Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Terry eventually told his parents about the masturbation conversation with Michael and they told some acquaintances. Word spread, but slowly. It was still just people from their neighborhood who were aware of it when Michael came to London on the Bad tour in 1988. But during the next five years the story would somehow cross the Atlantic Ocean. In 1993, Terry received a phone call from a Los Angeles Police Department detective who said that he believed Michael’s “bad behavior” had started with him. He didn’t believe Michael was a pedophile, Terry told the detective, just “a very confused person.”

  11

  Michael Jackson’s expected arrival at the 2006 World Music Awards ceremony was being framed by the newspapers in London as a shot at recovery, if not redemption. Jackson’s last appearance on an English stage had been almost ten years earlier, at the 1996 BRIT Awards, where his performance of the best-loved number from the HIStory album, “Earth Song,” was disrupted by a particularly memorable protest against celebrity self-importance.

  HIStory’s $30 million publicity campaign had been launched in the summer of 1995. When the executives at Sony met with him in the spring of 1995 to discuss how they would promote the album and the world tour that was to follow, Michael suggested, “Build a statue of me.” Sony built nine statues, each one a thirty-two-foot-tall construction of steel and fiberglass that depicted Jackson in his familiar pseudo-military garb with a bandolier strung across his chest, fists clenched at his hips as he gazed off into the distance. They were distributed in dramatic fashion to strategically selected European cities in June 1995. The scene that surrounded the giant crane that had lowered the Michael Jackson statue to the Alexanderplatz in Berlin was surreal to say the least, but even that didn’t compare to the sensation created by the giant Jackson statue that was floated down the River Thames aboard a barge in London. “Excessive” and “over the top” were among the milder criticisms made of the statue campaign; critics in several countries declared themselves “nauseated.” The distribution of the statues was followed shortly thereafter by the release of a “teaser” video that had cost $4 million and showed the real Michael Jackson costumed in the same way his statues were as he strode regally past hundreds of hired Hungarian soldiers who were surrounded by thousands of frenzied fans. “The clip doesn’t just stop at representing previously known levels of Michael mania,” wrote Chris Willman in the Los Angeles Times, “it goes well beyond the bounds of self-congratulation to become perhaps the most baldly vainglorious self-deification a pop singer has yet deigned to share with his public, at least with a straight face.”

  That summer’s publicity campaign had included a joint interview of Michael and his new bride, Lisa Marie Presley, by Diane Sawyer for ABC’s Primetime Live. Seen by some sixty million viewers in the United States alone, the Sawyer interview demonstrated that Jackson’s ability to attract an audience was undiminished. The undisguised point of it all, though, had been to answer the questions that lingered after the settlement of the claims made against Michael by Jordan Chandler, and in this the interview had failed miserably. The most memorable moment had come when Michael told Sawyer that he saw no reason to abandon his sleepovers with children. The deer-in-headlights expression on Presley’s face produced a public outpouring of pity for her.

  The 1996 BRIT Awards were held for the first time at London’s Earls Court. A significant minority of the audience had gagged on Bob Geldof’s introduction and presentation of a special “Artist of a Generation” award to Jackson: “When he sings, it is with the voice of angels. When his feet move, you can see God dancing.” Singing and dancing amidst a multicolored collection of clapping, chanting children, Jackson had struck what appeared to be a Christ-like pose as he stepped onto a platform and was hoisted above the crowd. Many of the audience’s younger members began to shake their heads. Just as the performance of “Earth Song” came to a crescendo, Jarvis Cocker, front man for the band Pulp, “invaded the stage,” as it was described in newspaper stories, to pantomime what appeared to be a highly stylized fart directed at Jackson.

  Bundled off the stage by security, Cocker was detained and questioned by police on suspicion of assault but eventually released without being charged. The initial condemnation of Cocker’s “rude display” was swiftly overtaken by congratulations for his nervy defiance of an overblown idol. Many applauded when Cocker answered criticism in the press by stating, “My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson sees himself as some kind of Christ-like figure with the power of healing.” Noel Gallagher, leader of what was then Britain’s biggest band, Oasis, promptly suggested that Jarvis Cocker should be made a Member of the British Empire. The nation’s most influential music magazine, Melody Maker, also demanded that Cocker be knighted. Pulp’s record sales soared, even as “Earth Song” began to fall from the charts, and a $50,000 waxwork statue of Cocker was placed in London’s Rock Circus. Over the next few months, Jarvis Cocker became an icon of cool in England while Michael Jackson turned into a symbol of all that was passé in pop music.

  Now, nearly a full decade since the BRIT Awards debacle, Michael was returning to Earls Court. Even before his arrival in London the city’s tabloids were reporting that Jackson had infuriated World Music Awards organizers with a half-million dollars of last-minute demands that included twenty first-class plane tickets and the erection of an eighteen-foot-high temporary wall around the Hempel Hotel in Bayswater, which he and his entourage had taken over at a cost of $80,000 per night.

  At Earls Court, Michael’s failure to appear on the red carpet to greet the thousands of fans who had come out to see him got the evening off to a bad start. Tensions mounted when the crowd discovered that Jackson would not be joining Chris Brown’s performance of “Thriller,” as had been promised in the newspapers. The disappointed audience drowned out Brown’s solo and several performances that followed with boos, claps, and chants for “Michael!” When Jackson finally took the stage (after being introduced by host Lindsay Lohan as “a god”) to join a choir for a gospel-inflected version of “We Are the World,” he seemed “overawed and petrified,” as an audience member quoted by the Mirror put it. Michael sang only the chorus of the song before abruptly stopping, throwing his Roberto Cavalli jacket into the front row, then repeatedly telling the audience how much he loved them. There was little love coming back. Boos rained down from every corner of Earls Court as he surrendered the stage to Rihanna, whose performance of her hit “Unfaithful” was largely drowned out by the raging crowd. Critics savaged Jackson in the next morning’s newspapers, describing his performance as “embarrassing” and “a shambles.” Michael’s inability to explain what had happened—he told reporters only that it had all been “a misunderstanding”—further irritated the media, which mocked him for days afterward.

  “Michael Jackson is beyond hope,” wrote one London columnist, and plenty of his colleagues seemed to agree. There was a new level of unattributed nastiness in the reporting on Jackson. One story described him as “a truly macabre figure” who was “so prone to panic attacks that he cuts himself off from human contact for days.” British press reports also called Jackson a “germaphobe” who hadn’t appeared on the red carpet at Earls Court because he was terrified of being touched by fans. An anonymous associate said Michael had become so lacking in self-confidence that he couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud.

  The catastrophe of Jackson’s appearance at Earls Court chilled his relationship with Raymone Bain, who had served as his intermediary with the World Music Awards organizers. Bain did her best to put out the story that Michael’s performance of “We Are the World” had been stopped short when someone backstage inexplicably cut off the sound, but that was swiftly and furiously denied by a spokesman for the show’s organizers. The music blog PopRevenge disclosed that “Jackson’s people” had been so inept that they allowed one of its reporters to infiltrate the chorus that was to perform with Michael: “Nobody asked if I could sing or dance or knew the song,” the young
woman told London newspapers.

  By the time he returned to Ireland, Jackson was so distraught that he dispatched Bain to announce that he would not be traveling to Japan for a “premium Christmas party” event on December 20 that had been planned months earlier. Badly as he needed the $250,000 cash payment, Michael insisted that the event be canceled, resulting in a degree of excoriation he had never before experienced from the Japanese media. He promptly agreed to make a trip to Tokyo in the spring to “host” a buffet dinner and concert by Michael Jackson impersonators, but this did not entirely quell the criticisms of his “insensitivity to the Japanese people” that appeared on the editorial pages of newspapers.

  By mid-December, the dank chill of the Irish winter was working its way into his bones, and the cold front that the London tabloids were sending his way across St. George’s Channel made the temperature feel freezing. He began to long for heat and light, and to ask if perhaps he had been out of the United States long enough to be missed. Three days before Christmas, he helped his children finish packing, then called for the limousine that would carry them all, plus Grace, to Cork Airport. While preparing to go, Michael gave the Dunnings his television set, a box of toys that had been bought for Prince, Paris, and Blanket, and the collection of hats he had worn during his stay in County Westmeath. He signed a slice of tree trunk, just as all guests at Grouse Lodge were asked to do, and left a page-size signature in the visitors book. As Michael left, he thanked the Dunnings for never once asking him to moonwalk, then told Paddy and Claire that they were “the only people who have never asked me for a photograph.” There were tears in his eyes as he walked out the door.

  Two hours later, Michael, Grace, and the kids were aboard a private jet that flew into the setting sun. At least in America they would give him something to help him sleep.

  PART THREE

  WEST

  12

  Michael Jackson was wearing his standard travel disguise of sunglasses and a veil when he stepped off his jet in a private hangar at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas on the evening of December 23, 2006. The entertainer, his children, and Grace Rwaramba climbed into a limousine that skirted the towering lights of the Strip, carrying them instead to the upscale suburbs northwest of the city, stopping finally at 2785 South Monte Cristo Way, a gated Spanish mansion on ten acres of grounds in the “custom home community” of Summerlin. Michael had signed a six-month lease on the property—sight unseen—that required an advance payment of $1 million, more than five times what it was worth on the open rental market.

  A large Christmas tree with dozens of brightly packaged presents beneath it waited in the living room of the Jacksons’ new home, placed there by gaming dealmaker Jack Wishna and his wife, Donna. Wishna, best known for bringing Donald Trump to Las Vegas (he was now a partner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower), had arranged for the private jet that brought Jackson and his entourage to Las Vegas from Ireland and already was letting reporters know that he and Michael had been talking for weeks about staging the star’s “comeback” in Las Vegas, possibly with a live show like the hugely successful one Celine Dion had been headlining for months at Caesars Palace. The two of them envisioned what would be a sort of Michael Jackson Hotel they could create either by transforming an existing property or developing a new one, Wishna said. Jackson had suggested that they use one of the statues left over from the HIStory promotion at the hotel, according to the businessman: “Michael says, ‘I want the hotel to encase it in the wall and the nights I’m in performance the statue comes out to the center of the Strip so the world knows that I’m here.’ It would come out on a conveyer belt.” Jackson even wanted to design his own King of Pop slot machines. But that was just one of several projects under consideration, added Wishna, who answered a call from Us Weekly by assuring the magazine’s reporter that Jackson “is poised to return to the top of the entertainment world soon.”

  Michael himself stayed silent and out of sight, hidden behind his new home’s gated entrance, except for a quick shopping excursion on Christmas Eve at the Forum Shops in Caesars Palace. The photographers and cameramen who missed him there attempted a series of drive-by shootings at the Monte Cristo compound but came away with nothing except pictures of the 16,000-square-foot mansion’s red-tile roof.

  Michael would make his first public appearance on American soil since the end of his criminal trial less than a week later, though, when he flew to Georgia for the funeral of James Brown. The seventy-three-year-old Brown had died of congestive heart failure on Christmas morning after being admitted to an Atlanta hospital with pneumonia. Two days later, his body was transported to Harlem for an open-casket viewing at the Apollo Theater that would last all day and into the evening of December 28 in order to accommodate the lines, in which some people waited as long as five hours in the cold for a look at the Godfather of Soul. By nine that night, Brown’s remains were in the cargo hold of a private jet, on their way back to his hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Michael Jackson was flying toward Georgia also, and made it to Augusta’s C. A Reid Sr. Memorial Funeral Home just after midnight on December 29, less than an hour after the arrival of James Brown’s body.

  The gold-plated casket was in the chapel when Mr. Jackson walked into his establishment at about 12:30 a.m., Charles Reid recalled, and he immediately asked that the funeral director raise the lid. Michael looked at James Brown’s embalmed body lying in a bed of cream-color satin, dressed in a black jacket worn over a ruffled red shirt, then leaned over to kiss the corpse on the forehead. He ran his hands through Brown’s freshly oiled pompadour and pulled a lock down onto the brow, in order to create the slightly disheveled look that he had seen so many times before, onstage and in photographs. Reid was preparing a moment later to reclose the lid of the casket. Michael Jackson, though, showed no sign of leaving. “Normally, a person comes in, views, and that’s pretty much it,” Reid explained, but Michael Jackson would remain beside James Brown’s body for four and a half hours.

  Mr. Jackson spent the first hour just standing and looking, Reid remembered. Gradually, he began to talk to the funeral director about how much Mr. Brown had meant to him, telling Reid that when he was six or so years old his mother used to wake him up any time James Brown was on television, just so he could watch his idol dance. The relationship that began back on the chitlin’ circuit had fluctuated over the years but grew strong in 2003, when Brown had been among the first black celebrities to offer support after criminal charges were filed against Michael Jackson.

  What took Charles Reid aback on that evening in late December 2006 was that after spending about an hour beside James Brown’s casket Mr. Jackson began to ask the funeral director a series of very specific questions about the preparation of a dead body. He wanted to know “how it was done,” Reid recalled. “What do you actually do?” Mr. Jackson made him go through the entire process in elaborate detail, Reid remembered. His famous visitor listened intently and interjected demands for the exact details as the funeral director described how one went about “setting the features” with eye caps and a needle injector. Michael Jackson didn’t want the funeral director to stop there. “What types of fluids do you use?” he asked. “And how do you put them in the body?” Reid found himself describing the various processes of embalming, the sorts of things that almost no one outside the mortuary professions wanted to know. “Most people shy away when it comes to death,” Reid would later explain to New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly. “They would be trying to head the opposite way. It was amazing to me he would talk about it the way he did. It’s just out of the ordinary.”

  Mr. Jackson’s questions weren’t morbid in nature, though, Reid said, not at all. Mr. Jackson was humble in his curiosity, very respectful and genuinely kind. He just wanted to know. It was almost five in the morning when Michael finally told Reid to close the casket and then walked back out of the funeral home.

  Michael Jackson was clearly the star attraction at Augusta’s James Brown Arena the
next day, where the funeral was staged. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stood beside him as Michael stepped to the podium and spoke to the crowd of 8,500 over a microphone. In some way that was clear yet ineffable, Michael’s appearance seemed to culminate a reassertion of himself as a black man that had begun back in 2003, shortly after the criminal charges were filed against him. A crowd that was largely African American had been swaying and singing along to such James Brown hits as “I Feel Good,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and yes, “Sex Machine,” which had ended with Brown’s casket being covered by the cape that had so often been laid over his shoulders at the end of his stage shows. The Reverend Sharpton delivered a stirring eulogy that recalled the impact of James Brown’s 1968 song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,” Brown had told the Associated Press in 2003. “The song showed people that lyrics and music and a song can change society.” Sharpton devoted a surprising amount of his speech to an explanation of Michael Jackson’s presence in Augusta. “I don’t care what the media says tonight, James Brown wanted Michael Jackson with him here today,” Sharpton boomed into the microphone. “He said . . . ‘I love Michael.’ He said, ‘Tell him don’t worry about coming home. They always scandalize those that have the talent. But tell him we need to clean up the music, and I want Michael and all of them that imitated me to come back and lift the music back.’”