Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Jackson’s self-medication became so sophisticated (at least in his own mind) over time that the IV lines he used were filled not with a single prescription drug but with the combinations of opioids, benzos, and sleeping aids that he called “mixes.” Michael “always ate too little and mixed too much,” according to Grace Rwaramba, who claimed that “I had to pump his stomach many times.” Yet members of the Jackson family suspected that Rwaramba was more than a passive observer of Michael’s drug addiction. For years she had been his closest adult companion, often the only aide who traveled with Michael and his children. Even when there was a larger entourage around Jackson, the nanny was the only one who had unfettered access to him. The police investigation would disclose that Rwaramba’s name was used to rent the mailbox to which prescription drugs were shipped to Jackson, and her credit card (unbeknownst to her, she claimed to police) was used to pay for those shipments.

  Rwaramba’s own story was that she had attempted on more than one occasion to curb Michael’s addiction to prescription drugs and actually approached Katherine and Janet Jackson to help her persuade Michael that he needed to enter a treatment program. His response had been to accuse her of “personal betrayal,” Grace recalled, and to dismiss her from her position as the children’s nanny. Weeks passed before Michael yielded to the kids, who kept asking for her, Rwaramba said, and invited her to return. She never went behind his back again.

  In early 2007, as Michael and the children were still settling into the house on South Monte Cristo Way in Las Vegas, the Jackson family decided that Grace was collaborating with Raymone Bain to keep Michael cooped up and under control and that the two believed his drug addiction made him more pliable. Whatever might be said about the Jacksons’ financial interests, his family members were the only people who had consistently attempted to get Michael off drugs. As early as 2001, Janet, Tito, Rebbie, and Randy Jackson attempted an intervention in New York City, shortly before the “30th Anniversary” concerts. Their brother’s response had been to tell them to leave him alone. “Look, I’ll be dead in a year, anyway,” Michael said.

  Twelve months later, his sisters and brothers attempted a stealth intervention by showing up at Neverland unannounced, hoping they could take him directly from the ranch to a treatment facility. According to the story Rabbi Boteach heard from Joseph and Katherine Jackson, Michael found out ahead of time that the family was coming and fled the ranch before they got there; the Jacksons suspected that Grace Rwaramba had warned him to leave. Tito Jackson would tell a different story when he granted an interview to the London Daily Mirror. Six family members in all—he, Jackie, and Randy, along with Janet, Rebbie, and La Toya—pushed their way past Michael’s bodyguards to gain access to Neverland. Tito said: “We bust right into the house, and he was surprised to see us, to say the least. We kept asking him if it was true what we had heard, that he was using drugs. He kept denying it. He said we were overreacting. We also spoke to a doctor [Tito declined to give the physician’s name], and he assured us it was not the situation. He said he was there to make sure Michael was healthy.”

  The Jacksons believed that the pressure they were applying was at least part of what motivated Michael to kick his drug habit a couple of months later. He had come clean without rehab and was very proud of himself, but when the Bashir documentary aired just a few months later, Michael not only resumed the use of Demerol and Xanax that he had abandoned earlier but upped the dosages, never again getting completely free of drugs.

  In December 2005, just six months after Jackson moved to Bahrain, the National Enquirer reported that Michael had suffered several drug overdoses and that the situation had “become critical.” Raymone Bain promptly issued a written statement declaring, “That story is entirely false.” Michael “is doing fine,” Bain assured the media. “I have never seen him happier or healthier.” Bain then added a threatening coda: “Mr. Jackson’s tolerance [for such stories] has come to an end. The green light that people have thought they have had to willfully impugn Michael Jackson’s character and integrity has now become red.” Bain would be forced to revisit this promise thirteen months later when, in the second week of January 2007 (three weeks after Michael landed in Las Vegas), the Mickey Fine Pharmacy filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court claiming that Michael Jackson owed them $101,926.66 for “prescription medicines.” This time, Bain informed the media simply that “the issue has been amicably resolved. Mickey Fine Pharmacy has been paid.”

  The Jackson family did not ignore the reports—or the signs—that Michael was once again flirting with disaster and in late January 2007 made what was at least their third attempt at a coordinated drug intervention. Multiple versions of what took place emerged, two stories put forth by people close to one or more Jackson family members, and another by Michael’s team of bodyguards. By one account, Janet Jackson had visited Michael at his Vegas home on South Monte Cristo Way after the Mickey Fine lawsuit appeared in newspapers and was shocked by both her brother’s appearance and the “creepy” environment in which he and his children were living. She phoned her brothers Jackie and Randy to come and convince Michael to get help but Michael ordered his bodyguards to turn the two away at the front gate, insisting that they needed to make “an appointment” if they wanted to see him. In the second version, Jackie and Randy got in the door, along with their sister Rebbie, but Michael became enraged when they suggested he was a drug addict and ordered them to leave. The bodyguards’ version was that Michael refused to let any of his siblings inside his house, agreeing to meet with them only briefly outside in the security trailer. According to the bodyguards, Randy Jackson came back later with his girlfriend Taunya Zilkie, who had worked for a short time as Michael’s PR person after his arrest in 2003. Randy tried to sneak past them as the gate was opening and closing during a delivery, the bodyguards said, and banged his vehicle against the iron bars as he wedged through. One of the bodyguards, Bill Whitfield, drew his gun. “Get that thing out of my face or I’ll call the press,” Randy snarled. When he realized he was confronting Mr. Jackson’s brother, he put the weapon away, Whitfield said, and phoned the house. Michael was “not happy” to hear that his brother had showed up unexpectedly, according to Whitfield, and said, “Send him away.” Furious, Randy backed his dented car into the street and drove off.

  One story not in dispute was that Joe Jackson had showed up at the mansion on South Monte Cristo Way only a few days after Randy’s attempt to gain access. Joe demanded a meeting with his son but was refused entry by Grace Rwaramba, who came out to meet Michael’s father when the bodyguards phoned her. Michael did not want to see him, Grace told the elder Jackson, who sat in his car outside the gates for three hours, finally driving away when they did not open for him.

  13

  Managing the Michael Jackson news had become a more complex task for Raymone Bain after January 25, 2007, when the Associated Press went worldwide with the story that the entertainer had returned to the United States to live. “I can confirm that he is in the United States,” Bain told the AP by telephone. “We don’t want to give out information regarding our client’s whereabouts because of safety and this is just an ongoing policy.”

  Even for those still in the dark about where Jackson had been living since his return to the United States, Las Vegas would have been a good guess. Michael’s relationship with the city was a long one. His first residency in Vegas had been in April 1974, when the entire Jackson family settled in at the MGM Grand for a two-week stand of shows that Berry Gordy and Ewart Abner had predicted would result in humiliating failure. Instead, those Vegas performances had become a sell-out smash, as was the Jacksons’ return engagement at the MGM Grand four months later. He had come back to the city again and again as he separated from his family, often to spend time with friends Siegfried & Roy, staying regularly at the Mirage, where the magicians were the resident act, and where the property was managed by his pal Steve Wynn. Jordan Chandler would allege that the first t
ime he slept in the same bed with Michael was at the Mirage in 1993. That scandal was still in full flower when Michael returned with his family to the MGM Grand one year later for the taping of NBC’s Jackson Family Honors special and the Review-Journal would report that “the show turned into more of a rally in Jackson’s defense, led by Elizabeth Taylor.” Michael had increasingly viewed Las Vegas as a sanctuary after that, the one place on American soil where he could always count on steadfast civic support. Just months after the airing of Martin Bashir’s Living with Michael Jackson had made him an object of condemnation and ridicule in the American media, Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman presented Michael with the key to the city. He was spending almost as much time in Vegas as at Neverland by then, and was, of course, living in a villa at the Mirage in November 2003 when the authorities in Santa Barbara County raided Neverland and issued a warrant for Jackson’s arrest. The spectacle of the next few days had become the most indelible memory that most in Las Vegas had of Michael Jackson, riding around in the backseat of Marc Schaffel’s Navigator, surrounded by bodyguards, wearing a frightened, dazed expression, seemingly with nowhere left to hide as TV helicopters circled in the air above him. Still, it was Las Vegas he had chosen for his return to America in the last days of 2006, and in early 2007 he was already looking for the home that would replace the paradise he had created for himself in the Santa Ynez valley.

  The media had jumped all over a December 2006 report on the Bravo channel program Million Dollar Listing that Jackson had put Neverland on the market. That was not true, but for the first time Michael was considering the sale of Neverland as part of the plan to fix his finances and subsidize the purchase of a new home in Las Vegas. The deal that, in principle, had been worked out months earlier between Sony and Fortress Investments was stalled because of the insistence by Fortress that all pending legal judgments and claims against Jackson be resolved before the refinancing agreement was finalized. The list of claimants and creditors was pages long and making deals with each and every person on the list had turned into a torturous task. As many as a dozen attorneys were working to get the mess cleaned up, but it was slow going, and in the meantime Jackson was still living from paycheck to six-figure paycheck. Serious shopping excursions were out of the question, and that he found nearly unbearable.

  Michael would pick up a nice chunk of change, but by his standards no bonanza, when he tried to make up for his canceled Christmas show by appearing at a “buffet dinner and concert” featuring a series of Japanese Michael Jackson impersonators in Tokyo on March 8. Tickets were $3,500 per person but seating was limited. Michael’s share was only about half of the $400,000 take. For that he had to spend “thirty seconds to one minute” with each of the paying guests and listen to a half-dozen impersonators perform his hit songs. Repairing his image in the country’s media was supposed to be the main point of the trip, and Michael got off to a bad start by showing up an hour late for the event, leaving his paying guests standing outside in a cold drizzle until he arrived. He tried to make up for it by giving each of them a hug and a handshake and he invited one hundred orphaned or handicapped children to attend the dinner and concert as his guests. If he ever lost the Japanese, Michael knew, there would be no place left on earth for him. He arrived on time the next evening for what the Tokyo newspapers described as “a fan appreciation event for lesser affluent fans” that cost only $130 per ticket. There were many more “lesser affluent fans,” of course, and Michael pocketed nearly another $200,000 for that appearance. He also hosted a “Fan Art Contest” in Tokyo during his five-day stay and collected another, more modest, check for that. Before leaving the country, he managed to garner some of the best publicity he had gotten in years from the American media by paying a visit to three thousand American GIs and their families at Camp Zama, a U.S. Army post about twenty-five miles southwest of Tokyo on the Sagami River.

  Back in Las Vegas, the deals that Jack Wishna had been touting since December looked more and more like mirages that were dissolving into the desert air. Jackson appeared “drugged up” and “incoherent” when he tried to discuss business with him, Wishna complained; the guy was so weak that he needed a wheelchair to get around.

  The Las Vegas media closely followed his movements. Assorted realtors claimed to be his agent in the search for his “new Neverland,” and described one luxury estate after another that he had inspected for its suitability. The Las Vegas Sun published a breathless report that Jackson was “lined up” to play a series of 250 concerts at a casino on the Strip, beginning in the fall of 2008, then followed that with news that the deal had fizzled. There was even bigger buzz around the story that Michael was working with fashion designer Andre Van Pier on the costume and set designs for a fifty-show “residency” at an unnamed Vegas hotel. The centerpiece of the deal, according to Van Pier’s partner Michael Luckman, was a fifty-foot-tall Michael Jackson robot that would be turned loose in the nearby desert as a sort of perpetual motion “monolithic advertisement” for the shows. That plan changed when it was decided that the robot design should be incorporated into the facade of a “Michael Jackson Hotel and Casino” by turning the building’s exterior into a King of Pop face that moved back and forth shooting off “laser beam–looking lights.”

  It wasn’t long before a disgruntled Wishna confided to Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Norm Clarke that Jackson had decided not to renew his lease on the South Monte Cristo Way property. Michael and his kids had trashed the place, according to Wishna. The master bedroom had been turned into a “huge romper room,” he said, where mattresses covered the floors so that the four of them could bounce around together while music blasted from the speakers in all four corners. The walls of the house were covered with handprints and the carpets splattered with stains. Van Pier and Luckman were still working on the design for the Michael Jackson Hotel and Casino when they read in the newspaper that “Jackson has given up on trying to relaunch his music career in Las Vegas and is heading back to Europe. He feels his fan base in Europe and Asia is much larger than the United States and is planning a tour of the continents.”

  There was no “tour of the continents” in the works and Michael wasn’t heading back to Europe, either, except for a quick trip to England to attend Prince Azim of Brunei’s twenty-fifth birthday party at the Stapleford Park House. The truth was that Jackson was flat broke and couldn’t afford now to even to rent a home in Las Vegas, let alone buy one. What he was looking for was that one “magic” person to help him mount the comeback that had become his last best hope.

  Randy Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, flew to Las Vegas in spring 2007 to meet with Jackson and a team of advisors who all seemed to be jockeying for first position. AEG stood for Anschutz Entertainment Group, whose principal was Philip Anschutz, the thirty-first richest person in the United States. Anschutz had parlayed fortunes earned from oil drilling and farming into a sprawling financial empire that included Qwest Communications, which he had founded, and the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroad lines. Through AEG, he had cofounded Major League Soccer and purchased ownership positions in several of its teams, including the Los Angeles Galaxy. AEG also had pieces of the Los Angeles Lakers and the team’s arena, the Staples Center. On top of that, he owned and controlled Regal Cinemas Corp., the largest movie-theater chain in America. A deeply religious conservative Christian, Anschutz’s stated ambition was to restore family films to box-office dominance, and he had taken a big step toward that goal one year earlier with the release of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a film produced in partnership with Walt Disney Pictures.

  Randy Phillips had not come to Las Vegas to talk about motion pictures, but rather about the state-of-the-art 18,000-seat arena called the O2 that AEG was about to open on the banks of the Thames in London. Phillips and his company were looking for a star big enough to pack the place. Michael Jackson, in spite of everything that had befallen him in recent years, still fit that bill. The two sat down fa
ce-to-face for the first time in the wine cellar of a luxury condo that AEG had rented for the occasion. Michael showed up for the meeting wearing big sunglasses and an oversize hat, Phillips recalled, and did not seem particularly engaged by the conversation: “He was listening. He wasn’t excited.” Barely responding to the idea of a concert series at the O2, Michael told Phillips he loved Celine Dion’s show at Caesars Palace (where Dion had already performed at more than six hundred sold-out shows on a stage built especially for her) and wouldn’t mind creating a situation like that. Phillips agreed to consider the idea.

  Only a short time later, though, Raymone Bain phoned to tell Phillips that Michael wasn’t ready to perform even a single concert, let alone a series of them, at the O2 or in Las Vegas. Bain made a similar call to Michael’s long-ago manager, Ron Weisner, who was producing the BET Awards show, scheduled to take place on June 27 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Weisner had invited Jackson to perform songs from his soon-to-be-released Thriller 25 album during the show and to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Diana Ross. Michael was “too incapacitated” to appear, Bain told the producer. That same week, Michael vacated the house on South Monte Cristo Way and flew to the Washington, D.C., area, supposedly to continue looking for the home that would replace Neverland.

  The move east startled both Jackson fans and the Jackson family. Joe Jackson and his proxies were telling reporters that Bain wanted to separate Michael from his family, which was deeply concerned about his “health and welfare.” Joe felt Raymone thought she could keep control of his son by relocating Michael to her power base in D.C.