Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  On the afternoon of May 15, at a table in the Polo Lounge, Phillips and Gongaware listened glumly as Joe Jackson explained that AllGood Entertainment had agreed to schedule the “Jackson Family Reunion Concert” at the Dallas Cowboys’ football stadium on July 3, which would give Michael plenty of time to get to London and prepare for the O2 shows. Patrick Allocco was ready to guarantee the family a fee of $30 million. His brothers really needed their piece of that money, and “I do, too,” Joe told his son. Leonard Rowe pointed out that Michael would be much better paid, on an hourly basis, for that one AllGood concert than he would be for fifty shows at the O2 Arena. “Who’s paying you?” Phillips demanded of Rowe at one point during this conversation. “It’s none of your concern,” Rowe answered. Flanked by Phillips and Gongaware, Michael explained that the deal he had signed with AEG Live was an exclusive one. He couldn’t perform anywhere else until he had finished the concerts in London. With Katherine urging her son to listen, Joe spent most of an hour trying to convince Michael that, at the very least, he and Leonard should be cut in on the AEG deal. “You owe me!” Joe shouted at one point, startling people at nearby tables. Again, Michael said that what his father asked was impossible.

  “But we all knew how hard it was for him to say no to Mrs. Jackson,” explained one of the attorneys who had negotiated the AEG contract. “And they were coercing him so hard that we worried he might just go ahead and sign something to please his mother and make his father go away, which would have been a disaster. It might have cost him the AEG deal, and it certainly would have given either AEG or AllGood, or both, grounds for a successful lawsuit. Thankfully, though, Michael listened to reason and refused to sign.”

  Michael went further than that. First, he insisted that his brothers issue a public denial of their involvement with AllGood Entertainment in a Jackson 5 reunion concert that was supposedly to take place in Texas on July 3. Then on May 25, five days after the postponement of the O2 shows, Leonard Rowe received a letter in which Michael informed his father’s partner, “You do not represent me and I do not wish to have any oral or written communications with you regarding the handling of my business and/or personal matters.”

  “No one was sure whether Tohme had been fired and whether Dileo had been hired or what was going on,” said one of the attorneys who had received the earlier letter that was supposedly from Michael but had actually been written by Dileo. “Was Dileo just writing letters and sending them out? Was he getting Michael’s okay? Or was he just putting something in front of Michael and telling him to sign it? Was that even really Michael’s signature? The whole thing was very mysterious.”

  “Basically,” said one of those who remained in Jackson’s employ, “the situation surrounding Michael was such that you were either creeping around with a knife in your hand, or you were holding your breath, waiting to see when you’d be stabbed in the back.”

  The O2 Arena concerts were “a do or die moment” for Michael Jackson, Randy Phillips observed in a May 30 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “If it doesn’t happen, it would be a major problem for him, career-wise, in a way that it hasn’t been in the past.”

  Sending a warning through the media was not, in general, an effective tactic for dealing with Michael Jackson. Phillips was smart enough to know that, but the AEG Live boss was beginning to feel the stress of a highly leveraged and increasingly exposed position. As costs quickly consumed the $12 million budgeted for preproduction, then more than doubled that figure, the joke Phillips had cracked to the London Telegraph back in March about making Phil Anschutz “into a millionaire from a billionaire” did not sound nearly so amusing. Michael’s absences from the CenterStaging rehearsals continued and what the Los Angeles Times referred to as Jackson’s “track record of missed performances and canceled dates” began to loom larger by the day.

  “We finally made Mohammed come to the mountain,” an exuberant Phillips had told the London newspapers at the announcement of the O2 shows back in March. Making Mohammed climb that mountain, though, was another task entirely. “In this business, if you don’t take risks, you don’t achieve greatness,” Phillips had gamely asserted in the Los Angeles Times. By the end of May, though, AEG Live’s head man was looking to cut corners and tie up loose ends. He refused his star’s request to shoot Victoria Falls from a helicopter equipped with an IMAX camera as part of the environmental theme that Jackson wanted for the O2 shows, insisting that it was an expense the company couldn’t afford. And when Michael proposed arriving onstage for the jungle section of the show by riding with three live monkeys on the back of an elephant, accompanied by panthers led on gold chains while a flock of parrots and other exotic birds flapped in the air around him, Phillips was grateful for the objections of animal rights activists from both sides of the Atlantic.

  Phillips and AEG Live had begun reminding Jackson that he had put up his own assets as collateral on the $6.2 million they had already advanced to him, and that he would be on the hook for a lot more if the O2 concerts were canceled because of his failure to perform. When a promoter involved with the O2 concerts questioned Jackson’s ability to deliver on his promise of fifty concerts, Phillips wrote back, “He has to or financial disaster awaits.”

  “We [need to] let Mikey know just what this will cost him in terms of him making money,” Gongaware wrote to Phillips. “We cannot be forced into stopping this, which MJ will try to do because he is lazy and constantly changes his mind to fit his immediate wants.” The performer needed to be reminded regularly that, “He is locked,” Gongaware added. “He has no choice . . . he signed a contract.”

  Michael understood his position, according to his longtime makeup artist Karen Faye: “He was scared to death because AEG was funding everything. He said he would have to work at McDonald’s if he didn’t do these shows.” Phillips’s “do or die moment” comment, though, was AEG’s first public attempt to get tough, to demand that Michael commit himself fully to the preparations for a show that was scheduled to open in a little more than a month. The stakes were now truly enormous. The CEO of the UK’s biggest secondhand ticket seller, Seatwave, told the BBC that “There’s gonna be somewhere near on a billion pounds’ worth of economic activity brought to London through hotels, restaurants, shops, pubs, people coming to see Michael Jackson. It’s the Michael Jackson economic stimulus package.” AEG Live was now out of pocket nearly $30 million and its commitments to the O2 concerts amounted to a good deal more than that. As the preparations for the staging of the show in London mounted toward a climax, Randy Phillips was relieved to hear from his director that the star of the show at least appeared to have a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve at the O2.

  All along, Kenny Ortega said, he and Michael had imagined the O2 concerts as a Broadway musical on a giant scale. He wanted to make his initial appearance onstage in a number constructed around “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” Michael told Ortega, and “I don’t want to hold anything back. I want this to be the most spectacular opening the audience has ever seen. They have to ask themselves, ‘How are they going to top that?’ I don’t even care if they’re applauding. I want their jaws on the ground. I want them to not be able to sleep because they are so amped up from what they saw.”

  The enormous stage for the “This Is It” concerts was being designed and built by Michael Cotton, who had designed the sets for the HIStory tour, in close collaboration with Bruce Jones, whose visual effects for The Spirit had impressed Michael, even though the film was widely regarded as a failure. Jones and Cotton, plus lighting designer Peter Morse and art director Bernt Capra, were filling the four biggest soundstages at the Culver Studios (235-feet-by-150-feet-by-45-feet tall—the same stages used to create the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind) with, among other things, the largest LED screen ever assembled: 100 feet wide. The screen was to provide a background of 3-D videos for the O2 shows that would run throughout the concert, designed to create a hologram effect by blending seamlessly with the
real sets and the live dancers performing in front of them so that, during the “Thriller” number, “live” wolves and ravens would be running through and flying around a cemetery set that Capra had populated with mummies, zombies, and a decomposed pirate.

  The crew had been given five weeks to make the transition from conceptual design to working set, an overwhelming task that left, as Capra put it, “no margin for error.” Integrating elements that were not only physically immense but also at the extreme edge of technology required degrees of both exactitude and flexibility that had never before been demanded of anyone involved in the production. The stage at the O2 Arena would have to be equipped to accommodate a cherry picker as tall as a two-story building that would be used to fly a spinning Michael Jackson through the air above his audience while a video and light show literally played inside his clothing—his costume made of a high-tech fabric rigged with circuitry. The stress of coordinating dozens of complex effects in such a tight window might have been unbearable if not for the fact that Michael seemed so confident they could pull it off, said Capra, who was collaborating with the star on restaging scenes from five Jackson music videos that stretched from the early 1980s to the late 1990s: “Thriller,” “Smooth Criminal,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” and “Earth Song.”

  As was so often the case among those who worked with him for the first time, Capra had been bowled over by the level of Michael’s intellectual and artistic literacy. He was stunned and delighted, the art director said, when Michael began their meeting on the “The Way You Make Me Feel” video with a dissertation on one of his favorite photographers, Lewis Hine, a social worker who had made his name during the Great Depression with photographs of young children working in mines and mills. He wanted to base both the set design and the choreography for “The Way You Make Me Feel” on the photos Hine had taken of men constructing steel beams for the Empire State Building, Michael explained: The whole thing should feel like it was happening among a group of workmen taking a lunch break atop a half-finished skyscraper.

  Michael had showed up every day at the Culver Studios between June 1 and June 11 to shoot footage for what became known as the “Dome Project,” the adaptation of the music videos he had worked out with Capra, plus a pair of short 3-D videos. One was “MJ Air,” in which a 707 jet rolled into the frame just as a hole opened in the screen, allowing Michael to enter and board the jet, which then flew away. The other new video, “The Final Message,” featured a young girl from an Amazon rain forest tribe embracing the Earth. Michael brought his three children to the set one day and sat them all in director’s chairs to watch the scene from “Smooth Criminal” where he would be chased by the likes of Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. “This is the first day that we’ve seen Daddy on a movie set,” Paris told Kenny Ortega. At that moment, Ortega remembered, Michael walked over and asked, with real concern, if the kids were “behaving.”

  During the third week of June, Michael was working out his choreography with Travis Payne in two-a-day sessions, one held in the afternoon at the Carolwood chateau, the other in the evening at the Los Angeles Forum, where rehearsals for the O2 shows had been moved to give the performers more space. John Caswell, the co-owner of CenterStaging, said that the move to the Forum was due entirely to the enormous scale of the production. “By the time he left my facility, he had graduated through several studios and was on a soundstage taking up ten thousand square feet,” Caswell explained—and even that wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t Michael Jackson’s health or erratic attendance at rehearsals that had delayed the opening of the London concerts, Caswell insisted, but rather the stupendous nature of what the entertainer was attempting: “He was trying and succeeding in structuring the biggest, most spectacular live production ever seen . . . The show was getting so damn big, they couldn’t finish it in time. That’s why they had to delay.”

  There was still an ambient skepticism on the sidelines, of course, and plenty of cause for concern among the attorneys and accountants clustered around the preparations for the O2 shows. On June 12, AllGood Entertainment filed a $40 million lawsuit against Michael, AEG Live, and Frank Dileo, claiming that there had been multiple breaches of Jackson’s “contract” to perform at a Jackson family reunion concert, including Michael’s promise not to appear onstage anywhere else before that event or for three months after it. When AllGood’s lead attorney told Britain’s Guardian that the lawsuit could be settled by cutting the company in on the O2 shows, the newspaper rattled London with a headline on its article that read: “Michael Jackson Comeback Concerts in Jeopardy?”

  Internet gossip columnists warned that Jackson was nowhere near ready to perform in London, and wondered if he was even really trying after Michael skipped rehearsals to spend the afternoons of June 9 and June 16 at Arnold Klein’s office in Beverly Hills. Karen Faye would later say that Michael was “self-sabotaging” with drugs because he didn’t believe he could do all fifty shows for AEG. Some of the most cold-eyed number crunchers involved with the O2 project, though, claimed to be impressed by the level of focus with which Michael was engaging the financial opportunities presented by his London concerts. During May, he had met with representatives of the Universal Music Group’s merchandise division, Bravado, to sketch out designs for more than three hundred items—from jigsaw puzzles and children’s games to leather handbags and rhinestone dog tags—that would be sold in conjunction with the “This Is It” concerts. “He really did understand the opportunity he had to repair his finances if he fulfilled his contract for the London shows,” said one of the entertainment attorneys working with him that spring. Simply by performing all fifty concerts at the O2, Michael would stabilize his finances through the end of his contract with Sony, this lawyer was advising him. If he did a world tour, he could likely eradicate most, if not all, of his debt and regain control of the Beatles catalog. With a U.S. tour, he might once again aggregate a net worth of a billion dollars. “He got it, he really did,” the attorney said. “I think he was ready to do what he had to do.” Kenny Ortega agreed: “There are those out there who say, ‘Michael didn’t want to do “This Is It,” he wasn’t capable.’ Michael didn’t just want to do it—his attitude was, ‘We have to do it.’” After nearly two solid decades of ridicule and excoriation over his lawsuits and plastic surgeries, his sham marriages and sperm donor–sired children—not to mention the molestation allegations against him—Jackson’s excitement about the London shows “was giving him back something that had been sucked out of him,” Ortega said, “his dignity as an artist.”

  Marc Schaffel and Dieter Wiesner remained “out there” among the doubters: “Just because Michael knew something was good for him didn’t mean he’d do it,” Schaffel said. “Performing the same songs the same way, night after night, Michael would be very unhappy,” Wiesner observed. “He didn’t like to do what he had done already. I know he was mad at them for making him.”

  After his visit to Arnold Klein’s offices on June 16, Michael again skipped rehearsal. Frank Dileo already had suggested to a fretting Randy Phillips that they reassemble the “old team” by inviting John Branca back aboard as Michael’s entertainment attorney. “I’m pretty sure Dileo wanted to bring Branca in as a way of protecting himself,” said one of the attorneys that was being pushed out the door. “He knew he had some legal exposure here, and not just from the AllGood deal. Dileo was planning to take the entire AEG commission and that was a deal Tohme had done. But if he brought Branca in, he had to figure John would help protect him. I mean, John wasn’t going to be taking an hourly fee. He was going to take his five percent commission and make a big killing. He would owe Frank.”

  Branca’s recollection was that Dileo had phoned him in late May to say, “Michael wants you to come back. He wants you to give some thought to what you can do for him, what kind of deals.” He spent three weeks drafting an “agenda” that detailed his plans for a concert movie, books, and assorted merchandising
deals, Branca said, then drove to the Forum on the evening of June 17 to present it to Michael during a break in rehearsals. At least five years had passed since the two men had seen each other, and their reunion was “very emotional,” as Branca recalled it: “We hugged each other. He said, ‘John, you’re back.’” Branca’s account sounded more than a little strange to people who had heard Michael repeatedly denounce Branca as a devil in recent years.

  Tohme claimed that Michael had made it overwhelmingly clear he did not trust Branca. The attorney had arranged to be introduced to Jackson’s new manager by Randy Phillips at the 2009 Grammy Awards ceremony, and afterward Branca phoned to arrange a lunch meeting, Tohme said. When he told his client about it, though, “Michael told me I had to cancel the lunch. He said, ‘You can’t have anything to do with Branca. I don’t want him near me.’”

  Michael Amir Williams, who by the middle of April 2009 was almost exclusively handling the details of Jackson’s business affairs, said he never once heard the name John Branca, and was not aware of any meetings with the attorney or communications with him of any kind.

  Whatever the arrangement was between Branca and Dileo, picturing Michael Jackson flanked by the two men who had steered the entertainer’s affairs during the most financially successful period of his (or any other artist’s) career was reassuring to Randy Phillips and the executives at AEG Live, who also encouraged the hiring of Michael’s former accountant, Barry Siegel. AEG execs were distraught, though, when Jackson failed to show for rehearsal on the evening of June 18. Randy Phillips was furious when he received an e-mail from Kenny Ortega suggesting that if the star of the show wasn’t going to come to rehearsals it might be time they “pulled the plug.” Phillips drove to the Carolwood chateau for a meeting in which he demanded, in the presence of Dr. Murray, that Michael stop seeing Dr. Klein and stop taking any drugs that Klein had provided. It was almost ten p.m. when Michael arrived at the Forum looking “very shaky,” as one person who was present put it.