Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  He had been charmed by Michael’s wit and surprised by his focus, Barrack would admit later. The polo-playing Barrack, whose own sprawling ranch in Santa Barbara County bordered Neverland on one side and Ronald Reagan’s Western White House on the other, shared a laugh with Jackson about being next-door neighbors, given that their houses were eleven miles apart. His sons had attended a number of the “field day” events that Michael staged at Neverland, Barrack said, and came back each time raving about what a great time they’d had. Ten minutes into their meeting, the odd couple found that they liked each other. Ten minutes after that, Barrack agreed to see if he could swing a deal to rescue Neverland from the clutches of Fortress Investments, which had rescheduled its auction of the ranch for May 2008.

  “Tom knows it’s a fabulous property,” Tohme observed. “He’s not a stupid guy. But it was a long, hard negotiation, because there was one issue we got stuck on. Under the Fortress loan, whoever held the note on Neverland owned everything on the property: all of Michael’s art, his books, his clothes—even his animals and his rides, whatever there is. I told Tom, ‘This is not right. I gotta take everything out.’ So we had a lot of back and forth, attorneys and stuff like that, but finally they agreed we can remove Michael’s personal things.”

  In May, just days before Neverland was to be sold to the highest bidder, Colony Capital announced that Tom Barrack had personally written a check for $22.5 million to “save” Neverland as part of a deal the company had made with Michael Jackson. Under the terms of the agreement, Colony and Barrack agreed to defer Jackson’s loan payments (for more money later) and to finance the refurbishment of the ranch with an eye toward selling it at a substantial profit. Tohme had cut himself in for a finder’s fee. It was a Tom Barrack kind of deal. He had never been the sort of investor who wanted to “chase yield” by buying properties with secure tenants and predictable returns, preferring to seek out undervalued assets that could be rehabilitated and sold for a big profit. That was exactly how he’d made a killing on London’s Savoy Hotel. Neverland Ranch, he imagined, might sell for as much as $50 million if it was marketed properly. Aside from being relieved of payment obligations, Michael was guaranteed to receive whatever profits were left after Colony deducted its investment in the note, plus accrued interest, management, upkeep expenses, and a 12 percent “success fee.” If Barrack was right about the eventual sale price, Jackson stood to come away with as much as $20 million.

  Michael had been wrestling with the problem of what to do with Neverland ever since arriving in Bahrain in the summer of 2005. During his long stay in Ireland, he had invited Bob Sillerman, the Wall Street deal maker who acquired Elvis Presley Enterprises, to visit him at Grouse Lodge to discuss ways they might make the ranch over into a fan destination. One tentative plan after another fell through, and it had looked almost certain that Fortress would sell the place out from under him before Barrack showed up in Las Vegas.

  For Michael Jackson, Tohme Tohme became “my partner Dr. Tohme” after the Colony deal was sealed. “Michael was very happy,” Tohme recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to be in charge of everything.’ He said, ‘You and I, we are gonna make billions, not hundreds of millions.’ He said, ‘I trust you like nobody else, and I’m gonna give you a free hand to do whatever you want.’”

  While the deal with Barrack seemed to have settled Michael’s Neverland problem, it had barely chipped the giant boulder of debt that was going to crush Michael if he didn’t begin to break it down. After reading through the refinancing agreement Michael had signed six months earlier, Tohme realized he would have to convince his prospective client that the day of reckoning would be upon him before he knew it. “I could see that this deal had put Michael in a position of losing the Beatles catalog and his own MiJac catalog—basically everything he had,” Tohme recalled. “He only had until 2011 to fix his finances, or this will definitely happen. I told Michael, ‘We need to eliminate as much of your debt as possible.’” The only way Tohme could see that happening, though, was to persuade Michael to mount another major tour. “But he doesn’t want it,” Tohme recalled. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to sing. I don’t want to perform. All I want to do is make movies and do projects.’”

  Filmmaking had become a fixation for Michael in the years following the HIStory tour. He came much closer to realizing the dream of owning his own movie studio than most people knew, according to Dieter Wiesner: “It was more than a dream, it was a plan.” The acquisition of Marvel Comics was at the core of that plan and Michael had tried for three years to pull it off. Back in 1999, he met with the primary creator of Marvel’s best-known characters, Stan Lee, to ask if they could be partners. “Michael wanted to make a Spider-Man movie long before there was a Spider-Man movie,” Wiesner explained, “and he told Stan Lee about that.” Lee, who was on the outs with Marvel at the time, has confirmed that such a conversation took place.

  “Michael was thinking about playing Spider-Man himself,” Wiesner continued. “He asked Stan Lee to help him run Marvel if Michael was able to buy the company, and Lee said he would. I really believed it would happen and it almost did.” Michael actually retained the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perrella to negotiate a sale with Marvel’s then-owner, Ike Perlmutter. “Michael thought this would be like his second buying of the Beatles catalog,” Wiesner recalled. “It was that big for him.” Reports at the time suggested the deal had fallen through because Perlmutter was demanding a billion dollars for the company. “That’s not true,” Wiesner said. “In 2002, Michael was willing to pay $1.4 billion for Marvel, which was the asking price then.” The financing fell apart, though, Wiesner said, when Sony refused to let Jackson use the ATV catalog as collateral: “Sony was constantly blocking his projects. They wanted to have complete control over him. And today Marvel is worth $4 billion. The Spider-Man movies have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Michael was right.”

  As an alternative, Wiesner and Jackson had negotiated a deal with Cinegroupe, the famed animation studio in Montreal, that would have given Michael a 51 percent share of the company and creative control of its projects. Michael possessed “plane hangars full of footage” from the film and video shoots he had commissioned over the years, Wiesner explained, “and he said, ‘Dieter, with the new technology we can make all of this—doesn’t matter if it’s Thriller tour stuff or whatever I have—we can make this completely new for the new generation. We can put everything together in a new light.’”

  Michael was initially encouraged by friends that included Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, according to Wiesner, who promised to go in as partners with him on several film projects but never followed through: “He said they had taken his ideas, but didn’t want him. He was always talking about this, about Spielberg especially. He was very hurt and angry with Spielberg. He said they promised him, Spielberg and Disney, but then they kept him out.”

  Michael had never really given up on his dream of becoming a movie star. His love of role play had actually triggered his separation from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A pair of elders were on the set of the “Smooth Criminal” video Michael had shot in 1987, shortly before the song was released as the seventh single from Bad, and had shaken their heads in disapproval as they watched Michael revel in the scene in which he had mowed down a battalion of alien invaders with a machine gun. Michael arrived late to the set the next day, his makeup artist Karen Faye would remember, and was obviously distraught. When she asked what was wrong, Faye recalled, Michael’s eyes filled with tears. “Mother called last night,” Michael answered, sobbing as he spoke. “The church called her and told her that I held and fired a gun yesterday. They ordered that I have to make a decision. I must leave the church or leave the entertainment industry.” His mother “felt horrible,” Michael choked out: “She told me it was up to me. She said she would stand by me with whatever I decided.” So here he was, back on the set, Faye observed. “Yes,” Michael told her, and prepared to shoot the day’s scenes.
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  When Phantom of the Opera first opened on Broadway in New York, he had showed up backstage night after night to talk to Andrew Lloyd Webber about playing the lead part in a feature film. “He had a connection to that lonely, tortured musician,” Webber would explain years later. Michael and Flashdance screenwriter Tom Hedley spent dozens of hours in a hotel room where the lamps were switched off and the curtains drawn, watching the 1939 black-and-white adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame over and over again as they discussed a remake in which Michael would replace Charles Laughton in the role of the hunchback. “This is awfully dark, Michael,” Hedley observed at one point. “Don’t you want to think about maybe doing something lighter?” “I like the dark,” Jackson replied. Even after those projects and others came to naught, Michael continued to take private acting lessons from Marlon Brando for years.

  Michael made his most determined effort to become the screen star he believed he should be in 2000 when he learned that Warner Bros. was developing a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with director Tim Burton. Working in secret, he recorded an original soundtrack for the film at a small studio in Los Angeles. “He wanted to play Willy Wonka in the worst way,” explained Marc Schaffel. “He thought it was the perfect role for him, and he planned to use the soundtrack, basically, to bribe his way into getting the part.” Schaffel attended several meetings at Warner Bros. to discuss the idea. “The execs at Warner were intrigued and went nuts over the soundtrack, absolutely loved it,” he recalled. “But then they came back later and said, ‘You know, this may not be the perfect marriage for us. But we would one hundred percent pay anything for the soundtrack.’” Michael demanded to know why the studio wouldn’t give him a chance at the Willy Wonka role. “I think Tim Burton wanted Johnny Depp all along,” Schaffel said, “but the reason Warner Brothers gave, when I pressed them, was, ‘We can’t have this guy starring in what would be a children’s movie. As a marketable idea, it doesn’t work.’ I had to tell Michael, and he was very hurt, very upset. He said these people were ignorant, that they were still rehashing all that ’93 stuff.” Warner Bros. told Schaffel that if Michael would sell them the soundtrack he could name his price and they would find a part for him in the movie, just not the lead. “Michael said, ‘If I can’t have the Willy Wonka part, then they’re not getting the soundtrack,’ and he just basically shelved it. It was such a shame, because he had done an incredible job with that soundtrack. I’m sure it would have won him an Academy Award.”

  What ultimately gave Tohme leverage to get Jackson to commit to live performance again was a realization that the key to motivating Michael Jackson was his children. “Tohme, who has a large family of his own, pointed out to Michael that his children had never seen him perform, and that he owed them the opportunity,” said Dennis Hawk, the attorney who was in the best position to observe the discussions between the two men. “Tohme also told Michael that unless he went back to work now—right now—he was in danger of having nothing to leave his kids. That got to Michael.”

  Several months would pass, though, before this approach took full effect. In the meantime Michael continued to list and drift, often without enough cash on hand to pay his bodyguards or entertain his children in anything like the style to which they had become accustomed. He was spotted out in public in Las Vegas only once that entire spring, on May 16, when he took the kids to an early showing of the second installment of the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. “I can tell that part of what Michael needs is to get his oxygen back,” Tohme recalled. “He needs to remember that he is the King of Pop. Michael knows this, but he doesn’t know it. Because of the criminal trial and all the lies that were told about him, he wasn’t sure how people saw him. I wanted him to go back out in public and look good doing it. I told him, ‘Michael, no more wheelchair, no more umbrella, no more masks, no more of this two-colored slippers.’”

  With Tohme’s encouragement, Michael made his most public appearance in Los Angeles in nearly five years during the last week of May 2008, flying in to attend the fiftieth birthday party of Christian Audigier, the French designer behind the Ed Hardy label. Michael was photographed dancing and smiling, wearing high-heel boots, black leather pants, and an elaborate periwinkle tunic with white lace flowers strung like bandoliers across the chest and sergeant’s stripes on the shoulders. Audigier proposed that the two of them collaborate on a clothing line, and Michael said it sounded like a good idea, but then flew back to Las Vegas to face a financial bind that was squeezing him tighter by the month.

  On June 3, Jackson ate dinner with Tom Barrack in the Las Vegas Hilton’s Verona Sky Villa and confessed that he knew he’d have to go back onstage or risk losing the ATV catalog, the one asset that had propped him up for years. Barrack had ideas. Colony Capital owned the Las Vegas Hilton, the same hotel where Elvis had staged his famous 1969 comeback concerts and performed for another seven years after that. Colony also held a 75 percent stake in the Station Casinos that dominated the locals market in Las Vegas. Michael could relaunch in Vegas as a headliner at either venue, Barrack suggested, performing as often as he liked, up to 180 shows a year, and earning tens of millions in the process. Or, if he preferred, Michael could include his brothers in an extravaganza that would be staged perhaps twenty or thirty times a year and still make him at least ten million. Michael had no interest at all in the second idea, and very little in the first, but was in desperate need of a patron, and so promised Barrack that he would think about both proposals.

  Michael’s recognition that going onstage again was probably his only way forward was, for Tohme, the fissure of hope that promised a breakthrough. “I was workin’ on it, and I was workin’ on him,” Tohme recalled. “Because he still wasn’t really ready to say he would do it. But he said, ‘See what you can do. Keep continuing.’ And I am telling him, ‘Michael, you have to do it. For the kids. For you. Show the world.’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’” More significantly, perhaps, Michael decided to suspend work on the “comeback album,” so that its release would be timed to whatever event he chose for his “comeback concerts.”

  In July 2008, Michael certified his faith in Tohme by signing not one but two separate powers of attorney (each witnessed by a lawyer) that gave the Arab nearly absolute control over his financial and business affairs. One month later, the two men signed a service contract that named Tohme as Jackson’s manager and guaranteed him 15 percent of any deals he negotiated. “Michael understands the love I have for him,” Tohme said. “He knows I want only the best for him. Before we sign, we make an agreement: He will never interfere in any of my business decisions and I will never interfere in any of his artistic decisions.”

  There was considerable overlap in those two apparently discrete areas of interest, however, as Tohme would eventually discover. In the meantime, according to Michael Amir Williams, what most impressed Michael Jackson about his new manager was Tohme’s claim of a close relationship with the royal family of Brunei. “This was the main reason Michael wanted Tohme around,” Brother Michael said. “He thought that Tohme was associated with this family and could easily get him the [Prince Jefri Bolkiah’s] Spanish Gate Drive estate.”

  “Michael really, really wanted that house,” Tohme said. “Michael has vision, he wanted to make it a residence, but also a museum. All the stuff he was buying— and he was criticized in the media for it—but he wanted to have a place like Graceland that would be a monument to him while he was alive and after he died. And he knew it couldn’t be Neverland.” The Spanish Gate property had the space to accommodate even Michael Jackson’s vast collection of art and antiques, by then spread out in warehouses that stretched from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica to Las Vegas. In addition to the immense main house, the estate Prince Jefri had created for himself included a 47,000-square-foot “sporting house” that featured an Olympic-size swimming pool, assorted fitness rooms, a squash court, a racquetball court, and a disco hall, plus two 4,500-square-foot gu
est villas. “I did my best to make it happen for him,” Tohme explained. “I am very, very close friends with a high government official in Brunei. I called and told him, ‘We’re gonna do it like Graceland.’ I eventually got the price down to $45 million. But then I find that financing for a place like that in Las Vegas is difficult. There are lots of houses that cost that much money in Los Angeles, but not so many in Las Vegas. They will finance maybe $20 million, maybe $25 million, but no more.”

  Collecting the money Michael would need to take possession of the Spanish Gate house became another carrot Tohme could use to motivate his client’s return to the stage: “I told Michael, ‘One more time. We’re gonna conquer the world. You will be back on top and you will get that house, too.’”

  In the meantime, Tohme was urging Michael to return to Los Angeles while they searched for the right concert package. “I told him, ‘The action is all in LA. People don’t want to come to Las Vegas to meet with you.’ But Michael was reluctant.”

  Michael’s resistance to the idea of leaving Las Vegas softened considerably after his fiftieth birthday. On August 28, dozens of British fans had showed up outside the gates of the Palomino hacienda to serenade Michael until the wee hours of the August 29. He was still glowing, despite not having slept a wink, when he did a telephone interview with Good Morning America that began before sunrise in Vegas and he was delighted to learn that millions of people had switched channels to ABC to catch some of it. “I’ll probably just have a little cake with my children and we’ll probably watch cartoons,” he answered in reply to a question about how he intended to celebrate.

  Michael’s mood was shattered later that same day, though, when he received a letter that had been signed by many of his neighbors. “He called me and he was crying like a baby,” Tohme remembered. “I said, ‘Michael, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘They’ve sent me something saying they don’t want a child molester living across the street.’” What especially hurt him, Michael said, were the complaints that Wasden Elementary School was just down the street, visible from the windows of Jackson’s home, and that it did not seem fitting to have an accused sex criminal so close by. As a “concerned mother” explained to the Review-Journal, “Of all the residences he could have purchased—why one across from an elementary school? I understand he was never convicted of anything and can live wherever he wants, but . . .”