And let’s not forget the strong possibility that Lester is the biological father of the late singer’s 19-year-old daughter Paris (whose mother Debbie Rowe, a former nurse, was married to Jackson).Lester happily talks about how he acted as a sperm donor for Jackson. I think he had a problem with actually doing the physical act of sex and a very low sperm count as well.’He also claims Jackson had been scared off women for many reasons, one of which is said to be the trauma he experienced after being propositioned by Madonna in her hotel bedroom.Neat and handsome, Mark Lester is just as I would imagine a 58-year-old osteopath, acupuncturist and father-of-four to look.Dressed in T-shirt and jeans, he moves smoothly around the enormous living room of his beautiful Georgian house in Cheltenham, and his voice is quiet.She did indeed look very like Lester’s daughters, particularly Olivia as a child.‘My kids weren’t that enamoured. Lester’s friendship with Jackson started in the late-Seventies when the singer was in London on tour and asked his manager to contact Lester. was his favourite musical and he’d watched it numerous times.‘I wasn’t really into his music, but my sister loved him,’ Lester says. ‘We were the same age and had lots in common as we’d both been child stars.’In truth, Lester’s showbiz career had struggled post-Oliver! He appeared in a few more films, but never really replicated the success of Oliver! Soon, Lester was part of Wacko Jacko’s inner sanctum.Through Jackson he met Uri Geller — ‘a lovely man; he was at my last wedding’ — and the bizarre David Gest, whose wedding to Liza Minnelli he attended in 2002 despite knowing, as did everyone, that Gest was gay.
Because this is the same Mark Lester who touched the nation’s hearts when he starred, aged eight, as the impossibly beautiful golden-haired orphan in the 1968 film Oliver!And the same Mark Lester who, as a teenager, was thrown out of restaurants for having chocolate pancake fights, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with hell-raising actor Oliver Reed. She thought she was going back with him.’There followed a frenzied drug-taking phase he describes as ‘an 18-month window of doing everything to extreme — every drug I could get my hands on.Famously, Reed brought a mute Hungarian prostitute to Lester’s 18th birthday party as a coming of age gift for him, shouting: ‘I want to make a man of Mark! Mostly coke, but you can’t really sleep very well if you do it all the time, so I had a few days off here and there.’The small fortune earned from Oliver!On one occasion, when Jackson complained about not being able to sleep, Lester says they drank six bottles of extremely fine wine, after which the singer slept for hours.In 2003, Jackson — already at the centre of allegations of sex abuse against children — admitted in an ITV documentary that he let children, other than his own, sleep in his bed.