Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  What Grace didn’t know was that Michael had become convinced that she was stealing from him. Tohme Tohme and Dennis Hawk had flown to Manama in October to try to settle Sheikh Abdullah’s claims against Michael. After reading the contract Michael and the sheikh had signed, Tohme explained, he realized that they could not close the deal with AEG until Abdullah gave Jackson a release. “Michael signed away his whole life,” Tohme explained. “He cannot fart without the permission of Sheikh Abdullah.” Tohme had traveled to Bahrain in the belief that his relationships in the Arab world and familiarity with Middle Eastern culture would form the basis of a dialogue with the Al Khalifas. Tohme was well connected in neighboring Oman, whose royal family were the Al Khalifas’ closest allies in the region. “And also I understand three things,” the manager explained. “One is that the Al Khalifas do not need the money. Two is that they do not want the publicity. Three is that it is not part of the Arabic tradition to fuck somebody who has been a guest in your home.” On top of that, “Michael really liked Sheikh Abdullah,” Tohme said, “and he felt the Al Khalifas had been very kind to him. I wanted to convey that to them personally, in the language we all speak.” Within a couple of days, Tohme had convinced the Bahraini royal family to let their attorneys try to work out a settlement with Michael’s lawyers that would release him from the 2005 contract and to accept something less than the $7 million they were demanding at the High Court in London. The Al Khalifas even agreed to permit Tohme and Hawk to remove the contents of the safe where Michael’s jewelry and cash were being held. When they opened the safe, though, the two men found it empty. The Al Khalifa people insisted that only one person had been in the safe since Michael’s departure, and that was Grace Rwaramba, who had shown up on her own in Manama, explaining that Michael needed some papers he had left behind. “I don’t have any direct evidence that Grace took anything out of the safe,” Hawk said, “but it was obvious the people in Bahrain thought she had.”

  Grace was never accused of any wrongdoing, but nevertheless Michael ordered the nanny gone soon after Tohme and Hawk returned from Manama. Grace swiftly compounded her employer’s disaffection when she agreed to testify for Abdullah in London, where his lawsuit against Jackson was to come before the High Court in November 2008. The sheikh was the first witness on his own behalf and, as anticipated, Jackson’s attorneys went after him with the accusation that he had exploited the performer’s posttrial vulnerability and lack of good sense. Not so, Abdullah told the court: “Michael is an individual who is very switched on. He is a fantastic intellectual.”

  “There’s nothing unusual about him?” Jackson’s own attorney in London, Robert Englehart, asked.

  “No!” Abdullah replied. The sheikh actually sounded at moments as if he still hoped Mikaeel would come back to him. But if he wasn’t going to get what had been promised, Abdullah made clear, he expected repayment. A court victory for the sheikh and his family looked likely after Grace Rwaramba took the witness stand to back Abdullah’s story in almost every detail.

  Michael was so desperate to avoid testifying in London that, Arnold Klein’s assistant Jason Pfeiffer alleged in court, he prevailed upon Klein to supply the evidence of a staph infection that could be offered as an excuse for why he couldn’t fly to the United Kindgom. Englehart, Jackson’s attorney, told the court in London that his client was awaiting test results and that “even in a best-case scenario it would be unwise to travel,” and requested that Michael be permitted to testify by video link from Los Angeles. Abdullah’s attorney Thanki insisted he needed Jackson physically in London and suggested the star be “bandaged up” and brought to London. The ruse bought Michael a brief delay, but the judge ruled he would have to appear in person at the trial. As the appointed day drew near, Tohme arranged through Mohamed Al Fayed to fly Michael and the children to London aboard a private jet, and planned on coming along for the ride. He was with Jackson at the Hotel Bel-Air loading bags into the limousine that was to deliver them to the Burbank airport when his phone rang. “Michael really doesn’t want to go,” Tohme remembered. “He is terrified of being in court. He knows it will be a circus. And literally at the last second I get a call from overseas: ‘Don’t come, it’s not necessary. We’re gonna solve the problem.’ So I told Michael, ‘Okay, let’s go back to the suite. We don’t need to go to London.’ And he was so happy.”

  After testifying for Sheikh Abdullah, Grace wouldn’t be returning to Los Angeles any time soon. Shortly after Rwaramba left London, reports came out of Africa that she had married a man named Joseph Kisembo. Grace would not confirm this, but it was true that she had returned for a time to Uganda, where her fluency in Runyankole kept her in the good stead that endured on the reputation of her father Job Rwaramba, a man who had set up and ran medical dispensaries in rural areas all over the country after escaping with his large family from Rwanda. Early in 2009, Grace founded, and appointed herself chief executive officer of, a foundation called World Accountability for Humanity, which was pledged to “bridge the gap” between rich Western donors and poor African recipients. From Uganda, Grace could not keep in contact with the Jackson children even by telephone. It was the longest period of time in their lives that they had gone without speaking to her.

  Michael let Dr. Tohme take the fall for sending Grace away. The children believed it and such a story seemed plausible even to the adults following the Michael Jackson saga. Amid widespread rumors that Jackson was on the brink of signing a contract with AEG to perform a series of shows at the O2, Tohme appeared to be in complete command of Jackson’s world. Tohme and Peter Lopez were in discussions with the Nederlander Organization about putting together a Broadway musical for Michael, and for an animated television program based on the “Thriller” video. As the president of MJJ Productions, Tohme was also working out the details of a deal for an MJ clothing line that would include “moonwalk shoes.” He had also retained the services of contract attorneys recommended by Tom Barrack to attempt a renegotiation of the Sony/ATV catalog deal. He intended to “secure the future” of Michael’s children, Tohme told Lopez and Dennis Hawk, with spin-offs from the O2 concert series that would include a 3-D live concert film, a 3-D movie based on the “Thriller” video, and a three-year worldwide concert tour. In Las Vegas, reports surfaced that Tohme and Barrack were simultaneously fleshing out yet another plan to develop a Michael Jackson–themed gambling establishment—a “Thriller Casino”—and were well into discussions about converting Neverland Ranch into a Michael Jackson Museum “in the style of Elvis Presley’s Graceland.”

  Reeling from a simultaneous collapse of the real estate and financial markets in fall 2008 that had already cost him an estimated $1.3 billion, Barrack was energized by the realization that at least one of his properties might actually be increasing in value. By January 2009, Colony Capital had hired eighty workers to complete Neverland’s refurbishment, all with an eye to selling the place for up to four times what he had paid for it, as Barrack explained to the Wall Street Journal. And “should Michael Jackson’s career be reaccelerated,” Barrack observed to the Journal, “it will have substantial additional value.”

  Prior to the Colony crew’s arrival, Tohme made a second visit to Neverland and returned to Los Angeles convinced that the removal of Michael’s personal property from Santa Barbara County was imperative. “So many things were left lying around, broken,” he recalled. “And people were taking things. Everybody has access. I went to the warehouse where much of Michael’s stuff was being stored, and it was sad that all this money was being wasted. I told Michael and he really didn’t care. He hated Neverland by then. He hated how they treated him in Santa Barbara during that trial. And he said, ‘I don’t ever want to set foot there again. Just get rid of everything.’ I said, ‘How about an auction?’ And he said, ‘Do it.’” Within a few weeks, Tohme made a deal with Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles to sell off everything that wasn’t nailed down at Neverland in 1,390 lots of “memorabilia.” The potential ta
ke, he was told, could easily surpass $10 million.

  The “reacceleration” of Michael Jackson’s career that Tom Barrack had spoken of in his interview with the Wall Street Journal began to look more and more likely after Michael signed the AEG “contracts” (actually, a letter of intent and a promissory note) on January 27, 2009. “Michael is very excited, but he is also very afraid that he won’t be able to live up to what people expect from him. Michael Jackson does not wanna go onstage and disappoint,” Tohme recalled. “He still needs to be lifted up, to be convinced that he is still the one, the King of Pop, that no one has replaced him, that no one can replace him.” Tohme continued to demonstrate that he understood how much even minor tributes meant to Michael’s self-esteem. “Michael told me, ‘I go to the store to buy a game for my kids, and everybody has a game except me.’ So I told Sony, ‘Michael Jackson, you have to make a game for him. Otherwise, nothing.’ Because we were discussing doing a new Off the Wall album like they had done with Thriller. So they agree. They send someone to see Michael in Los Angeles and he was flabbergasted. He was so happy.” The planned game would have a dance mat and be programmed with all of Michael’s signature moves.

  AEG had locked Michael in with language (tucked into a “miscellaneous clause”) that stated the promissory note agreement was “final” and that by accepting a “loan” of $6.2 million from AEG Michael was backing his promise to perform in London with a lien against “collateral” that included every asset he owned. The document also acknowledged that a “definitive” contract was still to be prepared and signed. Tohme and Randy Phillips continued to barter back and forth about the terms of the “definitive” agreement all through February. It had become clear to Phillips that convincing Michael to extend his concert series far beyond what was initially agreed on might be the only way to meet the worldwide demand for a Jackson tour. Tohme understood that doing just ten shows in London would not produce enough revenue to pay down Michael’s debts. Nevertheless, Michael still believed he would be performing only ten shows when he flew to London shortly after the first of March for the news conference at which the O2 concerts were to be formally announced. According to Tohme, the name for the concert series had been agreed upon just a couple of weeks earlier, when he and Michael were discussing the trip to London during a meeting in the living room at the Carolwood chateau. “Michael said, ‘You know, this is it, this is the last show I’m ever gonna do,’” Tohme recalled. “And I said, ‘So let’s call it ‘This Is It’ then.’ And he smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I like that.’”

  The trip to London was, for Tohme, the peak of his experience as Michael Jackson’s manager. “It was beyond your imagination,” he recalled. When he and Michael and the children arrived at the Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge, where they would be staying, “it was below zero temperature and people were sleeping outside in the park across from the hotel just to get a glimpse of Michael getting in and out of the car,” Tohme remembered. “I’ve never seen him happier than when he saw how his fans were running [and] greeting him.”

  The night before the March 5 announcement at the O2, Tohme commented on how fit Michael was looking, saying it was obvious he had added some bulk. Michael stripped to his underwear and stood on a bathroom scale that showed him weighing 157 pounds. “We were laughing,” Tohme remembered, “because of stories in the newspaper about how skinny he is, that they just keep printing the old news, they don’t even care what is true now. You should have seen Michael’s legs. They were like an Olympic sprinter’s, like steel bands from all the dancing. The guy is solid muscle.”

  Randy Phillips’s appraisal of Jackson’s condition the next day as they prepared for the press conference at the O2 Arena was not nearly so sanguine. “MJ is locked up in his room drunk and despondent,” Phillips wrote in an e-mail to his boss Tim Leiweke.

  “Are you kidding me?” was the reply Leiweke sent back minutes later. Just the day before, AEG’s corporate chief had attended a music-industry symposium where he answered a question about Michael Jackson’s readiness for a concert series by saying, “The man is very sane, the man is very focused, the man is very healthy.”

  “I [am] trying to sober him up,” a frantic Phillips wrote to Leiweke, as the appointed time of the O2 press conference approached. “I screamed at him so loud the walls are shaking. He is an emotionally paralyzed mess riddled with self-loathing and doubt now that it is show time.”

  He and Tohme actually had to dress Michael to get him prepared for the press conference, Phillips wrote to Leiweke: “He is scared to death.”

  More than three years later, Tohme would say that Phillips’s e-mails “exaggerated” Michael’s condition. Dennis Hawk agreed. “He might have drunk a couple of glasses of wine to relax,” Hawk said. “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he drank a whole bottle, given how big the moment was for him. But if he’d make the kind of scene Randy described in those e-mails, I think I would have heard about it. I didn’t.”

  Nearly four hundred reporters and more than seven thousand fans were assembled at the O2 when Michael arrived more than an hour-and-a-half late for the press conference. If Michael was either intoxicated or frightened, he hid it well behind a broad grin and an assured manner. The shows he would stage in the arena during the summer of 2009 would be called the “This Is It” concerts, because he intended to make them his final curtain call, Michael told the assembled crowd. “‘This Is It’ really means this is it,” he declared into a bank of microphones. Many in the crowd remarked on how deep and resonant his voice seemed to suddenly become. “I knew the announcement of the London shows would be big news, but I had no idea how big,” Tohme remembered.

  Michael had asked Tohme to arrange for him to take his children to see the revival of Oliver! at the Drury Lane theater a couple of nights after the O2 press conference. “I leaked it to the media when we were going,” Tohme said. “I wanted the public to know Michael will be there. Because I wanted Michael to get his oxygen back. I want him to know how much he is loved. I told the PR people working with me to leak it everywhere, to make sure his fans will know. But even I can’t believe what it’s like. There are thousands and thousands of people at the theater when we arrive. It was unbelievable how they reacted when they saw him coming. The love—I never saw anything like it. Michael is so happy, he cannot stop smiling. And the kids, they were shocked. They’d never seen this before, not like that. It’s like they finally know who their father is.”

  Michael’s mood would change dramatically when he discovered that Tohme and Phillips had already made a preliminary agreement that the number of O2 concerts might be increased if public demand warranted it. There was still some doubt within AEG about whether an audience for more shows existed, at least in London. Michael Jackson had not performed a major concert series since the end of the HIStory tour in 1997. Those forty shows had been hugely successful, raking in $90 million, but still finished second in total ticket sales that year to U2’s take from their PopMart tour. Jarvis Cocker became a folk hero for farting on Jackson during his last London appearance and a great deal had happened in the intervening years, including a criminal trial for child molestation. The only album of new Michael Jackson material released since 1997 was Invincible, widely considered a commercial failure. All of that, combined with the string of canceled performances and appearances in Jackson’s recent past, made the whole “This Is It” concept appear tenuous in the eyes of many.

  Early on during the O2 contract negotiations, Randy Phillips confided to several associates that Jackson’s lack of self-confidence was the most surprising—and worrying—thing he had observed about Michael. In London, Phillips tried to laugh off such worries: “If Mike gets too nervous to go on,” he told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, “I’ll throw him over my shoulder and carry him onstage. He’s light enough.” The AEG Live boss, though, continued to harbor doubts about the investment his company was making. Immediately after the March 5 press conference in London, Phillips and T
ohme agreed to test the waters by allowing fans to register for a “presale” drawing of tickets on Jackson’s official Web site. The response was far beyond what either had imagined: Michael’s site was overwhelmed by registrations that poured in at a rate of up to sixteen thousand per second. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of fans were unable to get through, nearly one million people had submitted applications within the twenty-four-hour window. Tickets not even printed yet were already being offered on eBay for $450 apiece.

  Phillips and Tohme prepared plans to at least double the number of O2 concerts. When Michael discovered what they were up to, he burst into a tearful rage, insisting that ten shows was all that he had agreed to perform. The operatic scene he created initiated a series of high-drama meetings with Phillips, Tohme, and the two LA attorneys representing Jackson’s interests in the AEG negotiations: Hawk and Lopez. Michael announced several times that he was canceling the O2 shows, but Tohme, according to one of the attorneys, had proven to be the first person in years who could force the star to acknowledge his circumstances. He would earn at most $20 million from the ten shows at the O2, Tohme explained to Jackson. Less than half that amount would remain after taxes, fees, and the cost of the settlement with Sheikh Abdullah. Even with what was in the Lockbox, there might not be enough to purchase the Bolkiah’s Las Vegas property. He still owed AEG all the money they were advancing for rent on the Carolwood chateau and for his other expenses, Tohme reminded Michael, and in the meantime he was falling further and further in debt to Sony.

  The reality of his financial situation was that Jackson had to earn at least $100 million before his financing arrangement expired in 2011, or face the liquidation of his assets—in other words, bankruptcy. Grudgingly, Michael agreed to twenty shows at the O2. Phillips then played what he had known all along would be his strongest card with Michael by pointing out that the first artist to perform at the O2 had been Prince, toward whom Jackson was well known to harbor both considerable ill will and an intensely competitive fascination. “As soon as Michael heard that Prince had done twenty-one shows at the O2, he insisted on doing more than that,” recalled an attorney who had been part of every negotiating session with AEG. “Ten more, in fact.” Within days, Michael’s agreement to thirty-one concerts at the O2 had been increased to forty-five shows that would continue through the end of 2009. Shortly after this, Jackson, Phillips, and Tohme settled on an even fifty concerts, extending into February 2010.