In the meantime, Jackson’s ghoulish gallivantings sent sales of the album itself skyward once again. “After the ‘Thriller’ video, I remember [the records] were running out the door,” says Yetnikoff. “He was selling a million records a week.”44
By age twenty-five, Jackson had become one of the richest entertainers on the planet, earning $43 million in 1983 and $91 million in 1984. His financial success was matched by Thriller’s accolades. In addition to a slew of positive reviews, the album received twelve Grammy nominations.45 And Jackson wanted to be sure he got the credit—sometimes at the expense of his collaborators. The night before the ceremony in Los Angeles, he called Yetnikoff.
“I’m winning a bunch of Grammys and Quincy is winning a bunch,” said Jackson. “He shouldn’t get a Grammy for producing the record, I produced it.”
“Michael, you’re crazy.”
“No, go to the Grammys, tell them to take Quincy’s nomination off, I want to be the only one getting the Grammy for producing the record.”
“Michael, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. One, it’s too late. Two, this is a TV show, they don’t care what you and I do at this point; it’s Quincy’s town more than it’s my town. And they’re not going to do it; they’re not going to take my word over his. And three, I saw him produce the fucking record! I saw him rolling the dials or whatever. This is ridiculous, I can’t do it.”46
In Yetnikoff’s autobiography, the former CBS chief writes that he ended the conversation by saying, “Go to the goddamn Grammys, Michael, and act like you’re happy.”47 It seemed Jackson heeded that advice when he arrived at the ceremony the next day. He was all smiles as he and Jones celebrated victories including Record of the Year for “Beat It” and Album of the Year for Thriller.
Jackson took home eight awards in all, and to this day, no other artist has collected more Grammys in a single night. It’s even more impressive given that the number of categories expanded from 67 at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards to a peak of 110 a quarter-century later.48 In the year that followed, the acknowledgments continued to pour in—and not just from Grammy voters. In May, Jackson agreed to waive the fee for the use of “Beat It” in an anti-drunk-driving campaign in exchange for a visit to the White House. There, on a sunny spring day, Ronald Reagan introduced the singer as cameras rolled.
“Well, isn’t this a thriller?” the president began as he formally welcomed Jackson to the White House, discharging a salvo of additional puns before turning serious.49
“Michael Jackson is proof of what a person can accomplish through a lifetime free of alcohol or drug abuse,” Reagan continued, turning to present the singer a plaque the size of a small coffee table. “Thank you, Michael, for the example that you’ve given to the millions of young Americans who look up to you . . . your success is an American dream come true.”
* * *
“John, I think I fucked up.”
It was Yetnikoff on the phone, calling Branca with the closest thing to an apology that he could muster.
“Why, Walter?” the lawyer replied.
But he already knew: Yetnikoff was feeling remorseful for berating Branca—and not taking Jackson’s opinion into consideration—during the E.T. fiasco. Since then, Thriller had broken just about every sales record there was to break. Even the E.T. album in question managed to crack the top 100 on the UK charts and earned Jackson a Grammy for Best Recording for Children. Yetnikoff’s stature had received an incredible boost as a result of Thriller’s success, and he wanted to keep his star happy.
“Well, Michael told me how big [Thriller] was going to be,” Yetnikoff continued. “But I didn’t realize how big it was going to be. I didn’t realize that. I think I fucked up. Is he mad at me?”50
“I don’t know, Walter. Would you be mad if you were him?”
“I gotta make it up to him,” said Yetnikoff. “How do you think I can do that?”
Branca’s moment had arrived.
“Give him ownership of his masters,” the lawyer said.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“Okay.”51
Chapter 6
* * *
THE BUSINESS OF VICTORY
Charles Sullivan describes many things as “grand and glorious.” On our first phone call, he used the phrase to characterize institutions of higher learning (Harvard, his alma mater), publications (Forbes), and the way he was feeling that day.
When we met for lunch at the Yale Club in New York a few days later, his outlook hadn’t darkened a bit. Decked in a blue blazer, a blue-and-white striped dress shirt, and neatly knotted yellow tie, the seventy-year-old came from a family accustomed to grandness and glory. His father founded the NFL’s New England Patriots and owned the team for three decades. Sure enough, when the waiter asked how he was doing, Sullivan’s reply was swift: “Grand and glorious.”1
Those two words also happen to be the best way to describe the vision of Michael Jackson and his brothers for the Victory Tour—the Jacksons’ post-Thriller reunion romp of 1984—bankrolled by none other than Sullivan. The tour would go on to gross $70 million, of which Sullivan would end up guaranteeing $55 million to the brothers. He wouldn’t see a dime from the tour. Then again, neither would Michael Jackson.
They both planned it that way, more or less. For Sullivan, the goal was expanding the scope of his business from sporting events to include live music. For Jackson, it was giving back (on the eve of the tour, he announced that he’d be donating his $6 million cut to charity) and doing right by his family (the excursion was his last with his brothers) so that he could move into the next phase of his solo career with a clear conscience.
“I had a much better story to tell: that this was the reunion of the Jackson 5, the group that really defined Motown and American music,” says Sullivan. “And that was a message that I was able to sell.”
Though Jackson didn’t end up keeping any money from ticket sales, the Victory Tour helped turn his already sparkling star into a supernova. He’d find other ways to add millions to his bulging coffers along the way.
* * *
As Jackson racked up record sales and Grammy Awards, his family watched his explosive success with great interest—and more than a bit of envy. Jermaine was in the process of leaving Motown after his solo career at the label had fizzled. The brothers hadn’t recorded an album since 1980’s Triumph, which had earned platinum certification for sales of more than 1 million, about what Thriller sold on a very good week.
Between Michael’s supernatural success and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the brothers’ reunion on the Motown 25 special, it seemed the time was right for new material. An album and a tour with Michael was just what Jackie, Marlon, Randy, Tito, and Jermaine needed to give their careers—and bank accounts—a boost.
Concocting a new album proved to be easy enough. The brothers started recording Victory in November 1983, bridging gaps in both musical taste and schedule by structuring the album mostly as a collection of solos. Jermaine made his return to the group with opening track “Torture” (written by Jackie Jackson), while Michael contributed a handful of songs including “State of Shock,” a duet with fellow Branca client Mick Jagger (“He sings flat,” Jackson teased his lawyer after recording the song. “I can’t believe you recommended him”2).
When it came to touring, however, Michael would prove to be a tough sell. He had already spent over a decade toiling alongside his brothers, and even his father acknowledged that the singer was tiring of the grind. “He was getting fed up doing all these tours,” recalls Joe Jackson. “He wanted to write and produce music.”3
Moving on made sense from a financial standpoint, too: though Michael had long been the Jacksons’ undisputed frontman, they still divided the spoils evenly. That didn’t seem to bother him as much as the fact that everything about the concerts was a group decision, from the set list to the dance steps. As always, though, he found it very hard to say no, especially when his moth
er got involved. She urged him to think about hitting the road with his brothers one last time, and eventually he relented.
“I felt the wisest thing for me to do would be not to do the tour,” Jackson later explained. “But my brothers wanted to do it, and I did it for them.”4
Even with Michael on board, the tour’s beginnings didn’t match its grand and glorious moniker. The search for a concert promoter began with an offer from music executive Cecil Holmes, who’d later sign New Kids on the Block to their first record deal. Holmes showed up to meet Joe Jackson and his sons with a check for $250,000 as an advance for the entire tour—about enough to cover one of the giant mechanical spiders that Michael wanted to be part of the show.
“Are you kidding me?” shrieked Joe, ripping up the check and dropping the remnants at Holmes’s feet. “We’re not going to be undersold like this!”5
Shortly thereafter, a new candidate emerged: Don King, the flamboyant promoter of boxing matches. He gave each brother a check for $500,000 to seal the deal. Per the Jacksons’ initial agreement with King, the promoter would take 7.5 percent of tour proceeds and the Jackson parents 7.5 percent; the brothers would split the remaining 85 percent evenly.6
There would be plenty to go around—the tour was expected to top $50 million in ticket sales. In preparation, Michael hired Frank Dileo to be his manager. The rotund former Epic executive (who passed away in 2011 due to complications from heart surgery) had a wit as sharp as his promotions expertise. “We stand next to each other,” he once said of Jackson, “and we look like the number ten.”7 He quickly came to appreciate his new boss’s intellect.
“A lot of artists don’t want to know anything about business affairs, but Michael is involved in every facet of his career,” he said shortly after signing on. “He’s not one of those people who stops thinking when he walks out of the recording studio or off the stage.”8
Dileo and Branca combined to form the two-headed business monster that oversaw a burgeoning Michael Jackson, Inc., but the singer had final say on all major decisions. “The business was me, and the imaging and marketing was Frank, and Michael oversaw both,” says Branca. “So Michael was the chairman and we reported to him.”9
As such, the two men accompanied Jackson to all the planning meetings for the Victory Tour, while Jermaine hired his own counsel and the other four brothers brought a representative of their own. Don King had an unusual plan to get these players on his side, as Branca learned one day at Hayvenhurst, where Jackson was still living. One of the promoter’s associates sidled up and informed him that King wanted to “give” the lawyer a boxer.
“He was trying to buy me off,” Branca remembers. “So I kept my mouth shut. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ”
“Don wants to give you a boxer to own,” the man replied.
Branca politely declined.
“It was this war,” he says, recalling the days that followed. “Michael would lock himself in his room, and Joe Jackson and Don King would come banging, ‘Open up the door!’ ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘Open!’ ”
It was King’s performance at the press conference to announce the tour—along with Michael’s discovery that King had spent four years in jail after a 1966 manslaughter conviction10—that pushed the young singer over the edge. Rather than trumpeting Michael’s success at the event held at New York’s posh Tavern on the Green, King seemed more interested in promoting his own triumphs, bloviating about legendary boxing matches he’d arranged, such as the Thrilla in Manila.
“The wrong Thriller!” explains Sullivan, who emerged as a candidate to replace King soon after the fiasco. “So Michael said to his father, ‘I don’t want to have anything more to do with this guy.’ He said, ‘I want a tour that will promote me, not promote him.’ And so he said, ‘We need to get rid of him.’ And Branca then sent King a [termination letter].”11
Sullivan entered the picture after calling Dileo in hopes of bringing the Victory Tour to his family’s 60,000-seat football stadium (his father bought the Boston Patriots for $25,000 back in 1959, moving the franchise to Foxborough in 1970 to play in what would become Sullivan Stadium as the NFL’s New England Patriots). Dileo asked if Sullivan might be interested in promoting the whole tour, and days later, the latter was on a plane to Los Angeles to meet the Jacksons.
The mild-mannered Sullivan, with his Brooks Brothers style and Harvard pedigree, couldn’t have been more different from the outrageous Don King. That certainly bolstered his case with Michael Jackson. It didn’t hurt that Sullivan was the managing partner of the New York office of law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where one of his clients was CBS Records. His first meeting with the Jacksons may not have been grand or glorious, but it did the trick.
“When I met them, you know, I got on well with them,” Sullivan recalls. “Met Michael, met the others. And they asked me to take the whole tour.”
Even at the outset, the proposed deal didn’t seem like an easy run to the end zone for Sullivan. He’d get 25 percent of ticket sale revenues and 22.5 percent of merchandise sales, with the rest going to the Jacksons—but he’d have to pay them a $55 million guarantee regardless (with 7 percent going to Joe and Katherine, 3 percent to Don King as part of his exit agreement, and the remainder split between the six brothers, who kept their original checks). Sullivan also gave each brother a check for $500,000 up front; in order to afford that, along with setup costs, he had to take out a $12.5 million bank loan. If sales fell short, he’d be on the hook for the difference.12
Originally, Sullivan was to have a partner in the endeavor: San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. But the elder DeBartolo vetoed the deal. Sullivan’s own family expressed similar reservations—Chuck himself admits that he only expected to net half a million dollars on the tour, not much for an NFL football owner, especially considering the eight-figure risk he’d be shouldering.
For Sullivan, though, immediate financial gain wasn’t the main goal. In those days, no national concert promoters were around to front cash for an entire tour. Artists had to negotiate with scores of smaller regional players, the sort that entrepreneur Robert F. X. Sillerman would later buy up and roll into what would become Live Nation. Sullivan’s previous experience hosting sold-out shows for Madonna and David Bowie in the early 1980s gave him confidence that he could create a live music behemoth of his own—and the Victory Tour was a perfect way to prove it.
“I thought it would provide a basis for future tour deals,” says Sullivan. “I also thought it would give me a leg up in getting major tours into Foxborough. That was the rationale.”
Sullivan agreed to the deal. He was happy, the Jacksons were happy, and even Don King had grudgingly accepted the terms of his buyout. Al Sharpton was brought in as a “consultant” in case King changed his mind and tried to convince the regional and local promoters to boycott the tour. When King was running the show, they had assumed that he was going to follow the old model and farm out the task of planning concerts to them. The promoters would collect their fees, book the venues, and hire caterers, limo companies, and security teams, thereby preserving a profitable status quo.
With Sullivan on the scene, it seemed they’d been cut out—he was planning to do all the legwork himself, bypassing the middleman in an effort to create a more efficient business model for the future. The regional and local bosses, of course, didn’t take kindly to this. Many of them had booked the Jacksons several times in previous years, and felt they’d played a crucial role in establishing the brothers’ careers.
“They were planning major protests and boycotts, but they didn’t have them because the regional promoters were paid [off], and the regional promoters paid off the local promoters,” recalls attorney Cynthia Minor, who was brought in as an advisor to the regional promoters. “Everybody got their little cut. And a lot of folks got paid off with tickets, depending on how far up the chain you were. Because the tickets were impossible to get.”13
To expedite shipment, tickets would onl
y be sold directly by mail, rather than through a third-party ticketing company. Sullivan added that they could be purchased only in blocks of four, for $30 apiece (about $65, adjusting for inflation). When fans protested, Michael asked Sullivan to change the policy, which he did.
Pepsi sponsored the tour, calling for the Jacksons to film two commercials. There was a problem, though: Michael wouldn’t touch the can. He insisted on writing clauses into his contract stipulating that he wouldn’t have to hold the soda on camera, and that he wouldn’t be in the ad for more than three seconds, lest he cheapen his image or overexpose himself.14
The first commercial, helmed by “Beat It” director Bob Giraldi, was filmed at a Hollywood lot made to look like a New York street. The second took place across town at the Shrine Auditorium, where a Jacksons concert was staged—complete with throngs of fans waving Pepsi cups in the air. But something went awry.
Michael was to appear at the top of a stairway, at which point he’d be illuminated in silhouette by a shower of sparks from magnesium flash bombs. Getting the timing right was tricky. After five takes, the director suggested that Michael wait a bit longer atop the steps before walking down and joining his brothers onstage. On the sixth take, he lingered just a moment too long, and the sparks ignited his spray-drenched hair.15
“I was dancing down this ramp and turning around, spinning, not knowing I was on fire,” Jackson wrote. “Suddenly I felt my hands reflexively going to my head in an attempt to smother the flames. Jermaine turned around and saw me on the ground, just after the explosions had gone off, and he thought I had been shot by someone in the crowd.”16
Michael was rushed into an ambulance and taken to the nearby Brotman Medical Center, where he was treated for third-degree burns to his scalp, nearly down to the skull. Once the relief that the singer was still alive had subsided, the executives at Pepsi immediately began worrying he’d sue them. Instead, he scored a new deal worth $5.2 million,17 the highest endorsement fee ever paid to a musician at that point—and $1.5 million to establish the now-defunct Michael Jackson Burn Unit at the hospital.18
Michael Jackson, Inc. Page 9
