Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  His new manager flew to Las Vegas the next day. “I told him, ‘Michael, it’s time to get the hell out of here,’” Tohme recalled. “I wanted him to come to Los Angeles. He was still not sure about that. So I said, ‘Why don’t you come to LA for a few days to meet my family, to stay with us?’ So I brought him to my house, we had lunch, he stayed there, but then he went back to Las Vegas.”

  Not to the Palomino property, though. Although he continued to use the house as an enormous storage unit, Michael moved once again into the Palms, where his visits to the recording studio were both less frequent and more informal than during his previous stay. He’d roll in after noon with all three of his kids, leading Blanket by the hand, dressed in black jeans and a silk shirt, noodle at the keyboards, working on melodies and trying lyrics, then leave an hour or two later.

  Back in Los Angeles, Tohme discovered an ally in his campaign to find the right “performance situation” for Michael when he took a call from Peter Lopez, one of the dozens of attorneys who had represented Michael in recent years. Like most of those who tried out for a role as “the one,” Lopez had been left with unpaid bills. “Peter knew I was now Michael’s manager,” Tohme recalled, “and he told me, ‘I’m owed money.’ He asked if I could pay him. I said, ‘At this time, there’s no money. But if you are owed I will see you get paid. Prove it to me.’ So he came to meet me at the Hotel Bel-Air. And I told him he had a chance to help me put Michael back on top. I told him, ‘Forget all the rumors. Michael is gonna go back to work. Help me find the right concert series for him.’ And I could see that he was a lot more interested in talking about that than about the money he was owed.”

  Lopez was the best-known Latin entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Among his closest friends was the new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had appointed Lopez to the State Athletic Commission. Lopez was married to former Dukes of Hazzard actress Catherine Bach and his list of clients, past and present, included the Eagles, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Andrea Bocelli. But “Peter knew that nothing would compare to helping Michael Jackson make a comeback,” Tohme recalled.

  Lopez first set up a meeting with Live Nation that left Tohme unimpressed. “I don’t like those guys,” he recalled telling Lopez, who then suggested AEG. Tohme claimed to be unaware of Michael’s previous meeting with Randy Phillips, who had never entirely given up on signing Michael to an AEG Live contract. What really moved things along was a phone conversation between a pair of billionaires, Barrack and Anschutz. Barrack told Anschutz how impressed he’d been when he met Michael Jackson in person. Anschutz pointed out that if Michael Jackson’s public stature was elevated and his career reinvigorated, the value of Neverland Ranch could easily double. Beyond that, a series of shows at AEG’s O2 could easily lead to some sort of resident performer arrangement in Las Vegas that might be staged at one of the Colony’s hotels or casinos. Immediately after Anschutz got off the phone with Barrack, he called Randy Phillips and asked him to meet with the Colony Capital CEO to talk about what it would take to secure a commitment from Michael Jackson to perform a series of concerts at the O2 in London. Barrack passed Phillips on to Tohme, who suggested that the AEG Live chief meet him for a drink at the Hotel Bel-Air.

  “So we sat, we talked, I liked him,” Tohme recalled. “He will do anything to have Michael Jackson. He said that. I said, ‘We need advances, we need this, we need that. Let me think about it and talk to Michael.” Phillips’s stock got a boost when Dennis Hawk, the attorney who had been brought in to assist Tohme in managing Michael’s affairs, told Jackson and Tohme that Phillips was “a classy guy” who could be trusted to help put on a show that would be everything they hoped for.

  Within days, a summit with Phillips and Anschutz had been scheduled to take place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, where the AEG principal owned a villa. “Michael and I talked a lot about it ahead of time,” Tohme recalled, “and I told him, ‘You gotta look sharp, show them who they’re dealing with.’” AEG Live’s “co-CEO” Paul Gongaware was advising his associates to take exactly the opposite approach to the meeting: Wear casual attire, he suggested to those who would be attending, “as MJ is distrustful of people in suits.” Also, they should be prepared to talk some “fluff” with “Mikey,” Gongaware added. Tohme, Hawk, and Lopez were already seated on one side of a conference table across from Anschutz, Phillips, Gongaware, and AEG corporate president Tim Leiweke when Michael arrived with Blanket. “He looked superb,” Tohme remembered. “He was dressed in his best and he was in great shape, had great color, his expression was happy, and his eyes were clear. I could tell from the first second they were very impressed by him.”

  Phillips would admit later to being startled by how changed Jackson was from the distracted, uninterested star he had encountered at their previous meeting months earlier. Michael now seemed “very laser focused,” Phillips said, intent not only on looking into the eyes of Philip Anschutz but also on working out some sort of deal.

  Anschutz, a business titan most often described as either “reclusive” or “secretive” in the media, “seemed to me a very nice man,” Tohme said, “a very honest man, a very kind man. I could see Michael felt it, too.” They had agreed beforehand that, after some introductions and a brisk, general conversation about what he hoped to accomplish with a new live show, Michael would stand up again, shake everyone’s hands, and say good-bye. “Because this is Michael Jackson,” Tohme explained. “He doesn’t sit there for hours talking to these guys. I always want to elevate him as much as I can, make him feel he’s the King of Pop. We had already arranged for his security and his driver to be waiting right outside. As soon as he is gone, we start negotiating for a comeback concert at the O2. Michael had told me he would never do any concert in the United States.”

  By the time the guests left Anschutz’s villa, they had a handshake agreement that Michael Jackson would perform a series of ten concerts at the O2 in London in the fall of 2009. Phillips and Tohme agreed on a presentation of the idea they believed would please the entertainer: “This way, Michael, fans from all over the world will be coming to you, instead of you having to go to them.”

  “And Michael Jackson did like the sound of that,” Tohme recalled. “He was starting to fill his lungs again.”

  Two weeks later, Michael agreed to move back to Los Angeles and live there until he left for London. Tohme arranged for Michael to have a huge suite in the rear of the Hotel Bel-Air, “away from everybody,” where the management would allow him to create a home studio, complete with a portable dance floor. Within a week of his arrival at the hotel, Michael began testing himself in sessions with a parade of musicians and dancers. He was eating regularly and sleeping better than he had in years. “It is a beautiful thing to see,” Tohme recalled. “He wants to prove to the world that he is still Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. And I am watching it happen in front of my eyes.” Tohme showed up at the hotel one day with Mina Shafiei, the finest tailor in Beverly Hills, best known for creating celebrity wedding dresses, to measure Michael for a wardrobe of silk jackets and the brocaded shirts he loved. “I want Michael to look like the biggest star in LA any time he steps out his front door,” Tohme recalled. “I want him to feel like the biggest star.”

  Michael had been tremendously encouraged by the news that a compilation album called King of Pop, released on his fiftieth birthday, had charted in the top ten in every country where Sony made it available, and that the company intended to expand the King of Pop concept into a series of records. Spreading rumors of a Michael Jackson comeback also resulted in a slew of interview requests. Tohme refused to approve any publications that would not guarantee, in writing, that his client be identified on first reference as “Michael Jackson, the King of Pop.” The number of musicians, producers, and songwriters calling to say they’d love to arrange a visit at the Hotel Bel-Air was doubling by the week.

  “Michael became very happy,” Tohme recalled. “He is working out every day, dancing, he lo
oks fantastic, smiling all the time, always very sharp and clear. The wheelchair is gone, the umbrella and the two-colored slippers are gone. There are no drugs, no problems with sleeping. I know because I was there all the time. I was seeing him two, three times a day. We’d talk on the phone five, six times a day. I can see and hear him becoming better by the week.”

  Tohme appeared to be delivering in his role as Jackson’s business manager, closing one deal after another. A “Michael Jackson Dance” application for MySpace and Facebook released three days before Michael’s birthday had turned into a big seller online. In September, the German teen publication Bravo launched its Legends series with a special issue dedicated entirely to Michael Jackson. That same month, Hot Toys announced a deal for a new Michael Jackson action figure that would be released in Japan during the coming Christmas season. Four weeks later, the same company scheduled the worldwide release of a Michael Jackson Cosbaby line, seven small figurines that featured the star in various incarnations that ran the gamut from his Motown 25 “Billie Jean” performance to the persona he had created for the HIStory tour. Tohme had also compelled Sony to pay Jackson $12 million in royalties from the worldwide sales of Thriller 25. “They really don’t have a right to hold that money for servicing the catalog; they have to turn it over,” Tohme explained. “Sony was not used to having someone representing Michael be so forceful with them, to threaten an audit or a lawsuit. But I don’t care about my relationship with Sony. I don’t care about my relationship with AEG. All I care about is my relationship with Michael Jackson. And that is what he needed.” Jackson instructed his manager to hold on to everything that was left from that $12 million after-debt payments in what the two of them called “The Lockbox,” a fund Michael would use to buy the Bolkiah Spanish Gate estate when the London shows were finished. The entertainer’s new manager had already told AEG that a condition of any agreement they signed was that a certain sum (eventually $15 million was agreed upon) must be paid as an advance before Jackson began performing in concert, so that he would be certain of returning to the United States with enough money to complete the work on the abandoned Bolkiah’s Las Vegas mansion.

  Tohme understood by then that the promise of a new home that would replace Neverland motivated Michael more than anything else that had been offered to him. “He talked about it constantly, more than making a comeback or anything else,” Tohme recalled. “It was his goal, his reward, and he was determined to reach it.” Between now and the completion of the London shows, Michael told Tohme in the early autumn of 2008, he wanted every penny that came in from outside the AEG deal to go into the Lockbox with the Thriller 25 royalties. “He said to keep it a secret,” Tohme recalled. “He doesn’t want anyone to know about it or touch it. He doesn’t want to touch it himself. And especially he doesn’t want his family to touch it. He made me promise they would never know about the Thriller 25 money. He wanted no contact with his family, whatsoever. We were changing his phone number every two weeks so that they wouldn’t be able to get it. He said they could have my number, they could contact him through me. And he was very kind. He said, ‘Help them.’ When one of his brothers calls and needs money, he says, ‘Give it to him.’ And he would always be generous to his mom. He loved his mother and trusted only her, no one else in the family. But even her he didn’t want to have his phone number, because he said the others would use her to get things from him.”

  The family had picked up on the increase in the buzz around Michael, though, and in late October Tohme had felt obliged to issue a statement from Michael about the rumor that Jackson was about to embark with his brothers on a Jackson 5 reunion tour: “My brothers and sisters have my full love and support, and we’ve certainly shared many great experiences, but at this time I have no plans to record or tour with them. I am now in the studio developing new and exciting projects that I look forward to sharing with my fans in concert soon.”

  By November, the O2 negotiations were advancing rapidly, Randy Phillips recalled, and Michael seemed more enthusiastic by the week about resurrecting his career. During a meeting with Michael at the Hotel Bel-Air, Phillips recalled, “I asked him straight off, ‘Why say yes to the tour now? Is it the money?’” Michael replied that cleaning up his finances was part of it, but the single biggest reason was that his children were finally old enough now to see him perform and understand why people chased him on the street. And he wanted people to start talking about his work again instead of his “lifestyle.” In that meeting, Phillips for the first time sensed that Michael Jackson still harbored grand ambitions. He described the movies he wanted to make, spoke about the comeback album he would release in tandem with the O2 concerts, talked about how much he wanted to settle down again, about finding a new home, some place he loved enough to let go of Neverland.

  Still, all of the people involved in working out the details of the contract for the London shows knew they were walking on eggshells. “Everybody said two things about him,” Tom Barrack would tell Fortune magazine. “Firstly, if Michael Jackson came back it would be the greatest thing in music history. And secondly, it would never happen.”

  “People told me I was crazy, that I would get my heart broken,” Randy Phillips admitted to Rolling Stone. “But I just believed in him. How many times in your career do you get to touch greatness?”

  PART FOUR

  SOUTH

  16

  It came as no surprise to the clerks at Santa Monica’s Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore that, in the autumn of 2008, they were among the first to learn Michael Jackson was once again living in Los Angeles. For most other people in the city, though, Jackson’s intellectual curiosity had always been the least appreciated of his qualities. He kept over ten thousand books at Neverland and had read most of them. The owners of Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard and Dutton’s in Brentwood had been selling to him by the box load for years. Michael was a quiet shopper who lingered longest in the poetry section but had a special affection for the all-embracing philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the nineteenth-century transcendentalists. He was extensively read in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the great psychoanalysts, whose work he was able to discuss with a sophistication that astonished acquaintances over the years.

  Many in the media were amused by descriptions of the infamous Last Supper painting that hung over his bed at Neverland, a depiction of him sitting at the center of a long table flanked by Walt Disney on one side and Albert Einstein on the other, with Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti” was right up there with Tchaikovsky’s “Danse des petits cygnes” in Michael’s book, and Little Richard did his own dancing) spread out beside them. Very few knew that Michael had studied the biographies of each of these “inspirational heroes” and could recount their life stories in extraordinary detail. He had been fascinated for decades with celebrities who died young, and professed amazement as early as the mid-eighties that it was “the same things over and over again”—meaning drugs and sex—that had brought the lives of these stars to an early, tragic end.

  Michael’s multitasking attempts to learn and grow amid even the most chaotic circumstances touched and perplexed any number of people who came into his life. He peppered with numerous questions nearly everyone he met who boasted expertise in any area of human endeavor. Michael studied the field of medicine intently, and, with the help of Arnold Klein, among other doctors, had arranged to observe numerous surgeries at the UCLA Medical Center. Jackson and Marlon Brando, another omnivore, spent much of their time together comparing notes about the various scientific concepts and technologies they were studying. Deepak Chopra, who had encountered Michael for the first time backstage in Bucharest during the Bad tour, recalled, “He would be swarmed by crowds at the airport, perform an exhausting show for three hours, then sit backstage afterward drinking bottled water, glancing over some Sufi poetry as I walked into the room.”

  G
regory Peck had met Michael a decade earlier when, one afternoon, Jackson called him up and asked if he could stop by for a visit. Peck was stunned that Michael had memorized every line of dialogue from To Kill a Mockingbird and asked cogent, thoughtful questions about the film. The friendship that developed from this meeting was as enduring as it was surprising. Jackson and Peck (who had bought a working cattle ranch in northern Santa Barbara County back in the late fifties, when he was working on a movie called The Bravados) regularly went horseback riding together at Neverland Ranch and carried on conversations that lasted for hours. Michael was among the few people with whom Peck would discuss the 1975 suicide of his eldest son, Jonathan, and the first “Blanket” Michael ever met was the Pecks’ dog. In December 2002, when the balcony-dangling incident with his own Blanket from the balcony of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin made Michael into an international pariah, Gregory Peck and his wife, Veronique, wrote an “Open Letter of Support” that was posted on Jackson’s Web site.

  When Gregory Peck died in his sleep at the age of eighty-seven in June 2003, Jackson created a minor scandal by arriving twenty minutes late (and dressed in a bright red jacket) to the actor’s funeral in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. What most of those who chided him for attempting to upstage the most beloved of Hollywood’s stars didn’t know was that Michael had come to the Pecks’ home in Bel Air the day after Greg’s death to help his widow plan the memorial service.