The Jackson-Liz Drug Link

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Chris Pizzello / AP Photo As the world said goodbye to Michael Jackson, new reports revealed signs of IV drug use. Gerald Posner uncovers details about his pill habit and the role of an influential friend—Liz Taylor.

Questions continue to swirl about how Michael Jackson apparently died from a prescription-drug overdose. After discussing Jackson’s medical history with several people personally familiar with it, The Daily Beast has uncovered new details about his early pill dependencies, including the role of an influential friend: Elizabeth Taylor.

Jackson idolized Taylor, multiple sources confirmed, holding her up as if she were the actual title character from Cleopatra, which he had watched dozens of times, bringing his friends regularly to meet her. Jackson told one she was “a mythical figure.”

And it was Taylor who endorsed Arnold Klein, the cosmetic dermatologist to Hollywood’s A-list, to Jackson. One of Klein’s nurses, Debbie Rowe, later married Jackson and was the surrogate mother for his first two children. One tabloid report even suggested since the pop star’s death that Klein was the biological father of those children, something he dismissed outright.

Jackson was twice warned by a good friend that his relationship with Taylor was toxic because she unwittingly fed his addiction.

In the mid-'80s, when Jackson was a new patient at Dr. Klein’s office, Taylor was seeking help for her own prescription-drug and alcohol problem. According to a source intimately familiar with Taylor’s medical history in the 1980s, she sought help from at least two doctors to counter her growing drug dependence. After multiple visits to one of them, she abandoned the pretense of wanting to be drug-free and instead asked for Dilaudid and Ativan, the first a powerful opiate that street users dub “the Bentley of heroin,” and the latter a tranquilizer.

The doctor refused and demanded she come clean on her entire prescription history. He then discovered that Taylor was using more prescriptions than she had disclosed during her earlier visits. A source close to the doctor said that when she was pressed about who was prescribing such a wide mix of drugs, she said it was Dr. Klein. The doctor urged her to enter rehab—she did in 1988—and much later remarked to an associate, “I’m surprised she’s still alive.”

A person familiar with Jackson’s medical history says this was around the time Jackson first began using some of the same pain and sleeping pills as Taylor. Dr. Klein was treating Jackson for vitiligo (which causes depigmentation and patchiness in the skin), this person says, and Jackson often complained about residual pain from his 1984 accident in which his hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi ad.

Dr. Klein not only counted Taylor and Jackson as patients but socialized with both. When Liz celebrated her birthday, for instance in 1999 at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel, at an Andrea Bocelli concert, she only invited Michael, Klein, her hairdresser, and her then-boyfriend, a Beverly Hills dentist and his two sons.

“Michael was often visiting Liz,” Michael LaPerruque, head of Jackson’s security for different periods this decade, told me. “And at different times, I met Dr. Klein. He would also be around.”

In January 1993, Michael Jackson performed at the 20th-annual American Music Awards at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium. Liz Taylor gave him a special award, and Jackson and Taylor were walking together after the show. “She was teetering, and you could smell the alcohol on her,” recalls a witness. “Her eyes were glazed.”

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