Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The frustration of the AEG executives now extended to Ortega. Only a couple of weeks earlier, during “The Dome Project” shoot, the director had told them that Jackson appeared to be responding to the pressure of a deadline by accelerating the pace of his preparations, and that his focus was sharpening as the cast and crew prepared for the move to London. Now, though, Ortega said he was watching Michael go off the rails again. He was seeing “strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive-like behavior,” Ortega wrote to Phillips, adding “it is like there are two people there. One (deep inside) trying to hold on to what he was and still can be and not wanting us to quit on him, the other in this weakened and troubled state.”

  The show’s music director Michael Bearden advised AEG that, “MJ is not in shape enough yet to sing this stuff live and dance at the same time.” Production manager John Hougdahl wrote after he watched Jackson stumble and mumble through a rehearsal at the Forum, “He was a basket case. Doubt is pervasive.”

  Scores of other observers on the scene, though, had maintained all along that Michael Jackson wasn’t either strong enough or sane enough to pull off a comeback at this stage of his life. Michael’s physical health was the main concern of those who actually cared about him. He had been losing weight at an alarming rate since the announcement of the O2 shows in London, and those who hadn’t watched it happen gradually were especially startled when they saw him for the first time after several months. Michael’s filmmaker friend Bryan Michael Stoller was one of them. Stoller and Jackson had become friends twenty years earlier after Jackson saw The Shadow of Michael, the young director’s short-film parody of the infamous 1984 Pepsi commercial. Stoller had paid his last visit to Michael just before the beginning of May, and recalled that when he greeted his old friend, “It was like hugging bones. After seeing him, I never thought he would complete the tour.” From the high of 157 pounds he had reached at the time of the announcement of the AEG deal, Michael’s weight fell as low as 130 pounds that spring. “We did talk a lot about his weight,” Kenny Ortega admitted. “We would always try to get him to eat something, but he said, ‘I’m a dancer and this is how I like to feel.’” Michael showed Ortega photographs of Fred Astaire at the height of his career, pointing out that his old friend Fred had been just as thin back then as he was now. Newspapers reported that Ortega was literally fork-feeding Jackson his chicken and broccoli dinners. “It’s not true,” the director said. “I would unwrap his plate and slide it over in front of him. But I didn’t feed him.”

  Also back in the picture were that pair of powerhouse women Tom Mesereau had tried to warn his client about back in 2005; Raymone Bain and Grace Rwaramba. Bain and her Washington, D.C., attorneys had attempted to take advantage of Michael’s absorption in preparing for the O2 shows and long-standing inattention to legal affairs by filing a ten-day notice of application for a default judgment at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. With just forty-eight hours left on the ticking clock, a team of three attorneys from the New York offices of Dewey and LeBoeuf appeared in court pro hac vice alongside a D.C.-based colleague to inform the judge hearing the case that a response to Bain’s suit would be entered before the deadline passed. Among the many ironies of the day’s legal drama was that the attorney Michael had put in charge of dealing with Bain was Londell McMillan, the same lawyer that Raymone herself had brought in to represent Michael (in the Marc Schaffel case, among others) more than two years earlier. Once the default judgment motion was set aside, Bain’s only real hope for a payoff would be to harrow or exhaust Michael into a settlement that saved him the cost of defeating her in court. And Raymone’s friend McMillan was the very attorney who had counseled Michael against settling cases on that basis, urging his famous client to battle every one of them through to a jury verdict.

  Grace Rwaramba had been given formal notice of her dismissal as the nanny to Michael’s children in early April, when she received a letter signed by Paul Gongaware that read: “It is with regret that I must inform you that your employment with Michael Jackson will be terminated as of Monday, April 20, 2009 . . . In an effort to try to reduce the impact of this termination, the company has worked out a severance arrangement that will pay you a final sum of $20,000.” Shocked and angry, Grace had accepted an invitation from “celebrity interviewer” Daphne Barak to sojourn at Barak’s expense in London. For that hospitality, plus an undisclosed fee, Grace had agreed to spend several days spilling secrets in a series of interviews (some videotaped) that painted her former employer as a drug-addled incompetent so lost in a chemical haze that he really believed his contract with AEG Live was for ten shows at the O2 Arena, not fifty. “He didn’t know what he was signing,” Rwaramba told Barak. “He never did.” At the same time, Michael was impossibly controlling, Grace told the interviewer, and did all he could to prevent her from developing a relationship with anyone who was important to him. While they were staying in New Jersey with the Cascios, “I tried to develop a friendship with Frank’s mother, just to tell them thank you, but when Michael saw we were getting friendly he said, ‘Don’t trust her. She is not interested in you. She just talks to you because of me.’” Grace was even scoffing at Michael’s image as a doting father. She and she alone had provided the three kids with a stable and loving environment, Grace told Barak: “I took those babies in my arms on the first day of each of their lives. They are my babies . . . I used to hug and laugh with them. But when Michael was around they froze.” The nanny described an afternoon when Blanket had put on a concert of Michael Jackson songs, singing and dancing for her and the two older children. “I was laughing so hard. Prince and Paris were playing around. It was such a happy moment. Then suddenly Michael walked in. He surprised us. Usually, the security would alert me that he was about to come. Blanket immediately stopped. The kids looked frightened. Michael was so angry. I knew I would be fired. Whenever the children got too attached to me, he would send me away.”

  Any number of times during the months they lived in Las Vegas, Grace said, she had been forced to keep the children away from their father so they wouldn’t see the pathetic state he was reduced to by his drug addiction. In the weeks after she was first ordered out of the Carolwood chateau at the end of 2008, Rwaramba went on, she regularly received distress signals from security guards and other members of the staff concerned about Michael and the kids: “These poor babies . . . I was getting phone calls that they were being neglected. Nobody was cleaning the rooms because Michael didn’t pay the housekeeper. I was getting calls telling me Michael was in such bad shape. He wasn’t clean. He hadn’t shaved. He wasn’t eating well. I used to do all this for him, and they were trying to get me to go back.” Without her, their former nanny lamented, those three kids were essentially alone in the world, and so was their father, even if he didn’t realize it.

  Friends who ranged from Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika to Marc Schaffel would insist later that Grace had been “tricked” into giving Barak those interviews. “Daphne is a vulture,” Schaffel said. “She waits and watches to see who is in trouble.” The Israeli-born, British-based Barak was a determined and resourceful vulture, though, one who over the years had induced women as varied as Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa, and Benazir Bhutto to speak into her microphone. Giving Barak the time of day made you a “dear friend” in her self-flattering autobiography, and the list of famous people she counted among her intimates was pages long. Back in 2003, Barak had persuaded Jackson’s parents to cooperate with her (for a substantial fee, of course) on a documentary broadcast in the UK (part of it aired in the United States on CBS) under the title Our Son: Michael Jackson. Barak and Joe Jackson followed Michael around for weeks, attempting to get him to speak to Barak on camera. “I had to have her kicked out of the lobby of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when she showed up with Joe,” Schaffel recalled. “She had offered him money to get an interview with Michael, and refused to go away when Michael said he wasn’t going to do it. He didn’t want anybody to talk to
Daphne about him, and was very upset when he found out his parents had taken her money to do it anyway.”

  Michael would have been even more upset to learn that Rwaramba—who knew far more about the past fifteen years of his life than his parents ever would—had done the same thing. Grace’s stay with Daphne Barak went undetected, however, and the ex-nanny began telling people that she and Michael were back in business. “In late May, Grace sent a message through a mutual friend that she wanted my new phone number,” Schaffel recalled. “She said Michael wanted to speak with me. I said, ‘Of course.’ But it was Grace who called. She said she was in London looking for a house for Michael that she was going to help set up for him.”

  The escalating intensity of the demands that he prepare for the London shows had, among other things, worsened Michael’s insomnia. His obsessive-compulsive tendencies were always exacerbated by pressure, and what would preoccupy him was never predictable. Around the middle of June, he began to make phone calls in the night to talk for hours on end about apocalyptic imagery from the Bible and its associations with predictions of the world’s end in 2012 that had been extrapolated from the ancient Mayan calendar. “We only have a little time left,” he kept saying.

  What made slumber even more difficult for Michael as the move to London approached was that his stress was now shot through with an accelerant of excitement. He was simply, as Frank Dileo put it, “too wound up” to turn off his thoughts when he got into bed. “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” was Michael’s constant refrain even after he began attending rehearsals regularly. His principal creative collaborators, Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, both suffered from insomnia themselves and so were less troubled than others might have been by Michael’s calls at three or four in the morning to talk through the ideas that had come to him during yet another sleepless night. Such middle-of-the-night conversations seemed to him a normal part of being “immersed in the process,” Payne said: “That was when we’d be able to get a lot done because the phones weren’t ringing and we didn’t have a schedule.” Ortega offered a more ethereal memory of Michael’s predawn phone calls: “He would say, ‘I’m channeling. I’m writing music and ideas are coming to me and I can’t turn it off.’”

  Over time, though, even Ortega grew concerned about the noticeable drop in his star’s energy level on the days when Michael reported to rehearsals—or, more often, failed to report—complaining that he hadn’t slept the night before. Maybe he should “hold off” working on writing new songs until after they opened in London, the show’s director suggested. “He would say when the information was coming, when the idea was coming, it was a blessing,” Ortega recalled, “and he couldn’t turn his back on a blessing . . . I would say to him, ‘Can’t you make a little pact with your higher power to have this put on the shelf for you until a later date? We need you healthy. We need you nourished.’ He’d laugh at me and say no. ‘When they come, you have to be ready for them and you have to take advantage of them when they’re there. Or they won’t be yours.’”

  After a few hours of tossing in his bed at home, though, the star wasn’t so sanguine about his sleeplessness. Michael turned to his old friend from the HIStory tour Dr. Allan Metzger, pleading for “some form of an anesthetic,” as the doctor recalled it. Metzger sympathized, having learned from the time they spent together on tour that after the high of a performance Michael simply “could not come down.” Sleep medications that were fine for other people simply did not work for Michael Jackson, Metzger would explain. During a meeting at the Carolwood chateau, Dr. Metzger remembered, Michael had attempted to sway him by explaining how “fearful” he was that the O2 concerts would fail because he wasn’t well rested enough to perform the way he needed to in London. Metzger, though, by his account, would write a prescription only for what the doctor’s attorney later described as “a mild sleeping pill.” When Arnold Klein also refused to prescribe anything beyond sedatives, painkillers, and muscle relaxants, Michael began seeing a second plastic surgeon, Dr. Larry Koplin, hoping that the nurse who administered anesthesia in Koplin’s office would help him obtain propofol. That effort, too, apparently failed.

  He was getting getting plenty of other drugs, though, from somewhere. Michael appeared “groggy and out of it,” as one witness put it, when, after nearly a full week’s absence, he showed up for rehearsals on the evening of June 19. “He didn’t look well,” Kenny Ortega would testify later. “Michael was chilled and soft-spoken . . . He wasn’t in the kind of condition to be at rehearsal.” AEG executives were infuriated again when “This Is It” site coordinator John Hougdahl sent an e-mail to Phillips and Gongaware on the evening of June 19 telling them that Jackson had been sent home because he “was a basket case and Kenny was concerned he would embarrass himself onstage, or worse yet—get hurt.” Ortega was at once graphic and distraught in the e-mail he sent to Phillips a short time later to describe Michael’s condition: “He appeared quite weak and fatigued this evening. He had a terrible case of the chills, was trembling, rambling, and obsessing . . . I was told by our choreographer that during the artist’s costume fitting with his designer tonight they noticed he’s lost more weight.” He had personally wrapped Michael in blankets and massaged his feet to calm him down, Ortega wrote Phillips, and was truly concerned that Michael might be slipping into a downward spiral.

  According to one person in a position to know, AEG’s executives were unhappy that Ortega had instructed Michael to just go home and come back when he was ready to work. “We have a real problem here,” Randy Phillips wrote to Tim Leiweke. After conferring with his bosses, Phillips told Frank Dileo to make sure his client understood what was at stake, reminding him of language in the contract that required Michael Jackson to put on a “first-class performance” in London while maintaining a “positive public perception.” Phillips also got Conrad Murray on the phone and told the doctor he needed to keep a closer watch on his patient. Michael needed to be kept away from Arnold Klein, Phillips told Murray and kept off whatever drugs Klein was giving him. Dileo left a voice mail on Murray’s iPhone in which he told the physician, “I’m sure you are aware he had an episode last night. He’s sick. I think you need to get a blood test on him. We got to see what he’s doing.”

  Ortega, though, thought Michael might need a different kind of doctor. “My concern is now that we’ve . . . played the tough-love, now-or-never card is that the artist may be unable to rise to the occasion due to real emotional stuff . . . everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated,” the director warned Phillips. “It’s going to take a strong therapist as well as immediate physical nurturing to help him through this.” He was concerned that there was apparently no one taking care of Michael Jackson “on a daily basis,” Ortega wrote to Phillips: “There were four security guards outside his door, but no one offering him a cup of hot tea.” He thought it was “important for everyone to know” that Michael truly wanted the O2 shows to happen, Ortega ended his e-mail to Phillips. “It would shatter him, break his heart if we pulled the plug. He’s terribly frightened it’s all going to go away. He asked me repeatedly tonight if I was going to leave him. He was practically begging for my confidence. It broke my heart. He was like a lost boy. There still may be a chance he can rise to the occasion if we get him the help he needs.”

  Back in his bedroom at the Carolwood chateau, Michael made more of the early morning phone calls that had become almost a ritual during the past couple of weeks. “He kept telling people he was saying good-bye,” Arnold Klein’s office manager Jason Pfeiffer recalled. “Everyone was creeped out by it.”

  Even Michael’s daughter was becoming concerned about him. It seemed strange to her that Daddy always had a big fire going, even on the warmest days, Paris would explain later. She and the new nanny, Sister Rose, would come into a room where he was sitting and “it would be so hot,” the girl recalled, but Daddy would keep saying he was cold, that he couldn’t get warm.

  Cherilyn Lee was co
nvinced that Michael had secured a supply of propofol after she received a phone call from the Carolwood chateau on the evening of June 21, just as the “This Is It” cast was about to begin full dress rehearsals at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. According to Lee, the caller was a member of Jackson’s staff who said that Michael needed to see her right away. “I could hear Michael in the background: ‘Tell her. Tell her that one side of my body is hot, it’s hot, and one side of my body is cold, it’s very cold,’” Lee remembered. “I knew somebody had given him something that hit the central nervous system.” You have to get him to the hospital, the nurse told the man who had phoned her. Michael wouldn’t do it, the caller replied. Why should I go to the hospital when I have my own doctor on call? Michael wanted to know.

  Conrad Murray had been spending nights at the Carolwood chateau since at least May 12, 2009, the date the physician had used a Visa card to pay $865 (plus $65 for FedEx shipping) to Applied Pharmacy Services in Las Vegas for a supply of Diprivan in 20-milliliter and 100-milliliter bottles. Included in the May 12 package sent to Los Angeles were three vials of antianxiety sedatives from the benzodiazepine family, plus a vial of Flumazenil, an “antidote” to the benzos that could counteract their effects in case of an overdose. During the next few weeks, Murray would make several more purchases of Diprivan from the Las Vegas pharmacy, gradually collecting enough propofol (some of it in 1,000-milliliter bottles) to last well into the London concert series.