by Tavis Smiley
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Before you judge me
Try hard to love me
—“Childhood” by Michael Jackson
Prologue
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
No one can quite believe it.
The dancers, the singers, the musicians, the crew—everyone is stunned, even shocked, by the power of Michael’s performance. His presence has electrified the Staples Center. It makes no difference that the cavernous arena is empty. Makes no difference that this is only a rehearsal. What matters is that after months of dire uncertainty about the upcoming shows in London—months when the star has appeared too weak, distracted, or drugged to commit to this enormous undertaking—Michael has turned it around. Just when many were convinced that the concerts, starting July 13, would have to be scrubbed, Michael has proved the skeptics wrong.
His voice is strong. His dance moves are impeccable. His critiques of the arrangements and choreography are right on the mark. But what moves his support team most is Michael’s heart. Everyone present can feel Michael’s loving and generous heart. His heart is beating wildly, and so are theirs. In his heart, he has rededicated himself to the great task at hand.
Onstage, Michael has taken command of what only a few days earlier appeared to be a hopelessly unwieldy production. Only he knows how to repair and refit the broken pieces. Only he has the charismatic energy to bring it all together. Only he has the singular focus to salvage this enterprise and pull off the comeback he has promised his worldwide audience.
As he works his magic for hours on end, all eyes are on Michael. The renewal of his ambition—to make these shows the most spectacular in his four-decade history of performing—has excited the ambition of everyone around him. To be close to Michael is to be close to immortality.
When he leaves the Staples Center that Wednesday evening, exhausted but exhilarated, he feels more alive than ever.
Yet only sixteen weeks earlier, at a chaotic London press conference, he was experiencing far different feelings.
1
This Is It
On March 5, 2009, in London, England, Michael realizes he must do what he has long sought to avoid. He must announce his decision to return to the stage. At this point he has no choice. Commitments have been made, contracts signed. The deal is sealed. Yet part of him remains uncertain and reluctant. A fifty-year-old single father of three who has devoted himself to his children, he has for the past several years led a highly protected and insular family life. He has not toured since 1997 and not performed since 2006, and then only for a few fleeting moments. Following his dramatic acquittal after a sixteen-week-long trial in the summer of 2005, he and his children have wandered the world in search of a peace that has maddeningly eluded him. Meanwhile, with his finances in catastrophic disarray, he has finally settled upon a solution: a series of ten concerts at the O2 Arena.
And still he isn’t sure.
As hundreds of reporters and thousands of fans await his arrival at the press conference inside the O2, Michael paces back and forth in a van outside the arena. He is not ready to face the music or the worldwide media.
He cannot help but remember his last public appearance in London. It was in 2006, during the eighteenth annual World Music Awards. Beyoncé introduced him at Earls Court, where he was presented with a Guinness World Record: twenty-four years after its initial release, Thriller was declared the biggest-selling record ever. But what should have been a happy occasion turned sad—at least for Michael’s fans. Besides joining with a children’s choir to sing a few choruses of “We Are the World,” Michael did nothing beyond give a brief acceptance speech. His fans had hoped he would perform “Thriller.” Instead, it was Chris Brown who sang the song. The next day the press eviscerated Michael, who claimed that he had never been scheduled to sing. The negative publicity stung, and now, waiting in the van, Michael wonders whether London is ready to forgive and forget.
This announcement is a turning point. He knows that there’s no going back. He’s gone back before. Michael has a history of breaking commitments and canceling shows, followed by floods of legal entanglements. He can’t afford to do that again.
“This is it” is the mantra that sounds inside his head.
This Is It is the actual name he’s given the tour. He wants there to be no mistake.
This will be his last public performance.
Ever.
His closest confidants, like his sister Janet, understand who he is and who he will always be: an artist obsessed with art. He is a man who wants nothing more than the freedom to devote himself to making music and other creative endeavors. Live shows are simply too draining. They are repetitive. They reflect his past, not his present, and not his future.
The O2 shows, though, will be different. He will not have to travel. This concert series will take place in one venue and one venue alone. That means he and his children can avoid the exhausting grind of a grueling tour.
The fact that his kids—Prince, twelve; Paris, ten; and Blanket, seven—have not seen the kind of jaw-dropping show he envisions for the O2 fuels his drive. In these, his last performances, his children will at last experience a full-blown Michael Jackson spectacular. They will have that memory to cherish forever.
Michael definitely wants to perform for his children. But after the ten shows, he also wants to ensconce them in a sixteen-acre estate on Spanish Gate Drive in Las Vegas. This is the property he views as a replacement for Neverland, now associated with unbearable pain and ceaseless persecution. He is obsessed with owning this Vegas mansion, the ultimate sanctuary. But buying it from Prince Jefri Bolkiah, a member of the royal family of Brunei, will require the windfall income from This Is It—and then some.
So yes, Michael is motivated. He has every reason in the world to go out there and announce these ten shows. In his deepest heart, he still feels the great passion of his fans. For over forty years, he has experienced an extraordinary rapport with his admirers. Few entertainers have elicited such fierce loyalty. He loves them as much as they love him. He wishes to please, thrill, and satisfy them; he wishes to thank them for their unwavering support. No matter how bleak his circumstances, his fans have stood by his side, sung his praises, bought his records, come to his shows, slept in the cold streets outside his hotel rooms. In those instances, he has invariably sent them food and drink. After all-day, all-night plane rides, he has been known to stop and sign autographs for the fans who have come to greet him in Mumbai, Munich, or Amsterdam.
Why are his handlers, afraid that he has been drinking, so anxious about his state of mind? Why is he hesitating? Why is he so consumed with doubt? Why has he kept the crowd of reporters and fans waiting a half hour, now an hour, now nearly ninety minutes?
His reluctance is understandable. The shows’ preparation will involve backbreaking work: arduous auditions, complex choreography, pyrotechnical special effects, meticulous musical preparations, and rigorous rehearsals. He sighs when he considers the road ahead. If only there was a way to avoid the ordeal. When AEG, the international entertainment promoter, initially proposed the idea of the O2 concerts to Michael back in the spring of 2007,
he expressed indifference. Negotiations were never initiated. But that was then, and this is now. Now, to satisfy his creditors and placate his fans, Michael has no choice.
He finds some comfort in the grand notion of destiny. He sees the design of his immediate future formed by the same destiny that took shape decades earlier, when it became clear that, as a five-year-old, he would front the family band. Then—as now—destiny said, “Express your creative genius. Go out and perform. Wow the crowds. Make the people happy. Pay the bills. Work hard.”
It is his destiny to return to the stage.
If he needs reassurance, it comes from a promotional film that he watches on a monitor in the van as it’s simultaneously projected on giant screens in the O2 Arena. It’s a series of video clips designed to send Michael’s fans, impatiently awaiting his delayed arrival, into hysteria.
The title card reads, “The time has come. The King of Pop returns.”
Here is Michael—the militaristic Michael from the HIStory tour—carved in a heroic statue so gargantuan that helicopters fly beneath his spread-eagle legs.
Here is Michael negotiating his miraculous moonwalk during the musical break in “Billie Jean.”
Here is red-leathered Michael forging a furiously syncopated peace among the warring “Beat It” gangs.
Here is Michael, as if shot through a cannon, leaping onstage during his Dangerous days.
Here is Michael prancing and prodding the ghouls and goblins in his sinuous “Thriller” dance.
Here is “Bad” Michael; “Dirty Diana” Michael; self-reflecting “Man in the Mirror” Michael; gravity-defying, mean-leaning “Smooth Criminal” Michael.
And all the while, in stadiums holding hundreds of thousands of ecstatic spectators—from Budapest to Brunei, from Brisbane to Tunis, from Seoul to Johannesburg—fans scream and tremble, fans convulse, fans faint, fans are placed on stretchers and carried off because the mere sight of Michael Jackson—the sound of his soaring voice, the movement of his undulating body—is more than their consciousness can contain.
As Michael watches all this, his confidence is reinforced. He is reminded of his power as a performer. No matter how complex and painful the preparation, no matter how the shows mingle the present with the past, it’s all worth it when he gets onstage and does what no one else can do.
He transcends. He transforms himself. He transforms the crowd. He loses himself, loses his doubts and apprehensions and becomes one with motion and melody. He moves through stages of ecstasy, and though extreme exhaustion follows every show, each one reestablishes the mystical harmony of his artistry. The extreme tensions of his personal life are worked out onstage: the pent-up rage, the mounting frustrations. If he embraces fury, grace can replace it. Lessons learned from the masters—from Fred Astaire and Charlie Chaplin and James Brown—are manifest in the form of a ferocious elegance, the hallmark of Michael Jackson’s utterly unique style.
The promotional film has aroused him.
Now he is fortified. Now he is animated.
Now he is leaving the van and walking into the O2 Arena.
Now he is facing the reporters and the hysterical fans.
Now he is smiling. Now he speaks.
“These will be my final performances. When I say this is it, it really means this is it.”
In response to screams of “We love you, Michael!” he puts his hand over his heart and says, “I’ll be performing the songs my fans want to hear… This is really it. This is the final curtain call. I love you, I really do. You have to know that. I love you so much from the bottom of my heart. This is it—and I’ll see you in July.”
He is up. He is happy. He is no longer equivocal.
It’s all happening. He is back.
And minutes after his appearance, millions around the world prepare to assault the website that’s selling tickets.
In one brief press conference, he has not only brought joy to fans, but he has given it to his children, his promoters, his managers, and himself.
He has embraced his destiny, a destiny that has always directed Michael Jackson toward spectacular success on the stage—the only place, he has claimed over and over again, where he feels entirely himself.
For the first time in years, he sees his future, once dark and foreboding, now bathed in the bright light of hope.
2
Who Will Buy This Wonderful Feeling?
To those who have dealt with him casually and those who have known him intimately, Michael Jackson is deeply loved. He is essentially a warmhearted, sweet, and gentle soul. Because he is extraordinarily sensitive, he is extraordinarily vulnerable. He is easily wounded. His instincts are to please. He dislikes confrontations and avoids them assiduously. He is smart, intuitive, and inexhaustibly curious. He loves the alchemy of art—the magic that informs theatricality of all kinds. He identifies with the powerless, especially children, and especially children who are thrust into the heady and exploitative world of entertainment.
It is only natural that on March 6, the Friday evening after his Thursday press conference, he has brought his children to London’s Drury Lane theater to see the enormously entertaining Oliver!, whose subject matter is the cruel exploitation of children.
Because the drama unfolds in lighthearted musical form, what might otherwise be a repellent story is made palatable. The bleak is made merry. The ability to mutate nightmarish scenarios into dramas of delight is one of the great themes in the work of Michael Jackson. Seated in the theater, seeing joy in the faces of his children as the story plays out, he remembers the first time he saw the film adaptation of the play. It was at the end of the sixties. The movie Oliver! was named the best picture of 1968 at the Academy Awards held in 1969, the same year the Jackson 5 recorded its first number one hit, “I Want You Back,” and released its first album. Michael viewed the movie at a moment when he couldn’t help but relate to Mark Lester, who played Oliver Twist. Mark was nearly Michael’s exact age. (Mark was born on July 11, 1958, Michael on August 29 the same year.) Like Michael, Mark won over audiences with a plaintive voice, an irresistible sweetness, and an engaging pluck.
Now, in the late winter of 2009, as Michael listens to Oliver sing “Where Is Love?,” a lament for a lost mother, he is moved to tears. He thinks of his own mother, the one constant source of love in his childhood, and cannot imagine life without a steadying maternal presence. He considers the conditions for children in nineteenth-century London, homeless orphans forced into hard labor under subhuman conditions. He envisions the work of Lewis Hine, one of his favorite photographers, who in the early twentieth century documented the plight of children working in Pennsylvania coal mines, New York City sweatshops, Georgia textile mills, Virginia glass factories, and Texas cotton fields. In Hine’s stark photos, the eyes of the children are vacant. There is not a hint of hope. The light of love has been spent.
Michael relates to these children. He feels for them on the deepest level. He understands, remembering what it’s like to be a child forced to labor under the uncaring hand of a brutal boss. But, while he knows that his talents were exploited, he also realizes that his particular exploitation was a complicated phenomenon—complicated because the work he was mandated to do, make music, brought him pleasure, recognition, and even adulation. Michael is left with the unsettling feeling that the exploitation might have been good for him.
It was music that took off the edge, just as another song sung by Oliver, “Who Will Buy?,” takes the edge off the boy’s dismal past through the expression of lilting melody. Melody washes away the pain and transforms what would be an intolerably painful story—the story of young Oliver Twist, or the story of young Michael Jackson—into a fable filled with optimism and good cheer.
It was a similarly sentimental musical number—“Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music—that he remembers singing at his first public performance; it was at an elementary school assembly when he was six. No one explained the meaning of that song to him. No
one had to. Aspirational energy was built into his character. He had to climb. He had to succeed. He still does.
Like so much of the art that Michael Jackson loves, Oliver! renews his spirit by affirming song and dance as the essential elements for overcoming trauma, no matter how severe. At every critical moment of his life, Michael has employed his musical genius to beat back the demons. It is the demons who drive the art—the manipulative villains like Fagin, who exploit children for personal profit, or, closer to home, his father, Joseph Jackson, whose beatings and attempts to terrorize Michael only added to his son’s fierce ambition.
Like The Sound of Music, like all the minidramas created by Michael—from “Thriller” to Captain EO to Ghosts—Oliver! has a happy ending. Villains are vanquished. Evil falls beneath the power of the choreographed good guys. Like the “smooth criminal” he loves to portray, Michael always saves the day. He saves the children.
After the show, Michael takes his own three children from the theater back to the safety of the elegant Lanesborough hotel, where he receives word of the sudden death of his guitarist and friend, David Williams. The news shocks Michael and, as quick as that, throws him into a state of deep grief and reflection.
David, only fifty-eight, was felled by cardiac arrest. Michael remembers the first time he heard him play. It was on an R & B song, “Don’t Hold Back,” by the group Chanson. David’s relentless rhythm guitar line riveted Michael’s attention. It was 1978, and, in conjunction with Quincy Jones, twenty-year-old Michael was auditioning musicians for what would be the first Jackson-Jones collaboration, Off the Wall. When David showed up at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles, he was presented with a rough version of “Rock with You” and asked to provide a guitar part. His playing stunned Michael. David’s rhythm riffs were complex, brilliantly percussive, and slyly seductive. David was precisely what Michael was looking for: a guitarist whose grooves both anchored and propelled the melody. That paradox—locating a rhythm locked in time and yet one that thrusts time forward, a rhythm that seemingly explodes time—is at the heart of Michael’s music.
