Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Jackson’s longtime publicist, Bob Jones, recalled that Schaffel had appeared on the scene at almost the very moment when the people who had done Michael’s film work over the past several years were breaking with him amid complaints that they weren’t being paid. Boasting of his background in film production and flashing a bank account that approached eight figures, Schaffel pledged to organize Michael’s various film and video projects through a company the two formed, called Neverland Valley Entertainment. There was talk of building a movie studio at the ranch, of making short films, perhaps producing an animated television series. But Schaffel was swiftly drawn into the preparations for Jackson’s “30th Anniversary” concerts, which were scheduled to take place on September 7 and 10, 2001, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

  Pulling together a list of performers Jackson considered worthy of the event had proven a complex task, but Schaffel quickly demonstrated he could contribute. Working as Jackson’s liaison with concert producer David Gest and writing a series of checks drawn on his own accounts to cover Michael’s cash flow problems, Schaffel helped secure the participation of many of the stars who would perform at the two concerts. Schaffel’s talent for massaging Michael’s ego would prove as much of an asset to the anniversary concerts project as his organizational abilities. When Michael began delaying his arrival in New York, “David was calling and screaming at me like it was my responsibility,” Schaffel remembered. “‘You gotta get him on a plane and get him here!’ David wanted him to have five days of rehearsal and Michael said, ‘I don’t need that. I’ll do one or two days.’ Michael wanted to go on a private jet, and David was trying to get him to fly commercial because they got comp seats on American Airlines. So Michael just waited him out. See, Michael just really wasn’t that psyched up to do the show. I mean, he thought it was neat, but . . . when something is Michael’s idea, he’s in it 110 percent. If it’s not his idea, if it’s something he’s got to do, he feels it’s work, and he starts dragging his feet.”

  Still, when word came that, despite the highest prices in the history of show business, tickets for the two Madison Square Garden shows had sold out within five hours, Michael wept with gratitude. CBS agreed to pay a licensing fee in the seven figures for the rights to edit the concert footage into a two-hour TV special and Jackson was now guaranteed a take of $7.5 million for his appearance at the two concerts, money Michael desperately needed. VH1 would later calculate that for the time the entertainer actually spent onstage, his pay totaled $150,000 per minute.

  Jackson at the time was living on what he described as a “restrictive” budget that had been imposed on him by his record company, Sony, and his main creditor, Bank of America. He complained constantly that because of his huge debt he had no ready access to his enormous wealth. “It was not difficult at that time for Marc to withdraw as much as a million dollars from his bank account,” King explained, “so he began to make cash advances to Michael. Generally, they were paid back a short time later, when other funds of Michael’s came in.” The first sum Schaffel handed over was $70,000, in July 2001, to pay for the shopping excursion with which Michael celebrated the news that he was about to receive a $2 million loan advance to create a charity record. When Michael said he “needed” something, Schaffel understood by then, he was not speaking of necessity as most people understood it, but rather about “a psychological state that he required in order to function.”

  That first cash advance was repaid in short order, Schaffel recalled. Money was constantly flowing to Michael from sources that were spread all over the globe. He didn’t keep a bank account for fear that some creditor might try to attach it, so all payments were made in cash. One of Schaffel’s main duties soon became acting as, literally, Michael Jackson’s bag man. “Michael’s other advisors, associates, business partners, patrons—whatever they were—would get him money by actually transmitting the payment to Marc, who would deliver it to Michael in cash,” King explained. Schaffel had made the first such delivery to Michael in a paper sack from an Arby’s fast food restaurant. Michael thought that was hilarious and began referring to the money coming his way either through or from Marc as French fries. “They’d have conversations where Michael would say, ‘Bring me some fries, will you? And supersize it,’” King recalled.

  A month after handing over $70,000, Schaffel wrote a check for $625,680.49 to cure a default on Michael’s Bank of America line of credit. Repayment continued to flow into his bank accounts, but the sums were not exactly congruent with what he was paying out. Still, Michael’s business manager said the debts would all be evened out over time and Schaffel had no reason to doubt it. “Marc not only adored Michael, he trusted him completely,” King explained. Schaffel made two more French fry deliveries to Jackson in August 2001, filling one bag with $100,000 in cash that Michael wanted to shop for antiques, and another with $46,075 that Michael needed to pay for appraisals of a $30 million mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, a property Jackson insisted he could afford to purchase after learning that the Madison Square Garden concerts had sold out. In early September, shortly before the concerts, Schaffel made two more payments, the first a relatively minor sum of $23,287 for the supposedly “free” concert tickets that Michael had promised to his personal guests for the anniversary concerts. The tickets turned out to not be free after all, and to avoid the embarrassment of explaining this to friends and family, Michael paid for them out of his own—that is, Marc’s—pocket. The second payment was for $1 million that Michael needed for his “best friend,” Marlon Brando, who demanded that sum in exchange for agreeing to make a videotaped “humanitarian speech” to be shown during the first of the two concerts. Michael’s other advisors all argued that it was ridiculous to pay Brando so much for a speech no one wanted to hear, but Michael insisted. “Marlon is a god,” he said. The naysayers would be proven right when, less than two minutes into the great actor’s incoherent comments, the crowd started booing and didn’t stop until Brando did. Well, it was only a million dollars, Michael said, not that much money, really.

  In the days immediately before the concerts, Schaffel gave Jackson $380,395 to pay for a pair of customized automobiles he wanted, a Bentley Arnage and a Lincoln Navigator, as well as a check to cover the interest on the $2 million loan Michael had taken out to finance the charity record.

  By this point he had received reimbursements of $1,750,000, Schaffel recalled, but that amount didn’t quite cover the $2.5 million he had paid out. The remaining debt was secured, though, because Michael had signed over the rights to “What More Can I Give?” Schaffel agreed with those who said it was the best song Jackson had delivered in years, with a soaring melody and a lyric that was as moving as any Jackson had ever written. By the beginning of September, the two of them were already talking about using it to produce a charity record that would rival the success of Michael’s “We Are the World” project back in 1985. Survivors of the next major humanitarian catastrophe would be the beneficiaries.

  The 9/11 terrorist attacks took place just hours after Jackson finished his “Billie Jean”/“Black or White”/“Beat It” medley at the end of the second anniversary concert. Up to that moment, Michael had imagined that the ugliest part of his stay in New York would be the nasty argument he had gotten into with Corey Feldman backstage during the first concert over Feldman’s plans to write a book about their relationship. When he was awakened after only an hour or two of sleep in his suite at the Plaza Athenee just in time to watch the World Trade Center towers collapse, “Michael was completely freaked out,” Schaffel recalled. “He thought there were terrorists loose in New York and he wanted to get his kids out immediately. We had a lot of police working as security at the hotel he was at, and they helped us get across the Hudson River to New Jersey before the bridges and tunnels were closed.” The next day, when Michael insisted he needed $500,000 in case he and the children were forced to “go underground,” Schaffel drove to a bank and withdrew exactly that amoun
t in cash. Jackson holed up for two days in New Jersey, then summoned Schaffel and the rest of his entourage to White Plains, New York, where the airport was about to reopen for a few hours. Sony arranged for a private jet at one of the hangars. Michael was en route from New Jersey when a new problem developed. The actor Mark Wahlberg had been shooting a movie nearby and was at the White Plains airport also, with his entourage, trying to get on the same plane. “So we had this big spat over who had priority,” Schaffel recalled. The two camps stood on the tarmac shouting at one another until Sony ruled that Michael Jackson was the ranking celebrity. Wahlberg was informed that he would have to wait until another jet could be located, and he stormed off. “But then at the last second Michael decided he didn’t want to fly,” Schaffel recalled. “He said he was going to go back to California by tour bus. So he told the rest of us to just get on the plane and go, before Wahlberg came back.” Within minutes a bus had been hired but by the time it got to White Plains, Michael had changed his mind again. He loaded his mother and other relatives on the bus, sent them off toward 287 West, then got Sony to find yet another private jet, and flew back to Santa Barbara aboard that plane with Grace and his kids plus a pair of bodyguards.

  When they reconnected back in California, Jackson and Schaffel immediately began to talk about using “What More Can I Give?” to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. In October, Schaffel rented a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he met with senior executives of the McDonald’s restaurant chain to discuss the “What More Can I Give?” charity record idea. It had taken only a couple of hours to strike a $20 million deal, after McDonald’s execs calculated they could sell at least five million copies of the record through their U.S. outlets alone.

  Schaffel felt like he was surfing a tidal wave of good fortune during those days, when he worked as Michael’s main intermediary in setting up the recording sessions at which the likes of Beyoncé Knowles, Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Carlos Santana, Reba McEntire, and Tom Petty contributed their voices and instruments to the “What More Can I Give?” project. It was the most fabulous experience of Marc’s life. He had gotten everything on videotape and couldn’t wait for the world to see Celine Dion after her first performances of “What More Can I Give?”, cheeks bathed in tears as she explained how much it meant to her to sing with Michael Jackson. One great talent after another had reacted similarly. The immensity of it was breathtaking. “Michael was so excited about the project,” Schaffel recalled. “I didn’t have to beg him to get to the studio, he would come in on his own. He really, really, really wanted to make it happen. He was like a different person when he was like that. He was convinced, and so was I, and so was everyone else, that we had two number one hits here, the English version and the Spanish version, which is actually the better of the two.”

  Then things began to unravel, as Schaffel would learn they tended to do in the decaying orbit of Michael Jackson. On October 13 the New York Post printed the first story about the “What More Can I Give?” deal. McDonald’s was startled, then overwhelmed, by the bombardment of complaints from American moms outraged that a so-called family-food chain would consider distributing the music of a suspected pedophile. McDonald’s executives phoned Schaffel two days later to say they were backing out of the deal.

  It would get worse. Several of Jackson’s financial advisors were upset by their discovery that Schaffel had obtained the rights to “What More Can I Give?” and they contacted John Branca, Michael’s longtime attorney. Branca had been a recurring figure in Jackson’s business affairs for more than twenty years, negotiating many of the entertainer’s most lucrative contracts. At times, he was Michael’s closest advisor. Relations between the entertainer and the lawyer had been cooling again recently, as Michael became increasingly suspicious that Branca was using him to profit from other business deals. The attorney imagined that Marc Schaffel might be part of a growing problem with his prize client. Branca, as well connected as anyone in the entertainment industry, needed only a few days to determine that Schaffel had made most of his fortune as a gay pornographer, producing and directing films with titles like Cock Tales and The Man with the Golden Rod, as well as operating several pornographic Internet sites. The attorney promptly phoned Jackson and set up a meeting at which he showed him a tape of Schaffel directing a gay sex scene. Soon after, Schaffel received a letter informing him that his contract with Michael Jackson was being terminated because “information about Mr. Schaffel’s background, previously unknown to Mr. Jackson, has just been discovered.”

  “That was all complete bullshit,” Schaffel said. “Everybody knew about my past, including Michael. At Arnie Klein’s house, Michael and Carrie Fisher and Arnie all made jokes about it, in front of many people. [Sony Music Group CEO] Tommy Mottola knew, too. He brought Usher to the studio to sing on ‘What More Can I Give?’ and Tommy was sitting there joking with me about some girl in the porn business he knew, to see if I knew her, too. But now suddenly everyone is acting like they’re completely shocked.”

  He knew Michael had no issue with his homosexuality, Schaffel said, or with Arnold Klein’s, or with anyone else’s. Still it was a relief, Schaffel admitted, when Michael phoned him a few days after the termination letter was sent and said, “Don’t worry, Marc, this will blow over. Just go with the flow.”

  Unfortunately for Schaffel, Branca and other Jackson advisors were actively lobbying Sony to kill the charity project by refusing permission for any of its stars to appear on the record—at least until Michael was able to recover his rights to the song. “And then Sony and Tommy Mottola became concerned that if they let us release ‘What More Can I Give?’ Michael wouldn’t finish Invincible,” Schaffel explained. “And he was dragging his feet about getting that album done. We would go to New York to record, then to Miami, then to Virginia. We would go here and we would go there. And Sony was paying all the bills. What it all came down to was that Michael wasn’t into it. Then when we started on ‘What More Can I Give?’ Michael was one hundred percent into that and zero percent into Invincible. Sony had tens of millions invested in their record, so they decided to shelve ours.” To try to ensure that the song stayed on the shelf, Sony put out the bogus story that “What More Can I Give?” had been considered “too weak” for inclusion on Invincible.

  Schaffel pressed on, attempting to stage a concert in Washington, D.C., to raise money for the families of the 9/11 Pentagon victims that would be filmed as a video for “What More Can I Give?” Michael failed to show up. On June 13, 2002, Schaffel faxed a letter to the Japanese chairman of Sony Corporation, Nobuyuki Idei, begging Idei to either release the single or permit its release through an alternative distributor. “It would be a tragedy almost as great as the first one to let corporate greed or politics stop the movement of people working together in the healing process,” Schaffel had written. He received no answer. Schaffel persisted, selling various rights in the “What More Can I Give?” project to an assortment of partners, contingent upon Michael Jackson’s participation, and waited for a chance at rapprochement.

  He saw that opportunity in the debacle that engulfed Michael in the months after the late 2001 release of the long-delayed Invincible. Sony had recognized within two weeks that Invincible was going to be the first full-fledged flop of the singer’s career. Like all Michael Jackson releases, the new album had gone straight to the top of the charts, but the 363,000 copies it sold in that first week was still less than a fifth of the 1.9 million units that ’N Sync’s Celebrity sold in the first seven days of its release that same year. And Invincible’s sales had dropped off precipitously. Sony was estimating that it would sell only two million copies of the album in the United States, less than a tenth of what Thriller had done, and only three million copies overseas, less than a fifth of the number Dangerous had racked up. Reviews of the album ranged from lackluster to dismissive. Only one single from Invincible, “You Rock My World,” reached even the top ten in the Unit
ed States. Mottola and Sony believed that Jackson’s refusal to support his new album with a world tour had doomed Invincible internationally. The company’s executives also complained that Jackson had failed to show up at a series of promotional appearances both in the United States and abroad.

  “There were a lot of events scheduled,” Schaffel recalled, “and all of a sudden Michael didn’t want to do them. That pissed off Tommy, who thought it was all because of ‘What More Can I Give?’ And a lot of it was. Michael wanted them to use ‘What More Can I Give?’ to promote Invincible, but Sony thought, ‘You’ll sell millions of copies of your record but hardly any of ours.’”

  Sony was mortified by reports that it had spent $51 million on the production and promotion of an album that was selling so poorly. In early 2002, an unnamed company executive told the New York Daily News, “Charges of pedophilia have really spooked a lot of American record buyers.” Within days, Jackson and his record company were locked in a battle that would become both public and vicious.