Before You Judge Me

by Tavis Smiley

  The thought of betrayal keeps him up tonight. He’s haunted by memories of how, in 1991, in reaction to the worldwide success of Bad, brother Jermaine released a reply record—“Word to the Badd!!”—accusing Michael of self-centeredness and unscrupulous careerism. Two years later, when accusations of pedophilia first emerged, sister La Toya threw him under the bus by publicly giving credence to the rumors.

  He can’t sleep because the forces he escaped by leaving the country after his 2005 acquittal are still in place in 2009. Confusing matters more, many of his old nemeses have become allies. Brother Jermaine, for instance, is the one who introduced him to Tohme Tohme, his present manager, who brought in AEG, the organization investing a fortune in salvaging Michael’s finances.

  He can’t sleep tonight because he’s unable to forget the series of events—improbable and unpredictable—that has led him to be living in this house in Holmby Hills.

  For the past four years he has been running, ducking, and hiding.

  Close to a physical and emotional breakdown at the end of the trial in the summer of 2005, he rejected the idea of returning to Neverland. Instead, he took his kids and flew to the other side of the world, to Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf, where he lived off the largesse of Sheikh Abdullah, whom he had also met through Jermaine, a Muslim since converting in 1989. For a while it appeared as if the sheikh was just the wealthy patron Michael had long sought. Together they forged a company with ambitious plans to make music and movies. But the harmony between the soul singer and the Arab royal lasted less than a year.

  After Michael took the kids to Tokyo in the summer of 2006 for the MTV awards show, he never returned to Bahrain. His relationship with the sheikh, who eventually sued Michael, was shattered. The next chapter in his sojourn unfolded in the remote Irish countryside, where, from August through the end of the year, he worked with artists, among them Will.i.am, on new music. It was there that magician Liam Sheehan entertained Michael and his kids for days on end. Magic held the same fascination for Michael as music. He saw them as similar phenomena.

  Toward the end of 2006, Michael and the children flew from Dublin to Las Vegas, where he rented a house on Monte Cristo Way. The hope was that in Vegas, with its enormous venues and insatiable appetite for splashy entertainment, he would find a promoter to keep his sinking financial ship afloat. No matter how great his net worth—estimates ran as high as $236 million—Michael’s debts were far higher. He was indeed courted by many of the most powerful men in the city, but he wasn’t ready to go back onstage. He turned down all offers.

  On December 30, 2006, Michael flew to Augusta, Georgia, for the funeral of James Brown, to pay homage to the master. Michael spoke of James as his single greatest influence and spent an inordinate amount of time in a private room with James’s corpse. Then it was back to Vegas, where his father, Joseph, and brother Randy, who briefly managed Michael around the time of the 2005 trial, desperately tried to gain entrance to the Monte Cristo compound. They wanted to reestablish a business relationship with Michael, but Michael wouldn’t let them in.

  Michael lay low in Vegas during the first few months of 2007. By June he was in the Washington, DC, area, living in hotels and looking for a home. With his finances more precarious than ever, he maxed out his credit cards. Hotels refused his business. In August, with his children in tow, he went to live in suburban New Jersey with the Cascios, his beloved surrogate family, with whom he’d been extraordinarily close for decades. A couple of months later, he and the kids relocated to Los Angeles, where he attended Jesse Jackson’s sixty-sixth birthday party. Meanwhile, Sheikh Abdullah sued Michael for $7 million.

  During the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays of 2007, billionaire Ron Burkle, whom Michael met through Jesse Jackson, volunteered to look into Michael’s financial morass. Michael was in imminent danger of losing his most valuable assets: Neverland and the Sony/ATV song catalog that included the Beatles’ copyrights. Meanwhile, Burkle arranged for Michael and the children to stay at Green Acres, the billionaire’s sprawling Los Angeles estate, free of charge.

  By the end of 2007, Michael was able to refinance his loans and save his properties. He returned to Las Vegas, living at the Palms Casino Resort. He went to work at a recording studio, where he began developing new material.

  In February of 2008, he was encouraged by the successful release of the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Thriller. In March, he and the children moved to still another Vegas rental property, a house on Palomino Lane. That’s when Michael met billionaire Tom Barrack, who looked at his debt—by then some $400 million—and decided to save the Neverland ranch and also connect Michael to another billionaire, Philip Anschutz, owner of AEG Live, the concert promoter. It didn’t take the Barrack-Anschutz team long to envision the enormous earning potential in terms of Michael Jackson world concert tours, movies, amusement parks, and even casinos. They were willing to pour tens of millions into rebuilding the Michael Jackson brand.

  Michael’s introductions to Barrack and Anschutz were facilitated by Lebanese-born businessman Tohme Tohme.

  By the summer of 2008, Raymone Bain, Michael’s manager during his posttrial period in the Middle East and Ireland, had been dismissed, and Tohme Tohme installed as her replacement.

  That fall, father Joseph reentered the picture, pressuring Michael to join a Jackson family reunion concert promoted by Patrick Allocco’s AllGood Entertainment. Allocco was also meeting with still another former Michael Jackson manager, Frank Dileo.

  In December of 2008, Michael moved from Vegas to the Carolwood estate in Los Angeles—the same estate where he now tries to sleep, after returning from London and the announcement of the This Is It shows, on this March night in 2009.

  He’s been through a lot in just a few years.

  From Bahrain to Tokyo. From Tokyo to Ireland.

  From Ireland to Vegas. From Vegas to DC.

  From DC to New Jersey and the solace of the Cascios’ home.

  From Jersey to L.A. and then back to Vegas before returning to L.A.

  And now all focus is on London.

  He has four months to prepare.

  Four months to deal with the forces at play: his manager, his family, his creditors, his promoters.

  Four months to make good on a deal that will surely secure for him the dream house—Prince Jefri’s mansion in Las Vegas—where he and his children can live happily ever after.

  Four months to rehearse for a series of shows—he has to do only ten—that will repay his loving fans for their unwavering loyalty.

  Four months to reassert his reputation as the world’s greatest entertainer.

  Four months to get in control of his life.

  Four months to finally put behind him the confusion and pain of his recent past.

  Four months to do what he has always been able to do: put his mind and heart into his art.

  Four months to reestablish his sense of purpose.

  Yes, Michael tells himself, four months is enough. Four months is all I need.

  And yet he still can’t sleep.

  4

  Demerol

  Back in 1997, at the conclusion of his third and final international solo tour—this one in support of the HIStory project—Michael released Blood on the Dance Floor, an album that included five new songs and eight remixes of previous releases. Among the new material was “Morphine,” the first and only Michael Jackson song to deal with his relationship to drugs.

  He thinks of “Morphine” on March 12, 2009, when he is on his way to the office of Dr. Arnold Klein, the dermatologist he met back in the eighties through entertainment mogul David Geffen. Although Michael has requested that AEG employ Dr. Conrad Murray, who occasionally treated his children for minor ailments in Vegas, as his full-time, live-in physician, he turns to Klein when he feels the need to escape the pain in his body and mind.

  There was a time when Klein’s clients, among them Michael’s dear friend Elizabeth Taylor, saw him as a savior. Klei
n and Michael were especially close. It was in Klein’s office that Michael met Debbie Rowe, his second wife and the mother of his first two children. Klein gained a national reputation for his use of Botox to augment lips and remove wrinkles and crow’s-feet from the face. Obsessed with appearing forever young, Michael turned to Klein—as well as to plastic surgeon Dr. Steven Hoefflin—to maintain a youthful appearance. Michael wanted, among other features, an upturned nose—much like the nose of Bobby Driscoll, the child actor hired by Disney to be the voice and likeness of Peter Pan—and a cleft in his chin and a blemish-free complexion. As a teenager, Michael, like Bobby Driscoll, was tortured by chronic outbreaks of acne. And as an adult, Michael was alarmed by an ongoing condition of vitiligo, a disease causing blotches of pigmentation loss. He feared that he would be permanently marred. After meeting Klein, the doctor who cleared up his skin, Michael felt relief and gratitude. But beyond the Botox and assorted collagens, Klein gave Michael something else: Demerol.

  Demerol is a powerful painkilling opioid, an addictive narcotic. Ever since the near-tragic accident that scorched Michael’s scalp in 1984, he has relied on medicine to cope with pain. This is the same reliance that caused him to cut short his Dangerous tour and enter a rehab facility in the early nineties. Among his close friends and family members, it is common knowledge that he has slowly slipped back into Demerol dependence. Interventions have proved unsuccessful.

  “Morphine” is one of Michael’s major musical constructions. It’s both frighteningly raw and hauntingly ethereal. Its story line is intentionally opaque. The drug is seen as a “hot kiss,” a “hot buzz,” a “kick in the back,” a “heart attack.” The sonic atmosphere is startling—a heady mixture of joy and shame, desire and remorse, dismay and relief. After he sings the first few verses with shocking intensity, Michael drifts off into a remarkable reverie. The beat suddenly stops. Rhythm is suspended. And suddenly he’s ingesting the drug and describing a state of euphoria. He surrenders to the high and melodically replicates the floating feeling brought on by Demerol. “Demerol,” he sings over and over again, looking down at himself in an out-of-body moment. “Oh, God, he’s taking Demerol!” He floats out into space; he floats above all physical distress, entering a stratosphere of pure pleasure. But the respite is brief. The interlude ends and we’re back into the endless warfare between willpower and indulgence, ecstasy and disease.

  Today Michael’s need to escape is great. After his return from London, his equivocation about the This Is It shows has grown. That’s because yesterday, March 11, he was told that all ten shows sold out in record time. The overwhelming demand crashed the websites where tickets were offered. Given Michael’s financial needs, Tohme Tohme and AEG argued that it would be foolish not to add another ten shows. They also let it be known that Prince held the record of selling out the O2, with twenty-one straight shows. They were certain that this fact would stoke Michael’s competitive fires and motivate him to do at least thirty shows, if only to best the artist with whom he has been compared since the early eighties.

  Michael agrees to thirty concerts, but when they sell out as quickly as the first ten, he’s given a new number: fifty. No one has ever come close to selling out the O2 with fifty consecutive shows. At first Michael is furious. That’s outrageous, far beyond anything he would ever consider. The task is too great; the work will be crushing. But his handlers spell out the tremendous financial rewards. They also appeal to his sense of grand destiny. If one man can sell out fifty shows at the O2, they contend, that man is Michael Jackson.

  They know how to push his buttons. After much heated discussion, Michael submits, but with one caveat: AEG must guarantee the presence of people from the Guinness World Records book to formally mark all the record-breaking accomplishments.

  So somehow, within a span of days, Michael has committed to five times as many shows as originally planned. He knows full well that his crafty handlers are manipulating him. But he also knows that he’s getting 90 percent of the profits from the concerts. In these new negotiations, he has also been able to get AEG to put down $15 million in a fund toward buying Prince Jefri’s Vegas mansion.

  The result of this last-minute inflation of obligations is confusion. On one hand, there is Michael the Conqueror, Michael who wants to break every sales record ever set, Michael who set his sights on world dominion. This is the same Michael who, in drumming up excitement for his HIStory tour, ordered the construction of a colossal statue of himself, in mock military garb, and had it set upon a barge that floated down the River Thames. This is the Michael who called himself the Thriller, called himself Bad, called himself Dangerous, and won’t stop until he rewrites the pages of HIStory to include a chapter on his unmatched feats. This is Michael the Heroic, Michael who, in 2001, titled his most recent studio album Invincible. This is the strong, determined, forward-looking, forward-marching, unbeatable, intractable Michael.

  But there’s another Michael, a realistic Michael, a humble Michael, a Michael who realizes that he has limits, a Michael who, from long experience, knows that the task of performing shows in a relatively short span of time, even without the rigors of moving from city to city, can be crushing. This is a Michael who remembers the fatigue suffered after three mind-numbing, soul-draining world tours: Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory. This is a Michael who realizes that he’s physically out of shape and emotionally out of sorts, a Michael who, out of the corner of his eye, sees his father making a move on him, a Michael who wishes he had kept his vow never to return to Southern California, the place where his fortunes fell so precipitously in 1993, with allegations of pedophilia and, a decade later, with an arrest and a prolonged trial. This is a Michael who wants to escape, slip back into hiding, and flee to an obscure corner of the world, where no one and nothing can ever bother him again.

  One Michael is excited by the notion of his own grandiosity. That Michael can’t get enough attention. Another Michael seeks solace in solitude. That Michael longs for anonymity. The conflict is hardly new. And adding to the puzzlement is that both Michaels—the one seeking the spotlight and the one running from it—have a heart to help a world full of hurt, have ambition to heal an ailing planet. Michael the Conqueror sees himself as strong enough to make a meaningful difference, just as Modest Michael, without pomp or ceremony, is moved to lend a hand to a homeless child or an impoverished orphan.

  “Before Off the Wall, when Michael could still step out in public without being mobbed, we’d go to a vegetarian restaurant called the Golden Temple,” said sister Janet. “He’d buy a large quantity of take-out meals, and we’d spend an entire afternoon riding around the city, stopping and giving this food to the homeless. We’d do this day after day. He’d say, ‘I know this is just a drop in the bucket. There’s still so much suffering in the world, but at least we’re doing something.’ When I watched him do all this, I realized that, for all his conflicts, he had an absolutely pure heart.”

  “Michael’s good-heartedness worked for him and against him,” said Bobby Taylor, the man who discovered him. “It worked for him because he was a truly wonderful human being with tremendous empathy for everyone. But it worked against him, I believe, because it made him want to please everyone—starting with his father. If you trace Michael’s career, you see him always working his tail off to please some kind of authority figure standing over him. After his father, it was Berry Gordy. After Berry Gordy, it was Quincy Jones. While with Quincy, there was also Walter Yetnikoff, the big boss at CBS Records. Eventually Michael did become more his own man—his own producer and his own boss—but that little kid inside him that was dying to please Daddy never completely died. And, of course, when it comes to Michael’s mother, Miss Katherine, he’d do anything in the world to make her happy. She held more sway over her son than anyone.

  “If you want to understand Michael, you got to remember one thing: he can be gotten to. By that I mean that he’s easily influenced. And he’s easily influenced because he’s basically a nice
guy who wants to make you happy. He’s also easily influenced because he’s a genuinely curious and open-minded individual. So if you can get close to Michael, and if you exert a powerful authoritative vibe, chances are you can get him to go along with your program. That’s why he’s had so many different managers at so many different times telling him what to do. And that’s why all these people, looking for a piece of the pie, went crazy trying to get next to him. They knew that once they had his ear, there was a good chance they’d also get his money.”

  During the short ride from the Carolwood estate to the office of Dr. Arnold Klein in Beverly Hills, Michael is all too aware of the people looking to get next to him. Now that he is back in Los Angeles, the center of the entertainment world, he feels that world crowding in on him. People from his past—managers, agents, and lawyers he once dismissed—are now knocking at his door. The voices inside Michael’s head are as loud and dissonant as ever.

  You need to avoid these people, says one voice. There’s a good reason why you cut them off. They were too self-serving, too controlling. Don’t get bit by the same dog twice.

  But another voice says, You need to allow these people back in your life. They helped you prosper. They served at a time when, unlike now, you were at the top of the charts.

  And a third voice: More than ever, you need strong guidance. You’ve made a mess out of your finances, and you lack the knowledge and wisdom to fix the problem.

  And a fourth voice: No one can solve the dilemma except you. You know yourself. You’ve always known what to do. You’ve always come back. This time will be no different.

  This time is different, says still another voice. This time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Committing to fifty shows is crazy. Your advisors are crazy.

  Fifty shows is sensational, argues a countervoice. Your advisors are sensational. They’re saving your life.