Before You Judge Me

by Tavis Smiley

  You’re ruining your life.

  You’re gaining your life back.

  You’ve never been stronger.

  You’ve never felt weaker.

  The voices need to stop, and there’s only one way to stop them.

  “Demerol,” the song says. “Oh, God, he’s taking Demerol.”

  Thus on the twelfth of March, in the privacy of Dr. Klein’s office, Michael is given Demerol to assuage the discomfort associated with minor dermatological procedures on his chin. Typically, a patient would receive fifty milligrams, but Michael, who over the years has developed a high tolerance for the narcotic, ingests two hundred milligrams.

  The vicious and confusing voices are quieted.

  The pain subsides.

  5

  Jehovah

  Three days after the appointment with Klein, it is Sunday, March 15. Michael is at home with the kids, watching cartoons and reading books. There’s nothing he enjoys more than the company of his children.

  His manager, Tohme Tohme, feeds him positive reports from the press. From the London Evening Standard, there are ecstatically optimistic statements from Randy Phillips, the AEG exec in charge of Michael’s This Is It shows. When it comes to Michael’s health, Phillips is unreservedly upbeat.

  “Michael was put through a whole battery of tests,” he says. “Stress, treadmill, electrocardiogram, blood work, and he passed them all… He’s in very good health. I’m fifty-four, he’s fifty, and I would like to have his cholesterol levels… He look[s] great. He’s filled out a little. He’s training.”

  Lou Ferrigno, who starred in TV’s The Incredible Hulk, is due to come over and start Michael on a fitness routine. Beyond that, Michael has hired a personal chef and is committed to a healthier eating program that excludes the greasy fried chicken he loves so much.

  The campaign is in place: vigorous exercise, nutritious food, and the mounting of the greatest shows of his career. Michael has reason to be of good cheer. Today his mind is clear. He’s wished away thoughts of the brewing warfare between rival handlers. He’s ignored the onslaught of urgent messages from his father, demanding a meeting. It’s Sunday, after all, and Sunday is the Sabbath, the day when even God Almighty rested.

  Sunday inevitably brings back thoughts of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and services at the Kingdom Hall where Michael’s mother brought her children to worship. After studying scripture for three years, Katherine was baptized as a Witness at age thirty-three, in 1963, around the time that five-year-old Michael began singing with his brothers. In her autobiography, written at the height of Michael’s fame in the late eighties, Katherine explained that her conversion started “with a knock on my door.” She was receptive to the evangelist’s strict understanding of biblical law. There was no ambiguity, no uncertainty. All questions were answered. The Witnesses proclaimed that these were the final days. After the imminent battle of Armageddon, only the true believers would be spared. Katherine was moved to become a true believer, and further moved to make certain that her children believed as well.

  Michael didn’t simply love his mother; he adored her. While his father employed brutal corporal punishment, his mother showered him with affection. And when his mother claimed that she had found the only true path to God, Michael followed her down that path with unswerving faith. His mother was incapable of falsehood. When she explained that Jehovah was to be sought and found through the teachings of the Witnesses, Michael, the most devoted of all her sons, accepted her explanation wholeheartedly.

  Michael saw Joseph as a restless and furious man. He saw Katherine as a serene and gentle woman. Joseph’s role was to prepare him to enter the ruthless world of show business. Katherine’s role was to prepare him to enter the hallowed Kingdom of God.

  That Joseph both realized and, at the same time, undermined that showbiz preparation is a difficult dichotomy for Michael to accept. Michael did, of course, succeed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. But the success was destabilized when, time and again, Michael was overwhelmed by the insane demands of show business and barely able to operate. Joseph was never capable of giving his son the necessary inner resources to effectively deal with stellar achievement.

  Although Michael will never publicly say so, Katherine’s spiritual preparation has also proved problematic. Just as Joseph’s program of nonstop work to achieve stardom was based on an uncompromising austerity, so was Katherine’s religion. Aside from the memorial of the Last Supper, the Witnesses eschew all holidays, including Christmas and birthdays. What they consider secular celebrations are strictly forbidden. Joseph enforced an unbending discipline in the realm of entertainment: practice, practice, practice. In the realm of spirituality, Katherine demanded another form of strict discipline: submit, submit, submit.

  As a child, whenever Michael was home, he clung to his mother. As an adult, he continued to live at home—and was the primary provider for his nuclear family—until 1988, when, at nearly thirty, he finally moved out of the Encino estate on Hayvenhurst Avenue and into Neverland. It’s easy to understand why Michael found it difficult to leave his mother’s side. She made him feel whole; she made him feel safe. Adopting the authoritarian interpretations of scripture taught by the Witnesses, she offered Michael answers that seemed at once simple and profound. As late as the 1984 Victory tour, Michael sought out Kingdom Halls in whatever cities he played. For years after becoming a star, he would disguise himself and continue to walk door-to-door, as Witnesses are mandated to do, handing out leaflets and proselytizing a theology that he was taught never to question.

  And yet question it he did. The questioning, although silent, began early on. When, for instance, the Jacksons moved from Gary, Indiana, to Hollywood at the spectacular start of their recording career, Michael lived for several months with Diana Ross, who, recognizing his ultrasensitive soul, introduced him to the world of art. Together they spent hours leafing through books devoted to the High Renaissance paintings of Michelangelo and to cubist portraits by Pablo Picasso. Instinctually, Michael recognized the sensuousness in religious paintings and the spirituality in secular works. Even as a preteen, he sensed the contradictions and paradoxes in artistic expression. He knew that tension was inherent in drama and that drama was a key ingredient of great art. He learned that art, unlike his mother’s religion, could contain confusion.

  His private tutor, a gentle Jewish woman named Ruth Fine, had homeschooled him and his brothers, as well as sister Janet, since they were young children. She accompanied them on the road and saw in Michael an active and inquisitive mind. When she spoke of her own religion as she introduced him to works of literature, he listened, and he read carefully, wondering whether, as the Witnesses claimed, all those who failed to adhere to their doctrine—even sweet souls like Miss Fine—would be denied eternal life. That made little sense, and yet Michael couldn’t—or wouldn’t—confront his mother with his doubts.

  As his own artistry grew, he suppressed his doubts. He compartmentalized. Art and music go here; religion and faith go there. He could sing love songs and dance songs and even super-sexy songs on Saturday and still go to the Kingdom Hall on Sunday with a full and pure heart. Nothing could deter him from being his mother’s dutiful child.

  It was in the eighties at the time of Thriller when the compartmentalization ran amok. It was, in fact, the title song that triggered the trauma. Michael’s fascination with gothic imagery goes back to his father. He often spoke about how Joseph strapped on a ghoulish Halloween mask and, in the middle of the night, sneaked outside, banged on the bedroom window, and woke up his little boys, scaring them out of their wits. Sometimes, on nights when Halloween was long past, he actually opened the window and climbed through, and then chased his kids, who thought he was a burglar or a child murderer, all over the house. Although Katherine did not curtail his corporal punishment—even when, as Michael once explained, Joseph stripped his sons of their clothes and covered them in oil before administering the beating—she did object to t
his frightening form of abuse. And yet Joseph continued. When Michael developed acne as a teenager, Joseph teased him unmercifully. So intense was the antagonism that Michael later confessed to his sister Janet that he fantasized about his father’s death and, with pleasure, imagined what it would be like to view him in his coffin.

  Death crept into Michael’s imagination and remained there until, as a mature artist in his midtwenties, he found a vehicle to vent his anguish. “Thriller” was the first of such vehicles, as both a song and a short film. The story operates on many levels at once. As an all-American guy wearing a letter jacket, Michael is out on a date with sweet sweater girl Ola Ray. Suddenly his car runs out of gas. They are walking alone in the woods when Michael turns into a werewolf and viciously assaults her. But that’s only make-believe. We switch perspectives to see that, in Michael’s words, “it’s only a movie.” He and Ola Ray are merely members of an audience watching a horror film that Michael is relishing. When they’re leaving the theater, the groove kicks in and the main musical text unfolds. The dead rise from their graves and join in a lavishly choreographed dance, Michael leading the way. The horror has been contained. But not for long. The horror explodes and the living dead pursue Ola Ray. They’re on the verge of devouring her when, just like that, Michael wakes her from the dream. The horror was only in her imagination. For a second time, Michael has brought her back to reality. He’s no longer a werewolf, no longer a ghoul; he’s simply a normal guy on a date with a normal gal. Before the film ends, though, we zoom in on Michael’s eyes and see that, after all is said and done, our guy isn’t normal at all. He’s paranormal. The spooky yellow of his eyes tells you that he is, in fact, an otherworldly character.

  This highly complex gothic tale upset the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because Michael still sought their approval—and by extension the approval of his mother—he added this disclaimer to the start of the film:

  “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.”

  Yet a break was inevitable. It came in 1987, with the production of the video for “Smooth Criminal,” in which, to save the day, Michael mows down a phalanx of marauders with a machine gun. This was too much for the Witnesses. This time, however, Michael offered neither a qualification nor an apology. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Witnesses’ Woodland Hills congregation, the Kingdom Hall that Katherine had been attending since moving to California, “disassociated” Michael from its sect. According to church rules, that meant that Michael’s mother, who would never abandon her adherence to the faith, was not allowed to discuss the dismissal with her son.

  Just as the twenty-one-year-old Michael had disassociated himself from his father, firing him as his manager in 1979, eight years later Michael could no longer look to his mother for theological guidance. Joseph had been dismissed in the secular realm, and Katherine was, in essence, dismissed in the spiritual. As a result, Michael was, in the words of Charles Brown’s classic blues, “drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea.”

  On this Sunday in March of 2009, the drifting continues. Michael feels untethered from his parents and his past. He feels uncertain about his future.

  To ease his mind, Michael turns to the classical music he has long loved, like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a symphony set to a children’s story with a sharp edge of danger and the threat of death, elements that Michael relishes in fables. He listens to Chopin piano sonatas and Beethoven string quartets, wordless creations that shower him with soothing harmonies, comfort him with lush melodies, and awaken him to the geniuses of past eras, to artists he feels certain are channeling the beauty of God.

  At heart, Michael remains, in the language of his mother, a God-fearing man. Because God is invisible and inaudible, because God is manifest obliquely through the Holy Scriptures and holy works of art, it was so much easier to understand God when God was so thoroughly explained by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Since separating from his mother’s community of true believers two decades earlier, he has sat with spiritual uncertainty. Michael is not a biblical scholar. He is not given to reading theology. Yet his love of the Lord is boundless. His feeling that the God of love lives and moves through our lives in a million wondrous ways remains strong as ever, even if there is no society of worshippers to anchor him.

  Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the writer and media personality who drew close to Michael in 2000, concluded that Michael might find greater balance in his life if he could only re-embrace his childhood faith. The rabbi saw him drifting. Katherine saw the same thing. In her conversations with Boteach, she related how she still passed on Jehovah’s Witness literature to Grace Rwaramba, longtime nanny to Michael’s children. Katherine still hoped to bring her lost boy back into the fold, just as brother Jermaine tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to indoctrinate him into Islam.

  Without a community, without a religious ritual, Sunday is a hard day.

  Prokofiev helps. Chopin and Beethoven help. It helps to hear the children laughing from the next room. It helps to gather them around him, to feel their love and sweet innocence.

  But on Sunday, time moves slowly, and at night, sleep, precious sleep, comes not at all.

  6

  Managerial Warfare

  “The greats are basically unmanageable,” Marvin Gaye once said. “I believe it’s true of most artists with outsized talent. We’re led by our creativity, not by managerial decisions. We can’t be controlled or fenced in. I know that’s true of me, I know it’s true of Stevie Wonder, and from what I’ve heard, it was true of Mr. Mozart. Wasn’t his dad trying to manage him? Well, that makes me think of Michael Jackson, another supertalent and an artist who I’m guessing is going to be unmanageable.”

  Gaye made the observation in 1980, in the aftermath of the release of Michael’s hit album Off the Wall. The statement proved prophetic. Over the course of his career, Michael hired and fired at least a dozen managers. A few were hired and fired twice. He had dozens of close advisors, many of whom were billionaires. Because his sweet nature elicited sympathy and his scattered focus revealed vulnerability, he was prey to both the well-intentioned and the unscrupulous. Fabulously wealthy princes like Sheikh Abdullah, who controlled an oil-rich kingdom, formed partnerships with Michael that seemingly guaranteed his financial security. And yet those partnerships inevitably crumbled, usually resulting in multimillion-dollar lawsuits. He was advised by mentors like Mohamed Al-Fayed, owner of the London department store Harrods, and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. Billionaires like Al Malnik, Ron Burkle, and George Maloof allowed Michael and his children to live in luxury, free of charge, until he got back on his feet—and yet that was never enough. Because of his mismanagement, he always needed more—more help, more money, more ways to save himself from going under.

  “Michael really had no concept of money,” said Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records during the eighties, when he was one of Michael’s closest advisors. “At a time when Thriller was selling a million copies a week, he felt like he had all the money in the world. He couldn’t conceive of his money ever running out. And because his work ethic was so strong—his work ethic had, in fact, been strong since he was a child—he couldn’t help but feel entitled. Rightfully so, he felt that he earned all he made. But that meant there was no limit to his spending.

  “We all have addictions—mine have become the stuff of legend—but I really do believe that Michael’s clearest addiction was to spending. When it came to shelling out money for anything, Michael had no pause button, no control. Spending gave him instant gratification. It made him feel powerful. His spending also applied to things like gifts and charity. No one was more giving. But it also had to do with self-indulgence. He wouldn’t think twice about moving into the highest-price hotel anywhere in the world, renting out the top floor, which might mean ten rooms in addition to the royal suite, and staying there for a month. And when it came to production budgets for his
music or videos, the sky was the limit. In that case, it wasn’t his money—CBS was paying those bills—so his spending was even more outrageous. It meant nothing for Michael to rent out two or three fully staffed studios at the same time, with engineers on call 24/7. If he showed up to work at one of those studios, fine. If he didn’t, that was okay too. He just wanted the convenience of being able to work whenever and wherever he wanted. And because he was making a fortune—for us and as well for himself—no one was about to tell him no.”

  Of Michael’s many managers, the one who looms largest is Frank Dileo, a former employee of Yetnikoff’s whom Michael came to call Uncle Tookie. Michael hired Dileo in 1984, when Thriller was still setting the industry on fire.

  “Frank was working for me as a promo man at Epic records,” said Yetnikoff. “That’s the subsidiary label that had acts like Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, and Michael. Dileo was the conduit between the label and the independent promotion men. Those were the guys responsible for getting airplay. In the eighties, they were incredibly important to sales success. Some considered the promo men a vestige of the old payola system. From where I stood, as grand czar of CBS Records, I didn’t have time to make moral judgments about influencing program directors. The shareholders wanted profits, and that meant I had to deliver hits. No one was better at working the independent promo system than Dileo. He was at the helm of the sales force when, out of the seven singles we released from Thriller, all seven went top ten. That had never happened before. I’m not saying Michael’s musicianship wasn’t absolutely terrific—it was—but Dileo’s salesmanship was equally terrific, and Michael knew it. Which is why he asked whether I’d be upset if he hired Frank as his manager.

  “I wasn’t at all upset. I was delighted. I was glad to have one of my confidants so close to Michael. Besides, I got a kick out of watching the two of them. Frank stood about as tall as a fire hydrant and was easily twice as wide. He always had to have an extra-long, extra-thick cigar sticking out of his mouth. Never met a man with such a strong center of gravity. One time, just for fun, I tried to knock him over. I body-slammed him and wound up on my ass. Frank hadn’t moved an inch. I think that’s another reason Michael liked him. He saw him as a rock-solid, steadying influence. It didn’t matter to Michael any more than it mattered to me that earlier in Frank’s career, he’d been convicted for betting on college basketball, a minor offense. More major was his uncanny ability to keep Michael Jackson songs and videos in heavy rotation from one corner of the globe to the other.”