Culkin Tells of Special Bond With Jackson

SANTA MARIA, Calif. — One morning in 1990, the phone rang in the home of Macaulay Culkin, the then 9-year-old acting sensation fresh off his star turn in the first “Home Alone” film.

Culkin picked up the receiver and discovered a kindred spirit: a 32-year-old man who a couple of decades before had been just like him -- an achingly cute boy with a domineering father and a wildly successful career in show business.

“He said, ‘Hey, this is Michael Jackson,’ ” Culkin recalled Wednesday from the witness stand at the pop star’s child-molestation trial. “ ‘I think I understand kind of what’s happening, and I’d like to get together and talk.’ ”

The King of Pop from the 1970s and ‘80s and the most successful child actor of the ‘90s immediately bonded over their mutual sadness that fame had snatched away their childhood joys too soon, Culkin testified.

It’s a lament that Jackson has reached out to a number of performers to share, including Brooke Shields, Emmanuel Lewis and Corey Feldman, all of whom had become famous as children.

Called as a defense witness in the trial in Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville’s courtroom, Culkin, 24, rallied to aid his old friend, who is charged with molesting a 13-year-old cancer survivor in 2003.

With the same heavy-lidded look as the boy he portrayed in the blockbuster “Home Alone,” Culkin rejected prosecution claims that he had been improperly touched by Jackson.

In presenting Culkin, defense attorneys suggested that Jackson surrounded himself with children not for abuse but for good clean fun.

Culkin was the latest of several young men to tell the jury that as children they had slept in the same bed as Jackson and nothing untoward ever happened. Jackson has described such encounters with boys as innocent slumber parties.

Culkin, the only one of the three who said Jackson still is a close friend, called the charges against the 46-year-old singer “absolutely ridiculous.”

Jackson is charged with molestation, attempted molestation, providing alcohol to a minor and conspiracy. If convicted on all counts, he could face more than 20 years in prison.

Jackson has long expressed a special affection for current or former child performers. One of his closest friends is Elizabeth Taylor. He has an entire room in his house devoted to Shirley Temple memorabilia.

When Jackson met the former actress, he once told an interviewer, she greeted him as a member of the same tribe.

“Oh, you’re one of us,” she reportedly said. The two hit it off immediately, Jackson recalled.

Godfather to the singer’s 8-year-old son Prince Michael Jr., Culkin is always welcome at Jackson’s Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, where Culkin relaxed for a couple of weeks about four years ago even though his host was not present.

In court, Culkin said their friendship was based on the shared experience of being overwhelmed by fame at an early age.

“One day I was essentially a normal kid who happened to be an actor, and the next thing I know, I’m just this thing where people are hiding in the bushes and trying to take your picture,” he said. “Next thing you know, you have a million acquaintances and no more friends. And he understood that -- that was one of the first things we talked about.”

For his court appearance, Culkin wore a dark suit and no tie, his white shirt hanging outside his pants. Asked to describe his career, he spoke in the nonchalant cadences of an old pro: “I started working at the age of 4, doing stage and things like that.”

By the time he was 10, “Home Alone” had grossed $300 million and every youngster in America had imitated the trademark Culkin pose: a hand on each cheek and a look of comic agony.

When Culkin arrived on the celebrity scene, Jackson already was firmly established as a major musical sensation. Yet Jackson still was so deeply shy around adults that he preferred the company of children -- mainly, according to prosecutors, young boys.

As he had with other boys before, Jackson invited his new young friend and his family to Neverland, the 2,800-acre ranch equipped by the pop star with a zoo, an amusement park, a video arcade, a movie theater and statues honoring his literary inspiration: Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

Culkin was such a frequent visitor, Jackson built a spot where the two could engage in elaborate battles with Uzi-sized water guns. A sign identifies it as the “M&M; Water Fort,” for Macaulay and Michael.

In his testimony, Culkin spoke of Neverland as nonstop fun, a place where he and his brother would play so hard and so long, they would end up sleeping wherever they ran out of energy -- on the floor in the video arcade, on one of the two hospital beds in the theater or, frequently, in bed with Jackson.

Prosecutors did not hide their skepticism of the actor’s portrait of innocence. Culkin, however, rejected suggestions from prosecutor Ron Zonen that Jackson may have run him ragged around Neverland so he could molest the boy in his sleep.

“I think I would have realized if something like that was happening to me, whether I was asleep or not,” Culkin testified.

Culkin was not asked specifically about a former Neverland chef’s allegation that he saw Jackson molesting the young star.

Philip LeMarque had testified that he was summoned to the kitchen in the middle of the night to prepare French fries for Culkin and Jackson. When he found the two in the video arcade, he said, they were raptly playing a “Thriller” game and Jackson was groping the boy’s genitals.

Culkin said all Jackson ever initiated with him and other boys around the ranch was “good old-fashioned fun.”

And he said he saw no ulterior motive in the many phone calls, some two or three hours long, that he and Jackson shared. He said Jackson sometimes expressed his fondness for the child actor by calling him a part of his family -- a compliment he also paid his current accuser and a number of other boys.

But Jackson didn’t ask all the other young boys he knew to guest-star in one of his videos, as he did Culkin. A year after “Home Alone,” Culkin did a rap number in “Black or White.”

John Landis, who directed the music video, called Culkin “a charming, sweet, maniacal, spoiled kid” and recalled a giant pie fight orchestrated by Jackson and his young friend.

“In terms of their friendship, it was like they were kids,” Landis said in an interview Wednesday.

Landis said he was startled, however, when Culkin’s father dropped him and his brother off at the video shoot for three days without toothbrushes or pajamas.

“At the time, I thought it was really sad,” Landis said.

As a teen, Culkin took legal action to emancipate himself from his father’s control. Jackson, in numerous interviews, has cast his own father, Joseph, as a tyrannical taskmaster who physically and emotionally abused his children.

Joseph Jackson, along with his wife, Katherine, has sat in court most days since March 1, the start of testimony in their son’s trial.

Culkin traveled with Jackson, as did a number of other boys mentioned in the trial. When family friends invited Culkin, then in his early teens, to Bermuda, Jackson asked if he could tag along, Culkin testified.

When they arrived, Jackson gave him an inscribed Rolex watch, which Culkin said he still has “in a box somewhere.”

He denied prosecutors’ contention that the expensive timepiece was part of a Jackson seduction scheme.

“It wasn’t anything all that crazy to me,” he said. “I was not a person without means, so it wasn’t anything that was all that awe-inspiring. I mean, my father had a Rolex.”

The current accuser says Jackson gave him a watch that the singer estimated was valued at $75,000. Prosecutors depicted the gift as part of Jackson’s campaign to groom the accuser for sex.

Culkin’s appearance came at a delicate juncture in his career. In court, he said he took a break from show business at 14 and only recently has started to work again. In the last two years, he has appeared in two independent films, “Party Monster” and “Saved!,” and acted in a dramatic production in London.

In September, he was arrested on two misdemeanor drug counts in Oklahoma City. He has pleaded not guilty, and a trial is pending.

Culkin’s public stumbles strike a sadly familiar chord, said Paul Petersen, a former child actor who runs an advocacy group called A Minor Consideration.

“The fame goes away, the sense of worth goes away,” said Petersen, who played son Jeff on “The Donna Reed Show.” “When you get thrown on the scrap heap of Hollywood, what do you do with yourself?”

In court, Culkin said he and Jackson still talk about the problems of child stars.

“It’s not like a child performer self-help group,” he joked, “but at the same time we’re part of a unique group of people, and so we have a unique understanding of one another.”

It’s a difficult thing for others to comprehend, he has said.

“Michael’s still a kid,” he told New York magazine in 2001. “I’m still a kid. We’re both going to be about 8 years old forever in some places because we never had a chance to be 8 when we actually were.”

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Times special correspondent Chris Lee contributed to this report.