Untouchable
Page 4
The opening volley had been fired before the album’s release, when Jackson demanded that Sony renegotiate his contract. Michael wanted possession of his master recording catalog within three years rather than the seven specified in the current agreement. Also, he asked that Sony throw another $8 million behind Invincible, with most of that money going to pay for the album’s third video. After Sony refused both requests, Jackson contacted his friend, songwriter Carol Bayer Sager, to ask if her husband Bob Daly, the former head of Warner Bros., would investigate whether the record label was cheating him. When Daly reported back that he saw no evidence of this, Jackson not only cut off contact with Bayer Sager and her husband, but proceeded to make what was perhaps the biggest miscalculation of his musical career—accusing Tommy Mottola of being biased against black entertainers.
Al Sharpton was with Jackson when he showed up outside Sony’s New York offices in July 2002 surrounded by a chanting crowd bused in from Harlem, waving photographs of Mottola drawn with horns and a pitchfork. Encouraged by Johnnie Cochran, the former O. J. Simpson attorney who represented Jackson during the Jordan Chandler affair, European fans had been bombarding Sony’s corporate offices with faxed sheets of black paper in a campaign coordinated to support the racism charge. Speaking to the media assembled outside Sony’s offices on Madison Avenue, Jackson not only described Mottola as “very, very devilish,” but branded the entire music business as “racist,” and announced that he intended to form a black artists union to combat discrimination. Michael was furious when Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who had been egging him on for weeks, began to backpedal. Sharpton actually told the assembled media that he had never known Tommy Mottola to be anything but sympathetic to black causes. By the next day, the backlash against Michael Jackson throughout the entertainment industry was ferocious. Almost instantaneously, Michael found himself despised by the people whose support he needed most.
Schaffel chose that moment to speak up for his estranged friend, telling the Los Angeles Times, “If you ask me, I think there are people who don’t want to see Michael on top.” Some of those people were at Sony, Schaffel suggested, and had been behind the scuttling of the “What More Can I Give?” project, because they knew it “would paint him in a different light than how they want him to be seen. They don’t want Michael to succeed. And they’re using my background as an excuse.” Jackson, who had almost no one else defending him publicly at that moment, was so grateful that he immediately brought Schaffel back on board. In what was for Schaffel a delicious bit of irony (and for John Branca no mere coincidence), Marc’s return to the fold would coincide precisely with Michael’s decision that he was done with his longtime attorney. Branca’s animus toward Schaffel afterward was considerable, but this bit of palace intrigue had actually been wrought by Michael’s new German managers, Ronald Konitzer and Dieter Wiesner. “Dieter and Ronald had brought in an outside auditing firm that did a complete examination,” Schaffel recalled, “and the paperwork Michael was shown attacked Branca for his relationships with Sony and Tommy Mottola.”
The paperwork was a dossier that had been prepared by the Manhattan-based corporate espionage firm Interfor, Inc. The company’s director, an Israeli émigré named Juval Aviv, was regarded as a dubious character in many quarters. The Village Voice had once published an article about him under the headline “Secret Agent Schmuck,” debunking Aviv’s reported claims that he had been the lead assassin of Israel’s state intelligence service, Mossad, in avenging the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Olympic village during the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly, Michael believed the claims in the Interfor report that Branca and Mottola had been involved in transferring funds that belonged to him into offshore accounts at Caribbean banks. It fit with suspicions he had been harboring for years about Branca’s too-cozy relationship with Sony. “Michael hated all lawyers anyway, including his own, and he made the decision that Branca should be fired,” recalled Schaffel, who was assigned to facilitate Branca’s dismissal, and then to replace Jackson’s longtime attorney with David LeGrand, the same Las Vegas lawyer who had contracted the Interfor report.
As the long process of Branca’s dismissal unfolded, Michael invited Marc to accompany him on a trip to Berlin in October 2002. Jackson was traveling to Germany to be honored at the country’s most prestigious entertainment awards ceremony, the Bambis, with a special Millennium prize that recognized him as the world’s “greatest living pop icon.”
The celebratory trip swiftly turned into a nightmare. First, while being serenaded by the huge crowd of fans gathered outside his Berlin hotel, the Adlon, Michael had impulsively displayed his nine-month-old third child, Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, by dangling the infant over the balcony railing of his third-floor suite. The images of him holding a baby in a blue jumpsuit, its head covered by a towel as its bare feet kicked the air forty feet above a cobblestone sidewalk, shocked and outraged parents worldwide. Child advocacy groups seized the opportunity to join in an orgy of public castigation. The British tabloids that had, for nearly two decades, called the star “Wacko Jacko” now were delighted to change that to “Mad Bad Dad.” Several commentators in Germany suggested that perhaps Michael Jackson should face criminal charges. Michael, who had never before been deplored on this scale, was forced to issue the first public apology that he had ever offered for his erratic behavior: “I made a terrible mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children.” Later, he even attempted to explain for the first time how his youngest child had become known as “Blanket.” It was derived from an expression he used with his family and his employees, Michael told a reporter: “I say, ‘You should blanket me or you should blanket her,’ meaning a blanket is like a blessing. It’s a way of showing love and caring.”
Jackson was subdued at the Bambi Awards ceremony and when he was called to the stage to pose with a fellow recipient, actress Halle Berry, he could barely whisper the words, “Berlin, ich liebe dich”—“Berlin, I love you.” News reports suggested that the “painfully shy” performance was the result of his humiliation and remorse over the baby-dangling incident. What the journalists didn’t know was that, shortly before Jackson took the stage, Schaffel had alerted him that something far worse was coming his way from across the English Channel.
To support the career comeback he hoped to launch with Invincible, Jackson had agreed to cooperate with a documentary by Martin Bashir, a British journalist to whom he had been introduced by their mutual friend, psychic spoon bender Uri Geller. Bashir seduced Michael, according to Tom Mesereau, among others, by boasting that he had been a confidant of the late Princess Diana. “Michael wanted to hear all of Bashir’s Diana stories,” Geller recalled. Jackson had tried for years, unsuccessfully, to form a relationship with Diana. She and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in fact, were just about the only two famous people he ever met who chose to keep him at arm’s length, which had only deepened his fascination with each of them. Bashir’s Diana anecdotes had persuaded Jackson to consent to what was about to become the biggest public relations catastrophe of his life.
“Bashir told so many stories about her, and Michael was completely charmed,” Dieter Wiesner recalled. “But then I heard from people in the UK that Bashir wasn’t Diana’s friend at all, that she felt he had tricked her into talking about her affair, and that she felt used by him—as Michael did later. So I was worried.”
Footage of Bashir’s documentary Living with Michael Jackson had gotten loose in London, and friends were phoning from England, Schaffel said, to warn him that Michael was about to be painted as a freakish pervert. After reading transcripts of the documentary’s rough cut, “Marc knew what a disaster this was going to be,” Wiesner remembered, “and Michael could see it in his eyes. After that I said, ‘Michael, this is going to be terrible.’ And he didn’t believe me. He said, ‘Dieter, Dieter, please. I don’t think so. Don’t think bad.’”
Almost a month passed before they flew back to Florida, where Bashir was supposed to personally screen the documentary for Jackson. “Michael was still waiting for him, because he should have the last approval,” Wiesner remembered. “More people were calling from UK, telling me this is going to be a bad thing. Then Bashir shows up with the whole camera team. He wanted to show Michael everything, but he wanted to have his reaction on tape, and I knew that would be used against Michael also.”
Bashir had arrived for what was to be their final interview shortly after the first of the year. Within seconds of sitting down with the star, the formerly unctuous director began to confront Michael with a series of acid-laced questions about his physical transformation. It was a particularly sensitive subject for Jackson at that moment in his life. Less than a year earlier, Michael had been preparing to shoot a video for the Invincible album when his then-manager, Trudy Green, sent someone to the star’s trailer to make a mold of his face. “She told Michael it was something for the makeup artist to use,” Schaffel remembered. “But Michael wanted me to ask her what it was really about. And Trudy told me, ‘Well, you know, he’s not looking too good right now, and we think we should make this mask for him to wear in this video.’ When Michael found out Trudy had said this, he just broke down and sobbed. It was one of only two times I ever saw him do that. I mean he was just heartbroken.” Michael stopped production of the video immediately, then fired Green, replacing her a few days later with “the Germans,” Wiesner and Konitzer. He was still distraught about the incident, though, which perhaps explained why he blatantly lied to Bashir about the extent of his plastic surgery, insisting there had been only a couple of operations on his nose, nothing more.
Bashir ramped up Jackson’s discomfort with an observation that his two oldest children, Prince and Paris, claimed they had no mother, then got Michael to contradict his earlier statement that the mother of his third child was someone with whom he had a relationship by admitting that Blanket was born to a surrogate. When Bashir discussed the subject of children who regularly spent the night at Neverland, often in Jackson’s own bedroom, the end was at hand. After admitting on camera that the ill or disadvantaged children he invited to stay on the ranch often slept in his bed (while he slept on the floor) Jackson grew agitated as Bashir pressed the subject. At first he said it was natural that family friends like Macaulay and Kieran Culkin would sleep in his bed; then he blurted out that “many children” had slept in the same bed with him. In his denial that there was any sexual motivation for this, Jackson uttered a line that would be replayed in countless news broadcasts: He told Bashir, “The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.”
Bashir returned to the UK “without letting Michael see a thing,” Wiesner recalled. Jackson was still in Florida when Living with Michael Jackson—introduced by Barbara Walters—was broadcast by ABC on February 6, 2003. “I was sitting with Michael on his bed watching it,” Dieter Wiesner recalled. “And he just broke down like I never saw before. He couldn’t believe that something like this was coming up again. He looked like he was gonna die. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t make a word come out.”
The Bashir documentary “rocked his world,” said Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon, who by the end of the year would ask a grand jury to indict Jackson on ten felony charges of child sexual abuse. After the documentary aired, Michael was so distraught that he took to his bed—alone—for days. Publicity-seeking Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred and her associate, Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, promptly filed nearly identical complaints with the Department of Social Services to challenge Jackson’s custody of his children.
With Jackson incapacitated, Schaffel took charge of damage control. The former pornographer swiftly demonstrated his media savvy by assembling a collection of videotapes about Bashir’s time with Michael Jackson that the British director did not control. Before agreeing to cooperate with Bashir, Jackson had insisted that he would have his own camera crew on location to shoot Bashir shooting him. “Despite how he’s portrayed,” Tom Mesereau observed, “Michael is no fool. He’s actually one of the most intelligent people you’ll ever meet. And he knew that he should have his own record of what was transpiring during those Bashir interviews. It was probably one of the smartest decisions he ever made.”
How smart wouldn’t be clear until almost two years later, when Jackson was in the midst of his criminal trial. On the Jackson tapes, Bashir was seen lavishing praise on Michael as both a father and a humanitarian, saying at one point that he had been moved to tears by his subject’s sensitive approach to parenting and was even more touched by Michael’s kindness to seriously ill and underprivileged children. A juxtaposition of those remarks with Bashir’s condemnation of Jackson in his ABC documentary as “dangerous” to children, Schaffel recognized, would be devastating.
Schaffel’s own stroke of genius was to set up interviews with a young cancer patient named Gavin Arvizo whose relationship with Michael Jackson had become the centerpiece of the Bashir documentary. A child psychiatrist and a child welfare worker were recruited to interview the boy, his mother, and his two siblings, all of whom defended Jackson vehemently. Gavin himself insisted on camera that he had never been touched inappropriately and that Michael was “completely innocent.” His sister Davellin and brother Star supported their brother by saying that during sleepovers at Neverland they always spent the night in Michael’s bed while he slept on the floor nearby. Their mother Janet Arvizo told the interviewers, “The relationship that Michael has with my children is a beautiful, loving, father-son and father-daughter one,” and threatened to take legal action against Bashir. Schaffel also delivered an interview with Debbie Rowe, the much-maligned mother of Michael’s two oldest children, whose generous assessment of her ex-husband’s character stood in marked contrast to what was being reported about their relationship in the media.
Though Schaffel was not able to include the interviews with the Arvizo family in what he was calling “the rebuttal video” (the cameraman who had shot those tapes was refusing to release them, claiming he had not been paid—at least not enough), executives at ABC’s rival networks were wowed by what they saw. Debunking the Bashir documentary might generate ratings that rivaled or even surpassed those that ABC had garnered. Fox eventually made the highest bid for what it would title Michael Jackson Take Two: The Footage You Were Never Meant to See and broadcast “the retaliatory special,” as People magazine called it, on February 23, less than three weeks after ABC aired the Bashir documentary. The Fox special not only stemmed much of the condemnation coming Michael’s way, but made him millions of dollars at a time when, as one associate put it, “he was dead broke on a cash basis.”
Schaffel put together a deal with Fox for a second documentary, this one titled Michael Jackson’s Home Movies, that would be broadcast in April, featuring family and friends such as Liz Taylor describing the sweetly naive man-child they knew and loved. Schaffel’s spreadsheet showed that Jackson would earn at least $15 million from the two videos, and perhaps as much as $20 million. Under the terms of their agreement, 20 percent of that money was Schaffel’s.
While waiting for the checks to arrive from New York and points east, Schaffel resumed his cash advances to Jackson. The first was made in February when Michael wanted to celebrate the Fox deal with a shopping spree. The paper bag he gave Michael was filled with $340,000 in cash, Schaffel said, because he knew how pent up Michael was, and knew also that nothing had a more calming effect on him than making an extravagant purchase. Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in March, then wrote Michael a check for $1 million in April. He needed $638,000 to pay for a piece of jewelry that Liz Taylor was demanding in exchange for agreeing to the use of an interview with her in the Home Movies video, Michael had explained, and another $250,000 that his mother Katherine insisted upon for her appearance in the video. The remainder was required to make the deposit on a new
Rolls-Royce Phantom that he absolutely had to have. A week later, Schaffel gave Jackson an additional $130,000 to help him pay off the Rolls.
Of course it all sounded strange to outsiders when their relationship spilled into the courts four years later, Schaffel would say, but you had to understand the extraordinary character of Michael Jackson. Michael’s overwhelming charisma was combined with a detachment from conventional reality that made him at once enormously powerful and utterly helpless. During a trip to Las Vegas in 2003 they had checked into adjoining suites at the Mandarin Oriental, then headed to a business meeting in a conference room downstairs. Schaffel recalled: “After the meeting, I had to go to the bathroom, so I told Michael, ‘Just wait here a second.’ But, of course, Michael doesn’t want to wait, so he decides go back to his room on his own. But he doesn’t remember the room number or the floor or anything. He probably doesn’t even know what city we’re in. So he just walks up some stairs and starts knocking on doors, waiting for the bodyguards to open one.” As he raced to catch up, Schaffel remembered, he could see the hallway filling with excited people who were following Michael Jackson down the hallway. “I mean, the entire hotel is in an uproar,” Schaffel recalled, “and Michael just keeps moving from door to door, knocking on each one, getting more and more frantic to escape the crowd gathering behind him. I finally run up to him and say, ‘Michael, my God, stop!’ Then I have to lead him to the elevator, with all these people still following us, and get him upstairs. The point is, Michael would have just kept going until somebody showed up to take care of him. Like a lot of people, I wanted to be the one.”
Schaffel still trusted Michael implicitly but by May 2003 he was beginning to grow antsy about the wait to be paid his share of the profits from the sale of the two videos. On top of that, repayment of the money he had advanced to Michael was arriving behind schedule. Not wanting to bother the star with such petty concerns, Schaffel took them to Jackson’s attorneys. The lawyers at first said the money was coming in from Fox more slowly than anticipated and that nothing had been received so far from foreign distributors and DVD sales. When Schaffel pressed, saying he knew that Michael had received at least $9 million to date, the attorneys answered that Michael had other debts to pay and that they weren’t sure Schaffel had a valid contract to collect 20 percent of the video money anyway. Eventually, an agreement was struck that would pay Schaffel $1.5 million for his work on the videos: a $500,000 payment immediately, followed by ten installments of $50,000 each. Less than a month after Schaffel received that first half-million, though, Michael complained that his funds were already depleted, that creditors were hounding him, and that Bank of America was gouging him with a ridiculous rate of interest. What Michael “needed,” Schaffel knew, was to spend money; he gave Michael another $250,000 to go antique shopping in Beverly Hills. “Bear in mind that Marc was still receiving repayments and the installments he had been promised from the sale of the videos,” King would explain. “He understood Michael’s situation as a simple cash flow problem.”