Debbie Rowe engaged; is a fight for Michael Jackson's kids next?

Debbie Rowe, Michael Jackson's ex-wife and mother of his first two children, is engaged to be married again. 

Rowe has said "I will" to Marc Schaffel, TMZ reports, three weeks after he proposed. She'd initially declined, the site said Thursday, because she thought she had terminal cancer. After finding out Wednesday that her diagnosis was actually the auto-immune disease sarcoidosis, she changed her mind. No wedding date has been set yet, she said.

The 55-year-old Palmdale resident met Schaffel when he was working for Jackson, according to ABC News, and their friendly relationship evolved over time. They've been splitting time between L.A. and her place. 

Prince Michael Jackson, 17, and his sister, Paris, 16, have "known him since they were little," their mom told TMZ. "They like him a lot."

Though Jackson and Rowe were married in late 1996, when she was six months pregnant with son Prince Michael, the two never lived together as husband and wife. Their divorce was final in 1999, with the former Mrs. King of Pop getting a $6-million settlement and giving up custody of the kids, with a visit allowed every 45 days. 

But wait -- marriage might not be the only legal action Rowe's considering these days: TMZ reported Friday that she's going to pursue guardianship of her children and maybe even Blanket Jackson, 12, who has a different, unidentified birth mother.

Sources told the site that Rowe's been worried about the environment at Katherine Jackson's Calabasas home, allegedly citing the age (83) of co-guardian Katherine Jackson, the frequent absence of co-guardian TJ Jackson and the frequent presence of the kids' uncles as concerns.

She doesn't want a payday, the site said, but would have the kids move to her Palmdale horse ranch. 

Paris -- spotted out with Blanket and cousin TJ's kids in SoCal in March -- was photographed with her mom over the holidays on a Hawaiian vacation. The mother and daughter reportedly speak frequently after reconnecting early last year. Last June, Paris was hospitalized following an alleged suicide attempt, after which she took off for boarding school and treatment in Utah. 

"I almost lost my daughter," Rowe said on the stand in August, when she was testifying in the Michael Jackson wrongful-death trial. "She is devastated. She tried to kill herself.… She doesn’t feel like she has a life anymore." She also said at the time that she was closer to Paris than she was to Prince. 

Michael Jackson a Reluctant Spokesman : Singer Ducks All Questions at Press Conference Held by L.A. Gear

Michael Jackson is the $20-million corporate spokesman who won't speak.

"Protect me. . . . Don't let them ask me any questions," Jackson whispered Wednesday morning to a top executive from L.A. Gear, moments after the enigmatic pop star told a Hollywood Palladium full of reporters that he was "very happy" to be a part of the L.A. Gear team.

By next spring, Jackson will be starring in L.A. Gear commercials. In the meantime he will help design and market a new line of L.A. Gear shoes. In return, Jackson not only has signed a multimillion-dollar contract, but he has also received options to purchase a "sizable amount" of L.A. Gear stock over the coming years, Chairman Robert Y. Greenberg told The Times in an interview after the press conference.

"If he wants to buy into the company, that's up to him," said Greenberg, who attended the press conference but did not speak to the gathering. Greenberg would not reveal details of the agreement, but he did say that the longer Jackson remains with L.A. Gear, the larger his ownership stake might grow.

'Could Buy the Place'

"He has no ownership in the company right now," said Sandy Saemann, executive vice president of L.A. Gear, who negotiated the deal and will direct the upcoming Jackson commercials. "But I suppose if he wanted to, he could probably buy the place."

Saemann called the agreement with Jackson "the largest corporate association ever reached between a company and a celebrity." One source close to L.A. Gear, who insisted on anonymity, said the contract with Jackson will exceed $20 million over two years.

Jackson has hooked up with one of the fastest-growing companies in America. L.A. Gear expects sales to exceed $1 billion this year, a huge leap from sales of $4.5 million posted in its first year, 1983. On Wednesday, L.A. Gear stock rose $1.25 a share to $65.50 on the New York Stock Exchange. Clearly, "Captain Eo" has replaced "Captain" Kareem in the L.A. Gear advertising line-up. Jackson, who plays the film role of "Captain Eo" in attractions at Disneyland and Disney World, is replacing former Los Angeles Laker basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as L.A. Gear's corporate spokesman.

Decked in black sunglasses, black slacks, a black jacket and a pair of black, $69 "Sportster" shoes made by L.A. Gear, Jackson read a 10-second prepared statement to reporters and then scurried from the stage.

When Jackson was first led on stage, a dozen flood lights filled the room and fog began to spew from giant machines. The stage from which Jackson spoke was dotted with dozens of giant fake palm trees and live fern plants that the company rented for the occasion.

Looming behind Jackson was a giant new logo for "Unstoppable," the line of footwear that the company says the fashion-conscious pop singer will help design and market. "This word epitomizes what L.A. Gear and Michael Jackson represent," said Saemann. "Together we're an unstoppable team."

In an interview, Saemann said L.A. Gear spent more than $50,000 on the press conference, which was broadcast live via satellite to a sportswear show in Munich, West Germany.

Many of the estimated 100 members of the press attending the rare Jackson press conference jeered when Jackson left before taking any questions. For one moment, Jackson appeared confused, and even seemed prepared to answer a question shouted by one reporter. Instead, Jackson blew a kiss towards the gathering when an aide quickly led the singer off the stage.

Why has L.A. Gear selected a spokesman who won't speak? Responded Greenberg, the company chairman, "I've spoken with him, and he speaks very well."

Jermaine Jackson: 'Word to the Badd!!' a Call to Michael : * Pop music: 'The only reason I wrote this song was to help my little brother get a grip on reality,' he says.

Jermaine Jackson says he took a biting musical swipe at his superstar sibling, Michael, because his younger brother had frozen him out of his life.

In an interview, Jermaine explained that the cantankerous lyrics to his song "Word to the Badd!!," which criticize Michael for allegedly changing his skin color and obtaining plastic surgery, were written in retaliation for eight months of unreturned phone calls.

"I understand he's a very busy person, but after you repeatedly try to contact your own brother and he doesn't call you back, you begin to wonder if he hasn't just completely lost touch with reality," Jermaine, 37, told The Times.

"I know people are going to go off on a tangent and say that Jermaine is jealous. But it's not true. Michael and I have never feuded. The only reason I wrote this song--and it came from the bottom of my heart--was to help my little brother get a grip on reality. I never meant to discredit him. The song was never supposed to come out in public. But now that it has, I am hear to say that, yes, I wrote it and I stand by it."

A bootleg cassette of "Badd!!" was leaked last weekend to programmers at several radio stations, which began playing it back-to-back with an unauthorized version of Michael Jackson's long-awaited new single "Black or White," a song about racial harmony that was not officially due to be released until Monday.

Jermaine's song includes lyrics such as:

Reconstructed

Been abducted

Don't know who you are

Think they love you

They don't know you

Lonely superstar . . . .

Michael Jackson, 33, could not be reached for comment, but a spokesman for his record company called the release of Jermaine's song a "malicious publicity stunt."

Representatives from LaFace Records, the Atlanta-based independent label for which Jermaine Jackson records, and from Arista Records, the company that distributes his music, denied playing any part in leaking the song to radio programmers, as did Jermaine.

Jermaine said he is tired of hearing the lyrics of "Badd!!" being compared to his sister La Toya's vindictive tell-all autobiography about the Jackson clan, of which an excerpt appears along with her nude photos in the November issue of Playboy magazine.

"In no form or fashion was this done as a publicity stunt," said Jackson, who hasn't scored a solo Top 10 hit on the pop charts since the early '80s. "This is not like La Toya. I think that what La Toya has done is unforgivable. I don't know who leaked the song. I certainly had nothing to do with it. But it doesn't anger me. If it wasn't leaked now, maybe it would have been leaked later. The fact is it's out there and I have to deal with it."

However, the way Jermaine looks at it, at least one positive thing occurred as a result of the song's public airing. Shortly after the recording was leaked, Michael called.

The two Jackson siblings reportedly met for the first time in eight months on Monday in Los Angeles.

"The first thing Michael asked me was 'Why?' " Jermaine said. "So I explained to him how I felt. After we talked for awhile we agreed that no matter how busy each of us gets that we should never be too busy to take a call from one another. But that's between us.

"You see, I love my brother very much. My relationship with my brother is more important than money. It's more important than a No. 1 record. The most important thing is that we maintain being brothers and hopefully this song will help improve our relationship. I'm not happy that the song has been made public, but what can I do about it now?"

A tamer version of "Word to the Badd!!" is included on Jermaine Jackson's new album, "You Said," which was released last week. The singer said he specifically asked his record company to edit the version now playing on the radio before placing the song on the album because he did not "feel emotionally ready for the public to hear it."

"My song deals with much more than any plastic surgery or any facial changes or this and that," Jackson said. "The bottom line here is that this song was written as a private message to help get my brother to heal our relationship."

Still, all the attention focused on the bootleg version of "Badd!!" has officials at Arista and LaFace reportedly considering the possibility of rush-releasing the original track as a single or offering it free to consumers who buy a copy of Jermaine's new album.

Asked whether he would consent to the release of the unedited version of "Badd" if pressed by his record company to do so, Jackson said he was still undecided.

"I really don't know," Jackson said. "I'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Michael and I talked. That's what's important to me. He left smiling and I'm smiling."

The Rise of Boreytelling: Maudlin tales that go on till the heartwarming final act

There's a serious affliction stalking the corridors of advertising, claiming more victims with every passing week. Even you, dear reader, may either be infected or know someone who is We are calling it the Peter Jackson syndrome*; a condition inspired by the Kiwi-born director who took The Hobbit, a brief narrative suffused with an almost childlike simplicity and sucked the life out of it over three films, transforming it into nine ponderous hours of epic hiking interspersed with the odd dragon fight or two to keep things lively.

Jackson and his studio had good reason to bloat The Hobbit: more movies meant more cash from fans who couldn't get enough of unlikely hairy footed heroes, easily identifiable villains and more deus ex machina than a Tamil mythological from the 1980s. We are going to ask you this in the nicest way possible, Indian advertising: what's your excuse?

Every time a new "online only" commercial makes its way to our inboxes or timelines, we groan inwardly and outwardly, knowing that's probably another four wasted minutes of our life we are never going to get back. Too many ads these days don't have very much to say, take too long saying it and then awkwardly graft a brand in somewhere during, but most often at the end of the film. It reminds us less of advertising and more of some valiant MC, at the end of a concert or a theatre performance, trying to "get a round of applause for the sponsors!" as the audience shuffles and shoves its way to the exit.

We truly are in the age of Boreytelling: maudlin narratives that wind on forever with a supposedly heartwarming final act. The most egregious offenders so far are Pepsi's 7 minute long Diwali film about a tiff between a city based woman and her aged parents.

All the other films, however dull, compare favourably with this one simply because they are shorter. And more recently an ad for Gillette about a blind old man, his son and their near 30 year long love affair with cricket which ends when the son gets married, something the elderly gent seems a little unnecessarily churlish about.

We could have sworn this ad played out in real time and left us feeling at least three decades older. What would make it slightly bearable was if the films changed things up just a little every now and then. How about something funny for a whole four minutes? Key and Peele and Mitchell and Webb, have done it on season after season of great sketch-based comedy. How about four minutes of suspense? Or action? However, for every exception like Ogilvy's 'Prison Break' for Tata Sky or McCann's stammering comedian for Nescafe, there's the rule.

An agency head we spoke to recently, wondered at how young creatives these days were so eager on scripts about making the world a better place, provided they were able to get a brand to foot the bill, of course. We reckon it could be the result of growing up on saccharine Michael Jackson anthems like 'Heal The World' or 'The Earth Song' and watching films bristling with a self-righteous need for change like 'Rang De Basanti' while in or just out of college.

However, it most likely has less to do with altruism and more with riding a trend. But in the process, the industry is dulling one of its best skills: the ability to pack a great narrative with heaps of nuance and understated detailing into an incredibly short span of time. Even worse, it's wasting the gift of length on the cinematic equivalent of hearing the local bore narrate tedious tales about the triumphs and tragedies of the dullest people in your neighbourhood.

And that's a tragedy far more poignant than any we've seen in an ad so far.

*We were initially going to call it Jackson's Disease before we realised it's becoming a common term for vitiligo: the skin condition Michael Jackson suffered from, the treatment of which resulted in him transforming from black to white. Strangely enough, we do have a few brands suffering from that as well: note the ads for the fairness category or purely desi apparel brands which hawk their wares using primarily white-skinned models. But that's another rant for another week.

Michael Jackson

Rusty Kennedy/Associated Press

Updated: Nov. 29, 2011

Michael Joseph Jackson’s story was a quintessentially American tale of celebrity and excess that took him from musical boy wonder to global pop superstar to sad figure haunted by lawsuits, paparazzi and failed plastic surgery.

At the height of his career, Mr. Jackson was indisputably the biggest star in the world; he sold more than 750 million albums. He spent a lifetime surprising people, in his last years mainly because of a surreal personal life, lurid legal scandals, serial plastic surgeries and erratic public behavior that turned him — on his very best days — into the butt of late-night talk-show jokes and tabloid headlines.

Mr. Jackson died at age 50 in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009. His death itself became an enormous spectacle. On television and on the Internet, tens of millions of people worldwide watched a memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

The cause of Mr. Jackson’s death was a mixture of the powerful anesthetic propofol and the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office.

Two days after Mr. Jackson’s death his personal doctor, Conrad Murray, told detectives that he had been using propofol nearly daily for the last two months to help Mr. Jackson sleep. But he said that he had been trying to wean Mr. Jackson off the drug and had tried sedatives instead. Dr. Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter for providing him with propofol.

Guilty Verdict and Sentencing

On Nov. 7, Dr. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The jury deliberated less than nine hours. He could also lose his medical license.

On Nov. 29, Dr. Murray was sentenced to four years, the maximum he was facing. However, because of California’s chronically overcrowded prisons, it was unclear how much time he would actually spend behind bars. Dr. Murray was initially being sent to a county jail because of a state law aimed at easing overcrowding. Court observers said he was likely to spend two years there and then serve out the rest of the time under house arrest.

The trial focused on whether Dr. Murray abdicated his duty as a doctor, recklessly providing Mr. Jackson at home with a powerful sedative that is typically used in hospitals with extensive monitoring.

Judge Michael E. Pastor, before announcing the sentence, castigated Dr. Murray for his lack of remorse. “To hear Dr. Murray say it, Dr. Murray was a bystander,” the judge said. “Talk about blaming the victim. Not only is there not any remorse, there’s umbrage and outrage.”