Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Joe went where he always did after exhausting other options, to his estranged wife Katherine. Joe and Rowe worked Michael’s mother on multiple fronts. Rowe began with a furious denunciation of her son’s new so-called manager. This so-called “Dr.” Tohme was an amateur shyster who knew nothing about the entertainment business and was using Michael to make himself rich, Rowe said. Tohme was in cahoots with AEG, working with them to cut Michael off from the rest of the world, including his own family. If Michael did the Superdome concert, Joe and Rowe said, Michael would pocket at least $20 million for one night’s work, and the rest of the family would split another $20 million after the television rights were sold. Her share alone would be $2 million, Rowe promised Katherine Jackson, and all she had to do for that money was convince the son who loved her that there was a better deal for him on the table than the one he had made at AEG Live.

  By the end of March, Katherine had begun to serve as Joe and Rowe’s conduit to Michael Jackson. Michael had issued strict orders that neither his father nor his father’s partner was to be admitted through the gates of the Carolwood chateau ever again, and he refused to speak to either of them on the telephone. His mother, though, always got through within twenty-four hours of calling. “Michael really only listened to Mrs. Jackson when it came to the family,” said one of the attorneys who was representing him. “He didn’t listen to his dad and he didn’t listen to his brothers and sisters. The only one he wanted to help all the time was Mrs. Jackson. Whenever she wanted anything, we had to take care of it. And now she was doing everything she could to convince Michael to sign that AllGood deal.”

  Not everything. When Joe Jackson insisted that Katherine should prevail upon Michael to let her move into the Carolwood chateau in order to work on their son around the clock, she refused. “I have more respect for his privacy than that,” she told Joe. Still, she continued to ask Michael every time she spoke to him on the phone why he wouldn’t replace Tohme Tohme with Leonard Rowe and sign the AllGood deal. It would be good for him and for the entire family, said Katherine, who had maintained for years that Michael’s biggest mistake in life was to leave the Jackson 5.

  “We were hearing about all of this,” recalled Hawk, “and everyone was worried that Michael would sign an AllGood contract just because his mother wanted him to.”

  His siblings had long since fallen into step behind their parents, looking to be cut in on a deal that Patrick Allocco promised would be the biggest payday that any of them other than Janet had seen in decades. Jermaine was especially persistent in lobbying for a collaboration with Michael. “Jermaine called constantly. It was never-ending,” said Hawk, who had become, grudgingly, the liaison between Michael and Dr. Tohme on the one hand, and Michael and the Jackson family on the other.

  Meanwhile, Frank Dileo continued to spread the story that Tohme Tohme was a Svengali who had hypnotized Michael into obeying his will, even when it was clearly not in his best interest. He found a receptive audience among the Jacksons, who were eager to believe both that Tohme was keeping them away from Michael in order to maintain his control and that the new manager was in over his head. Perhaps he was. Several seasoned AEG executives noticed that Tohme appeared both enraptured and overwhelmed amid the adulation that surrounded Michael on the London trip for the O2 announcement. The starry look in the man’s eyes, the AEG execs said, made them nervous. Also, Tohme didn’t seem to grasp that his determination to protect his client from any outside demands or pressures, to mediate every one of Michael’s business dealings, no matter how trivial, was alienating those who believed that access to the star was their ultimate validation.

  By March 26, when Frank Dileo and Leonard Rowe met for the first time, at the urging of Katherine Jackson, attorney Peter Lopez had joined the chorus of people who were carping about Tohme. Lopez was convinced that it had been Tohme’s decision, not Michael’s, to name Dennis Hawk as Jackson’s primary entertainment lawyer. Also unbeknownst to Tohme, Michael Amir Williams—“Brother Michael”—had formed a behind-the-scenes relationship with Dileo and began to make the complaint that Tohme was “mostly talk.” Tohme’s blustering tone and imperious manner, combined with his broken English, strange name, and Arab background, didn’t win him any friends in the Jackson household or in the media. At the same time, there was a certain naïveté to Tohme, a curious inability to recognize that just because people were warm and friendly when they sat across the table didn’t mean they weren’t sticking pins in a voodoo doll as soon as you left the room. “I am from outside this business,” Tohme explained. “I am a businessman, and I think I have played with the big boys, but I have never seen anything like the entertainment industry, where people will do anything to win, where there is no idea of honor or loyalty, where sneaking and backstabbing are just the ordinary way to do things. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it until it was already happening.”

  On April 2, 2009, the Celebrity/Access Web site published a column by Ian Courtney under the headline “Will Michael Jackson’s Real Manager Please Stand Up?” that cited a press release in which Leonard Rowe claimed to have been hired as Michael’s new manager. The article then quoted a spokesperson for Dileo saying that Frank was Michael’s new manager, and that Mr. Dileo’s company would be joining with AEG to issue a press release that challenged Rowe’s misrepresentations. Tohme held his tongue, letting an e-mail sent from the offices of AEG Live speak for him:

  Ian, the only individual that AEG Live has dealt with from the onset of the recent negotiations that resulted in the unprecedented sales of 50 shows at the O2 Arena in London is Dr. Tohme. He has been in attendance at all my meetings with MJ and was instrumental in MJ’s appearance at the now historic press conference in London. MJ has continued to refer to Dr. Tohme as his manager.

  I received one phone call from Leonard Rowe requesting a meeting that I, summarily, turned down after Michael Jackson told me, personally, that Rowe was not involved and disavowed that purported quote in the press release. That was my one and only interaction with Leonard Rowe.

  As far as Frank Dileo . . . we are not anticipating any press releases involving Mr. Dileo, nor are we in a business relationship with him.

  That is it in a nutshell.

  Randy Phillips

  For Tohme, Phillips’s written remarks were reassurance enough. “Even when I know that Frank Dileo is sniffing around, that Leonard Rowe is sniffing around, that John Branca is sniffing around, that others are sniffing around, I am not worried,” he explained. “I am Michael’s manager! I have the documents! He has given me complete control. So I think it does not matter what the others say. I have a lot to learn.”

  18

  After the announcement of the O2 shows in London, the crowd of paparazzi tailing Michael whenever he ventured out in Los Angeles expanded three-fold. Jackson’s only two regular destinations, the paparazzi knew, were Arnold Klein’s office and Elizabeth Taylor’s Bel Air home. By April, Michael was visiting Klein’s office two or three times a week. The tabloid pack chasing the story naturally suspected that Jackson was collecting painkillers and spent a good deal of time sipping milkshakes at the counter in Mickey Fine’s while they waited for him to emerge from Klein’s offices. It was difficult to say whether Jackson was getting drugs from Klein, however, because according to a former assistant, the doctor had taken to writing prescriptions for certain patients under his own name. Records would later reveal that Klein had written at least twenty-seven new prescriptions to himself after Michael Jackson returned to the United States from Ireland, for Valium and Vicodin, as well as for the sedative midazolam and for modafinil, a drug used to treat narcolepsy that was said to improve wakefulness in people who didn’t get enough sleep. Mickey Fine’s motorcycle deliveryman was seen coming and going from the Carolwood mansion on a regular basis. Michael often went to Liz Taylor’s directly from Klein’s office, leading some of the paparazzi to speculate that the King of Pop was working as a drug courier.

  While it
could not be proven that Klein was providing Jackson with drugs, there was no doubt that he was working as Michael’s doctor. By his own accounting, Klein provided more than $48,000 worth of medical services to Jackson in the three-month period between March 23 and June 22, 2009. The 179 procedures involved were minor compared to some of the work done on Michael in the past, but inventorying the sheer volume of foreign substances shot into or applied onto his face during those weeks was not for the squeamish. Michael had been injected fifty-one times with an intramuscular drug meant to prepare his skin for insertions of Restylane with the fine-line needle that Klein was using to fill Jackson’s wrinkles. Restylane is an acid-based substance that can not only cause headaches and nausea but also commonly results in tenderness at the injection points—a small price to pay, say those who extol its long-lasting results. Klein had also injected Michael with Botox around and under the eyes and in his forehead, not only eliminating what dermatologists like to call “expression lines” but also reducing his body’s ability to cool itself with perspiration. Jackson received as well multiple applications at Klein’s office of the ophthalmic solution Latanoprost, developed as a treatment for glaucoma but more popular for enhancing the growth, thickness, and darkening of eyebrow and eyelash hair. In addition, Klein had given Michael the eyelash lengthener and thickener Latisse, and a supply of the mouth plumper Nutritic Lips. There had been some new “acne surgery” in the doctor’s office as well. Part of the explanation for the big bill was an emergency situation involving Jackson that required Klein to interrupt a weekend vacation to fly into Beverly Hills in a rented helicopter and to transport his staff in chauffeur-driven cars. It was believed by the Jackson stalkers among the paparazzi (who had not heard Michael was trying to get out of testifying in London) that it had something to do with a staph infection that had developed after work on Michael’s nose.

  For Klein, repairing the damage that Jackson had already done to himself was half the battle; helping Jackson stave off the effects of aging was the rest of it. Michael was unable to bear even the thought of growing old, let alone the process of it. He would be a recluse after the age of sixty, Jackson had said more than once. “You don’t want people to see you growing old?” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach asked him back in the year 2000, when the star was about to turn forty-two. “I can’t deal with it,” Michael answered. “I love beautiful things too much and the beautiful things in nature and I want my messages to get out to the world, but I don’t want to be seen now . . . like when my picture came up on the computer, it made me sick when I saw it . . . Because I look like a lizard. I wish I could never be photographed or seen.” Watching Fred Astaire suffer the debilitation of old age had been one of the worst things he ever endured, Michael told the rabbi. “One day [Astaire] said to me, ‘You know, Michael, if I was to do one spin right now, I would fall flat on my face. My equilibrium is totally gone.’” It was agony to watch the greatest glider ever move about his house at the end, Michael said: “Little tiny steps, and it broke my heart.”

  “I think growing old is the ugliest, the most—the ugliest thing,” he had told Boteach. “When the body breaks down and starts to wrinkle, I think it’s so bad . . . I never want to look in the mirror and see that.” At age fifty, though, there it was. He would refuse to let it go all the way, Michael said. “I don’t want to go out like Brando,” he told Gotham Chopra that spring in Los Angeles. “I’d rather go out like Elvis.”

  In preparation for the O2 shows, Jackson was determined to surround himself with familiar faces. AEG Live was happy to support their star’s clannish approach to the “This Is It” concerts. Randy Phillips had already gotten off to a good start with Jackson by embracing the fact that, when he prepared for a stage show, Michael thought of himself first and foremost as a dancer and was inclined to choose choreographers as his principal collaborators.

  Kenny Ortega, with whom Jackson had been meeting on a regular basis almost from the moment he returned to the United States from Ireland in 2006, had choreographed both the Bad and Dangerous tours before going Hollywood. Ortega had come a long way since the days when he was teaching Patrick Swayze to dirty dance and transforming Madonna into a Marilyn Monroe who could twirl for her “Material Girl” video. Twenty years after the end of the Dangerous tour, Ortega was considered to be the person most responsible for turning High School Musical into one of the most lucrative franchises in Disney’s history. That success, plus the ease of communication between Kenny and Michael, made the seven-figure fee Ortega was to receive as show director for the “This Is It” concerts seem to AEG a solid investment.

  It was no surprise either that Michael wanted Travis Payne to help him design the dance routines. Payne had won an American Choreography Award back in the mid-nineties for his work on the music video for one of the angriest songs Jackson ever wrote, “Scream,” a furious denunciation of the tabloid media. Jackson and Payne persuaded AEG to fly in hundreds of dancers from all over the world who would be winnowed down to the twelve chosen to perform onstage with Michael at the O2. Those who had worked with Michael in the past were impressed that he broke with his practice of screening the tryouts by video, so as to avoid meeting those he would reject, and insisted upon getting up close to each and every aspirant so that he could look them in the eye. The bean counters grumbled when eight of the twelve Michael selected turned out to be Americans, while two of the other four were Canadians. What exactly had been the purpose of spending tens of thousands of dollars on plane tickets to bring scores of people from Europe to Los Angeles? The accountants wanted to know. Those expenses were peanuts compared to what Christian Audigier had in store for Jackson’s concert wardrobe; Audigier’s plan was to encrust Michael’s outfits with 300,000 Swarovski crystals.

  When it came time to choose the band, Michael selected a mix of familiar hands and fresh faces. The drummer he picked to drive the dance performances was Jonathan “Sugarfoot” Moffett, who had served as Michael’s percussionist a quarter century earlier on the Jacksons Victory tour. For lead guitarist, on the other hand, Michael had chosen Orianthi Panagaris, a stunning twenty-four-year-old blonde Australian of Greek descent who was largely unknown outside the business. When she was eighteen, Carlos Santana had pulled her onstage to perform with him at a concert. Michael insisted Panagaris audition after seeing some of her YouTube videos and appeared overjoyed when she opened her live performance for him in Los Angeles with the solo from “Beat It,” then delivered a version that measured up to the one Eddie Van Halen had produced more than twenty-five years earlier. He grabbed the young woman by the arm, walked her to the edge of the stage, and hired her on the spot.

  For his personal trainer, Michael hired Lou Ferrigno, who had first come to his attention as the second-best-known bodybuilder (behind Arnold Schwarzenegger) of the early 1970s and later as the nonspeaking actor who played the giant green man on the popular TV show The Incredible Hulk. The two were training three times a week, always at the Carolwood chateau. “The paparazzi will follow me if I come to your house,” Michael explained. Working with Michael required a whole different approach from the one he’d taken when he’d been hired to bulk Mickey Rourke up with muscle for his role in The Wrestler, Ferrigno recalled. Michael wanted flexibility and sinew, so they did exercises that involved rubber bands and an inflated ball, not free weights. Ferrigno had first worked with Michael almost fifteen years earlier when Jackson was preparing for the HIStory tour, back in the days when he was known to regularly push himself beyond his physical limits. The Michael Jackson he was spending time with these days seemed mellower and more measured, Ferrigno thought. Michael did every exercise he was asked to do, and was “very animated,” Ferrigno said, but also seemed to have learned something about quitting while he was ahead.

  Back in the nineties, Michael had confessed on a number of occasions how lonely his life was but he now seemed much more “fulfilled and happy,” said Ferrigno, who could only stand and grin when Michael took a break from their workou
ts to play hide and seek with the kids: “He was like Mr. Mom.”

  Michael would show up for their training sessions in an all-black outfit, Ferrigno remembered: black slacks, shirt, shoes, and a jacket that Jackson removed on only a single occasion. Ferrigno looked at his arms and saw no needle marks.

  Michael hadn’t stopped using drugs, however. He ingested pills in a pattern that appeared random but was actually based on his mood. Boredom was a trigger for his drug use, as were anxiety and depression. When he resorted to a needle, it was most often below his waist where no one would spot the tiny stab wounds. He’d collapsed any number of veins over the years, which was why he preferred to have a physician supervising his injections.

  Michael especially favored needles when he suffered crippling bouts of the insomnia that his anxiety and depression fueled. His struggle to sleep nearly always became a losing battle during periods of intense stress. Over the years, he had built up incredible tolerances to doses of antianxiety drugs like Xanax and Valium (not to mention opioids such as Demerol and OxyContin) that would have left an average man catatonic. More than twelve years after he had first sampled it, there was still only one drug he could count on to help him start the day feeling rested and renewed. A trained anesthesiologist and a clinical setting, though, were required to safely use propofol.

  Cherilyn Lee, a registered nurse who visited Michael Jackson’s home approximately ten times in early 2009, tried to remind him of that. Like any number of medical professionals before her, Nurse Lee was first summoned by Michael Jackson to tend to his children’s “cold symptoms.” When the entertainer began to question the nurse about her practice, Lee told him that she worked mainly as a nutritionist who, based on a person’s blood chemistry, could mix up a vitamin and mineral concoction that would boost energy. She had done it for Stevie Wonder and she could do it for him, Lee said. Michael hired her to serve up a daily menu of invigorating all-natural cocktails, according to Lee, but let only a day go by before asking if the nurse might also give him an injection of Diprivan as a sleep aid. Taking that medication anywhere but in a hospital was dangerous, Lee replied. “He said, ‘I don’t like drugs. I don’t want any drugs. My doctor told me this is a safe medicine,’” Lee recalled.