MJ (36 page)

Five months earlier, Michael had seen one of his doctors, Allan Metzger, for a physical exam.
“He is exercising regularly and taking only vitamins. He does not drink or smoke and takes no recreational drugs,” the doctor wrote in his notes. But his severe pain from his scalp burns and skin conditions persisted. He regularly visited at least two doctors at the time, including Metzger and his plastic surgeon Steven Hoefflin. Metzger prescribed Vistaril, an anti-anxiety drug, and Ultram, a painkiller. Neither was serious or addictive, but MJ was growing frailer and more sensitive to pain.

Five days before the broadcast, only three songs were properly choreographed.
Yet HBO and Sony had arranged tickets for international journalists, and Michael’s band had already rehearsed at the theater. On December 6, while dancing during a dress rehearsal for “Black or White,” Michael Jackson collapsed.
“He fell super-duper hard on a metal grating,” recalls Lather, who today handles choreography for Usher. “Me and my assistant were watching: ‘Oh my God, did you just see that?’ ” George Duke, the prolific jazz keyboardist who had contributed to
Thriller
, had arranged strings for the orchestra and was in the Beacon at the time.
“My manager and I looked at each other: ‘This is over,’ ” Duke recalls in an interview shortly before his death. “I got paid anyway.”

Bodyguards surrounded Michael Jackson, picked him up, and carried him away.
Morey called 911. Paramedics put MJ on a gurney and sped him to Beth Israel Medical Center North on New York’s Upper East Side. Michael’s stated reason for the cancelation was exhaustion—EMTs gauged his blood pressure at an
“abnormally low” 70/40 and said doctors gave him oxygen and water mixed with salt and other minerals. Trip Khalaf, MJ’s longtime sound engineer, is dubious whether the singer wanted to do the show in the first place.
“Michael got himself into this shit and he didn’t know how to get out of it,” he says. HBO canceled the show and took the insurance money. Although he adapted some of Lather’s choreography for his “Ghosts” video, Michael Jackson would never dance the newly created HBO routines in public.

*  *  *

On the
HIStory
tour, which began in fall 1996, whatever was left of Michael’s budgetary restraint appeared to evaporate. On Michael’s first day of rehearsal, at an airline hangar in San Bernardino, California, he walked into a room full of people, looked around, and called over his production manager, Benny Collins.

“Who are all these people?” he asked.

“Those are the lighting guys.”

“Okay, they can stay.”

“Who are those guys?”

“Those are the sound guys.”

“Okay, they can stay.”

“Who are
those
guys?”

“They’re the accountants.”

“Send them away.”

The
HIStory
tour came together much like the
Dangerous
and
Bad
tours. “Billie Jean,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Beat It,” and
“Thriller” were to proceed more or less the same as always. To introduce “Billie Jean,” he laid a suitcase on a stool in a spotlight, silently removing his white glove, black fedora, and sequined jacket as if unpacking in a hotel room. Those on the tour took in the massiveness of it all. “There were people screaming and crying everywhere we went,” says Stacy Walker, one of the dancers.

In previous tours, Michael had developed a bond with his dancers and band, and even much of the crew. This time, not long after his child-molestation settlement, things were different.
“It was just a general feeling that there was a lot more going on, and it wasn’t the kind of happy-go-lucky feeling it used to be,” says sound man Trip Khalaf. “He became a lot more withdrawn from all of us. He used to be around a lot, then all of a sudden he wasn’t.”

The
HIStory
tour had Michael’s most elaborate effects and skits. It began with a roller-coaster video, from the point of view of the rider. Then a large, white
2001: A Space Odyssey
–style space pod appeared onstage and Michael emerged in a spacesuit and large white robot helmet, anticipating Daft Punk by half a decade. Then he fell in with his dancers for “Scream” (which he sang by himself, sans Janet), jiggling his shoulders and moonwalking sideways in a gold robot suit and boots.

In previous tours, Michael was in constant motion, to the extent that his doctors worried about him losing too much weight. For
HIStory
, he
was perceptibly picking his spots. By this point, Michael had fully mastered the art of the pose, spreading out his arms in a variety of Christ-like contortions, holding up his fists one at a time or lifting his arm like a conductor. At thirty-eight, he was still unusually limber. He pulled off the usual well-known moves in “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal,” but he clearly was more limited. In bursts, he moonwalked forward and sideways, thrusted his crotch, bobbed his shoulders. The high point was “Stranger in Moscow,” for which he stood in a spotlight and appeared to improvise, flowing with the wind that blew up his shirt and jacket.

At some point on the tour, which lasted for a little more than a year, Michael’s insomnia intensified. In July 1996, he became so desperate for sleep that he enlisted two German anesthesiologists who showed up at his hotel suite, Debbie Rowe reported, with
“enough equipment where it looked like a surgical suite.” They administered Diprivan, also known as propofol, the potent sleep-inducing drug he’d received in his eyelids during procedures before the
Dangerous
tour a few years earlier. Debbie, with her medical knowledge and familiarity with Michael’s pharmacological history, tried to talk him out of taking it: “What happens if you die?” she asked him. But Michael wasn’t worried about the medication; he’d had plenty of experience taking painkillers and sleep aids. He told Rowe he was at the end of his rope—he desperately needed sleep to restore his energy for the shows—and didn’t know what else to do. Michael took Diprivan twice, before each of his scheduled shows in Munich. He performed flawlessly.
^III

Rowe had become more than a nurse, friend, and traveling companion, especially after Michael’s relationship with Lisa Marie had ended with a disagreement over having children. Lisa Marie had three from her previous marriage and worried about future custody battles.
“Debbie Rowe says she’ll do it,” Michael told Lisa Marie. “Okay,”
she snapped, “have Debbie Rowe do it.” So Debbie did it. The public wouldn’t learn about her “gift” to Michael until years later, but she became pregnant in December 1995. Lisa Marie filed for divorce in January 1996. (In official documents, she noted the separation date as December 10, 1995—when she visited him in the hospital after he canceled the HBO special.) By the time of the
HIStory
tour, Rowe was with Michael constantly, even showing up on the sets of his videos.
“He relied on her a lot,” recalls Mick Garris, who worked closely with Michael on the screenplay for 1997’s
Ghosts
.

On November 12, 1996, Rowe left her golden retriever, Cuervo, and German shepherd, Harley, with neighbors in her apartment complex in Van Nuys, took a fourteen-hour flight to Sydney, Australia, and checked in to the $2,750 presidential suite at the Sheraton on the Park hotel. After Michael Jackson’s concert at the Sydney Cricket Ground, with about thirty friends, Debbie and the star of the show married at two
A.M.
Michael played “Here Comes the Bride” on a grand piano; Debbie wore white; within ten days, she was pregnant. How Rowe became pregnant remains one of the central mysteries in MJ’s life. She has refused to answer all questions about the conception. Not long after fending off paparazzi in front of her $840-a-month one-bedroom apartment, she gave birth to Michael Joseph Jackson Jr.—Prince—on February 13, 1997, at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Debbie had Michael’s second child, Paris Katherine Michael Jackson, on April 3, 1998. Then, because the marriage had always been more of an arrangement than a relationship, Debbie requested a divorce. Michael agreed to pay her
$10 million as part of the settlement, with installments beginning in October 1999.

When his kids were young, Michael did everything he could with them. Prince was shy, while Paris was bubbly, girly, and doting. Michael traveled with them and took them to his studios. Working with CJ deVillar, an engineer at the Record Plant, Michael abruptly handed Prince to him and strode into the vocal booth. DeVillar wasn’t accustomed
to wiggling toddlers, especially when he was expected to work the faders and master talkback buttons with two hands.
“I can tell on his face, he’s enjoying me struggling. So now it’s a game,” deVillar says of Michael. “I can tell he’s trying to mess with me.” At one point during the hour-long vocal session, Prince hit the wrong button and ruined the take—MJ didn’t mind. He took his kids on outings, often covering them with masks so they wouldn’t register in paparazzi images. For this, Michael received a lot of ridicule in the tabloids, but it made sense. When they weren’t with Michael, the children could go about their lives anonymously. Michael hired
Grace Rwaramba, a Rwandan-born former office assistant, as their nanny. When Michael and his family later traveled the world, Rwaramba scouted for locations, negotiated prices, and assessed security before Michael gave his approval. Randy Jackson insisted Grace enabled Michael’s abuse of sleeping pills, while others saw her as a stabilizing force.
“Michael trusted her one hundred percent with the kids,” says Dieter Wiesner, one of MJ’s managers after Sandy Gallin and Jim Morey departed his camp. “But he did not want Grace too close to the kids. Sometimes, when the kids started to see Grace like a mom, then he stopped her for a week.”

*  *  *

After the
HIStory
tour ended in October 1997, Michael spent the next few years puttering around high-priced recording studios in LA, vaguely pondering his next album. Beginning in
early 1998, he worked on as many as a hundred different tracks. He spent the Grammys the following year at Marvin’s Room, a studio named for the late Marvin Gaye in Hollywood, where MJ first invited Sony and Epic executives to hear the new material. The song he emphasized was “Break of Dawn,” which he recorded with a young producer named Dr. Freeze, in addition to “A Place with No Name,” a reinterpretation of America’s seventies hit “A Horse with No Name.” (Sony’s president, Tommy Mottola, was so excited about the new music that on the return flight from LA to
New York, he asked another executive, Cory Rooney, to write his own song for MJ, “She Was Loving Me.”) At LA’s Record Plant, during this period, engineer CJ deVillar’s routine to prepare for an MJ recording session was to brew tea, turn on the Cartoon Network, mute the TV sound, and twist the studio knobs so Michael could record. Over ten days, Michael and CJ compiled forty vocal tracks.

In the twenty-five to thirty-five sessions deVillar worked with him, Michael canceled numerous times. He often left early. At first, Michael showed up with an entourage that prepared for every eventuality.
“I may go
here
,” Michael would say offhandedly, prompting a flurry of travel arrangements involving four booked flights to different parts of the world—three of which had to be canceled the second Michael stepped onto one of the planes. “Michael wastes a lot of money,” deVillar says.

That was true—in payments big and small. Back in 1993, Michael’s Neverland Ranch payroll included salaries for ninety employees—among them, five elephant trainers, eleven gardeners, and three reptile handlers.
Rolling Stone
reported MJ paid
$1.54 million for producer David O. Selznick’s
Gone with the Wind
Oscar and $5,000 an hour for his own plane, usually packed with high-priced assistants. The work he was doing with deVillar, Dr. Freeze, and others for his upcoming album would eventually cost $20 million in production. Plus, during this time, a California jury ordered him to pay more than $20 million to Marcel Avram, one of his longtime promoters, for canceling two shows in 1999. And there were smaller, persistent expenses. While working on the
Invincible
album, which would come out in 2001, Michael took Harvey Mason Jr., a trusted songwriter, engineer, and coproducer, on spontaneous shopping trips. One day they went to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square; Michael was dressed like a Middle Eastern sheik to avoid recognition.
“Get anything you want,” Michael told his new friend. Sheepishly, Mason selected a CD. “You’re not doing a good job of shopping!” Michael admonished, then swept an entire shelf full of CDs and DVDs into his shopping cart. “Do it like
that
.” Mason happened
to mention he was a James Bond fan, and the next day, a complete set of Bond DVDs and a new, high-end portable DVD player showed up at the studio.

“Michael would believe somehow that Sony was paying for it all, and they were,” says one of his associates and confidants, Marc Schaffel, who wound up suing him. “But they were charging it to him. Anything he did, whether it was hotels or private jets or whatever, they paid, but they charged him for it. So he was using up more and more of his income and going deeper and deeper into debt with Sony.”

By 1998, Michael’s total debt was
$140 million.

He wasn’t broke, but he was heading in that direction. His album sales weren’t as grand as they used to be, and while the
HIStory
tour had grossed $165 million, due to the expenses, he’d actually lost $11.2 million on it. (
Dangerous
had broken even.)
“He was simply addicted to Number One hits and roaring crowds, and he didn’t care what he had to pay to get them,” wrote Tommy Mottola, chairman of Sony Entertainment. What saved him from bankruptcy, over and over, was his 1984 investment in the Beatles catalog. In 1995, he sold half of his stake in ATV, the publishing company, to Sony for
$90 million; the two owners, Michael Jackson and Sony, essentially became partners in running the company.
“He said it very explicitly: ‘Don’t talk to me about the money. I will spend whatever I need to . . . it’s my money,’ ” recalls Michael Schulhof, who as Sony Corp.’s American chief executive oversaw MJ’s record label through 1996 and met personally with the star numerous times. “He burned through a lot of money and it’s ultimately why we were able to get fifty percent of the ATV catalog. I remember thinking to myself at the time: ‘He’ll eventually run out of this, too.’ ” His problem, in addition to the spending, was keeping an eye on the
“vampires” and “spiders” in his camp, as Lisa Marie Presley called them.
“I was always scolding him and warning him: ‘Who are you traveling with? Why don’t you have someone who would take good care of you?’ ” recalls Uri Geller, the Israeli-born celebrity “mystifier”
who first befriended MJ when he was a teenager. “There must have been some good people around him, too, but he did whatever he wanted.” By 2001, Henry Aubrey, MJ’s bodyguard and de facto business manager, noticed employees were paying $3,000 a week on two SUV rentals. Aubrey cut that to $300.
“He didn’t keep on top of every single dime, because he had people doing that for him,” he says. “And the people who were doing that for him weren’t doing a very good job.”