Isolated from the world by his stellar fame and bizarre lifestyle, Michael Jackson cut a lonely figure. Lasting friendships were rare – often only with fellow superstars who had some inkling of what it was like to live under his level of constant global scrutiny.
One such close friend was screen god Marlon Brando who met the singer in the early 1980s after reportedly being introduced by record producer and composer Quincy Jones.
It seemed an unlikely match – the macho matinee idol, then heading into his 60s, and the delicate, asexual pop elf – but Jacko was apparently swept away by the actor’s mercurial personality.
For Brando’s part, he enjoyed the singer’s lavish surroundings and spent a great deal of his later years staying at Jackson’s huge Neverland Ranch estate – even though he had to cart an oxygen tank with him because of breathing difficulties.
‘Marlon Brando has become a very close and trusted friend of mine,’ Jackson gushed in his 1988 autobiography Moonwalk. ‘I can’t tell you how much he’s taught me. We sit and talk for hours.’ Brando was ‘like a father to me’, he said.
Which makes for some very weird family dynamics if a startling new claim is true – that Brando fathered Jackson’s youngest child.
According to reports, the star of The Godfather, On The Waterfront and Apocalypse Now donated sperm to the pop star before his son, Bigi Jackson, was born via a surrogate in 2002.
Bigi – previously known as Blanket – was born two years before Brando’s death, aged 80, in 2004. Jackson himself died only five years later, of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication in 2009. ‘It has all kicked off within the wider Jackson estate quite recently, with Paris and Prince [the eldest of Michael Jackson’s children] being told of this development,’ a source told The Sun newspaper.
‘It is all very strange, but the pieces of the puzzle seem to add up. Everyone is trying to get their heads around it.’
Michael Jackson met Apocalypse Now actor Marlon Brando in the early 1980s, with the singer writing in his memoir: ‘Brando was like a father to me’
Bigi Jackson, left, with his elder siblings Paris, centre, and Prince in 2012
As well they might be. For the ‘origins’ of Jackson’s three children – charity founder Prince, 28: singer, actress and model Paris, now 27; and the far more private 23-year-old Bigi – remains one of the greatest mysteries about the star.
The Daily Mail approached John Branca, co-executor of Jackson’s estate, to ask about the Brando claims, but we have had no response. Of course, it’s a sensitive issue for the trio, but the speculation has only intensified over the years as the children have grown up looking less and less like their famous father. And, indeed, less and less like each other.
It isn’t the first time Brando has been mentioned as one of Jackson’s sperm donors, although some observers have claimed that Bigi’s biological father could also be Marlon’s son, Miko, now 64, who worked as a security guard and driver at Neverland in California’s Santa Barbara county. Miko is one of Brando’s 11 children by his three wives and has his father’s heavy eyebrows and dark eyes… as does Bigi. Although, of course, the same is true of countless other men.
Miko also appeared in the video for Jackson’s 2001 song You Rock My World and has previously talked about the time his father Marlon spent on Jackson’s luxuriously appointed and well-staffed 2,700-acre estate.
‘He loved it. He had a 24-hour chef, 24-hour security, 24-hour help, 24-hour kitchen, 24-hour maid service. Just carte blanche,’ said Miko. ‘Michael was instrumental in helping my father through the last few years of his life. For that, I will always be indebted to him.’
The ranch – packed with children’s attractions including a Disney-themed train station, carousel and other fairground rides – was also where Jackson allegedly sexually abused a string of young boys.
Jackson always denied the claims but, in 1994, Marlon reportedly told LA prosecutors he thought it was ‘pretty reasonable to conclude that [Jackson] may have had something to do with kids’. Brando told LA deputy district attorneys he once confronted his sexually repressed friend at Neverland over the child abuse allegations against him and Jackson broke down in tears.
‘My impression was that he didn’t want to answer because he was frightened to answer me,’ said Brando. ‘I had asked him if he was a virgin and he sort of laughed and giggled, and he called me Brando. He said, “Oh, Brando.” I said: “Well, what do you do for sex?” And he was acting fussy and embarrassed.’
When Brando asked Jackson about his friends, Jackson reportedly replied: ‘I don’t know anybody my own age. I don’t like anybody my own age.’
The actor also said he passed on ‘impressions and concerns’ he had discussed with son Miko.
Brando’s conversation, among other revelations, has fuelled speculation over the years that Jackson had an intense phobia of heterosexual sex – possibly as a consequence of his overbearing father, Joe, making Michael and his older brothers perform in strip clubs when they were very young.
Michael Jackson was married to Debbie Rowe for four years
Brando’s son Miko – one of 11 of ther actor’s children – has the heavy eyebrows and dark eyes of a Brando
Prince, Paris and Bigi. The ‘origins’ of Jackson’s three children remains one of the greatest mysteries about the star
That suspicion was strengthened by various supposed girlfriends such as actresses Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields admitting their relationships with Michael had been entirely asexual. Rumours also swirled that Jackson was in fact impotent.
He was also married, for just two years between 1994 and 1996, to Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. She insisted they had sex regularly although she has said she didn’t want to have children with him, fearing a ‘nightmare’ custody battle and also believing he was too emotionally immature to be a father.
The mother of Paris and Prince is Debbie Rowe, a nurse Jackson met when she was working as an assistant to his dermatologist Arnold Klein.
Rowe claimed that, following his divorce from Lisa Marie, Jackson got upset that he might never become a father.
A devoted Jackson fan, she suggested she could bear his children – an account that was later corroborated by Lisa Marie, who told Playboy in 2003 that even during their marriage, Jackson was aware the besotted Rowe ‘had a crush on him’ and wanted to have his children.
Rowe was the same age as Jackson and became his second wife in November 1996, a month after it was revealed that she was pregnant (having suffered an earlier miscarriage).
According to Rowe, Jackson impregnated her artificially with his own sperm, although he initially denied it (as he did reports that his relationship with her was rooted in money).
Michael Jackson Jr – nicknamed Prince – was born the following February and Rowe gave birth to daughter Paris, again apparently following artificial insemination, just 14 months later in April 1998.
However, the couple divorced in 2000 with Rowe – who gave Jackson full custody rights – reportedly overwhelmed by the intense public attention. Prince Michael Jackson II – alias Blanket, alias Bigi – was born in 2002 to a surrogate mother who has never been identified. Jackson said the baby was again produced through artificial insemination using his own sperm.
Oddly, he initially claimed he’d had a relationship with the mother and she wanted to remain anonymous but later changed the story and insisted he had never even met her.
But if there is at least some agreement about the mothers of Jackson’s children, there’s none – other than Jackson’s insistence that he sired all of them – about the fathers.
Brando, pictured with Miko, had conversations with Jackson that have fuelled speculation over the years that the singer had an intense phobia of heterosexual sex
Bigi was born in 2002 to a surrogate mother who has never been identified, with Jackson saying he was produced through artificial insemination
Notwithstanding the fact that Debbie Rowe was white, their fair skin and Caucasian looks – Prince’s hair was initially blond, while Paris has blue eyes – soon prompted speculation that he was not their biological father.
The idea was strengthened by the farcical lengths Jackson took to hide their faces in public behind masks or blankets. However, Jackson – who was born black despite reportedly lightening his skin with bleaching cream – insisted he was their biological father in a notorious 2003 interview with Martin Bashir.
‘I used a surrogate mother [for Blanket] and my own sperm cells. I had my own sperm cells in my other two children,’ he said. ‘They are all my children.’
However, in the same year, biologists and geneticists started telling the media that, although it was theoretically possible that Jackson and Rowe had produced light-skinned children, the odds were low.
Reports began to circulate that Jackson suffered from a low sperm count and had turned to other men – friends he trusted and admired – to provide him with children. Speculation began to build to a frenzy.
Initially, attention was focused on his dermatologist (and Rowe’s former boss) Klein, who released a decidedly ambiguous statement days after Jackson’s death in June 2009, saying: ‘To the best of my knowledge, I am not the father of these children.’
Klein later said he had given Jackson some of his sperm and thought he could be father of the older two. Prince does indeed look similar to Klein.
Years later, when someone on X suggested the skin specialist could be his father, Prince cryptically commented: ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’
Observers took it that Prince was saying – as many others have over the years – that his biological parentage was irrelevant as Jackson had raised him.
Almost as soon as Jackson died, the plot became murkier still, with sources telling showbusiness website TMZ that neither Michael nor even Debbie Rowe were the biological parents of Prince and Paris.
In fact, other people’s sperm and eggs were used for the embryos, they claimed.
Yet more stories around the parentage of Jackson’s children emerged. A month after the singer died, a woman named Claire Fields Cruise filed an astonishing lawsuit in Los Angeles claiming to be the sole mother of all three children. She said Prince was fathered by a man living in France, while Paris Jackson’s father had been Fields Cruise’s ‘unofficial college sweetheart’.
Fields Cruise, who was seeking guardianship of the trio, claimed for good measure that Jackson actually fathered Connor Cruise, adopted black son of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but gave him to the Hollywood couple because he didn’t like his skin colour.
Just a day before this utterly wild and predictably fruitless claim was filed, another potential parent entered the ring.
British actor Mark Lester – who played Oliver Twist in the 1968 film Oliver! – claimed he donated sperm to Jackson in 1996 and that he could be Paris’ biological father. Lester became a close friend of Jackson (a fan of the classic musical) and is godparent to all three of Jackson’s children along with Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin.
Lester, now a 67-year-old osteopath, cited physical similarities between Paris and his daughters Harriet and Olivia, and indeed with himself when he was young. ‘There’s a possibility that one or all, very unlikely all, but one of those kids may be mine,’ he said.
He said he’d provided the sperm as a ‘gift’ to enable his superstar friend to become a father.
‘I was just helping out a friend. I think he had a problem with actually doing the physical act of sex and had a very low sperm count as well,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2017. Lester claimed Jackson had been scared off women for various reasons, including the ‘trauma’ of being propositioned by Madonna, lying naked in bed for him in her hotel room.
Lester said Jackson asked him to make a sperm deposit at a Harley Street clinic in London – and made it clear he wasn’t the only friend that Jackson approached.
‘Michael said it would all be completely confidential and I knew he was asking others in his inner circle – actors Macaulay Culkin, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, Uri Geller, people from Harvard with doctorates, all sorts,’ he told this newspaper.
Lester also said he was ‘pretty sure’ that Bigi was Michael’s biological son, although he didn’t say why. Nor did he expand on why he ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to take a DNA test, which the Jackson children also declined to do.
Although celebrities like Culkin have distanced themselves from such speculation, there was one other notable paternity claim.
Shortly after Jackson’s death, his former bodyguard, martial arts expert Mark Fiddes, insisted he had also donated sperm to the Jackson collection and that the singer told him he was keen to have ‘an athletic child’.
Fiddes speculated that he ‘might’ be the biological father of Bigi and reportedly asked for a DNA test to prove he was father to Paris, too. Again, he didn’t get it.
Any reluctance on behalf of the children to get DNA tests isn’t linked to their legitimate right to inherit money from his estate – all three are named beneficiaries in Jackson’s will.
The saga continued in 2013 when AEG, the concert promoter being sued by the Jackson family for $40 million (£30 million) over Michael’s ill-fated This Is It tour, was reportedly prepared to present the court with evidence that only Bigi Jackson was the singer’s biological child.
At the time, a Jackson clan member reasoned to the New York Post that Bigi ‘looks just like him’. Yet now we’re told that everyone thinks he looks just like Marlon Brando.
Without those conclusive DNA tests, the mystery of who fathered the Jackson Three is unlikely to be resolved.