Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

by Bill Whitfield

  There were plenty of people coming through Michael Jackson’s life, but there was nobody really in his life. He was friendly with these people who’d visit, but these meetings were business meetings, for the most part, like with Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson—that was to discuss some charity program in Africa. There was almost no one in his life on a personal level coming by to say, “Hey, let’s go hang out.” Never in the whole time I worked for the man did I hear anybody just call him up to say, “Hey, guess what movie I just saw?” There was nothing like that going on. It was business.

  Javon: His main contact with the outside world was through the fans. He got tons of fan mail. Ms. Raymone’s people would collect it and bundle it, and every few days it would arrive in these big sacks. It came from all over the world—Canada, England, Egypt, Japan, India, Ireland, Spain. He read all of it.

  Every so often, early on Saturday mornings, we’d take him on long drives and he’d immerse himself in his fan mail. I’d drive. Bill would ride shotgun. We’d load up a few boxes of mail in the vehicle and then we’d head out into the desert and just drive for three, four hours. We’d drive up into the mountains, where there was still snow on the ground. We’d go all the way across the Hoover Dam, into Arizona, then turn around and head home.

  Mr. Jackson would sit in the back, classical music playing, the curtain drawn. You could hear him opening envelopes, going letter by letter. Sometimes he’d say, “Hey, listen to this, guys. This is so sweet.” And he’d read us something somebody had written. People would write about their children dying of illnesses and how much his music had meant to them. Some of it made him very emotional. You could hear him getting choked up. He’d say, “You guys may not understand, but this is where I get a lot of my inspiration to write my songs.”

  By the time we got back to the house, he’d have two separate piles of letters. He’d keep one, hand us the other and say, “These you can get rid of.”

  Bill: People would send gifts too—teddy bears, balloons, flowers, photos, personal keepsakes. A lot of this stuff was handmade. A collage or a card with a special message. He would mostly keep the gifts that were handmade. He liked that. Sometimes he’d get a package and it seemed suspicious to him or he just didn’t feel right about it. He’d give it to us and want us to check it first. There was never anything dangerous, no bombs or anything like that, but a lot of teddy bears and music boxes wound up drowning in the pool for us to find that out.

  There was so much of it that one of the bedrooms had to be designated as the fan mail room. The walls in there were plastered with handmade cards and letters, and the floor was covered with big stacks. And that was just what accumulated in Las Vegas over a few months’ time.

  Javon: Except for those letters and occasional visits from his mother or one or two other people, he really was just alone with the kids inside this little bubble. From the outside, you might think that Michael Jackson led this high-flying, glamorous life. But all the high-end restaurants and five-star hotels we went to? Never once did we go in through the front lobby, where everything’s beautiful and pretty and clean. We were moving through underground parking structures, going through side entrances in the back by the dumpsters. We didn’t ride in the nice glass elevators. We rode in the service elevators with trash bags stacked in the corner, waiting to be hauled down to the basement. That’s the world Michael Jackson lived in.

  Bill: There were times when you felt like a rat scurrying through a maze, going down all these dimly-lit corridors. The smell of the service entrances was horrible. I’d have on a freshly pressed suit, polished shoes, and we’d be stepping in filth, rotting food. I’d be thinking, Damn, it stinks in here.

  Name me one other celebrity that has to go in through the back of the hotel every time. Not every now and then, every single time. There’s only one occasion I can remember that we weren’t sneaking around in the back of a hotel. Mr. Jackson had a meeting at the Bellagio, and we ran into Steve Wynn. He asked us to walk through the Bellagio’s casino area with him, so we did. A few people were gawking, but it was mostly an older crowd. Wasn’t too busy that time of day. We walked into the front lobby area and Mr. Jackson looked around and said, “You know, I can’t even remember the last time I saw the lobby of a hotel. I forgot how beautiful they are. This is really amazing.”

  A lot of the time, hanging out, he was just a regular dude. But every now and then you’d get these reminders of how isolated his life had been. It would come at odd moments, like with some of the words he used. One of the times we had to stay at a hotel, they’d snuck Prince’s dog into the room. They couldn’t really walk the dog outside because there were supposed to be no pets at that hotel. Plus the dog wasn’t fully house-trained anyway. You can imagine what it smelled like in there after a couple days. Mr. Jackson came to me and he said, “Bill, I need you to go out and get some smells.”

  “Smells? What’s ‘smells’?”

  “You know, things to make the room smell good.”

  “You mean air fresheners?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that.”

  Sometimes he used words, I didn’t know what he meant. One time he said, “Bill, I need you to go to the airport and pick up the governess.”

  “The governor’s coming? What governor?”

  He laughed. “No, Bill. The governess. Like, the person who watches the kids.”

  “Do you mean the nanny?”

  “Yeah.”

  So why not just say that? He’d use these words, and I’d be like, “Mr. Jackson, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He’d just shake his head. He’d say, “You guys need to read more.”

  Javon: That’s how he filled all those hours by himself: books. He’d read anything and everything he could get his hands on. History. Science. Art. There were so many trips to Barnes & Noble. It was almost a weekly thing. He would go into bookstores and drop five thousand dollars like he was buying a pack of gum. At one point, he actually bought a bookstore—I’m talking about an entire bookstore. He paid cash for it.

  Bill: It was on his way back from Tokyo, during those couple days he spent in L.A. He went to visit this used bookstore. It had a lot of rare books from the personal libraries of some pretty famous people, Hollywood stars. These were books that Humphrey Bogart had signed, books that Ingrid Bergman had signed. He asked the owner how much it would take to buy all of his books. The owner didn’t take him seriously. So he made an offer of $100,000. Said he’d pay cash on the spot. Couple weeks after he got back from L.A., this U-Haul filled with all these books showed up at the house in Vegas.

  Javon: When that U-Haul pulled up, me and Bill were like, “What the hell are we supposed to do with this?”

  Mr. Jackson pointed out one of the rooms on the second floor and said he wanted to turn it into a library. He said, “You guys will need to build shelves in here.”

  So we went to Lowe’s and bought some bookshelves, brought them back to the house, and set them up. Then we had to move all the books up in the elevator, box by box. At first, we tried to label and categorize them all, fiction or nonfiction, but it got so overwhelming that we just started stacking the books on the shelves in no particular order. But he was happy with it. He’d just go in there and get lost and find interesting things to read.

  Bill: He never wore reading glasses in public, so whenever we’d go into a bookstore, he’d always go to that rack where they keep the glasses. He’d grab a bunch and he’d do a Fred Sanford, trying different ones on until he found a pair that matched his prescription. That’s how I learned his eyes were messed up. When he read at home, he had one of those magnifying glasses that they use in doctors’ offices, the kind with a built-in light that blows things up about a billion times bigger.

  There’s a newsstand in Vegas where you can get newspapers from damn near every country in the world. He wanted those, every week. He’d say, “Whatever foreign newspapers they have, bring those to me.”

  “Even ones
in different languages?”

  “Yes.”

  Whatever they had that was foreign, we’d pick up. Whether he read them all, what foreign languages he understood, I have no idea.

  He read The Wall Street Journal every day. That was the only American media he’d consume, because the Journal was pretty much the only place he could get real news without running into crazy Michael Jackson stories. That’s part of why he didn’t watch TV, only DVDs. The man was a punch line on Jay Leno’s show practically every night. It was like he couldn’t risk turning on a television. He didn’t want to see that stuff, and he didn’t want the kids exposed to it.

  That was a challenge just because we went to so many bookstores and newsstands. We’d get calls from Raymone. She’d say, “An article came out in such and such magazine. Make sure he doesn’t see it.” So we would walk into Barnes & Noble ahead of him, and we’d know which magazine to look for. We’d grab the whole stack, flip them around, or just take them off the shelf.

  Sometimes there’d be a good article about him in a magazine. Raymone would FedEx it to me with a note to give it to Mr. Jackson. I’d go and bring him the magazine, and he’d reach for it and then jerk his hand back and say, “Is it okay for me to read?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s nothing bad?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  He never went on the Internet. Same reason. If he wanted something online, he’d tell me and I’d go look it up. He did do some eBay shopping, though. He tried that a couple times. Maxed out my damn credit card.

  The man had a lot going on. Mental stress. Anxiety. On the one hand, that required us to be hypervigilant about everything in his world. Hiding magazines, keeping cameras away from his kids. At the same time, it was our job to try and make his life as normal as possible, and that meant backing off so he had the space to just be a person. He didn’t want us crowding in on him, making him feel more like a prisoner than he already was. We had keys to the house, but we would always let him know if we needed to come in. We didn’t really need to be in his living space. That belonged to him and his kids. So we made every effort not to be in there.

  Javon: There were a couple times he invited us in to watch movies with him and the kids. He asked us twice, and we said no both times. Bill told him, “Sir, we can’t look out for you and your kids if we’re watching a movie.” I think Mr. Jackson really appreciated that.

  Part of the reason his security turnover rate was so high was because people would get too familiar with him. “Mr. Jackson, is it okay if my kids come over and meet you?” We didn’t do that. He’d had security on him practically every day since he was ten years old. There were things about our job that he understood better than we did. So I’m sure he was evaluating us, studying us as much as we studied him.

  Bill: Sometimes he’d ask to see our guns. He’d want to hold them and check them out. He wanted to be informed about everything we were doing, but I think it was also because he thought they were cool. One time I was showing him the piece I had, and he said he’d always thought about owning a gun himself, that it would be useful for protection, but that he would never have one with his children in the house. “Besides,” he said, “there are probably too many people I’d want to shoot.”

  Javon: We were working nonstop. I was working fifteen-, eighteen-hour days. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go home at all. I worked 7:00 a.m. to midnight and had to be right back in there at 7:00 again, and I lived about forty minutes away. So I’d bring some extra food along and sleep in the trailer.

  I’d just had a newborn baby right about the time I started working for him. I hadn’t told anybody, even my child’s mother, who I was working for. I’d been telling her that I was working for a high-profile dignitary. After a while, she didn’t want to hear that. It got to the point where she was like, “Are you really working? Are you having an affair on me or not? I don’t know anybody who has to be at work this much.”

  She thought I was really doing some dirt, cheating on her. She said, “Here we are with a newborn baby. You’re not about to keep going to work and not telling me where you work at. What’s the big secret?”

  So after about three months I had to give in and let her know. When I told her it was Michael Jackson, she said, “You lyin’!” She didn’t believe me. She was like, “Of all the things you could say, you gonna tell me you’re workin’ for Michael Jackson?! How long did it take you to come up with that one, Javon?”

  We went back and forth until I finally had to show her my pay stub. When she saw it said MJJ Productions, she was like, “Wow, you really work for this guy.”

  Bill: There was a pool house in the back; we’d use the shower in there. I’d call my daughter and ask her to bring me some clothes, bring me this or bring me that. Undershirts, razors, an extra toothbrush. We were hitting up Burlington Coat Factory on the regular, picking up clothes to keep in the trailer for when there was no time to go home and change. It got to the point where it wasn’t that you wanted to stay, but you felt like you couldn’t leave.

  For the overnight shift, we worked out a signal with Mr. Jackson. We put a lamp in one of his bedroom windows, and as long as the light was on, that meant he was up and might need us for something. When the lamp was off, that meant everything was okay and he was turning in. Whenever he couldn’t sleep, we’d hear him in the studio. The way it was set up, we could see the studio windows from the trailer. It’d be three-thirty in the morning, pitch black outside, the whole neighborhood quiet. The light in the studio would come on. You wouldn’t hear anything for a while. There was a TV in there; maybe he was watching videos or something. Then, about fifteen minutes later, you’d hear a bass line. You’d hear him adjusting the volume, the tempo. You’d hear his feet moving on the boards—and then that voice, that voice that sold millions of records. It would just come pouring out of him. Beautiful. Incredible.

  Javon: It gave me goose bumps. How could you not get goose bumps, hearing Michael Jackson performing like that? In the dead of night, just sitting there and listening by yourself, no one else around? We never really got used to it. It was always amazing no matter how many times we heard it.

  We’d get these little peeks at how his mind worked. We’d have some piece of music on in the car, a classical symphony or something, and he’d get hung up on a sound he heard in the background, some type of instrument or a tone, and he’d want to rewind it and listen to it again. He’d play it back and go, “Can you guys hear that?” He’d play it over and over, going, “Right there. That cymbal, right there, do you hear it?” We couldn’t hear it. There were sounds in music that he’d hear and get obsessed with, things that we couldn’t even pick up on.

  It was like he had a musical soundtrack in his head, running all the time. We’d be driving along and he’d just start humming a melody or beatboxing some percussion. In the days after, you’d hear him working it out in his head. No words, just sounds. It was almost like it wasn’t something he was doing consciously; it just happened. He told us that sometimes complete songs would just come to him, the melody, the lyrics, every instrumental part. He couldn’t get the beat out of his head until he’d worked it out. It just took him over entirely. That’s when you’d hear him in the studio late at night.

  Bill: When you heard him in there? It was something you wanted to tell the world, especially if it was music that you knew nobody had ever heard before. Sometimes he’d play his old music and just dance to it. Other times he’d be working on a new track or a new melody. You wanted to grab your cell phone and call someone and say, “Yo, I’m listening to Michael Jackson singing right now. Like, right now.” But you couldn’t.

  Javon: He would turn it up loud. Loud to the point where you’d be wondering if he was going to wake up the kids. You could tell he was pouring all his anger and frustration and energy into his dance moves and his music. Sometimes it would go on all night. I’d be on graveyard shifts, and he’d have that light on in h
is room till dawn. I’d think to myself, “When does he actually sleep?” I was working all these hours and I was dog tired, and he was in there wide awake.

  Some nights, you’d think maybe he fell asleep with the lamp on, but then you’d see the kitchen light come on and you knew he was still up. That happened a lot. He was up at night more than he wasn’t. If I worked the graveyard shift three times a week, three times a week Mr. Jackson would be up on my watch. If he turned in early and the light went off, it would almost come as a surprise.

  But you always knew when he was sleeping well, because when you got to work in the morning, he’d be real engaging, real friendly. He’d come out before breakfast just to say hello. Then there would be times that he would go two or three days without communicating with us at all, like when Feldman left. We started getting used to it. Like, “Okay, he’s going through his quiet stage again.”

  Bill: When he was in good spirits, we did what we could to keep him in good spirits. When he went into that quiet mode, or a loneliness stage, we knew. We felt it. Plenty of times, start of the day he’d jump into the car, happy and smiling and animated. “Morning! Everybody sleep well?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I slept like a baby.”

  Other times, he’d get in the car, wouldn’t say a word. We’d know something was wrong. He’d got a phone call. Some kind of bad news. Something. We’d drive for a little bit. There would be total silence for ten minutes, twenty minutes. Then, out of nowhere, real soft: “Why don’t they just leave me alone?”

  Javon: There were many nights when he’d call and say he wanted to drive down to the Strip. Those evenings were not planned; a mood would just strike him. He’d call Grace and tell her to come over to watch the kids, and once they were asleep, he’d come down, jump into the ride, and we’d roll out.