Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  According to Dr. Murray, he spent six weeks using an IV to feed 50 milligrams of Diprivan into Jackson’s veins after the performer returned home from rehearsals, enough to let Michael “sleep” (it’s more accurate to describe patients under propofol as unconscious than as asleep, anesthesiologists say) for at least a few hours, then wake up feeling not just rested, but actually exhilarated. Kai Chase, Michael’s chef, would say she knew nothing about any sleep medications, but did see Dr. Murray carry a pair of oxygen canisters downstairs each day after his morning consultation with Mr. Jackson in the master bedroom. Oxygen is one of the two medical gases (nitrous oxide being the other) that are commonly mixed with anesthesia in continuous-flow machines during surgeries.

  The degree to which Murray had assumed control of all decisions being made about Michael Jackson’s physical well-being was evident to Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips when they showed up for a meeting on June 20 that the doctor had demanded. Dr. Murray insisted that Michael was “physically and emotionally fine,” Ortega remembered, and seemed infuriated by the decision to send Michael home from rehearsal on the previous evening: “He said I should stop trying to be an amateur doctor and psychologist and be the director, and leave Michael’s health to him.”

  He was reassured when Dr. Murray “guaranteed us that Michael would get into it,” recalled Phillips, who sent out an e-mail that afternoon in which he expressed his confidence in Murray, “who I am gaining immense respect for as I get to deal with him more.”

  “This doctor is extremely successful (we check everyone out) and does not need this gig,” Phillips added, “so he [is] totally unbiased and ethical.”

  23

  The last ten days of rehearsals in Los Angeles had been shifted to the Staples Center because even the Forum didn’t have enough ceiling height to accommodate the production’s gargantuan scale. According to Kenny Ortega, Michael Jackson responded to the move with a determined effort to demonstrate that he could still, as the show director had put it, “rise to the occasion.”

  Just three nights after an exasperated Ortega had sent him home, Michael arrived at the Staples Center for the first full dress rehearsal of the O2 show, on the evening of June 22, “in this new kind of place,” the director recalled, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Suddenly “everyone was just kind of believing,” Ortega said. “I think there was this feeling in the room, in the air, we all could feel it, like we were on a plane. ‘We’re packed, we’re going.’ You could see London, we could smell it, we were ready.”

  They had all seen the mercury in Michael’s personality during the past few weeks, moments when he was illuminated by a flash of insight and expected that his dancers and musicians get it without a great deal of explanation. He might coax them at first, but turned insistent within moments, flashing his temper when one of the performers frustrated his demand for an adjustment in tempo, or pouting and stalking off when another answered his instructions with a look of incomprehension. But now, a little more than a week before they were scheduled to leave for London, Michael seemed suddenly to love everything he saw and heard. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he kept telling people.

  Watching it all through the lens of her camera, Sandrine Orabona was entranced by the sense of communion that enveloped Michael, his musicians, and the dancers as they worked out their performance of “Human Nature.” A strange but beautiful intimacy appeared to have developed among all the performers, the videographer remembered. Everything onstage started moving at lightning speed and people began to speak in what Orabona described as “creative shorthand,” so focused that they could understand each other completely with only a couple of words and a gesture. When Michael told the musicians, “Make it sound like you’re dragging yourself out of bed,” they all seemed to know exactly what he meant and “were spot on,” the videographer recalled. The atmosphere on the stage that evening, Kenny Ortega would say later, became a kind of shared breath in which the entire production team understood exactly what would be possible when they took the stage in London. “Everyone in a Michael Jackson show is an extension of Michael Jackson,” Ortega had shouted at the dancers any number of times during rehearsals, and now it was as if they had known all along precisely what he meant.

  On the following evening, June 23, Tohme Tohme showed up at the Staples Center to make his first-ever visit to rehearsals for the London shows. Ten days earlier, Tohme and Katherine Jackson had met at the Coffee Bean on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. Tohme’s claim was that Mrs. Jackson wanted the meeting to tell him that Michael was deteriorating physically and to beg him to intervene. Mrs. Jackson’s story was that Tohme was asking her to help him get his job back. She had never liked the man, Michael’s mother said, ever since he had insisted that her grandchildren who were living in the Lindley Avenue condo should pay rent on the place. Whoever was telling the truth about the Coffee Bean meeting, what was certain was that Tohme hadn’t seen his erstwhile client face-to-face in five weeks. And was horrified, Tohme said, when Michael ran forward to wrap him in an embrace: “I felt his bones. I was shocked to see the weight he had lost. I asked him, ‘Michael, what’s happening with you?’” Michael just laughed off the question about his weight, and went back to rehearsals. Only minutes later, though, he pulled Tohme aside to complain tearfully that, “They’re torturing me.” He asked what was wrong, Tohme recalled, “and all Michael told me is that they’re asking him to put things in his ears. He hates things in his ears—the microphone, you know, he doesn’t like that.” It felt like someone sticking a fist in his ear, Michael said, but they wouldn’t let him take it out. “I said, ‘Michael, just don’t wear it if you don’t want to. You are the star.’ But he said, ‘They’re making me.’” Within moments, though, Michael was back onstage performing, and looked as if there was nothing at all bothering him. “It was confusing,” Tohme recalled.

  Tohme would say later that whatever doubts he harbored about his own status were soothed by that visit to the Staples Center. Randy Phillips introduced him to everyone as “Dr. Tohme, Michael’s manager,” and placed a bracelet around his wrist that would allow Tohme access to the Staples Center rehearsals any time he wanted to show up. At one point, Michael waved to Frank Dileo and said, “Come here and give your boss a hug.” Dileo responded by walking away, and Tohme asked Randy Phillips, “What’s that guy doing here?” They kept Dileo around, Phillips answered, according to Tohme, “because he makes Michael laugh.”

  When Michael returned to the Carolwood chateau that evening, there was already an IV drip set up in his bedroom. Dr. Conrad Murray would claim later that he had grown concerned about fostering a propofol addiction in Jackson, and was especially bothered by hearing Michael refer to the white liquid Diprivan solution as “my milk.” He had decided that Jackson should be “weaned” from his reliance on propofol, Murray said, and sometime after midnight, gave Jackson a Diprivan dosage of 25 milligrams—just half of what Michael had been taking—then supplemented it with two of the prescription sedatives that had come in a package delivered from Las Vegas. It was enough, Murray claimed, to let the performer sleep until after the sun rose the next morning.

  On June 24, 2009, Michael arrived at the Staples Center at about 6:30 p.m. for a meeting with Randy Phillips, Tim Leiweke, and Grammy Awards show producer Ken Ehrlich. Frank Dileo sat in, listening with Phillips and Leiweke as Jackson and Ehrlich discussed their ideas for a Halloween television special that would incorporate clips from Michael’s live performance of “Thriller” at the O2 Arena into the network premiere of his film Ghosts. Phillips’s promise of support for Michael’s attempt to create a career in movies, the AEG executives knew, had been a major motivator in winning his agreement to the O2 concerts; the airing of Ghosts would satisfy that promise in a big way.

  The understanding that a success in London was going to reinvigorate Michael Jackson’s career across the board—as a live performer, as a recording artist, as a filmmaker, and as a cultural phenomenon—seemed at last to
be sinking in, Phillips thought. Michael was humming with excitement as he left his meeting with Ehrlich to spend the next hour reviewing the 3-D effects for the “This Is It” shows. What the production team had done with the music videos of the Dome Project had him giddy with excitement. Michael’s idealism and his vainglory each would be on full display in this series of “short films.” But what the fans would wildly love was certain to invite an equal measure of derision from his critics.

  Those who mocked him could be counted on to sneer at a montage that placed Michael among a parade of his icons: Princess Diana, Mother Teresa—and now the face of Barack Obama. Anyone with an even slight sense of perspective could only squirm while imagining what the likes of Jarvis Cocker might say about the eleven hundred CGI soldiers who would march down the Champs-Élysées to the tune of “They Don’t Care About Us” before arriving at an Arc de Triomphe that had been bent into an M shape. Jackson-lovers and Jacko-haters were certain to be polarized by the effects that would accompany Michael’s performance of “Earth Song,” the spiritual centerpiece of the “This Is It” show. The song would end with a recapitulation of that famous man-versus-tank scene from Tiananmen Square, only at the O2 it would be a dewy young native girl facing down a bulldozer in the Amazon rain forest—soon to be replaced by Saint Michael standing up for her against the villains of corporate pillage. On the other hand, the 3-D effects that would be incorporated into “Thriller” were going to flood the arena with adrenaline, and the sight of Michael in his white pinstriped suit dashing through the reworked video for “Smooth Criminal”—dodging a come-hither look from Rita Hayworth’s Gilda in one frame and ducking a Humphrey Bogart scowl in another—was both electrifying and hilarious.

  “I want people to scream for miles!” he had told Ed Alonzo, the magician-comedian that had been hired to help him stage the two big set-piece illusions of the London shows. Jackson was delighted by what he and Alonzo had come up with for the introduction to the concert’s opening number, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” As Michael stood on the darkened stage, a luminous glass globe would hover in the air, then float all around his spacesuit-encased body before flying out above the audience, growing steadily brighter as it zoomed over the heads of the fans then spun back toward the stage, skimming across the floor before it climbed again and landed in Michael’s open palm, exploding into incandescence as it disappeared from sight. The other piece of stagecraft Alonzo had created was a prelude to Michael’s performance of “Dirty Diana.” The stunt was to take place on and around a flaming mattress. Michael would be pursued about the bed by a pole-dancing aerialist “fire woman” who would raise a burst of “flames” (fluttering strips of scarlet and crimson fabric) each time she touched the stage. She would catch her prey eventually, of course, and then, leering, use her golden ropes to lash Michael like an unwilling partner to the tall posts of the bed. A semisheer sheet of billowing red fabric would fall over the scene, allowing the audience to see only Michael’s struggling silhouette until finally the red sheet fell—revealing the fire woman as the one tied to the bed, just as Michael materialized in the center of the stage, standing alone.

  A planned practice session for the magic acts would be postponed until the next evening, but Alonzo was still waiting and watching when Jackson finished his chicken and broccoli dinner and took the stage at just about nine p.m. on the evening of the twenty-fourth. Michael complained that he had laryngitis, Alonzo remembered, and people glanced at one another, wondering if he was joking. There was no sign that he was ill when Michael began what turned into a run-through of the numbers he would perform at the O2. “He looked great and had great energy,” Alonzo recalled. “He wasn’t singing at full level, but it was as beautiful as ever.”

  To what degree sweet emotions or wishful thinking—or even self-interest—might have colored the memories of those who were present in the Staples Center that night is impossible to gauge. Still, there was a persuasive unanimity in the recollections of witnesses.

  “Bioluminescent,” was the word Kenny Ortega used to describe the Michael Jackson he saw on the stage at Staples.

  “He came onstage and was electric,” agreed the show’s lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe.

  “It was fantastic, he was so great,” said Randy Phillips.

  “I watched in awe,” said Michael’s personal photographer Kevin Mazur. “Every track he sang sounded terrific. Michael was back and in real style.”

  “The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Ken Ehrlich said. “I wasn’t watching Justin Timberlake or Chris Brown or Usher or any of the hundreds of acts that have taken from Michael, the modern inheritors of his art. It was him.”

  During Michael’s performance of “Billie Jean,” Sandrine Orabona would recall, “I turn the camera around and it’s like fifteen crew and dancers on the floor [standing and] watching, and they can’t believe what they are seeing.”

  “We all looked at each other and there was something that said he really had it,” Woodroffe remembered. “It was like he had been holding back, and suddenly he was performing as one had remembered him in the past.”

  “I honestly could not wait to see the show,” Mazur chimed in.

  Ehrlich alone leavened his recollections of Michael’s performance with something that resembled objective reporting: “What I saw that night was a person who was still in the process of learning the show. I watched Kenny Ortega walk him through some stage directions. I know his method and there’s a certain reticence when he’s not in full makeup and wardrobe . . . I’ve seen him in rehearsal mode several times over the years. Michael is extremely methodical. He’s not going to give it all until he knows he’s got it all. But sometimes he’d jump into it, and it was really exciting. As he got more comfortable with the props and where the dancers were, he got more animated . . . He wasn’t giving it full out, but vocally he had started to really project.”

  For several others, the most impressive thing about Michael’s passage through the songs he would perform in London, from the opening salvo of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” right on through the show’s closer, “Man in the Mirror,” was that he never hesitated. “He didn’t even take a moment to grab a bottle of water or take a rest,” remembered Ed Alonzo. “He went from one number to another.” According to Ken Ehrlich, Michael “performed virtually nonstop for two hours and ran through about a dozen greatest hits. He stopped just a couple of times to tweak arrangements and work on moves with dancers.”

  Michael did pause once for a few minutes to inspect the props that would be employed during his performance of “Thriller” at the O2, and was especially taken with the giant spiders Bernt Capra had created for him. Then he went right on to the next number.

  The most transcendent moment of the evening, those who were there would say, was Michael’s rendition of “Earth Song.” He had placed his own composition at the very heart of the program he planned for London, and intended it to be the climax of the concert. His performance of “Earth Song” was the climax of that last rehearsal, according to the people present in the Staples Center, the one moment of the evening when Michael truly cut loose and gave full voice. The homiletic lyrics of “Earth Song” might easily have been dismissed (and were, by any number of critics) as cloying clichés, targeted to the sort of emotional manipulation that is the essence of sentimentality. Yet as he finished the song amid the sounds of crying whales and images of a ravaged rain forest, “We all had goose bumps,” Randy Phillips said. “I had never seen such exultation in the cast and crew.”

  Everyone stood stunned for a while, Kenny Ortega remembered. Moments later, it seemed, the rehearsal was over, but no one wanted to break the spell by leaving: “When he finished, we all stayed there, just pressing around.” Finally, as the other performers started to move offstage, he and his star stood out front, Ortega recalled, and “Michael said, ‘This is the dream. We did it good, Kenny. We did it. Very good.’”

  “There was this anticipation of
tomorrow, this anticipation of London and this great feeling about what we’d accomplished over the past couple of nights,” Ortega remembered. “He told me he was happy. He had nothing creatively or critically to say to anyone other than, ‘I love you, thank you, everyone’s doing a great job and I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

  It was after 12:30 a.m. when Michael began to make his way out of the arena. One of the producers stopped him to say thanks for all the work he’d done to finish the videos. A moment later, the man came running over to tell Ortega, “You won’t believe what Michael just said to me: ‘Make sure those ghosts come through the screen.’”

  Randy Phillips walked Michael outside to his car. According to Phillips, “He put his arm around me and said to me in that kinda soft, lilting voice of his, he said, ‘Thank you for getting me here. I got it now. I know I can do this. I’ll take it from here.’”

  Michael Jackson had left the Staples Center in Travis Payne’s words “ecstatic and excited.” The sensations he carried with him out of the rehearsal were still charging Michael’s nervous system at 1:30 a.m., when he began trying to settle down in his bedroom at the Carolwood chateau. Sleep would not come easily.

  Dr. Conrad Murray, though, at least by his account, was determined to continue weaning Michael from his reliance on Diprivan. As he had the night before, Murray said, he decided to attempt a gradual induction of sleep in Michael without using any anesthesia at all. He began, the doctor said, with a tablet of diazepam, a benzodiazepine drug most commonly marketed as Valium. Diazepam is principally an antianxiety drug, though it is also used to treat insomnia and epileptic seizures, as well as muscle spasms, restless leg syndrome, and alcohol withdrawal. Valium is frequently administered to hospital patients who are about to undergo such relatively minor procedures as a colonoscopy, and is sometimes used before more major surgeries, not only to relax patients, but also because its hypnotic effects tend to induce a specific state of amnesia that permits people to forget what it was like to be cut open. It’s a valuable drug, but also a highly addictive one. Symptoms of withdrawal from long-term use can include convulsions, tremors, and hallucinations.