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Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra, Michael’s meditation guru, “Larry King Live” (June 26, 2009) (archived)

And we're now joined by Deepak Chopra, medical doctor, spiritual adviser, best-selling author, knew Michael Jackson for a very long time.

How did that come about, that you and he would be friends?

DEEPAK CHOPRA, SPIRITUAL ADVISER, AUTHOR: In 1988, he called me out of the blue and asked me to teach him meditation. I went to Neverland and we had a weekend together and became friends since that.

KING: What was he like?

CHOPRA: Magical. First time I met him, he was magic. He had a jukebox in his studio, with the traditional coins. So, we threw in a few coins and said, choose the music. And I choose "Saturday Night Fever" and he started to dance. And he went into --

KING: How did you deal with it all when there were accusations made against him.

CHOPRA: I speak regularly to him. I used to actually check on him regularly. And --

KING: Did you not believe all the --

CHOPRA: I never saw that behavior. And my children spent a lot of time with him. And they never saw that behavior. My son traveled with him on his "Dangerous" tour. Michael did spend a lot of time with children. And when I asked him why he did that, he said, he never had a childhood. That's what he enjoys.

KING: Understandable. You complained, though, today about people around him. You've been very open and been critical of what?

CHOPRA: Well, in 2005, after the trial, Michael came and spent a week with me. And out of the blue he asked me for a prescription, knowing that I'm a doctor and I have a license, too. It was a prescription for a narcotic. I said, wait, why would you want a prescription for a narcotic? It suddenly dawned on me that he was getting a lot of prescriptions from a lot of people.

KING: Was he an addict?

CHOPRA: Yes, he was.

KING: Did people around him encourage that addiction?

CHOPRA: Yes, more so his doctors.

KING: Didn't he have migraine headaches, though? Wasn't he in a lot of pain?

CHOPRA: He was in pain. But there are many ways to manage pain. Even if you're on narcotics, there's a way to manage narcotics. KING: Miko, what do you make of these?

BRANDO: It's hard to say right now.

KING: Did he take a lot of pills and stuff?

BRANDO: Not more than anyone else. If he had a headache, he took something. It wasn't anything that he was on a daily --

KING: Deepak, do you not agree?

CHOPRA: No. I know for a fact that he did. I saw bottles of OxyContin. I knew he was getting shots. I knew his doctors were enablers. What can I say?

I confronted him many times with it. When I did, he would stop returning my calls until we changed the topic.

KING: Lisa Marie Presley, his ex-wife, writes on her MySpace blog that Michael once told her he was afraid he would end up like her father. Did he talk about that?

CHOPRA: He did. Miko's father was also my friend. I used to go to their house all the time and have Indian food. Marlon would bring in Indian food. Michael would often say, particularly to my son, I'd rather go out like Elvis than Marlon Brando.

“The Huffington Post” (July 26, 2009) (archived)

When we first met, around 1988, I was struck by the combination of charisma and woundedness that surrounded Michael. He would be swarmed by crowds at an airport, perform an exhausting show for three hours, and then sit backstage afterward, as we did one night in Bucharest, drinking bottled water, glancing over some Sufi poetry as I walked into the room, and wanting to meditate.

That person, whom I considered (at the risk of ridicule) very pure, still survived — he was reading the poems of Rabindranath Tagore when we talked the last time, two weeks ago. Michael exemplified the paradox of many famous performers, being essentially shy, an introvert who would come to my house and spend most of the evening sitting by himself in a corner with his small children. I never saw less than a loving father when they were together (and wonder now, as anyone close to him would, what will happen to them in the aftermath). Michael’s reluctance to grow up was another part of the paradox. My children adored him, and in return he responded in a childlike way. He declared often, as former child stars do, that he was robbed of his childhood. Considering the monstrously exaggerated value our society places on celebrity, which was showered on Michael without stint, the public was callous to his very real personal pain. It became another tawdry piece of the tabloid Jacko, pictured as a weird changeling and as something far more sinister.

It’s not my place to comment on the troubles Michael fell heir to from the past and then amplified by his misguided choices in life. He was surrounded by enablers, including a shameful plethora of M.D.s in Los Angeles and elsewhere who supplied him with prescription drugs. As many times as he would candidly confess that he had a problem, the conversation always ended with a deflection and denial. As I write this paragraph, the reports of drug abuse are spreading across the cable news channels. The instant I heard of his death this afternoon, I had a sinking feeling that prescription drugs would play a key part.

The closest we ever became, perhaps, was when Michael needed a book to sell primarily as a concert souvenir. It would contain pictures for his fans but there would also be a text consisting of short fables. I sat with him for hours while he dreamily wove Aesop-like tales about animals, mixed with words about music and his love of all things musical. This project became Dancing the Dream after I pulled the text together for him, acting strictly as a friend. It was this time together that convinced me of the modus vivendi Michael had devised for himself: to counter the tidal wave of stress that accompanies mega-stardom, he built a private retreat in a fantasy world where pink clouds veiled inner anguish and Peter Pan was a hero, not a pathology.

This compromise with reality gradually became unsustainable. He went to strange lengths to preserve it. Unbounded privilege became another toxic force in his undoing. What began as idiosyncrasy, shyness, and vulnerability was ravaged by obsessions over health, paranoia over security, and an isolation that grew more and more unhealthy. When Michael passed me the music for that last song, the one sitting by my bedside waiting for the right words, the procedure for getting the CD to me rivaled a CIA covert operation in its secrecy. My memory of Michael Jackson will be as complex and confused as anyone’s. His closest friends will close ranks and try to do everything in their power to insure that the good lives after him. Will we be successful in rescuing him after so many years of media distortion? No one can say. I only wanted to put some details on the record in his behalf. My son Gotham traveled with Michael as a roadie on his “Dangerous” tour when he was seventeen. Will it matter that Michael behaved with discipline and impeccable manners around my son? (It sends a shiver to recall something he told Gotham: “I don’t want to go out like Marlon Brando. I want to go out like Elvis.” Both icons were obsessions of this icon.) His children’s nanny and surrogate mother, Grace Rwaramba , is like another daughter to me. I introduced her to Michael when she was eighteen, a beautiful, heartwarming girl from Rwanda who is now grown up. She kept an eye on him for me and would call me whenever he was down or running too close to the edge. How heartbreaking for Grace that no one’s protective instincts and genuine love could avert this tragic day. An hour ago she was sobbing on the telephone from London. As a result, I couldn’t help but write this brief remembrance in sadness. But when the shock subsides and a thousand public voices recount Michael’s brilliant, joyous, embattled, enigmatic, bizarre trajectory, I hope the word “joyous” is the one that will rise from the ashes and shine as he once did.