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They met as children and for 40 years he was Michael Jackson's confidant. Now, in an intimate account, J. Randy Taraborrelli writes about the Michael Jackson he knew. He reveals what sort of father Jackson was, and explains the great sadness of his mother, Katherine, who has been granted temporary custody of her grandchildren.

His first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, was firmly convinced that Michael Jackson should not be a father. He was too emotionally immature to raise a child, she concluded.

'I think he needs a parent,' she said. She refused point blank to have his babies. Undaunted, he hooked up with an old friend, Debbie Rowe, a nurse specialising in skin disorders, and she had his children instead, most probably after artificial insemination - although startling reports this week say that neither Debbie nor Michael are actually the biological parents of their two children.

When Debbie told her own father, he asked about this method of conception: 'Isn't he capable of fathering a child like anyone else?' She laughed: 'Michael doesn't do anything like anyone else.'

On the insistence of Michael's mother, Katherine, a devout Jehovah's Witness, he and Debbie married after his divorce from Lisa. Six months' pregnant and wearing black, she walked towards him at his suite in a Sydney hotel while he sat at the Пианино playing 'Here comes the bride'.

He had on a creamy foundation that made his face almost stark white, and extra eyeliner. He wore a hat with one long curl framing each side of his face and fake sideburns. His 'best man' was a new friend named Anthony, whom Michael claimed was his nephew. He was eight years old.

It seemed that Lisa Marie might well have been right, then. Certainly, everything that happened over the Далее few years seemed to Подтвердить her opinion.

Prince Michael Jackson, Michael's son, was born in hospital in 1997, and together he and Debbie cut the umbilical cord. Then, while she stayed put, Michael rushed the baby off to Neverla