Bad launched a record five consecutive singles to the number 1 spot on the charts, three more than Thriller (though all seven of that album’s singles reached the top ten, only “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” actually claimed the top spot).28 It took a quarter of a century for another album (Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream) to match Bad’s feat. Jackson penned nine of the eleven songs on the album—all but “Just Good Friends” and “Man in the Mirror”—and some, including “Dirty Diana,” “Leave Me Alone,” and “Smooth Criminal,” remain among his most iconic efforts.
Yet when Bad was released on August 31, 1987, many reviewers—white critics, in particular—seemed to focus more on Jackson’s changing physical appearance than his music. Vitiligo treatments had left his skin noticeably lighter, and he’d had multiple plastic surgeries as well. Says hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy: “It was such a stark physical transition . . . it became the only thing you could think about, in a sense, when you are in a space where how we look and ‘look at me’ is so much a part of it all.”29
The New York Times’ album review noted his new chin cleft before discussing his music,30 while the Los Angeles Times’ response began by referring to Jackson as “the world’s favorite frail man-child.”31 Rolling Stone said the album was better than Thriller, but buried the observation toward the bottom of a review that opened by calling Jackson a “faux-porcelain elephant man.”32
A readers’ poll conducted by the same magazine named Jackson the year’s Worst Male Singer. He did earn Grammy nominations in a handful of categories including Album of the Year, but Bad won only for Best Engineered Recording—Non-Classical (and, in 1990, for the “Leave Me Alone” video). The negative press didn’t stop Bad from debuting at number 1 in the US and many other countries; to date, the album has sold 35 million copies worldwide33—placing it among the most successful of all time, but nowhere near the 100 million figure that Jackson had initially envisioned.
Still, Bad’s commercial success during the fall of 1987 was one of the many factors that helped put CBS Records on pace to top the previous year’s record profits of $162.1 million (on $1.5 billion in revenue) by more than 20 percent. Because of this virtuoso financial performance—and the musical acts that drove it—Sony agreed to buy CBS Records for $2 billion34 that November.
“Look at the roster: Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, you know, they had a lot of artists,” says Yetnikoff. “The whole classical thing was very interesting, too. [But] Michael was a big star . . . it contributed.”35
* * *
If Sony’s executives needed any additional persuasion to close the deal, they may have received it in September of 1987 when Jackson played a string of shows in Tokyo to kick off the Bad tour.
Godzilla himself would have been hard-pressed to re-create the level of hysteria that accompanied Jackson’s arrival in Japan. He landed in a Boeing 747 packed with twenty-two truckloads of equipment, including 700 lights and 100 speakers.36 The authorities shut down half of Tokyo’s Narita airport to accommodate the hordes of local and foreign press who’d arrived to greet him. Bruce Swedien remembers the scene when he and his wife disembarked with Jackson, Dileo, Quincy Jones, Bubbles the chimpanzee, and a host of others.37
Sensing danger, Dileo ordered Jackson’s entourage to make a protective circle around the singer in order to get him through the airport. Jones and the others closed into formation and ushered Jackson into his limousine without incident. (Swedien thinks they could have saved time by simply unleashing Bubbles: “He would have straightened out those reporters!”)
Jackson opened his tour with three sold-out shows at Tokyo’s 45,000-seat Korakuen Stadium—and that was just the beginning. His sixteen-month tour grossed $125 million (a quarter of a billion dollars, adjusting for inflation) on 123 shows, drawing 4.4 million fans—the most of any tour to that point. Former Live Nation chief Michael Cohl figures Jackson might have gotten $300 per ticket if the excursion had happened today. “It could be an astounding number,” he says.38 Indeed, by that math, the tour would have grossed more than $1 billion, making it the biggest of all time by a wide margin.
After the cumbersome democracy of decision making during the Victory Tour, Jackson took advantage of the control he had over his first solo excursion. To bring visual ideas to life, he personally collaborated with his costume designers—including Michael Bush, who remembers Jackson leafing through magazines, tearing out images that inspired him, and Scotch-taping them floor-to-ceiling. The two would then sit down with one piece of paper, one eraser, and two pencils: “He would draw, I would erase,” says Bush. “I would draw, he would erase.”39
In addition to costumes, Bush helped design a special shoe for the “Smooth Criminal” performance—one that allowed Jackson to execute his magical, gravity-defying forty-five-degree lean.
“You’re sure it works?” said Jackson when he eventually saw Bush’s creation.
“Well, Michael, I wouldn’t bring it to you if it didn’t work.”
They laughed, and Jackson took another look.
“This is not going to work.”
“Michael, it works; I did it, Dennis did it, we’re here now to show you.”
Jackson placed his feet in the shoes.
“Now lean toward me,” instructed Bush. Sure enough, Jackson floated toward the ground, his body diagonal from the floor, as though he were doing a push-up with no hands. When he returned to his upright posture, he was crying.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you made this work!”
“That’s the job you gave me.”
“We have to patent this.”
Four years later Bush discovered Jackson had gotten the patent, sharing the credit with Bush and Tompkins.
* * *
Even after he arrived in Japan, Jackson was deeply involved with the underpinnings of every show. He had a practical thirst to understand what everyone around him did and know how everything worked, from the costumes down to the staging. “I got my lighting designer for the tour,” he’d say. “I need to understand what that board does. Because if I tell the guy I want this light up here to do this, and he says, ‘I can’t,’ I need to understand why he can’t, but I also need to understand why maybe we can.”
All the while, Jackson kept up with music industry goings-on between concerts, scouring the charts for up-and-coming songwriters to sign to ATV. One such musician was Bryan Loren, who at the time was producing for the likes of Sting and Barry White. Jackson exhorted ATV president Dale Kawashima to get the new prospect on board.
“He wanted to be involved not just with buying older songs, classic songs like the Beatles,” says Kawashima, noting that Loren was later added to the roster and would go on to work on Jackson’s next album. “He was interested in signing new writers to ATV. . . . It was not John Branca who’d call up and say, ‘Oh, there’s this great writer Bryan Loren, we have to sign him.’ That was Michael Jackson.”40
Jackson’s primary concern, however, was being in top shape for his performances. That was quite clear to those in his inner sanctum, and to those who briefly passed through—including, by a strange twist of fate, Jon Bon Jovi. “I don’t have a lot of Michael Jackson anecdotes,” the Jersey-born rocker said over the phone. “But I can tell you one, and you can make of it what you will.”41
In September of 1987, Bon Jovi and his eponymous band were still riding the buzz of Slippery When Wet, which had catapulted the group to international superstardom a year earlier. They were playing a handful of shows in Tokyo’s 20,000-seat Budokan arena while Jackson drew 135,000 fans over a sold-out three-night stand at nearby Korakuen Stadium. As it happened, they were all staying at the same hotel.
One night, Dileo called and asked if Bon Jovi would like to meet Jackson, an invitation the rocker gladly accepted. The hotel was shaped like a hand, with the palm containing an elevator bank. The fingers radiated outward, each its own wing with multiple rooms; on the top floor, one wing was blocked off for Jackson and his inner circle. Dileo
led Bon Jovi and his bandmates down a long corridor to the singer’s suite, pausing to slick back his hair and extinguish his cigar before opening the door.
“The room had been ripped to shreds and redecorated,” says Bon Jovi. “They put up mirrors against the wall so [Jackson] could practice his dancing, and a wooden dance floor in there. And they took over a wing of this hotel. Needless to say, spending money was not really an issue.”
Jackson, however, was nowhere to be found. So Bon Jovi and his pals waited on the couch. When the singer finally arrived, he made quite the entrance, decked out in one of his trademark outfits from the Bad Tour: all black leather and buckles, a spandex shirt, belts draped over his shoulder. “When he entered the room, your eyes sort of had to focus again,” Bon Jovi remembers.
The Jersey rockers, fresh from a string of tour dates in Australia—and new to the trappings of superstardom—immediately began regaling Jackson with tales from their trip. They were so big Down Under, they told him, that they had to buy wigs and fake mustaches to avoid paparazzi; the only way out of their hotel was in the laundry van. Jackson smiled and nodded, never giving away the fact that he’d been doing the same since his Jackson 5 days.
“So we made small talk and he couldn’t have been nicer,” Bon Jovi says. “We kept saying, ‘Michael, you’re sitting up here by yourself, man, we’re down two floors below you . . . we’re all here, on nights off we’re hanging out, come on down.’ ”
Again, Jackson smiled and nodded. Eventually Bon Jovi and his band bid their new friend adieu and headed back downstairs, hoping they might get to party later on with one of the only acts in the world bigger than them. But with each passing minute, they grew more certain that Jackson wouldn’t be coming. Imagine their surprise when Jackson sent down Bubbles to entertain them.
“We proceeded to get very drunk, have a bunch of water fights, knock on doors, typical classic rock star things to do in the eighties,” Bon Jovi recalls. “And [we] blamed it all on Bubbles.”
Jackson never came downstairs. And despite the fact that Bon Jovi showed up at Jackson’s show, the singer didn’t return the favor. It wasn’t out of any personal animosity, but rather an unstoppable focus on his work.
“We were having a blast two floors below with Bubbles, and he was up there practicing his dancing,” says Bon Jovi. “While we were being goofballs and enjoying our success, he was practicing even after the shows because he was just so ultra-über-focused on being Michael Jackson. The blessing was the curse.”
As the tour wore on, another future music legend witnessed Jackson’s perfectionism—and the toll it took on him—up close. Sheryl Crow, then twenty-five years old, served as a backup singer and often performed duets with Jackson on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.”
“I got to witness on a nightly basis what made him so completely different from everybody else,” she recalls. “And that is that quality in somebody that is true stardom, for lack of a better word. I think he had such an understanding of the divinity that existed in him, and was also cursed by a fragility of the human spirit that existed from all the wounding that went along with making him who he was.”42
Crow felt he had internalized the pressure of becoming the focal point of the Jackson 5, and thereby his family’s meal ticket, at such an early age. Initially, she was amazed at how the Bad Tour was in many ways like a Broadway show, with everything consistent from one night to the next, down to the banter between songs.
In the midst of the tour, even as stadiums swooned before Jackson across the globe, Crow noticed how hard he was on himself—and at times “sort of the crumbling of his confidence in who he was,” she says. “But when he would sing on songs like ‘Human Nature’ and ‘Billie Jean,’ you could look out at the audience and see people’s faces just be transfixed.”
* * *
By the end of 1987, Jackson had won eleven Grammys and earned a quarter of a billion dollars, all before the age of thirty. He had paved the way for black artists to dance and sing their way into living rooms all around the country—and for acts of all races to not only profit immensely from previously unheard-of brand extensions but to own the entities behind them as well.
Yet the noise around Jackson—some of it generated by him, some by others—was beginning to drown out some of his accomplishments. “When the conversation was more about the bizarre than the music for a prolonged period of time, you know, you can do that when the music is so extraordinary,” says Levine. “[But] it all started to become a little too far out.”43
As outlandish as the stories of hyperbaric chambers and Elephant Man bones were, some observers believed there were more insidious forces behind the backlash over his success. “The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all,” writer James Baldwin opined. “All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth. . . . I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables.”44
Chapter 10
* * *
OFF TO NEVERLAND
The only way to truly appreciate the scope of the Neverland Valley Ranch is to climb the Giving Tree—the majestically gnarled oak up in which Michael Jackson composed many of his songs—and slowly turn clockwise.
To the east, a driveway stretches out from the main house, crossing a stone bridge on its path to a public road roughly a mile away. To the south, a meadow bigger than a football field sits behind an equally prodigious pond. To the west, a redbrick train station sits atop a knoll; embedded in the hillside is a twenty-foot-wide clock made of living flowers, the word “NEVERLAND” spelled in bushy yellow plants at the top.1
To the north of the tree (one of the property’s 67,000 sycamores and oaks2) is Neverland’s 2,700-acre backyard, about four times the size of Monaco. There’s a swimming pool, a video game arcade, and a full-size movie theater; beyond, a sepia savannah gently slopes up to the tip of a 3,000-foot peak that Jackson dubbed Mt. Katherine, after his mother.
Neverland’s more extravagant features are now gone. Its amusement park rides and train cars were hauled out long ago, and the ranch’s nonhuman inhabitants—which once included alligators, elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers and, of course, Bubbles the chimp—are nowhere to be found. A dusty inflatable pool is all that remains inside the building that was once home to Jackson’s vaunted video game collection. And the main house, a sprawling mock Tudor with seven bedrooms and thirteen bathrooms, sits pristinely empty in the center of it all.3
But traces of the property’s longtime owner remain, most notably in the dance studio adjacent to the movie theater. In the center of the mirrored room, velvet ropes hang from four brass poles, marking off about ten square feet of the floor. Lift back the piece of plexiglass below and you’ll find a well-worn spot, a series of swooping scratches carved into the caramel wood. Illuminated by a single spotlight, it was once Michael Jackson’s favored location for practicing spin moves.
The indentations from Jackson’s Florsheims started to accumulate shortly after he returned from the Bad Tour and bought what was then called the Sycamore Valley Ranch. Up to that point, Jackson had lived at his family’s home in Encino—it was only at age twenty-nine, after selling tens of millions of albums and embarking upon what was then the highest-grossing tour of all time, that he finally stopped living with his parents.
Neverland’s initial asking price: $60 million. Branca jumped in and helped Jackson negotiate, eventually closing at $17.5 million. The final sale included a fully stocked wine cellar, and the sprawling main house came fully furnished. A grateful Jackson gave his lawyer a fittingly grand token of thanks: another Rolls-Royce.4
* * *
“Frank Sinatra was the Chairman of the Board, Elvis was the King,” sighed Michael Jackson one day to Branca and Dileo. “What am I, the Gloved One?”
The year was 1988, and though Jackson was al
ready the lord of the Billboard charts and had a veritable kingdom of his own at Neverland, he conspicuously lacked something very important: a royal nickname. The best of his extant monikers was the Gloved One; one of the worst, in his opinion, was Wacko Jacko.
Jackson was fairly certain that the regrettable state of his informal nomenclature had something to do with the racial bias of his detractors. He used to tell Branca he thought the press didn’t want him to be bigger than Elvis because Jackson was black, and that they insisted on labeling him Wacko Jacko in part to tear him down.
Fortunately for Jackson, a dear friend had a better name in mind. He first met Elizabeth Taylor in the early 1980s after he reportedly saw her walking out early from one of his performances. Insulted, he called her in tears. She explained that she’d left because she couldn’t see the stage or hear the music; the explanation was good enough for Jackson, and the two soon became friends, bonding over their early life experiences in show business.5
“Our childhoods are very similar, and we have that from the very beginning in common,” Taylor told Oprah Winfrey in 1993. “I was a child star at nine, had an abusive father, and that kind of brought us close together.”6
“I love Elizabeth Taylor,” Jackson wrote in his autobiography, echoing his friend’s sentiments. “I’m inspired by her bravery . . . I identify with her very strongly because of our experiences as child stars. When we first started talking on the phone, she told me she felt as if she had known me for years. I felt the same way [about her].”7
After Thriller established Jackson’s supremacy on the charts, Taylor suggested a new title for him, one that she’d already taken to using in public: the King of Pop, Rock and Soul. He was delighted. The only question was whether people would start using it. Conveniently, Jackson had been invited to appear at the fifth annual MTV Music Video Awards to receive what was then called the Video Vanguard Award, honoring lifetime achievement in the medium (it was later renamed in Jackson’s honor).
Michael Jackson, Inc. Page 14
