Michael Jackson, Inc.

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “The theme of our ad campaign is ‘unstoppable,’ ” said Saemann, introducing the singer. “This word epitomized what LA Gear and Michael Jackson represent. . . . I want to tell the competition, we’ll up you a Jackson.”8

  “Thank you very much,” said Jackson, looking spiffy as ever in sunglasses, a sleek dark suit, and a purple dress shirt. “I’m very happy to be a part of the LA Gear magic.”

  * * *

  As the 1980s drew to a close, Michael Jackson seemed to be asking his closest advisors more questions than usual. Sometimes he’d ask Branca for his thoughts about Dileo’s managerial work. Others, he’d ask Dileo if he thought Branca was spending too much time with the Rolling Stones, whom he was also representing.9

  Branca knew that method of operating from the outset of his relationship with Jackson, when the singer would ask him if he was as good as Frank Sinatra’s lawyer. It was Jackson’s way of motivating his lieutenants. But Dileo’s means of motivation sometimes rankled Jackson: at one show in Pittsburgh, the singer showed up a half hour late—and the manager yelled at Jackson in front of his whole family.

  Dileo imagined himself as something like an updated version of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s boisterous manager (though, to be fair, Jackson was too shrewd to allow Dileo the 50 percent cut of earnings that Elvis gave Parker). He was also loyal, to a fault. He didn’t take on extra acts to manage, thinking Jackson wouldn’t permit it. Then rival advisors would whisper in Jackson’s ear that Dileo didn’t know anything about the music business. Coupled with his occasionally overbearing attitude, this made Dileo an easy scapegoat for Jackson’s disappointment in the sales figures for Bad, which hadn’t approached those of Thriller. In 1989, Jackson fired his manager.

  The purge was just beginning, and not only at Michael Jackson, Inc. In 1990, Sony’s chief dismissed Yetnikoff, citing his “behavior.” Ironically, Yetnikoff had given up many of his notorious vices well before his dismissal, but that didn’t necessarily help his cause. (“In my first year of sobriety, I may have been crazier,” he says.) He also saw too late that his former protégé and eventual replacement, the lounge-singer-turned-song-plugger-turned-manager Tommy Mottola, had been planning a coup. (Geffen’s gleeful response to his rival’s demise: “Ding dong, the witch is dead!”)10

  Shortly before Yetnikoff’s departure from the label, Mottola called Branca and offered to put him on a lucrative retainer; the attorney declined (he and Mottola were never close, and per his longstanding policy, Branca felt it would be a conflict of interest to represent both an artist and his record label).11

  And despite the Days of Thunder incident, Jackson and Geffen seemed close as ever. “Michael wanted him to manage him,” recalls Yetnikoff. “Geffen didn’t want to manage him. He said, ‘Do you wash windows?’ And Michael said, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Well, I don’t manage.’ ”12

  But Geffen had Jackson’s ear. He also had a handful of attorneys he preferred, and it started to look like Branca might be the odd man out. Sure enough, later in 1990, Branca received a letter by messenger: Michael Jackson no longer required his services. His colleagues Ken Ziffren and Gary Stiffelman met with the singer one last time to try to change Jackson’s mind. They told him they’d be willing to represent him themselves if his issue was with Branca, at which point Jackson became tearful and passed a note to Stiffelman: “Tell John and Karen I’m sorry and I love them. . . . I truly appreciate all the firm has done.”13

  * * *

  The executive ranks of Michael Jackson, Inc. were beginning to unravel. In the near term, a new team headed by two of Geffen’s associates, lawyer Allen Grubman14 and manager Sandy Gallin, took over Jackson’s business—and with it, the LA Gear deal.

  Before Branca was fired, Gallin had approached him to set up a meeting with Jackson, who’d just dismissed Dileo. Gallin (who has also managed Cher, Neil Diamond, and Dolly Parton) thought he might be a good fit for Jackson. The singer had considered a handful of others, but Gallin eventually won the job after bonding with the King of Pop over the scope of their shared dream of making Jackson as big in the film world as he was in music.

  “What he thought he could become and what I thought he could become were very similar,” says Gallin. “Michael thought of being the biggest, the best . . . to repeat the great success of Thriller and to be able to have more people attend your concerts, to be able to have the most successful short films at the time, to be able to do movies, and to succeed more than anyone else in any form of entertainment that he entered into, whether it was writing, producing, singing, acting, directing. It was innate to his personality.”15

  During the half decade Gallin would spend managing Jackson, he noticed something else besides boundless talent and ambition: as the singer underwent procedures to sculpt his physical features toward an impossible ideal of perfection, he became more and more drawn to painkillers like the ones initially prescribed to him after his Pepsi commercial accident years earlier. The manager didn’t see it as a full-fledged addiction at that point, but it was certainly noteworthy.

  “While I managed him, it wasn’t anywhere near as serious as it became after I managed him, having nothing to do with me at all,” says Gallin. “I think he got into it with his plastic surgeries . . . he could figure out a way to get what he wanted. It was very hard for doctors to say no to him.”

  Despite the managerial changes, Jackson’s business career was chugging along at a healthy clip. To help promote Jackson’s shoe, Saemann directed a commercial that features the King of Pop spinning through a dark, steamy street in his new kicks. His face appears for only about three seconds toward the end when, after destroying a street lamp with the sheer force of his mojo, Jackson looks up to find a young girl smiling and clapping from an upstairs window.16

  Saemann and Jackson also developed a close working relationship. They’d go to record stores and sales meetings together; on one occasion, Jackson elevated the moods of seven hundred sales reps by dancing on a table. He and Saemann would even edit videos together late into the night. “He was no slouch,” recalls the former LA Gear executive. “When Michael went to work on something, it might take two weeks to get ahold of him, but he’d give you five hours.”17

  Jackson, however, still hadn’t completed his new album. Yetnikoff was gone, and his replacement wasn’t going to push his biggest star too hard—not yet, anyway. Perhaps Branca or Dileo would have hurried him along, but they were out of the picture. Whenever Saemann broached the subject with Jackson, the response was the same. “I’m a creative guy,” he’d say. “You can’t force it.”

  In the end, LA Gear had to move forward with the launch of the sneaker line though neither the album nor the promised product tie-in had emerged. Retailers were expecting the shoes to be delivered on schedule—but they were also expecting the footwear to make an appearance in promotional material that accompanied Jackson’s new record. When that didn’t materialize, the results were disastrous. The shoes sold hundreds of thousands of pairs, says Saemann, but there were also hundreds of thousands that had to be returned to the manufacturer after languishing too long on the shelves.

  Jackson hadn’t held up his end of the bargain, and LA Gear was suffering. The day Saemann introduced him at the press conference, the company’s stock stood at $20.75 per share, down from a high of $50.38 the previous year.18 By January 1991, the stock had plummeted to $2.88; it lost 21.5 percent on a single day, thanks to the announcement that the company expected to lose $4 million to $6 million in the fourth quarter.19 Jackson’s deal factored heavily into that figure.

  In June of 1991, Saemann voluntarily resigned from the company “to pursue other business interests.” Roy A. Disney’s Trefoil Capital bought 30 percent of the slumping company around the same time.20

  LA Gear would go on to sue Jackson in 1992; after the singer countersued, the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum. Saemann suspects the company let Jackson keep what they’d already paid him—the first half of the prom
ised $20 million—but didn’t have to fork over anything more. And despite the damage to Saemann’s stock options and reputation, he still has some fondness for the singer.

  “I enjoyed every minute around him; we talked as equals and friends,” recalls Saemann. “But, genius or not, he didn’t deliver.”21

  * * *

  Back in 50 Cent’s office, the rapper is done pacing. Now he’s sitting down again, musing on his shared connections with Michael Jackson. There were plenty of those on the business front, given that the King of Pop proved it was possible for an entertainer to start his own clothing label, shoe line, and record company long before the birth of 50 Cent’s G-Unit empire.

  But he connects with Jackson on another level. Right or wrong, many people define both men by their most successful album—Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was the rapper’s Thriller. Like Jackson, he had many other hits, but the album remained something of an albatross because of the inevitable comparisons it evoked whenever a new effort was released.

  “[Reviewers] go, ‘Yeah it’s cool, but it’s not as good as it was when you came the first time,’ ” he explains. “And you can’t have a second chance at a first impression. No matter who you are.”22

  Despite spending more than a decade trying to top Get Rich, it’s still his bestselling album and most critically acclaimed. 50 Cent doesn’t seem too distressed, though; he’s turned his attention to new business ventures like his SMS headphone line and SK Energy drink.

  The specter of success took a seemingly heavier toll on Michael Jackson. One need only consider how much time and money he spent on subsequent albums to see how badly he yearned to top Thriller—a perfectionist’s longing that caused him to drastically delay the launch of multiple works—sometimes at the expense of interconnected business ventures like the LA Gear shoe line.

  He did all of this in a vain effort to achieve something that was, by definition, basically impossible: to make an album more successful than the most successful album of all time. And Jackson was spurred on over and over again by reviewers and listeners who continued to hold his work, both sonically and commercially, to the standard of Thriller.

  “They just put you up against yourself,” says 50 Cent. “If they give you an opponent, you can analyze and figure out their weaknesses and beat them. But if it’s yourself, how do you win? How do you top that?”

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  DANGEROUS VENTURES

  Teddy Riley was already on the plane to California when his manager explained they’d be taking the last leg of their trip to Neverland via helicopter. The producer had seen a lot in his life despite being just twenty-three years old. After growing up in a Harlem housing project, he’d crafted tracks for the likes of Bobby Brown, Big Daddy Kane, and Keith Sweat, helping to establish the musical genre known as New Jack Swing along the way—but he’d never been in a chopper.

  That was only the beginning of Riley’s adventures with Michael Jackson. It was late 1990 and the singer still hadn’t finished his follow-up to Bad, which he’d been working on since returning from his tour the previous year. He’d already completed a number of new songs including “Black or White,” “Heal the World,” and “Will You Be There,” but didn’t feel they were ready to be released; he didn’t think he had enough material for a suitably revolutionary new album yet.

  Riley touched down at Neverland armed with about seventy new tracks and a recommendation from Quincy Jones, who was out after producing Jackson’s previous three albums.1 Says sound engineer Bruce Swedien of the split: “I think Michael just wanted to take charge of his own life, and that’s it.”2

  After signing a nondisclosure agreement with Neverland’s security team, Riley was escorted to the main house and left alone in a room full of humanitarian awards and plaques commemorating Jackson’s various recording milestones. There were other curiosities, too, including a gold-and-platinum chess piece that caught Riley’s eye. He reached out to touch it—and suddenly felt a hand tap him on the side. He turned around and found himself face to face with Michael Jackson, who’d sneaked in through a secret door.

  “It scared the heck out of me!” Riley recalls. “So that was my first time meeting him. . . . Michael is such a jokester. He just died laughing, fell on the floor. I was on the floor scared, he was on the floor laughing, and we just hit it off from there.”3

  Jackson then led Riley on a tour of his property. They stopped in one room that had two life-sized mannequins of the King of Pop, another filled with hundreds of red corduroy shirts, and a dark chamber where Riley was startled once again. This time, the culprit was a giant doll—used in the 1980 horror movie Effects—that popped out and growled at the producer, much to Jackson’s amusement.

  Then the singer took Riley to the guesthouse, where the producer would stay for the next few days with ten rooms all to himself on the shores of a tranquil pond. Inside, the building was a testing ground for future Jackson-branded products: every room had a carpet sporting the logo for Jackson’s Moonwalker film. There were bowls filled with Moonwalker candy bars. The bathroom even had a Moonwalker toothbrush.

  The two musicians talked for hours every day. Jackson gave the young producer insights on their industry, including his philosophy that “publishing is the real estate of the whole business.” They covered other topics, too—life and love—Jackson even told Riley about a girl he was seeing at the time. Recalls Riley: “I guess he was just trying to feel me out to see if I was a trustworthy person.”

  After four days, Jackson was sold on having Riley craft tracks for his upcoming album, and arranged to have all of the producer’s equipment packed up and sent across the country—five racks of samplers, a handful of synthesizers, and much more. As soon as Riley had set everything up, Jackson arrived to begin work.

  “Oh my God, we are going to have so much fun,” he said upon entering the studio. “Let’s hear the music.”

  Riley first played the backing track for what would become Blackstreet’s “Joy,” and though Jackson seemed to like it, he ultimately passed. The producer continued to flip from demo to demo—skeletons of songs featuring drum machines and synthesizers, all waiting for lyrical flesh—hoping the King of Pop would bring some to life on Dangerous. But he gave Riley the “record company demo face” four songs in a row. In the middle of the fifth, Jackson stopped the track. Riley was convinced that he’d failed, and that he was about to be relieved of his duties.

  “Play those chords of ‘Remember the Time,’ ” said Jackson, referring to the last song. Riley obliged. “What is that chord called?”

  “I don’t know, ’cause I play everything by ear,” the producer replied. “Maybe it’s a C 9 augmented. Why’d you ask me what that chord is?”

  “Because I’ve never had that chord or a chord like that in any of my music,” said Jackson. “You just brought something to me that I never heard, never experienced in any of my records. Now I would like to write and do the melodies right now on that chord to see if it works with what I want to write to it.”

  They stayed in the room for about four hours until the song was finished. Then Jackson laid out the plan for the rest of the album.

  “I take everything from the piano,” he said. “Once we’ve got that, then we go and we make the record. You do what you do, and I write my melodies . . . we don’t need anything but you and this piano and my melodies.”

  * * *

  Time hadn’t dampened Jackson’s insistence on perfection or his relentless ambition, and with Dangerous, Jackson’s goal was the same as it had been with Bad: 100 million copies sold. Says engineer Matt Forger: “He realized that everything he released basically had to be perfect, because it was going to be compared to Thriller.”4

  The same held true for the mega-deal that preceded the album. In March of 1991, Jackson scored a new agreement with Sony that promised him an advance of $5 million per record, a royalty of 25 percent of retail sales, and a share of profits through his own newly formed
record label. He’d be encouraged to sign new acts as well; for his troubles, he’d get an up-front payment of $4 million, plus $1 million per year to run the label and $2.2 million annually for administration costs.5

  In addition, the deal gave him the Hollywood opening he and manager Sandy Gallin had pursued since they’d started working together, calling for Jackson to earn $5 million for appearing in “a musical action adventure.” The Los Angeles Times proclaimed the contract “the biggest ever awarded to an entertainer” and predicted it would net Jackson hundreds of millions of dollars.

  “He always wanted better, more, bigger,” says Gallin. “He was never satisfied. If he sold 3 million the first week, he should have sold 3.5 million. If the record was less than number one, he was never ever satisfied or happy.”6

  Dangerous finally made its debut on November 26, 1991. With tracks ranging from the guitar-heavy “Black or White” to the sugary “Heal the World,” Jackson seemed to be trying to create something for everybody—which became the chief complaint for some reviewers. The Los Angeles Times called it “a messy grab-bag of ideas and high-tech non sequiturs,”7 while the New York Times opined that the album “only reinforces Jackson’s place as the most paradoxical superstar in pop history.”8

  It seemed that many critics were judging the album by its cover—both their preexisting mental image of Jackson and the collage art that physically adorned Dangerous. The cover featured Jackson’s eyes peeking out from behind a gilded white mask; in the background, notable images include what appears to be Jackson’s pet chimp wearing a crown, an elephant looming above Neverland-inspired gates, and famous circus act Tom Thumb standing on the head of P. T. Barnum. Said Rolling Stone: “The triumph of Dangerous is that it doesn’t hide from the fears and contradictions of a lifetime spent under a spotlight.”9