Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The unveiling of “We Are the World” in March 1985 would not only put Michael front and center again but elevate him to savior of mankind status. The song made pop stars the point persons in global humanitarian efforts. An initial shipment of 800,000 records sold out in three days. In all, three million copies of “We Are the World” were purchased before the end of the year, and the song raised almost $40 million for the starving people of Ethiopia. As much as this success inspired him, Michael wanted to make sure he got credit for it. When Ken Kragen put together a domestic antipoverty program called “Hands Across America” and commissioned a theme song that was to debut at halftime of the 1986 Super Bowl, Michael objected, and eventually convinced Kragen that his own song “should always be the anthem” of celebrity relief projects. He was overjoyed when “We Are the World” was declared the front-runner for Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards ceremony, scheduled to take place one month later, but annoyed to discover that Quincy Jones had been chosen to accept the prize. He promptly concocted a plan to upstage Jones. A young woman was hired to play the part of an adoring fan who would run in from the wings while the award was being presented to throw her arms around Michael as he stood next to the producer. It would make the front page of every newspaper in the country, Michael enthused, and nobody anywhere would remember Quincy’s acceptance speech.

  The core of essential beneficence in him was increasingly covered over by the accretions of egomania. Ever his enabler Walter Yetnikoff grew tired of it. “I could not have a conversation with him that did not revolve around Michael Jackson and his records and his shows and how wonderful he was.” He grew so out of touch with the world around him that he often did not recognize newly minted celebrities. When he showed up on the set of the movie Space Jam, which featured Michael Jordan at a time when the NBA star was at the apex of his fame, Michael found it very difficult indeed to believe that a basketball player might be more famous than him. Jackson needed one of the young boys who accompanied him to explain just who exactly this other Michael was.

  6

  He had become convinced that it was time to “take control of my own life,” Michael Jackson announced as the end of the 1980s approached. Almost immediately, he began to shed the very people who had been the architects of his enormous popular success. Among the first to go was Quincy Jones, the producer of his three previous solo albums. Jackson resented the credit Jones had taken for Thriller, especially since Jones had tried to keep “Billie Jean” off the album. Jones believed there was a simpler explanation: “I think at one point he felt I wasn’t in touch with the market anymore,” Jones would tell CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric in 2009. “I remember when we were doing Bad I had DMC in the studio because I could see what was coming with hip-hop. And [Michael] was telling Frank Dileo ‘I think Quincy’s losing it and doesn’t understand the market anymore. He doesn’t know that rap is dead.’ This is 1987. Rap hadn’t even started and by 1992 it was all rap and at that time Michael was going after all the big rappers, Teddy Riley, all the rap producers, to spend five times what they were paying me to produce his records.”

  Michael then discharged Dileo. As his manager, Frank was adept at massaging Jackson’s ego at the same time he emerged as one of the very few people who could disagree with Michael and make it stick. The best-known story about the two involved Jackson chasing his manager around a hotel room by brandishing his pet boa constrictor; Dileo reportedly pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot the damn snake if Michael didn’t put it down.

  The five-year run of success that Jackson and Dileo enjoyed together ended with a thud, though, in early 1989. The media reported that Dileo had been fired for botching the domestic release of Michael’s ninety-minute video Moonwalker, which would not be distributed theatrically anywhere but in Japan. The Jackson family was furious with Dileo for letting Michael spend $27 million on the project; twenty-five people had worked for a solid six months on a four-minute-forty-five-second section constructed around “Leave Me Alone.” Dileo was prominently featured on the Bad album jacket, appearing with Michael in a large photograph that bore the caption “another great team.” When Bad failed to become “the biggest record ever,” as Michael had predicted publicly and often, he began to divest himself of everyone associated with it, Jones and Dileo among them.

  John Branca was the next to go and his departure foreshadowed Jackson’s future even more ominously than the exits of Jones and Dileo. David Geffen was the agent of this specific dismissal, but the pattern was perhaps more important than the particulars. Again and again, Michael would allow a new and exciting voice not only to catch his ear, but also to cancel out the advice of a proven familiar. Anyone who knew how he had been raised understood that loyalty was of little value among the Jacksons. Branca, though, had been instrumental to Jackson in securing the ATV music catalog. He had a handshake agreement with Robert Holmes à Court in the spring of 1985, Branca would recall, but then the Australian “fucked me” by making a more lucrative deal with rival bidders Charles Koppelman and Martin Bandier. Branca maneuvered behind their backs with a phone call to Irving Azoff, chief of MCA, which was putting up the money for that deal, convincing Azoff that a favor to Michael Jackson at this particular moment would be repaid many times over. When Azoff pulled the funding for the Koppleman-Bandier deal, the catalog was sold to the next highest bidder, Jackson. The only concession Branca had to make to Holmes à Court was an agreement that the Australian’s daughter would retain rights to “Penny Lane” as what, according to Branca, Holmes à Court termed a “souvenir.” Five years later, though, Geffen began whispering that Michael should have a better deal at CBS Records and that Branca’s close relationship with Walter Yetnikoff was the main reason he didn’t. In the years since closing the ATV deal, Branca had made Jackson tens of millions in various sponsorship and merchandising deals. The copromoter of the Victory tour, Chuck Sullivan, had paid Michael $18 million in 1985 to develop a clothing line. A year later, Branca negotiated a deal with Pepsi that paid his client $15 million for the rights to sponsor a Michael Jackson solo tour. In 1988, Branca secured an advance of $10 million from a company called L.A. Gear to endorse its sneakers. A year after that, he salvaged the Moonwalker debacle by negotiating a ridiculously lucrative contract for Michael on rentals and sales of the video, a deal that resulted in Jackson’s actually earning a profit on the seemingly doomed project. Michael began to resent the attorney, though, when Geffen and others explained to him how much of that money Branca was putting in his own pocket, and how he was using his relationship with Michael Jackson to feather his nest with other clients. In late 1990, it was announced that John Branca was being replaced as Jackson’s lawyer by a team of attorneys who were closely associated with Geffen. Yetnikoff was fired by CBS Records’ parent company, Sony, a short time later.

  All of this had occurred while Michael was sinking deeper and deeper into a self-imposed isolation. He had separated from both his family and the city he had called home from the age of ten when he purchased Neverland Ranch in 1988 and left Los Angeles to live in the Santa Ynez Valley, more than a hundred miles up the coast, just north of Santa Barbara. He had first admired the property while Paul McCartney and his wife Linda were staying there during the filming of the “Say Say Say” video in 1982. It was called Sycamore Ranch back then, nearly three thousand acres where Figueroa Mountain Road wound through lush rolling hills to an estate that had been built to the lavish and exacting standards of a wealthy California developer named William Bone. The 13,000-square-foot main residence, set among one of the most beautiful groves of live oaks in all of California, was a hybrid Tudor mansion and Dutch farmhouse, with brick and masonry walls built around massive wooden beams that framed leaded glass windows, topped by a beautifully gabled roof. There were seventeen rooms on the first floor, sixteen rooms upstairs, and an enormous wine cellar below ground. Branca had handled a lengthy negotiation with Bone, eventually reaching a deal that allowed Jackson to buy the estate for
$17 million, a little more than half the asking price. Jackson rewarded his attorney with a Rolls-Royce convertible. Almost immediately after taking possession of the property, Jackson renamed the place Neverland Valley Ranch and made it over into a signal declaration of wealth, success, and the power to create a private world in his own image.

  The ranch in Santa Barbara County, just a short drive from Ronald Reagan’s “Western White House,” was far enough removed from the home he had grown up in—for his first ten years, anyway—to support the Jackson family’s rags-to-riches story’s most mythic dimensions. By the time the Bad tour was over, Michael’s personal fortune had grown to considerably more than $100 million and he was looking for something that would awe his visitors in the same way he had been awed when he first saw Berry Gordy’s staggeringly luxurious Bel Air palace, or Paul McCartney’s stunning spread in East Sussex. Neverland Ranch would amply serve that purpose.

  Branca warned Jackson that he was unlikely to recoup the $55 million he had invested in “improving” Neverland if or when he sold the place, but Michael was by then indifferent to such concerns. Reporters invited to tour Neverland during its 1990 public unveiling most often began by inspecting the towering statue of Mercury (the Roman god of profit, trade, and commerce) in the driveway outside the mansion, then climbed a hill out back that led to a near replica of the Main Street train station at Disneyland, with a floral clock that was barely less magnificent than the one Walt Disney had designed for his own park. There, they caught a C. P. Huntington–style train out past a two-story fort outfitted with water cannons and a nearby Indian village replete with teepees, a totem pole, and full-size-replica Native Americans, to the amusement park where a carousel with custom-made hand-painted animals awaited young visitors. There was also a Ferris wheel, a bumper car arena, a three-story-high slide, and Michael’s favorite, a roller coaster called the Zipper. Nearby was a zoo where horses and zebras ran together, and buffalo roamed among ostriches, deer, llamas, and giraffes. The “rec building” housed two floors of arcade games, while Neverland’s private lake offered kids the choice between a swan boat, a canoe, and a red dinghy. The train’s final stop was the $2 million Neverland Cinema, with a fully stocked candy counter and a glassed-in viewing booth with reclining beds to welcome seriously ill youngsters.

  “Michael Jackson is very fond of children,” Rolling Stone’s Michael Goldberg observed in his report of the trip to Neverland, without a hint of hidden meaning. Goldberg was shown a room on the upstairs floor of the main house where a canopied bed was covered with dozens and dozens of dolls along with jack-in-the-boxes featuring each of the major characters from The Wizard of Oz sitting on shelves beside it. Another room was jammed full of children’s games and toys, coloring books, and crayons. The “train room” featured an enormous and elaborate Lionel set, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Bart Simpson, Roger Rabbit, and E.T. A pile of Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse, and Bambi quilts lay on the floor, in case the kids staying over wanted to have a slumber party. Goldberg was clearly more captivated by the “exquisitely furnished” first floor, which included an oak-paneled library stocked with rare editions of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling, a living room anchored by a custom-made Bosendorfer rosewood piano, and a den warmed by a stone fireplace. Rolling Stone’s reporter refrained from mentioning the numerous life-size paintings of Michael that hung on the interior walls of the main house. Nearly every one showed him striking a heroic pose while costumed in brightly colored but vaguely military uniforms that suggested the dandified garb of nineteenth-century European royalty, replete with cape, sword, ruffled collar, and, very often, a crown.

  Goldberg was among those who insisted that one couldn’t fully appreciate the magic of Neverland unless you saw it at night, when the whole place looked as if it had been “sprinkled with a kind of high-tech fairy dust.” Strands of white bulbs ran up the trunks of the oak trees and out the limbs to the branches, blinking on and off at intervals so that the glittering trees seemed to materialize out of thin air one moment, then vanish the next. The sound of music was nearly deafening. After its release in 1995, Michael’s song “Childhood” played constantly on the carousel, while cartoon soundtracks blared from the speakers astride a JumboTron the size of a drive-in movie screen. Songs filled the air even when one wandered off to explore the grounds; on lawns and in flowerbeds, speakers disguised as gray boulders poured forth show tunes until nearly midnight. A winding yellow brick road illuminated by recessed gold-color lights led to an amusement park that was lit against the night sky, while the main house, the lake, the bronze statues of young boys beating drums, playing accordions, or shaking tambourines were lit with strobes that lent the entire scene a sense of Brigadoon-like appearance and disappearance.

  Michael’s favorite place in Neverland was the three-turreted tree house that could be entered only by climbing the trunk. It was there, at a spot overlooking the lake, that he had written most of the songs for his new album, Dangerous. The entire music industry was in shock at a report that Jackson had spent $10 million of CBS Records’ money on the production of Dangerous, five times what it cost even the most profligate bands to make a record. Michael publicly reveled in the commercial success of Dangerous, even as he privately winced at the mixed critical reception. The attempt to replicate his earlier successes was painfully obvious to those who panned the album. The song “Who Is It” was filled with sonic hooks almost identical to the ones Michael and Quincy Jones had used on “Billie Jean,” they said, while “Heal the World” seemed like little more than a rewrite of “We Are the World.” The New York Times called Dangerous Jackson’s “least confident” solo album. The Los Angeles Times asked, “How dangerous can a man be who literally wants to please everyone?” Still, Dangerous debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart and remained in the top ten more than a year later. Record company executives were most impressed that more than three-quarters of Dangerous’s sales had been made outside the United States.

  Michael Jackson was the most international music star ever and in recognition Sony had secured his future with a contract that was the most lucrative in the history of the entertainment industry. The $65 million guarantee was but an advance on a deal that could be worth $1 billion to Jackson, according to the Sony press release that announced it. Jackson had become the first artist in any medium to be given 50 percent of profits, or even close to that amount. That was on top of the 25 percent royalty he would receive for each retail sale, plus a signing bonus of $4 million and $1 million per year to run his own record company. Sony had also agreed to put up an additional $2.2 million per year in “administrative costs,” plus more than $10 million to pay for music videos, and honored the singer’s ambition to be a movie star by including provisions that guaranteed him a fee of $5 million for every film he appeared in, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts. “Michael is the greatest superstar in the music industry,” Sony senior vice president Ron Wilcox told the Los Angeles Times, “and the contract is justified by his past achievements, existing talent, and future potential.”

  Jackson was now wealthy almost beyond imagining. The ATV catalog was doubling in value annually, spinning off millions in earnings. Dollars were flowing out of his accounts in prodigious amounts, but still not nearly as rapidly as they were flooding in. Michael was watching his fortune grow, keeping a constant eye on cash flow, and paying close attention to accounting statements. “The bookkeeper we hired during Invincible was the same bookkeeper Michael had back in the Thriller days,” said Marc Schaffel, “and she told me that back then Michael would check the complete balance down to the dollar in his bank account, every day. That she would write the checks and deliver them to Michael and he would sign each one personally. She said there were times he would see a bill and he wouldn’t sign the check, that he would call the vendor and ask them, ‘Why is your bill $50,000? You’re charging me too much.’ And then he would go back and tell her to make the check for $40,000. She said he knew
every dollar that was going in and out. It amazed me because he was so far removed from that when I met him.”

  Michael was in Asia, near the end of the Dangerous tour in the summer of 1993, when word came that he had been accused of sexually molesting thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler, and that authorities in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties had initiated criminal investigations. He canceled his remaining dates and soon after checked into a rehabilitation facility to deal with what was said to be a prescription drug addiction, then returned to the United States several weeks later to discover that the floor had fallen out from under his entire life.

  It was Michael’s misfortune that this first “child sex scandal” had broken the year before O. J. Simpson cut his wife’s throat, at the very moment when cable news and tabloid culture were recognizing their perverse synergy. Jackson’s singular strangeness seemed to make anything possible, and the dollars dangled by various editors and producers attracted a slew of “insiders” who sold the entertainer out for whatever they could get. Two former Neverland security guards received $100,000 to tell Hard Copy that they were fired because they knew too much about the singer’s relationships with young boys. Later, in court, both men admitted they had made up most of their story. Jackson’s former maid Blanca Francia took $20,000 for telling Hard Copy that she had seen Michael naked with young boys, including her own son, then contradicted that claim in interviews with the police and Jackson’s attorneys. Francia later threatened to file a lawsuit that squeezed a $2 million settlement out of the singer. Jackson’s former secretary Orietta Murdoch and his ex-head of security Robert Wegner sold separate stories suggesting that Jackson had been sexually involved with a pair of Australian kids, who each adamantly denied it.