Rock Stars Boxed Set: Murder, Manslaughter and Misadventure

by Joe Bensam

  Despite these dramas, this was undoubtedly Michael’s night. He swept the awards, winning a total of eight Grammys, including Best Album award.

  ***

  Having finally extricated from his management contract with Joseph, Michael was in the market for a new manager. He was greatly impressed by the way an executive at CBS, Frank Dileo, had promoted his albums, and thought he would make a great manager. Frank accepted, and got to work on organizing Michael’s affairs.

  One of the Frank’s first tasks was to deal with a call from the White House, asking if Michael would let them use Beat It as the background music for a public service commercial on drink driving. Michael was not keen on giving his music away for free, but he had another idea - he said they could use the music if the President gave him some kind of award. After consulting with the President, the White House agreed, and a visit to Washington D.C. was arranged.

  On the big day in May 1984, both the President and the First Lady looked great. But they paled into insignificance compared to the star of the show, Michael himself. Dressed in a bold, blue military uniform, he looked like a camp but powerful army general in full dress regalia. Ronald Reagan presented the award, which had been invented especially for this occasion, and Michael beamed as the cameras flashed. The only discordant note was the presence of a mysterious young man that Michael described as a 'close friend.' White House dealt with the manner by telling the press that he was with the Secret Service.

  Michael get an award at the White House

  Inside the White House, Michael was due to meet with the Reagans for a private chat. But things went downhill fast when the pop star saw that a large number of people were gathered for the event. He had been told it would there would only be a few people. Worse still, he had been told there would be children - and there were none. Michael ran down the hall in tears and locked himself in the toilet. While Frank tried to talk him out of the toilet, officials cleared the reception room of most of the adults, and shepherded in a few of their kids instead.

  Michael finally returned to the room, and as he spoke to others in the room, Nancy Reagan confided with one of Michael’s aids.

  ‘It's all so peculiar, really,’ she said. ‘A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don't know what to make of it.’

  The aide whispered back to her.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You don't know the half of it.’

  ***

  Chapter 6 - Wacko Jacko Makes Another Fortune

  With plenty of money in the bank, Michael was keen to find ways to invest his cash, especially within the music industry. He saw an opportunity to do this when he teamed up with Paul McCartney to write some songs.

  The partnership seemed like a great idea. Two of the world’s great songwriters, one American, one British getting together to write new material. Their work did produce some great songs as they worked together at Paul’s retreat in rural England. However, what Michael found most interesting was Paul’s publishing empire. The Beatles had naively sold the publishing rights to their songs at an early age, with the result that they only receive half of the songwriting royalties for their songs. The rest of the money went to Northern Songs, a company that was later bought by ATV. However, Paul had compensated for this by building his own publishing empire of music. Apart from his own post-Beatles songs, he had acquired the catalogs of Buddy Holly and other major artists. In the early 80s, this collection of songs was bringing him in around $40 million a year.

  Michael was impressed by the numbers, and by the idea of running his own song publishing empire. When he got back to the States, he asked John Branca to start looking out for properties in this market that he could buy. Michael started building a profitable business, but there wasn’t much in the catalog to get excited about. Then one day, John called Michael to tell him that the Northern Songs catalog was up for sale.

  ‘You don’t mean the Northern Songs, do you?

  ‘Yeah, Mike,’ We're talking The Beatles, man. The Beatles!’

  A frantic round of bidding followed, with Paul McCartney taking an interest, then dropping out as the price escalated. Michael finally acquired the entire Northern Songs catalog for $47.5 million. At the time, it seemed an outrageously high price to pay. In retrospect, it looks like a bargain.

  Michael was delighted to be the new owner of most of the The Beatles songs, but having shelled out so much money, it was imperative to start seeing some return on that investment. One consequence of the deal was that every time Paul played one of his own early Beatles songs in concert, he had to pay a royalty to Michael. But what really angered Paul was that Michael now started exploiting the songs by allowing them to be used for commercials and other advertising purposes. This was certainly profitable. Panasonic paid $240,000 for the rights to use All You Need is Love in a commercial, and there were many other deals of a similar nature.

  Paul was incensed, but there was little he could do. Michael couldn’t see the problem. As far as he was concerned, he was introducing Beatles songs to a whole new generation, and putting money in both his and Paul’s pockets at the same time. Yoko Ono, who controlled John Lennon’s estate, agreed with him. And after all, Michael had bought the company fairly in an open auction.

  ***

  In 1984, Bob Geldof - singer of the Irish band The Boomtown Rats - was horrified by the scenes of famine in Ethiopia that he saw on the TV news. Compelled to do something to help, he roped in a bevvy of rock stars to record the British charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ The single was a huge success, and raised a great deal of money for charity. The whole event also raised Bob’s profile enormously, making him a national hero, with national newspapers calling for him to be knighted ‘Sir Bob.’ (even though that was not possible as he was not a British citizen).

  All this attention did not go unnoticed across the pond in the US, and soon a similar project was planned for the American market. Stevie Wonder became involved, and he called Michael and asked if he would sing on the record. There was no way Michael was going to turn this opportunity down. He had always been willing to help the sick and homeless...and sick and homeless children were a no-brainer. On top of that, there was clearly an opportunity to be seen as a champion of the needy, exactly the kind of publicity he reveled in. It was decided that Michael and Lionel Ritchie should write the song, and after a week of writing, We Are The World emerged as the result.

  Michael and Lionel Ritchie wrote ‘We are The World’ together

  An all-star cast was roped in to make the recording, including everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Diana Ross to Billy Joel and Tina Turner. The recording session lasted all night, but by the next morning, the whole song was in the can. It went on to sell over four million copies, topping the charts in both the US and the UK.

  ***

  For some time, Michael’s increasingly odd behaviour had been attracting headlines around the world. Despite his denials, it was transparently obvious that he was having more and more plastic surgery, with his nose getting thinner still, and a new cleft suddenly appearing in his chin. As his fame grew, he seemed to become more and more obsessed with creating the perfect look. He seemed to be oblivious to the fact that most people saw each operation as another step towards freak-show status. Some speculated that he was trying to look more like Diana Ross, others that he had just lost the plot. But nobody knew the real answers except for Michael...and he was adamantly denying that he had undergone any procedures after the first two.

  The rumors about Michael being gay persisted, taking on a new twist as he was seen more and more often with pretty young men and boys in his company. Michael still denied that there was any kind of sexual relationship with them, yet he continued to be seen with these young males in what could be considered compromising situations.

  You might think this was enough adverse publicity for one superstar, but Michael had other ideas. Whist in hospital a
fter the Pepsi fire incident, Michael saw a special oxygen chamber, called a hyperbaric chamber, used to heal burn victims by exposing them to pure oxygen. He thought it would be fun to have his photo taken in it, but somehow the story got back to the press. Frank Dileo wanted to kill the story, but Michael thought it would make a great publicity story that could put him on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. He arranged to have the photo leaked to the press, and soon the story spread like wildfire.

  The picture that made headlines around the world

  As he flicked through cable TV channels and saw the story repeated over and over again on many different news shows, Michael realized something important. He didn’t have to let the media control him - he had now discovered that he could control the media.

  It wasn’t long before Michael found another opportunity to leak a bizarre story. For many years, he had been interested in the movie The Elephant Man, about the Victorian man who was born so disfigured that he became a circus freak show exhibit. Michael discovered that his bones were held in a hospital in London. He thought it would be a great publicity stunt to announce that he had offered half a million dollars to buy the bones to take home. The story was leaked in the same way as before, and the story spread like wildfire once again.

  One unexpected side result of the story was that Michael was contacted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ elders in California. They thought this kind of publicity about one of their congregation portrayed the faith in a bad light. You might think that was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but they persisted. In response, Michael announced that he was leaving the religion, a decision which caused his mother a great deal of anguish.

  Meanwhile, Michael discovered that the publicity campaign was beginning to backfire. Playboy magazine quipped: ‘Rumour has it that the descendants of the Elephant Man have offered $10,000 for the remains of Michael Jackson's nose.’ The British tabloids named him Wacko Jacko, and he became increasingly seen as not just eccentric, but possibly completely barking mad. Soon the press stopped waiting for Michael to leak stories to them, and started making up their own. Michael became extremely irritated about the fictions, but as he was the one who had fanned the flames, he was hardly in a position to complain.

  One fictional story did amuse, him, however. It claimed that musical rival, Prince, had used ESP to control Michael’s chimpanzee, Bubbles.

  ‘He’s gone too far this time,’ Michael was reported as saying. ‘What kind of sicko messes with a monkey.’

  Michael laughed for hours about that one.

  ***

  By 1987, Michael had a bit of a problem on his hands. He had become accustomed to being the major star in the family, and enjoyed the power and influence that gave him over everybody. So it came as a bit of a shock when his kid sister Janet unexpectedly flourished into a star in her own right. Her album Control became the big hit of 1986, going on to sell six million albums.

  Michael’s kid sister becomes a superstar

  This put Michael under a lot of pressure whilst working on his new album, Bad. The last thing he wanted for his little sister to overtake him in the stardom stakes. And seeing as she was the star of the moment, while he was seen by the world as being Wacko Jacko, he had a significant challenge on his hands. The other problem was that Michael knew his latest album would be compared directly to Thriller...and that was a hard act to follow. But he knew he had some great songs, and spent a lot of time with Quincy Jones, working to get the new album exactly right.

  The new album, Bad, was not destined to beat Thriller, but it put in a pretty respectable performance, reaching No.1 in both the US within a few weeks of release. The first single ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ reached No.1 in both the US and the UK, while the next single, Bad also shot to the top of the charts. The Bad tour kicked off in Japan and took Michael on a gruelling 18-month worldwide journey. The concerts were a huge success, but when Michael returned home for the Grammy awards, disappointment set in. He was nominated for four awards, but won none. He was inconsolable, and looked it. As one reporter said: ‘He couldn't have looked any more heartbroken if someone had walked away with his pet chimp.’

  Some time earlier, whilst filming a video in the Santa Ynez Valley in California with Paul McCartney, Michael had become enchanted with the estate that Paul rented for the duration of his visit. When this came on the market sometime later, Michael decided to buy it. After some fierce negotiation, he became the proud owner of 2700 acres of prime real estate for a mere 17 million dollars, which he promptly renamed Neverland, in honor of his hero Peter Pan.

  Neverland was soon transformed into a private theme park, with everything from fairground attractions and a Ferris wheel to a four-acre man-made lake and many acres of green and expensively manicured grassland. The house was opulent when Michael moved in, but soon became much more so, with vast sums of money spent to furnish it just the way he liked it. It was no surprise to any of his staff when regular visitors to Neverland included not just hundreds of disadvantaged children, but also a string of young boys, who were typically discarded when they reached their teens. The parents of one received a Rolls Royce in return for their friendship, so it is easy to see why such parents were tolerant of the odd relationship between Michael and their sons.

  With a little more privacy now that he had moved out of the family home, Michael was able to continue with an alarming series of cosmetic surgery operations. By this time, the structure of his nose had collapsed under the strain of repeated operations, and he had to wear a prosthetic nose tip to make his nose look normal. This required a fair bit of effort every morning, and often Michael chose to simply wear a surgical mask to hide his face instead.

  Michael entertains more children at Neverland

  That was not the only change in the Gloved One’s appearance. It had been apparent for some time that his skin was becoming whiter and whiter, the result of using bleaching agents on his skin. He was also diagnosed with Vitiligo, a skin disease which can be hereditary - but can also be caused by excessive use of bleaching agents on the skin. One of its effects is de-pigmentation of the skin. Add to that the excessive quantities of pancake makeup that he uses to hide skin blemishes, and you have a very strange look indeed. This is most noticeable in the rare family photos of the Jacksons brothers in later years. In these, you see a group of healthy, good-looking African-American guys - plus a porcelain-faced clown who forgot to remove his makeup. At first glance, you might think the photo must have been taken on Halloween.

  Chapter 7 - The Accusations Start To Fly...

  Even if you are the world’s biggest superstar, fate can intervene in surprising ways to throw your life off course. When Michael’s car broke down as he was driving on Wilshire Boulevard in May 1992, it was certainly an inconvenience. But he could not have imagined that this incident would start a change of events that would cost him many millions of dollars, his reputation...and ultimately his life.

  Michael found himself at the side of the road, stranded in a jeep that was blowing steam all over the busy highway. He had no idea how to deal with such an emergency, so he called 911. The emergency services told him they couldn’t help...even if he was Michael Jackson. A few minutes later, a Rent-a-Wreck tow truck pulled up and asked if needed a hand. He certainly did, and soon Michael’s truck was being towed back to the Rent-a-Wreck garage. Back at the garage, owner Dave Schwartz called his wife, June. He told her to bring their son Jordie over right away.

  Jordie Chandler (Dave was not his real father) was about 12 years old, good-looking and white. In other words, exactly the profile that matched so many of Michael’s young friends.

  Michael’s sexuality was still an ongoing subject of discussion in the press. The general verdict that he was still a virgin, damaged by the traumas of his childhood in witnessing both his father’s repeated infidelity and his brothers’ wild partying with groupies. Although he had made a point of being seeing with beautiful women such as Tatum O’Neal and Broo
ke Shields, everyone knew that this was a smokescreen, and that no sexual relationship had emerged in these cases. The rumors that he was gay continued to circulate, but Michael vigorously denied them all. And in any case, there was nothing to support them except for his oddly effeminate manner. Certainly, there was no suggestion at that time that Michael was having any kind of sexual relationship with the young white boys that were so frequently seen in his company - even if some people thought the relationships were inappropriate.

  Michael had often said he had missed out on his childhood - constantly rehearsing, recording and gigging while other kids were playing and having fun. So there seemed to be a simple explanation to his love of children and childish things - he was simply acting out the childhood he never had.

  Michael’s work with children was well known, ranging from the We Are The World project to his own Heal The World Foundation. There was no doubt that he had very generously donated millions of dollars to children’s charities, including the $7 million he had earned on the last Jacksons tour. He portrayed the image of someone who genuinely loved children, even claiming that he would commit suicide if there were no children in the world. Everyone believed him, including Jordie’s mother. She thought it would be a great idea for Jordie to become Michael’s friend, so she encouraged this by giving Michael their phone number.