Before You Judge Me

by Tavis Smiley

  On this Friday in March, Michael is reading reports on the latest attacks against him. Earlier in the month, two British soldiers had been allegedly killed by the Irish Republican Army, the military force that had been powerful in the eighties. Two English comics commented on television that they weren’t sure which phenomenon from the eighties they wanted back less: the IRA or Michael Jackson.

  Michael is shocked. He’s being compared to a murderous militia. The analogy makes his blood run cold. Why would anyone make such an insinuation, even as a joke? Why would anyone go out of his way to say something so deeply hurtful?

  Michael is crestfallen. He begins to worry that public opinion in England is turning against him. Compared with the United States, where he had been doggedly prosecuted, England is supposedly safe ground. His attraction to the O2 Arena as a comeback venue was largely about its location. He felt that England and Europe were far more forgiving than his home country. But now he remembers that it was in England that the “Wacko Jacko” moniker began. He forgets that he has contributed to this picture of himself as an oddity. Even four years after his acquittal on every charge leveled against him, he feels that he still stands accused. When will the accusations stop? When will the media have its fill of finding fault? When will it stop looking for ways to wound him?

  Michael has long fought the feeling of being a victim. He has read enough psychology and self-help tomes to know that victimhood is an emotional trap. Once we start to feel persecuted by the world, the world turns dark. Doom envelops us. It’s imperative that we not see ourselves as victims. We’re in control of our own mental states. We can be whoever we want to be. We can stay positive, ignore the nastiness, and make progress. Michael is determined to move forward.

  At the same time, Michael cannot easily break a pattern established early in his career. He cannot pretend not to care what the world thinks of him. He is, after all, an entertainer. Entertainers live on the love of their fans. And if Michael’s fans are fed lies, if they are led to believe that he is, in the insinuation of the English comics, as villainous as a killer, doesn’t he have every right to be upset? Isn’t he entitled to express the pain that such comparisons bring? Is he supposed to simply sit back and take it?

  No. He instructs his people to issue a statement that says, “Michael was told about the comments and was appalled. It was a disgusting slur. To compare him to cold-blooded murderers is not funny. It’s highly offensive.”

  Michael feels crushed. He feels that, even on this first day of spring, even at a time when renewal is in the air and optimism should prevail, avoiding cynicism isn’t easy. No matter how valiantly Michael tries to present a wholly positive agenda, the press will never tire of slandering him. He despairs at the thought that he is powerless in this unending war.

  8

  Father, Father

  In What’s Going On, the sublime suite of songs released in 1971—the same year the Jackson 5 hit with “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and their Saturday morning cartoon show debuted on ABC—Marvin Gaye sang about crying mothers and dying brothers. He also invoked the image of his own father when he exclaimed, “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate.” Gaye was referring to both the Vietnam War and the personal war he had waged with his father ever since the singer, like Michael, had suffered beatings as a small child. The brutal battle between father and son was a lifetime preoccupation for Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson alike.

  Like Marvin, Michael put Mother on a pedestal, despite the fact, that in both cases, Mother was unable to protect her son from her husband’s violence. Like Marvin, Michael worked hard to transcend the hostility. He knew that holding hatred in his heart damaged his soul. When Marvin was murdered by his father on April 1, 1984, Michael, at the height of his Thriller success, was grappling with the Victory tour. He yielded to pressure from his mother, even though he had no interest in reuniting with his brothers, knowing that the tour would also involve his father—something that Michael desperately wanted to avoid. That troubled father-son relationship, as much as he tried to escape it, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  “If my mother had only thrown my father out of the house and once and for all divorced the man,” Gaye once said, “my life would be easier. If she could get rid of him, maybe I’d be able to do the same.”

  These words could have been spoken by Michael, whose mother, despite the knowledge that Joseph fathered a child with another woman in 1974, would never divorce her husband. Though they have maintained separate residences for years, Katherine’s permanent attachment to Joseph meant that Michael would be bound to Joseph as well, no matter how frantically he tried to distance himself. To be in a relationship with Mother necessitated being in a relationship with Father. The triangulation—Katherine, Joseph, Michael—would hold firm for the duration.

  The week of Monday, March 23, 2009, begins with Michael worrying about his mother’s repeated requests that he meet with his father and Leonard Rowe. It was, in fact, Joseph who first hired Rowe back in the late seventies to book a Jacksons tour.

  Joseph wants back into his son’s business. Backed by Patrick Allocco, head of AllGood Entertainment, Rowe is assuring Joseph that there are millions to be made. Better yet, those millions can be made from a single concert, not fifty.

  Distressed, Michael sees how the opposing forces are lining up:

  Joseph, Katherine, Rowe, and Allocco stand on one side of the divide.

  AEG’s Randy Phillips and Michael’s manager, Tohme Tohme, stand on the other.

  In a perfect world—in Michael’s idealized world—reconciliation is realized. Everyone works together for the greater good. Thus he avoids the emotional situation he likes the least: a confrontation. He longs for peace, not merely among the warring factions but inside his soul. He is battle-weary. At the same time, he feels himself drawn to both camps.

  Tohme Tohme did negotiate the AEG plan, which has allowed him to keep his half of the vast Sony/ATV music catalog and his many assets, including Neverland. Only the AEG plan has provided a strategy for buying Prince Jefri’s sprawling Las Vegas estate. There is also a proviso for a multimillion-dollar development deal to produce a movie version of “Thriller,” with Michael locked in as producer.

  For good reasons, he trusts Tohme Tohme.

  But for other good reasons, he does not.

  Michael is still upset that Tohme Tohme lacked the sensitivity to realize that auctioning items from Neverland—and publishing photos of those items in a splashy public catalog—would bring him embarrassment and pain. And wasn’t it Tohme Tohme who conspired with AEG to increase the This Is It concert count from ten to thirty to fifty?

  If he was really protecting me, Michael wonders, wouldn’t he have found a better solution than piling on to an already overbearing workload?

  Then there is the simple fact that Michael loves his mother dearly. He would like for her to personally profit from his return to the stage. He would also like to please her by trying—as he has tried countless times in the past—to reconcile with his father, just as she has always been able to reconcile with her husband. If that means meeting Joseph and Leonard Rowe simply to hear them out, well, isn’t that the least he can do for the woman he treasures above all others?

  He fears that his father, known to express hostility and skepticism toward white agents and promoters, will surely express that same view about white-owned AEG. In 1983, Michael felt moved to publicly respond to what were perceived as Joseph’s racist remarks concerning the Jacksons’ white managers, Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann. “To hear him talk that way turns my stomach,” said Michael, referring to his father’s comments about the “white help.” Michael added, “Racism is not my motto.”

  As former president of the Black Promoters Association, Leonard Rowe has long complained about racial prejudice in the record industry. And of course Michael himself protested against bigotry in the music business when he publicly lashed out against Sony after the release of his last studio al
bum, Invincible, in 2001. In taking that stance, he found himself saying some of the same words he had heard his father speak.

  And why not? Isn’t his father a strong and fearless man who quit the steel mill and, against odds of a million to one, whipped his sons into shape and turned them into professionals with enough polish and pizzazz to win over the world? Isn’t Joseph a model—maybe the ultimate model—for taking on the phonies and the manipulators? Isn’t he a stand-up guy who never fails to stand up for himself and his family? Joseph has never backed down or broken down. He has what it takes to get through the thorniest situations. He has real guts. And, best of all, he never falls apart.

  Falling apart is a real fear for Michael. In agreeing to this strenuous schedule in London, he continually worries about whether there will be enough time to mount the spectacular shows he envisions, and whether he has the stamina required to endure the ordeal.

  As Michael’s worries mount, so does his desire to return to his dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein. On this same Monday in March, Michael’s usual entourage of two blue Escalades carries him to Beverly Hills, where Klein gives him two hundred milligrams of Demerol so he can tolerate the pain of Botox injections under the eyes. Michael’s antiaging obsession is as great as ever. In the artist’s Peter Pan pursuit of staying forever young, Klein is his main ally. In the next fourteen weeks, Michael will spend nearly $50,000 on dermatological treatments.

  He is preoccupied with his face—the face that suffered from endless outbreaks of acne and was the subject of vicious teasing when he was a boy; the face that he considered repugnant; the face that, the minute Michael had the means, was resculpted into a form that, to his eyes, was flawless. A face that, in short, bore no resemblance to the face of his father.

  And yet he can’t stop seeing his father’s face as he struggles to decide whether to meet him and Leonard Rowe at Carolwood estate.

  It has been years since he faced his father, years since he has even spoken to him on the phone. He has needed that time away. Michael has needed to avoid Joseph’s incessant and aggressive pressure to engage his son in one deal or another. Yet Michael also yearns for some rapprochement. He wants to forgive.

  For a couple of years beginning in 2000, when Rabbi Shmuley Boteach became Michael’s spiritual guru, one of the rabbi’s essential directives was that Michael forgive his father. At the time, Michael was living in New York and working on Invincible. Always looking for normalcy in family life—hence his long-term relationship with the Cascios of New Jersey—Michael loved sharing home-cooked Friday night dinners with the rabbi’s family to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. It was the rabbi who arranged for Michael to address England’s Oxford University in March of 2001 and promote the artist’s Heal the Kids charity and children’s universal bill of rights.

  Cynics saw this as part of Michael’s campaign to rehabilitate himself in the public eye. But it’s difficult to read Michael’s remarks, especially those concerning his father, and doubt his sincerity.

  Michael speaks with great empathy about his father’s long days in the steel mill doing work that “kills the lungs and humbles the spirit.” It’s no wonder, he claims, that Joseph had trouble expressing his emotions, no wonder he developed a hardened heart. Now, through forgiving eyes, Michael sees Joseph’s “harshness” as a “kind of love.” He now understands that his father pushed him because he loved him. He says that in the place of bitterness toward his father he feels a blessing; instead of anger he has found “absolution.” Reconciliation has replaced revenge. And what used to be fury has turned into forgiveness.

  It’s a beautiful speech, and yet those feelings, no matter how genuine, were not enough to forge a lasting bond or even renew the fragile father-son relationship. While Joseph did stand by his son’s side during the grueling trial in 2005, once the acquittal came and Michael fled the country, the son cut off all contact with the father, returning to the pattern he had established in the eighties. The less Michael saw of Joseph—and the less Joseph became entangled in Michael’s business—the better.

  And yet now, on March 23, 2009, Michael is unhappy. He feels boxed in by a manager, Tohme Tohme, whom he has known for little more than a year. He feels constrained by the contractual complexities engineered by AEG and wonders if he’s being manipulated. Adding further to his distress is the distress of his mother. She won’t be satisfied until, after all these years, he agrees to see his father and his father’s friend—a man whom Katherine considers a friend of all the Jacksons—Leonard Rowe.

  After days of agonizing over the decision, he makes up his mind.

  In the name of reconciliation and forgiveness, in the name of family solidarity and family trust, he agrees to let Joseph and Rowe come to the house the day after tomorrow.

  He knows his mother will be happy and his father will be excited. He knows that Leonard Rowe, a man he likes, will try with all his might to reassert himself in Michael’s affairs. He knows he may be making a mistake, but he’s thought about this long enough—and he’d rather be making music. Michael would always rather be making music.

  In addition to the classical pieces that he’s been composing, Michael has never stopped writing pop songs, soul songs, rock songs—all songs geared to give free rein to the voices chattering inside his head.

  In Michael’s personal life, these truculent and demanding voices are in continual conflict and are the source of confusion and pain. One voice, for instance, tells him to avoid his father, while another voice tells him to embrace him. One voice says to rid himself of Tohme Tohme and have outside advisors scrutinize his deal with AEG, while another voice says to leave well enough alone.

  In Michael’s musical life, though, he is able to blend these various voices. Conflict and confusion are harmonized into melodies of beauteous consolation. So he runs to music like a believer runs to church. Music is his strength and salvation.

  In “Keep Your Head Up,” for example, a song he recently wrote with Eddie Cascio—the son of his dear New Jersey friend Dominic Cascio and a young man he has known since he was a small boy—Michael works in the style of painter Edward Hopper, whose portraits of lonely and isolated figures in the landscape of Depression-era America reveal the naked souls of his subjects. Michael’s subject in “Keep Your Head Up” is a single mother working two jobs, a woman beaten down by life. He offers her both empathy and hope. Then, in the tradition of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the personal is extended to the eco-political. The song’s subject expands beyond the lonely woman looking for sustenance. Mankind is indicted for “sucking up the air” and scarring “the earth from under me.” For all the environmental ruin, the singer can hardly breathe and see beyond the blight. And yet it is hope generated by love that informs the song and situates it as another of Michael’s sacred anthems. “Keep Your Head Up,” like countless other Michael Jackson compositions, is recorded but remains unreleased during his lifetime.

  His storehouse of material is Michael’s refuge from the storm. There are pure songs of extravagant multipart harmony in which seemingly every voice inside Michael’s head is lovingly merged into lush melodies. “(I Like) The Way You Love Me” is one such song. There are others, like “Monster” and “Threatened,” that allow Michael to return to gothic horror, tales in which “everywhere you seem to turn” terror stares you in the face. For Michael, though, the terror also takes the form of the press. It’s the paparazzi, he cries, that’s the monster. He calls out the entire Hollywood culture. Hollywood itself, with its unyielding insistence on bodily perfection and its insatiable appetite for scurrilous gossip, is the grossest monster of all.

  In “Hollywood Tonight,” another tale of desperation, the character in question is a fifteen-year-old girl, a runaway bound for the glories of Hollywood, her head filled with dreams of stardom, her name changed so that she, like Michael—the man who is imagining her to life—might reinvent herself and put the pain of her past behind her.

  Michael is further comforted and di
stracted by the brilliance of a song written and recorded years earlier with rocker Lenny Kravitz. Michael adopts the story as his own, especially at this time and in this place. The title says “(I Can’t Make It) Another Day.” The theme is clear: only the other will save the singer from despair and self-destruction. But there’s no telling if the other is a mystical deity or the object of earthly romance. The recurring motif, the message that resonates in Michael’s heart, speaks to the search—the endless quest for redemptive love. Even as he leans in and, over Kravitz’s brilliant track, continues to sing “I can’t make it another day,” Michael is, in fact, suggesting just the opposite: he’s triumphing over despondency by allowing music to let him make it through another day.

  And even though the day is good, even though he has found solace in making sounds and crafting stories, when night arrives the doubts return. Uncertainty plagues him, and as usual, he struggles to find the peaceful rest he so deeply desires.

  9

  Managing Managers

  On March 25, 2009, nearly four years after Michael left the country with his children following his dramatic acquittal, he is finally prepared—or unprepared—to allow his father back into his life. Until now, he has refused to see him or even speak to him on the phone.

  The last time Joseph tried to see his son was two years earlier, when Michael and the children were living in a rented estate in Vegas. Michael’s brother Randy, who had managed him at the time of the 2005 trial, had also attempted to gain entrance. At different times, both father and sibling were turned away. Both became enraged. Joseph berated the security guys, claiming that they wouldn’t have their jobs—there would be no Michael Jackson—were it not for him. Randy grew so furious that he rammed his car into the gate. That happened on the night of Elizabeth Taylor’s seventy-fifth birthday party. Michael was so upset by the incident that he canceled plans to attend the celebration. Yet he still didn’t let Randy in. He knew what his brother and father wanted—money, money, and more money—and he was not prepared to engage them in any discussion concerning his business.