Another pause.
Suddenly, Kenneth began to weep. ‘But, Michael, if you don’t come to my country to perform, I have no choice but to kill myself,’ he said, his tone theatrical. ‘I mean it. I’ll do it.’ In moments, Kenneth was sobbing, uncontrollably.
Jermaine took one look at him and fell to his knees, laughing. He had to hold his hand over his mouth to stifle the sound. Then, Jerome fell to the floor, as well, laughing hysterically.
Kenneth ignored them both. ‘You see, this is my mission,’ he continued on the phone, tears cascading down his cheeks. ‘My mission is to bring you, the great Michael Jackson, to Korea to perform for all of the people there. I must see you. Please, I beg of you. Michael, please. Please.’
Finally, Michael agreed to meet with Kenneth Choi. He never could resist a crying man.
According to Jerome, when Kenneth got off the phone, his demeanour immediately changed and he began dancing around the room, merrily. ‘My God, I can’t believe it,’ he whooped. ‘I talked to Michael Jackson on the phone. Oh my God!’
Meanwhile, since the two weeks Katherine had to convince Michael to sign the contract had passed, she had no choice but to return the million-dollar reward money. Joseph was upset with her when he found out she had the money, and even angrier when he heard she had given it back. ‘We coulda’ used that money, Katie,’ he said, angrily. ‘Oh my God. The world is going crazy when my own wife has a million dollars and doesn’t tell me about it.’
Soon after that, Jerome Howard quit working for Katherine and Joseph Jackson. ‘I discovered that Kenneth Choi was meeting with Joseph and Katherine behind my back, cutting a side deal. When I saw this happening, I quit.’
It had been twenty years since the Jacksons moved from Gary to Los Angeles in search of fame and wealth. All of them had come to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. However, somewhere in the process, they seemed to lose all perspective on reality. It seemed that none of them knew when to stop; they wanted more, always more. When the Koreans figured out how to appeal to this acquisitive streak, a new, Moonie-induced decadence spread like a cancer throughout the family.
The Moonies gave Joseph a Rolls-Royce Corniche; later he would get more than fifty thousand dollars because, after all, he was Michael Jackson’s father and, it was thought, he must have some influence on him.
Then, Katherine got thirty-five thousand dollars, because she was Michael’s mother.
Then, Jermaine got a Range Rover, because he was the brother who, it was felt, had the most power over Michael. (He gave the automobile to Hazel, as part of their divorce settlement.)
Then, Michael got sixty thousand dollars and expensive artwork, because he was, after all, the man of the hour. That wasn’t enough, however, so the Koreans sent over a white Rolls-Royce Corniche, which Michael happily accepted. Why not? If they were dumb enough to give it to him, he figured, he was smart enough to take it. He wasn’t even sure where it came from, he said. ‘Who are these people, and why are they giving me a car?’ he asked John Branca.
Other people were getting many thousands of dollars just because they knew Michael and, it was hoped, had some sway over him. Jerome Howard said. ‘To the Moonies, this was just so-called seed money, funds they had to spend in order to get close to Michael.’ Even Michael’s bodyguard, Bill Bray, got half a million and, today, no one even remembers why or how he got it.
Everyone was greedy enough to accept what they could before the Koreans finally realized that the chance of Michael Jackson ever doing those concerts was nil. The nadir of the debacle was reached when one of Bill Bray’s girlfriends went to Kenneth Choi and said, ‘Listen up, you. My boyfriend controls Michael Jackson, and I control my boyfriend. So, if you want this concert to take place in Korea, then you’d better give me something.’
‘Well, what do you want?’ Kenneth asked, hopefully. Maybe she could do the job no one else was able to do. She mulled it over. ‘How about that 560 SEL Mercedes-Benz you have parked in your driveway?’
‘It’s yours,’ Choi said. He handed her the keys.
Finally, Kenneth Choi got the meeting with Michael Jackson he had so desired. Katherine brought him along with her to the Soul Train Awards where Michael was an honouree. When Katherine introduced him to her son, he dropped to his knees and kissed Michael’s hand. ‘My people need you,’ he told Michael. ‘You must perform in Korea. After all, Japan attacked our country two times, and you performed in Japan two times. You even held a Japanese baby in your arms.’
‘Huh?’ Michael asked. He looked perplexed. ‘Who the heck are you? Mother, who is this person?’
‘Why, Michael, this is the nice man I told you about,’ Katherine said, eagerly. ‘Kenneth. You know, the man who is putting together the concerts in Korea?’
From the look on his face, Michael didn’t have the vaguest idea who his mother was talking about, or why the man in front of him was on his knees.
‘My people need to see you,’ Kenneth continued. ‘You are a hero, a saint of men.’ He then pulled out a video camera and began taping Michael. ‘No, wait!’ Michael said, putting his hands in front of his face. ‘Stop! Is this that reunion thing? Is that what this is?’
‘Yes, Michael,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes! This is him. Kenneth Choi.’ She was brimming with excitement.
‘But I don’t do business with my family,’ Michael said, turning to Kenneth. ‘And stop taping me. Stop it, I said.’
By June 1989, after almost six months of feeling pressured by everyone around him, Michael finally signed a contract to appear in Korea for four shows that would take place in August. ‘I can’t take another second of it,’ he said in explanation of his decision. ‘These people are going to drive me crazy until they get what they want. So, let’s just do the shows and get it over with.’
He would perform only four songs, however, as well as a medley with his brothers. The rest of the show would be done by the brothers, without Michael.
‘I’m doing it for Katherine,’ he said of the Korean deal.
The family was elated. Finally, Michael had committed to the Jackson – Moonie Project. No one received the reward money, however, because Michael had made up his own mind. ‘He should have gotten the million dollars,’ said John Branca, ‘for turning himself over to the Koreans.’ (Until the first edition of this book was published in 1991, Michael didn’t even know that there had been a reward offered to any family members who could secure his services.)
Amazingly, considering all that had occurred in the recent six months, when the deal was signed and it was time to pass the promised millions on to Michael, the Reverend Moon, who was to fund the venture, decided that the agreed-upon amount was too high a price. According to Jerome Howard, Moon wanted Michael’s payment lowered: first to $8 million, then to 7, then 5, then 4.5, and finally to $2.5 million. Finally, the deal fell apart, completely.
As a result, Michael Jackson ended up being sued by Segye Times, Inc. – which is financed by Reverend Moon. Moon wanted his money and all of the gifts to be returned. Also named in the suit were Joseph, Katherine, Jerome Howard, Jermaine Jackson and Bill Bray.
Michael, in turn, sued Segye Times, Inc. for eight million dollars saying that he was not giving back any of his gifts, and not demanding that anyone else give back theirs, either.
There is disagreement among the participants of the Jackson – Moonie Project about who is responsible for what had occurred, but most associates of Michael’s agree that none of it would ever have happened if Frank Dileo had still been Michael’s manager. After all, in the past, Frank had intercepted many deals having to do with the family before they even reached Michael.
Even John Branca could not have protected Michael from the debacle because by the time Michael went to him for advice, he had made up his mind to sign the deal. Also, it seemed to some observers that Michael, now seeming more paranoid than ever, was beginning to lose confidence in John as well.
‘I don’t even know how this whole thing happened, or how I got invol
ved in it,’ Michael said at the time. ‘All I know is that I kept saying no, no, no, no. But my family would not take no for an answer. Look what happened as a result. The whole thing made me sick. Just sick.’
LaToya’s Drama
In the summer of 1989, after the Jackson – Moonie Project was no longer an issue for them, the Jackson family braced themselves for more distress from LaToya, who was thirty-three years old. They had heard that she was now writing a book of her own, one that would be nothing like the one penned by Michael. Hers, LaToya threatened, would tell the ‘whole truth about my dysfunctional family’. (One would think the family wouldn’t be so worried, though, since in April of 1988, LaToya told a reporter, ‘To my knowledge, Michael has only had one nose job.’)
According to Marjorie Walker, a friend of the family’s at the time, ‘Katherine telephoned LaToya to ask if it was true that a book was being planned. LaToya said it wasn’t true. Meanwhile, she had been negotiating with G. P. Putnam’s Sons publishing house. When Katherine found out she had a deal, she was hurt. Once upon a time, LaToya never lied. If you knew LaToya, you’d understand how out of character her behaviour had been since she’d met Jack [Gordon]. She is a girl who was scared to death to go out of the house, who felt her family could do no wrong. Now, she was planning to write a book about just how wrong they all were.’
LaToya signed a deal with Putnam, which advanced her more money for her autobiography than Michael had received for his from Doubleday. Michael’s was reportedly a $300,000 deal; LaToya’s $500,000.
‘It won’t be so bad,’ Katherine reasoned. ‘What can she write about anyway?’
For starters, LaToya was going to claim that Michael had been sexually molested as a child. When word of this allegation got back to Michael, he was incensed by it. ‘She can do what she wants, if she wants to get back at Joseph and Katherine for whatever,’ he stormed, ‘but don’t drag my ass into it. I never did one damn thing to hurt that girl. So, stop her, Branca,’ he told his attorney, John.
John Branca arranged a meeting with Jack Gordon to discuss the matter. During it, he told Jack that Michael did not want his sister writing that he’d been molested.
‘Why not?’ Jack demanded to know. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘Look, man, I don’t know if it’s true or not,’ John told him. ‘But I do know that if she writes it, Michael will sue her. That, I fucking know is true.’
Rumours that Michael was sexually molested as a child had been circulating for years within the entertainment industry. Michael denies it. With that denial in place, there’s not much more anyone else can say about it. It certainly seems that if such a thing were true, it would be known by now considering how exposed Michael’s life has been in recent years.
In subsequent letters to LaToya and Jack, John Branca reiterated his position at the meeting: Michael would litigate against his sister if she made any claim about him being sexually abused. He also indicated that Michael would make himself available to read whatever it was she eventually wrote in order that he be able to review it for ‘accuracy’.
After he received that particular letter, Jack Gordon telephoned Katherine’s ex-business manager, Jerome Howard, to inquire as to whether he still had the power to arrange a meeting with Katherine. According to Jerome, Jack wanted to offer Katherine a deal: if she and Joseph paid LaToya five million dollars, LaToya would cancel her memoirs. ‘It’s the least they can do for her,’ Jack reasoned, ‘considering all they have done to her.’ Moreover, if Jerome was the one who could convince the Jackson parents to pay LaToya the money, he would be paid ten per cent of the total: $500,000.
‘Man, that’s blackmail,’ Jerome said, according to his memory.
‘No, it’s not,’ Jack responded. ‘It’s business. Plain, simple business.’
‘Well, I don’t want anything to do with it,’ Jerome told him. ‘I’ll present the deal to Katherine and have her get in touch with you about it.’
‘What? You don’t want $500,000?’ Jack asked, incredulously.
Jerome said no. ‘I telephoned Katherine and then met with her,’ Jerome recalled. ‘I told her what was going on. If she wanted to stop her daughter’s book, it was going to cost her five million bucks. She wasn’t pleased. I also told her I didn’t want to get involved, that Jack had offered me a percentage but that I didn’t think it was fair money. I suggested she should have her lawyer deal with it. I suppose she did.’
After that, someone in LaToya’s camp apparently fed a story to the media that Michael had offered her twelve million dollars to kill the project. It was not true. However, in an apparent attempt to maintain heightened interest in her project, LaToya charged that ‘Michael’s offer is awful, a sign of bribery. Nothing is going to stop me,’ she said, as if a war cry, ‘no matter how much I’m offered.’
Jack Gordon then made the ludicrous allegation that Michael had offered to purchase G. P. Putnam’s Sons, for eighty-four million dollars just so that he could prevent the book from appearing.
According to an associate of Michael’s, ‘What really happened is that someone representing LaToya – and I’m not saying it was Jack and I’m not saying it wasn’t, because, frankly, I don’t know – got in touch with Michael’s people and said that Mike had better come up with millions if he didn’t want that book to be published. Mike was hurt. He had never done anything to LaToya to cause her to be so unkind to him, and he felt that Jack was orchestrating all of it. Still, it was LaToya who was responsible for the final outcome of it. “She doesn’t get a free ride just by saying Jack is the one doing the dirty work,” he said. “She has to take responsibility, just like I do.” I was in the room when Michael made his final decision. “I’m not going to let my own sister, a person I loved, a person who has known me all my life, blackmail me. This is as low as you can go,” he observed. “Tell LaToya I said she can go jump in a lake. She’s not getting one fucking dime from me.”’
For LaToya, family loyalty was clearly a notion now relegated to her recent past. In fact, to keep the pot stirred, Jack claimed that LaToya’s years at Hayvenhurst had made her so angry and bitter that she would include yet another allegation in her book: that Joseph had sexually molested her.
Katherine was stunned when she first heard the charge from Jack. ‘Why, it’s just not true,’ she insisted.
‘Oh, yes, it is,’ Jack said.
‘But who told you this?’ Katherine demanded. ‘Did LaToya tell you?’ Jack said that it had been Rebbie who told him.
By the time Katherine confronted Rebbie, she was seething. However, Rebbie denied ever having told Jack that LaToya was sexually abused by Joseph.
Michael then telephoned LaToya and, as she later recalled it to me, ‘We fought about many things, but the main thing was the book.’ When Michael wanted to know if there was anything critical of him in it, she refused to get into details. The true issue was not her book, she told me, but the fact that Michael ‘is jealous of all the great exposure I’m getting. He wants to hog the limelight.’
‘Look, I’ve been doing this since I was five years old,’ Michael told her, according to her memory. ‘And here you come out of nowhere. What justifies your fame? You’re not entitled to it yet, LaToya. You haven’t done anything, yet.’
‘Why, how dare you?’ LaToya exclaimed. ‘After all I’ve been through with this family, how can you say that to me?’ She had apparently confused familial dysfunction with artistic achievement. At any rate, she said that she never wanted to speak to Michael again, and then slammed down the phone.
On 5 September 1989, LaToya, now thirty-three, and Jack Gordon, fifty, were married in Reno, Nevada. Two days earlier, LaToya telephoned Katherine and said, ‘I don’t have a family any more. I don’t have a mother, father, or brothers or sisters. I’ve disowned you all.’ The Jacksons firmly believed that LaToya didn’t love Jack, that she only married him in order to disassociate herself from the family. Jack said that they had six security guards with them at all tim
es to prevent her from being kidnapped by the Jacksons. ‘Jack used to tell me all the time how Joseph was trying to kidnap LaToya, and that LaToya was scared to death. From what I understand, Joseph used to beat her when she was a child,’ recalled Gary Berwin, whose business dealings with Joseph went sour in 1985.
‘LaToya was not a very happy person. She’d had a hard life, and she found someone to love and rely on – Jack Gordon,’ Gary continued. ‘Finally she had escaped from that family. I asked Jack specifically why he married LaToya. I asked him, “Did you marry LaToya because you really love her, or did you marry her as a convenience for you and herself?” He said, “No, man, I really love her.” I said, “C’mon, man, be honest with me.” He replied, “I’m telling you, I love her very much.”’
‘I want more money than anyone else…’
In August 1989, Michael Jackson turned thirty-one years old. Recent years had not been easy for him. Family pressures and demands, as well as career concerns, seemed to keep him in a continuous state of anxiety. Though he had left home, he never really left the womb. As much as he tried to shun his family, except for Katherine, he just could not seem to do it – mostly because they wouldn’t cooperate in that regard. They just get coming back for more. Somehow, their problems always ended up his.
Despite the fact that he was now in his thirties, many people in his circle felt that Michael had never grown up, that he was still an adolescent at heart, playing with his teenage male friends and entertaining handicapped youngsters at his palatial estate. He liked wearing his many disguises and was agitated when people pointed him out, not so much because he didn’t want to be identified as because he had left home thinking he had such a swell costume, no one should ever have been able to recognize him. Visiting Disneyland, Disney World and Universal Studios was still his favourite leisure-time activity; fantasy was a major part of his life.
On the career front, there had been much discussion as to how to follow Bad. Just as when he was attempting to conceptualize a successor to Thriller, Michael was concerned about competing with himself. Bad had not sold as many copies as Thriller and Michael was disappointed. Still, rather than try to compete with the previous two albums by issuing another one of new material, John Branca convinced Michael that he should release a Greatest Hits collection, entitled Decade, which would also include a few new songs. It was a good idea. It would take some pressure off Michael at a time when he did need a break in his life.
Michael Jackson Page 48
