you,’ Majestik said. ‘It’s over.’

And it was.

It had felt like a revealing interview. A small contribution to the picture of the cloistered and backward-looking world Michael had grown up in. An upbringing in which, whether due to the culture of the time or the strict Jehovah’s Witness beliefs his family professed, the idea of men loving other men was beyond the pale.

When the time came to edit the film, we were still self-conscious about playing second fiddle to Martin Bashir’s astonishing effort, so we decided to make a feature of Martin’s presence. I made mention of my feelings of demoralization as I saw him coming and going from Michael’s hotel suites. Hence, too, the title: Louis, Martin, and Michael. We delivered the programme in late 2003, along with the two others. I felt like Santiago, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, arriving back with his raddled tuna carcass hitched to his boat. In a qualified and equivocal way I had broken my dry spell and earned back some measure of honour. It wasn’t the Hamiltons or Paul and Debbie, or anything resembling the impact I was supposed to be aiming for, but it was something.

Then I pushed my battered skiff back out to sea and paddled far, far away from television.