by Tavis Smiley
Michael does, in fact, take us to a sacred place when the music stops and, in a scenario repeated in “Smooth Criminal,” he breaks into a form of pure—or, better yet, impure—preaching. He and his dancers fall into a vignette of moans and cries, a deep call-and-response dialogue as old as the field shouts and primitive church services of nineteenth-century rural black America.
“Bad” allows Michael to realize an example of character development—from reticent nerd to artistic hero—that must be counted among his greatest achievements. Rivaling “Bad” as pure cinematic magic is his long-form video Ghosts, featuring the song by this name from Blood on the Dance Floor. That was twelve years ago, but Michael remembers it as if it were yesterday. Cowritten by Michael and Stephen King and directed by special effects master Stan Winston, it is Michael’s most sinister and satisfying venture into gothic fantasy.
Michael plays the part of both the maestro and his adversary, the puffed-up mayor. The maestro, a surrogate for the real-life Michael, is the guardian of the haunted house that the rabidly reactionary mayor is determined to shut down. It is no accident that the mayor has the demeanor of Tom Sneddon, the prosecutor who pursued Michael with unchecked zeal. In perhaps the most transcendent moment in any Michael Jackson video, the mayor is consumed by the maestro’s magic and, in an astonishing dance, expresses a range of rhythmic fury that seems to set him free of all animus. There is a skeletal dance—starring a disembodied Michael Jackson—that also carries the suggestion of emotional catharsis. Michael is free of his enemies, free of his physical preoccupations, free to become nothing more than the form of his dance.
Michael sees film as a way to both escape and redefine reality—his ultimate fantasy. He has never lost his desire to become a master filmmaker himself. And now, looking back at the titans with whom he has worked—Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Winston—he feels that, in spite of every obstacle that came his way, he has made his mark in movies.
The truth is that he’d much rather be making a movie than preparing for months of grueling shows and, most likely, still another world tour. The fact that he has already done three world tours as a solo performer—Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory—doesn’t ease his apprehension. Hundreds of dates in dozens of countries before millions of fans—those tours went on for years. When he is reminded that his only solo tour that came to the United States was Bad—and that was twenty-one years ago—he hears his promoters arguing the necessity of bringing This Is It back home. Their arguments center on one thing and one thing only: money. The money to pay off his debts, the money to buy the palatial estate in Las Vegas, the money to make the movies of his dreams.
“Price of Fame” pops into Michael’s mind. It’s one of the approximately fifty songs he wrote for Bad that never made it onto the album. Like dozens of his unreleased compositions—“Don’t Be Messin’ Round,” “I’m So Blue,” “Free,” “Streetwalker,” “Fly Away”—it stands as a remarkable work. The story centers on a warning issued by “Father”: if it’s fortune and fame that you’re after, your life will never be serene. That’s the price of fame. You have no right to complain, no right to even feel the pain. If you do manage to escape—to a remote village, say—the world will soon forget about you. You can’t run that risk. So live with it. This is the reality you’ve chosen. You can fashion your disguises, you can beef up your security, but you’ll never escape. You’ll always be found. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to the world. Don’t think. Don’t reflect. Your only job is to sign on the dotted line and perform.
To escape the traps of fame—to be “Free” or “Fly Away”—is merely wishful thinking, still another unfulfilled fantasy. Try as you might, you’ll never stop paying the price for fame, because fame, for all the suffering it causes, is your cross, your obsession, your unalterable fate.
Michael thinks about the stories he read as a child; he also thinks about the stories he read as an adult seeking to deepen his understanding of life. The ones that moved him most—the stories of Jesus and Peter Pan and the Elephant Man and E.T. and Hamlet and the Greek god Dionysus—were all about the inevitability of fate.
Now, merely a month away from the start of the next major chapter in his whirlwind life, Michael wonders about his own fate.
What is it?
22
On the Good Ship Lollipop
On Wednesday, June 10, Michael goes to Dr. Klein’s office for the first time in six days. Before he leaves, he’s given two hundred milligrams of Demerol.
Two days later, he makes an appearance at the Forum for a rehearsal, but his participation is limited. He’s distracted and lethargic. It’s difficult for Michael to concentrate on any of the routines. His security men explain to the press, which congregates in front of the rehearsal space, that, due to his extreme fatigue, Michael really doesn’t want to be in the arena.
Fatigue is the reason given for his missing the next three straight days of rehearsals. AEG is more than concerned. The promoters are alarmed. Messages fly back and forth between them and Conrad Murray, who continues to claim that Michael is fine.
Michael is secluded at the Carolwood estate. For now, he is not working out with Lou Ferrigno, he is not practicing his dance routines, and he is not working on his music. Instead, he is looking for ways to comfort himself. To keep his thoughts from racing to the future, he lets his mind settle on the past. In the past, when he endured long periods of high anxiety, he relied on several methods to calm the emotional storms. For years—especially during those times when he was on the road—he insisted that his hotel bedroom be covered with pictures of Shirley Temple as a child star. For Michael, she is the personification of sweet innocence. Her image soothes his restless soul: the blond ringlets, the sparkling smile, the dimpled cheeks, the lilting little-girl voice, the bubbly personality. Michael knows all her movies, from Bright Eyes to The Littlest Rebel to The Little Princess. With great delight he listens to her sing “Animal Crackers in My Soup” and “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” With even greater delight he watches the dazzling hoofer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson teach her to tap. Michael views Shirley Temple—just as he views Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet and Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and Sammy Davis Jr. in Rufus Jones for President—as Hollywood royalty of the highest order, which is to say the youngest order. He sees himself in these child actors, their charm captured and frozen forever at a moment in their lives when their beauty was unspoiled.
Michael remembers when, as an adult, he went to meet the former child star who became the distinguished stateswoman Shirley Temple Black. He wept uncontrollably. In relating the experience to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Michael explained that he left her house feeling “baptized.” He couldn’t stop telling Shirley how merely looking at her little-girl image had saved him from utter despair. He let her know that for years a member of his staff had been assigned to turn his suites into Shirley Temple shrines, filling them with posters and life-sized cutouts. Worshipping at those shrines had kept him from, as he said, “throwing in the towel.” Shirley responded with kindness, taking Michael’s hand and saying that she understood, that she loved him. “I’m sorry I grew up,” she apologized. The apology moved Michael to more tears. He too felt guilty for having grown up and desecrated the purity of his youth.
He remembers a story that he has told for decades, the one about a lady who recognized him and his brothers at the airport. At the time, Michael was in his teens.
“Are you the Jackson Five?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“And where’s cute little Michael?”
“I’m Michael.”
The woman looked him over, made a face, and said in disgust, “What happened? Ugh!”
Michael thinks of what happened to the Our Gang kids and to Bobby Driscoll, the voice of Peter Pan and an Academy Juvenile Award–winning Disney child star who was featured in Song of the South, So Dear to My Heart, and Treasure Island, only to die a penniless drug addict in 1968, t
he year the Jackson 5 auditioned for Berry Gordy in Detroit.
He thinks of the pledge he made to Shirley Temple Black: to build and maintain a museum for child stars, the obscure as well as the famous, so that both their contributions and their suffering would never be forgotten. He wonders how he will represent himself in the museum. Will there be only pictures of the irresistibly cute preteen Michael? Will he be able to display photos from when his fourteen-year-old face, like Bobby Driscoll’s, was ravaged with acne? Will he be able to look at images of himself from when he was trapped in those long and awkward stages of his postadolescent life, when he hated everything about his appearance? Will he be able to bear it?
The purpose of the museum would be to permanently capture the good feelings generated by the child stars. But how do you separate the good from the bad? When Michael sees a picture of himself as a young boy, he feels compelled—as did Shirley Temple Black—to apologize. “I’m sorry,” he says to the world. But sorry for what? Sorry for growing up? Sorry for not being able to prolong the sweet innocence that charmed and comforted his fans? Sorry for developing into an artist compelled to incorporate anger and fear into his songs? Sorry for becoming a complicated and conflicted adult?
Sometimes when he listens to old Jackson 5 songs—the enduring hits like “ABC” or “The Love You Save”—he hears in his voice a fresh optimism and guileless joy that he hardly recognizes as his own. The silken smoothness of the voice continued into adolescence, into the seamless dance grooves of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” and “Off the Wall.” He hears his voice darken and assume an edge of desperation when, on Thriller, he begins to explore unchartered territory in deeply personal songs like “Billie Jean.” Because “Billie Jean” is an enormous hit, Michael sees that his fans are willing—even eager—to accompany him on his journey of self-exploration. The floodgates are opened, and Michael never looks back. His life becomes his art. His life becomes his songs, his videos, his dances. To express the confusion of his life, his voice necessarily becomes pained. His voice expresses the full range of his emotional contradictions: all at once he feels blessed, victimized, misunderstood, grateful, furious, brave, afraid, heroic, helpless, powerful, impotent, vulnerable, and invincible.
Now, on Tuesday, June 16, Michael feels increasingly disoriented and weak. It is far more than a physical fatigue. It is a mental fatigue, a spiritual fatigue. He thinks of a Marvin Gaye song from What’s Going On that he has long loved, an ethereal meditation on escaping through chemicals called “Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky),” in which the singer reflects on a world filled with folks who are “tired and weary.” For relief, he goes to a place “where danger awaits.” Michael knows that Marvin is talking about addicts and that, as in Michael’s own testament to the power of drugs—“Morphine,” from Blood on the Dance Floor—the subject is the allure of a drug-induced state.
Yet in Michael’s mind the office of Dr. Arnold Klein is not a place where danger awaits. Michael is not a street junkie. He is not a junkie at all. He is the patient of some of the world’s most renowned physicians. His ongoing dermatological treatments are not indulgences. They are necessary. He cannot accept any plan other than one that allows him to retain the face of eternal youth. Anything else, any sign of deterioration, any indication of aging, will drive him mad. Images of Shirley Temple as a young girl, images of himself as a young boy—these are pictures that have remained unsoiled, the pictures to be treasured and preserved.
To preserve this picture is an arduous procedure. Demerol is the price that Michael pays. Demerol turns these treatments from pain into pleasure. On Tuesday, Demerol is the order of the day.
On Wednesday, June 17, Michael returns to rehearsals, where, according to his former lawyer, John Branca, he and Michael have an emotional reunion. It appears—at least to Branca—that after their long estrangement, he and Michael are back in business. Their rapprochement may well have been facilitated by Frank Dileo, who worked closely with Branca when they guided Michael through the wildly lucrative days of Thriller and Bad. If reinstating Branca means more stability for Michael, AEG has no complaints.
But AEG has other complaints, deadly serious complaints about the state of Michael’s health. At this same June 17 rehearsal, an observer, shocked by the singer’s appearance, says, “That’s not Michael up there. He’s like a ghost.”
The next day, Thursday, June 18, Michael fails once again to show up for rehearsals at the Forum. In total frustration, director Kenny Ortega sends an email to AEG’s Randy Phillips, suggesting that Michael’s chronic absences from the rehearsals might mean that it’s time to fold the tent and call it a day. Incensed, Phillips takes it upon himself to drive to Carolwood, where he somehow convinces Michael to get to rehearsal. He also confronts Conrad Murray about Michael’s repeated visits to the office of Dr. Arnold Klein and the drugs that the artist has been ingesting. But Murray, like everyone else in the Jackson camp, has no control over Michael. In the word of Berry Gordy, Michael has become “rudderless.”
Michael finally arrives at the Forum at around 10 p.m. and stays for several hours, but his participation is limited and his disorientation still disturbingly apparent.
It has been only a week since Michael was present for the Dome Project filming at the Culver Studios, where Ortega viewed the artist as an active and focused participant. Now Ortega is telling Phillips an entirely different story: that Michael is displaying “strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive-like behavior… It’s like there are two people there. One [deep inside] trying to hold on to what he was and still can be and not wanting us to quit him, the other in his weakened and troubled state.”
The next day, Friday, June 19, Michael is even worse. He makes it to the Forum but is unable to sing or dance. Kenny Ortega sends him home and emails Phillips that Michael “appeared quite weak and fatigued this evening. He had a terrible case of the chills, was trembling, rambling, and obsessing.” Ortega goes on to say that he covered Michael in blankets and massaged his feet in an effort to assuage his anxiety. He’s concerned that after Phillips played what Ortega calls the “tough love, now or never card,” Michael “may be unable to rise to the occasion due to real emotional stuff.” Ortega is further convinced that Michael needs to be “psychologically evaluated.” “It would shatter him, break his heart if we pulled the plug,” he goes on to say. “He’s terribly frightened it’s all going to go away. He asked me repeatedly tonight if I was going to leave him. He was practically begging for my confidence. It broke my heart. He was like a lost boy. There still may be a chance he can rise to the occasion if we get him the help he needs.”
Saturday, June 20, the last day of rehearsals for the dancers at the Forum. Michael does not show up.
Home at the Carolwood estate, he seeks solace. His body is increasingly and inexplicably cold. It may be the meds; it may be the relentless assault of anxiety. Whatever is causing his chilling discomfort, Michael seeks a blissful escape from a world spinning out of his control, and entry into a world of fantasy and fun, a world populated by people whose only job is to make you smile, people who live in the world of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, people like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and, as always, the enchanting Shirley Temple, who, at age six, continues to lure Michael onto the Good Ship Lollipop with the promise that he will, at long last, rest comfortably and dream his troubles away.
23
Breaking News
Back in the late summer of 2007, when Michael and his children moved to the suburbs of northern New Jersey and stayed at the home of the Cascios, the artist’s close friends for over two decades, he was genuinely attempting to connect with a loving and normal family. Normality, a long-held dream of Michael’s, would never be achieved, but he nonetheless loved being close to people who seemed to be living drama-free lives. During this last visit with the Cascios, he wrote a group of songs—some with Eddie Cascio, son of paterfamilias Dominic—that i
ncluded “Breaking News.” In the tradition of the previously released “Leave Me Alone,” “Why You Wanna Trip on Me,” “Scream,” and “Tabloid Junkie,” the composition is a furious lamentation about the abuse that Michael suffers at the hands of the press. This protest is the most personal of all. For the first time in his great body of work, Michael repeatedly calls out his own name in a song.
He decries how everyone wants a piece of Michael Jackson. The media won’t stop stalking Michael Jackson. The world is following every story about Michael Jackson. People want to see him destroyed just because he’s Michael Jackson. And then, in the most chilling image of all, Michael Jackson foresees a reporter who cannot wait to write the obituary of Michael Jackson.
That was 2007. This is Sunday, June 21, 2009.
Michael Jackson is home at the Carolwood estate, where he is experiencing great discomfort of body and mind. Emails are flying back and forth between his manager, his promoter, his director, and his doctor. Emergency meetings have been held about the state of Michael’s health. Kenny Ortega is convinced that Michael is too weak to rehearse. Frank Dileo is expressing alarm about Michael’s aberrant behavior. AEG is disturbed about Michael’s use of drugs. Attempting to wean his patient off a nightly dose of propofol, Conrad Murray is telling everyone that, as Michael’s primary physician, he has everything under control. According to Murray, whose precarious financial health is dependent on keeping this job and getting Michael through the London concerts, there’s no cause for concern. He barks back at Ortega, accusing him of being an “amateur doctor and psychologist.” Murray instructs everyone to let him handle the health of Michael, who, he insists, is “physically and emotionally fine.”
