SANTA MARIA, Calif. – Michael Jackson surely did a good thing when he called a young cancer patient struggling to survive in a California hospital. The phone call lifted the boy’s spirits and for a brief moment helped him re-engage in life.

The entertainer told the 11-year-old about his mystical home called Neverland Ranch, and invited him to visit when he felt better. They spoke about famous people Michael Jackson knew and the show “The Simpsons,” and the boy shared his dream of becoming an actor. But the youngster was seriously ill. His weight had dropped from 100 to just 68 pounds.

Doctors warned his parents that few survive fourth-stage cancer and suggested they start thinking about funeral plans. But somehow, the boy endured the cancer and the removal of his spleen, one of his kidneys and several lymph nodes. When the cancer moved into his lungs, he beat that, too. In August 2000, the boy felt well enough to travel. He and his family – his father, mother, younger brother and older sister – accepted Jackson’s invitation and were picked up in a limousine and driven to Neverland.

That first night the two boys, aged 11 and 9, slept in Jackson’s bedroom, and the rest of the family was guided to guest quarters away from the main house. And on that first trip, the boys told the grand jury, Jackson gave them the gift of a laptop computer.

The children would later tell a grand jury that on that first night, the gift helped bring about their introduction to Internet porn sites – XXX-rated pornography – that Jackson and his adult friend Frank Cascio Tyson helped them reach and navigate. These brothers had just entered an entirely new way of life.

The boy and his family came back several times over several months, each visit following the same pattern: The boy and his younger brother slept in Jackson’s bedroom, feasting on adult computer images, staying up until all hours of the night, and having their senses assaulted.

The rest of the family was tucked in faraway guest quarters on another part of the ranch.

During much of 2001, the boy relapsed and was too sick to travel. The master of Neverland, however, stayed in touch by telephone, often spending over an hour talking to the boy. But the calls soon became less frequent.

In the spring of 2002, the boy was invited back to Neverland – by comedian Chris Tucker. As he often does, Michael Jackson allowed his 2,700-acre property to be used as the spectacular backdrop for someone else’s celebration, but he was not at that party.

“After my remission, Michael didn’t want to talk to me anymore,” the boy testified to the grand jury. “But one day he called me, and he found me, and he wanted me to go up to the ranch and do something . . . something that he was filming.”

It was six months after the Tucker birthday party, in September 2002. Naturally, the boy went.

“Michael introduced me to a guy. He told me his name was Martin Bashir. Michael pulled me aside and told me, ‘OK, you want to be an actor, right?’ . . . ‘OK. I’ll use this as like your audition . . . I want you to act.’ And he told me to, like, say a bunch of good stuff about him, like he’s my father,” the boy told the grand jury.

Michael Jackson has lawyers and accountants and a loyal appointments secretary but no close personal advisers. He alone makes the decision about who gets close to him. Long ago, Jackson made the decision to shut out his own family in lieu of strangers’ families, to ask them to camp out with him at Neverland. And once there, Jackson openly admits, he invites their young boys into his bedroom suite to spend the night.

He himself – and he alone – permitted British journalist Bashir into his inner circle, allowing him to film at random for seven months. He sat before Bashir’s cameras, holding hands with the boy, and declared to the world that there is nothing wrong with a 45-year-old man sleeping with a young male teen. At one point during the interview, the boy rests his head on his benefactor’s shoulder in a rookie actor’s move toward familiarity.

The boy and his family went back to Los Angeles.

And again, “he stopped talking to me,” the boy told the grand jury. “I just forgot about it, started going to school [and] we moved out of East L.A.”

It was September 2002 and the boy’s parents had been separated for many months. After the teen’s remission, his mother enrolled him in the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps. Life was starting to become predictable for the children again.

Then, another call from Michael Jackson. He suddenly wanted the boy to fly to Miami for a news conference. News reports were swirling about the Bashir documentary that would soon air, revealing the boy with whom Jackson had admitted sharing his bed.

On the phone with the teenager, Jackson was back in the director’s seat, producing what he felt would be the best retort: Use the boy himself to counter the awful innuendo. In short order, the family boarded Chris Tucker’s private plane bound for Florida.

In Miami, however, someone, somehow, got to Jackson and made him understand it was not a good idea to use a recovered cancer patient – not once, but twice.

But there was, according to the boy and his younger brother, the introduction by Michael Jackson of “Jesus juice” (white wine) and “Jesus blood” (red wine) – beverages alleged to become a nightly ritual for man and boys.

And under an alcoholic haze, the district attorney of Santa Barbara County says, a desperate Michael Jackson did the most despicable, intimate things to the older boy, and encouraged his entourage to hold the family close – too close.

Team Jackson knew that once Bashir’s documentary aired, Michael Jackson’s already-tarnished reputation would be permanently stained with scandal, his worth as an entertainer wiped out.

Desperate Jackson associates are said to have taken desperate steps, including implementing the idea of shipping the family off to the far reaches of Brazil to get them as far away from prying reporters and police as possible. In the end, the family refused to go.

It’s no coincidence that tomorrow, in Superior Court in Santa Maria, when District Attorney Tom Sneddon reviews the bones of the case against Jackson in his opening statement, that the keystone, the jury will be told, is the Bashir documentary.

And Martin Bashir will be the DA’s first witness.