Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (15 page)

Me and Bill headed back downstairs while Mr. Jackson tucked them in. We’d just reached the bottom of the staircase when he came back out and called over to us in a whisper and said, “Guys, I want to thank you so much for doing this for my kids. They really appreciate it. And Javon, please give a personal thank-you to your cousin for closing the park down for free. It’s rare that someone does a favor for me without wanting something in return. Make sure you remind me tomorrow to send her an autographed picture. Thank you. Thank you, and God bless you.”

9

Michael Jackson first played Las Vegas in 1974, when he and all eight of his siblings put on a musical variety show at the MGM Grand. Joe Jackson had arranged the gig personally because Motown was against it; Berry Gordy felt it wasn’t right for the band’s image. But Michael wanted to play Vegas. He was a huge admirer of Sammy Davis, Jr., who’d broken the color line at many of the hotels and resorts in the 1960s. Michael thought it was important to continue that legacy, and so—as he did with everything—he threw himself into making their Vegas gig the best he could.

Though he was only sixteen years old at the time, Michael Jackson’s tireless work ethic had already become legend in the industry. But in the decades since, as his life was beset by personal struggle, he became more famous for backing out of performances than for making them. In December 1995, Jackson committed to film an HBO concert special in New York. Three days before the event, he collapsed onstage during rehearsals and was rushed to the hospital. The concert had to be canceled. In 1999, contracted to perform two millennium concerts in Australia and Hawaii, Jackson pulled out of both events just months before they were to take place; the promoter sued and Jackson paid out $5.3 million to cover the damages.

Two years later, in September 2001, Jackson did follow through with his 30th Anniversary Celebration concerts at Madison Square Garden, but the album he was promoting with the event,
Invincible
,
turned into a public relations fiasco of its own. Jackson had spent six years in the studio, on and off, to produce the record, repeatedly delaying its release and running up massive production costs in the process.
Invincible
debuted at No. 1 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and many other countries, but sales fell off quickly, and Sony halted the album’s promotional campaign, sparking a bitter feud between Jackson and Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola.

After his 2005 trial, Jackson entered into a partnership with his host in Bahrain, Sheikh Abdullah, signing an ambitious contract that promised a wide range of projects, including new studio albums and a stage musical. In addition to providing Jackson with a palatial home and state-of-the-art recording facilities, Abdullah covered many of the singer’s unpaid legal bills and advanced Jackson millions of dollars to cover his living expenses overseas. In April 2006, Raymone Bain issued a press release announcing Jackson and Abdullah’s joint venture, Two Seas Records, saying that Jackson’s first album for the new label would be out the following year. Less than three months later, Jackson reneged on the deal and departed for Ireland.

During all the time in which Michael Jackson “wasn’t working,” he was actually working all the time. In Ireland, he spent months in the studio with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. Once back in the States, he collaborated frequently with producers and artists like Kanye West, Babyface, Ne-Yo, and RedOne, composing and recording dozens of new songs. Jackson still loved to work. He just wasn’t following through on his professional commitments. He’d become a recluse. Once an admirer of Howard Hughes, Jackson had come to live much like him, holed up behind a gated wall in Las Vegas, behind a cordon of bodyguards.

And who could blame him? For years, going back to the Chandler scandal and even before, the tabloid backlash against Jackson had been unrelenting. Everything he did, every move he made, was taken and turned into yet another chapter in the crazy life
of “Wacko Jacko.” On a good day, he was called a weirdo and a freak. At the low end, a criminal and a pedophile. If spending millions of dollars to clear his name in court wasn’t enough to change people’s opinions about him, why engage with the public at all? Jackson withdrew. He buried himself in family life and creative projects and found some measure of happiness there. But the more he disengaged, the more his debts and his legal entanglements festered. To wipe them out, Jackson was being told he needed to go back onstage. To preserve his privacy and peace of mind, he mostly wanted to stay out of sight.

He couldn’t do both.

Javon:
Two days before the Tokyo trip, Feldman had told us that Mr. Jackson wanted us to outfit a music and dance studio in one of the rooms in the house while they were gone. We started making arrangements for all the equipment we needed to buy—the flooring, the egg-carton panels for the walls, all that. We went to a party rental place to buy the dance floor. Then Bill and I built out the room.

Bill:
Up to that point, music-wise, nothing much had been going on. There was talk about Mr. Jackson doing one of these casino gigs. Jack Wishna, a promoter out here who recently passed away, he was involved in a lot of those negotiations; he was the one responsible for convincing Mr. Jackson to come here in the first place. We also took Mr. Jackson to several meetings with Steve Wynn, who owns the Wynn resort and casino. There were some discussions about building Mr. Jackson his own custom arena, like they did for Celine Dion at Caesars Palace. We took him to meeting after meeting on that. None of it ever went anywhere. There were times we’d be coming home from these meetings, and we’d hear Mr. Jackson on the phone saying, “They want me to do all these shows, but they
don’t understand that I’m not young like that anymore. I can’t do what they’re asking me to do.”

Javon:
These promoters were adamant about him performing five nights a week. That’s pretty much standard for the major acts out here. He wanted to work three nights a week. That’s one of the main reasons he wouldn’t commit. He’d say, “Everyone wants me to do a show but they don’t understand that when people come to a Michael Jackson show, they expect me to
perform
the whole show. I can’t just be like the Osmonds. I can’t just sit on a stool and sing ‘Kumbaya’ like these old Vegas crooners. People want me to dance from beginning to end.”

He told us that when he was in his prime, he was like an athlete. He’d have to consume thousands of calories a day just to do one of his shows, and he’d lose three or four pounds every night from exerting so much. “That’s a lot of wear on my body,” he said. “My body can’t take that anymore.”

There was a small gym with a treadmill in the house. We worked out with him a few times. There were some days he’d come in and he could keep up with us for a while. There were other days he’d get on that treadmill and he couldn’t go fifteen minutes without wearing himself out. But he wanted to give the same electrifying performances he gave twenty, thirty years ago. And if he did it on Monday, he wanted to do the same show on Tuesday. He’d say, “If people pay to see me, I have to give them a show.”

Bill:
The twenty-fifth anniversary of
Thriller
was coming up. That was another reason he’d come back to the country. There was talk about remixing the songs, reshooting the videos with new special effects. I overheard a lot of those conversations, and I could hear Mr. Jackson saying he was against it. He’d say things like, “There are some things you should never touch.” But I believe Sony had more say in that than he did. They were dragging him into
it. He was still under a lot of contractual obligations to them.

He hated Sony. That was another big problem. He didn’t like a lot of the people he had to do business with. Artists always have problems and issues with their management companies and their record labels, but his hatred of Sony was on a whole other level. He hated Tommy Mottola, the head of the label. Hated him. Called him the devil.

One day, Mr. Jackson told us he wanted some headphones to listen to music while he walked on the treadmill. One of the other security guys went out and got him a pair. I was in the house less than a week later, and I saw that they’d been broken in half. These things weren’t dropped. They were broken on purpose. I picked them up and saw they were Sony headphones. I wouldn’t have bought him anything that said Sony on it, but whoever purchased them probably wasn’t aware of the situation.

Careerwise, everything was just sort of static. You’d hear about deals coming up, such-and-such might be happening, then you weren’t sure, then it was maybe back on again, then it wasn’t. There was a meeting with Simon Fuller, the producer of
American Idol
. Mr. Jackson was supposed to make an appearance on that show. We started to plan the detail, organize the travel, the hotel. First he was going to appear on the show when they were filming in New York. Then it was supposed to be when they were in L.A. Then we just stopped hearing things.

Very seldom in Michael Jackson’s world would you get definitive word that something was canceled. You’d just stop hearing about it. If he had something in the works, an event or an appearance, people would be calling you on the regular. “What time is he coming? What does he like? What does he want? Does he need such and such?” Then the calls would just stop. That meant one of his attorneys had stepped in to say that it wasn’t going down.

Javon:
It just seemed like he had no interest in work or business in general, but he still loved to create, to make music. There was a guy named Brad Buxer. He was a producer and engineer. He’d worked on the
Dangerous
album and the
HIStory
album with Mr. Jackson back in the day. Once we built the studio, Brad would come to Vegas on and off and stay for a few days at a nearby hotel. He would come to the house, bring some musical instruments, and they would just jam together. Once Brad started coming around, there was a lot more music around the house, and Mr. Jackson seemed rejuvenated and energized. They were working on tracks we’d never heard before.

Bill:
There were several meetings with different artists and producers. Some of them working on remixes for
Thriller 25
. Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, he was working on some of those tracks. There were meetings with Babyface, a couple of sit-downs with Akon. He was also doing one of the
Thriller
tracks, and they were collaborating on another song together called “Hold My Hand.” We heard Mr. Jackson rehearsing a lot of the early demo versions of that. A lot of these meetings took place at the Palms. It’s a hotel and casino complex that has a high-end, state-of-the-art recording studio. A lot of major artists come into town to record there.

Except for Brad, Mr. Jackson didn’t spend a whole lot of time working with these guys face to face. They’d meet for a couple hours, collaborate, then go off and work on these ideas and concepts on their own. They’d talk and play him the tracks over the phone. Sometimes I’d get the songs emailed to me. I’d burn them to disc and bring them to Mr. Jackson, and he’d play them in the car. None of it was very organized.

There was always talk of assembling these bits and pieces into a big comeback album, but like most things in his world, that project never seemed to materialize. For the most part, he was just writing and creating music because he loved doing it. There were
also choreographers coming to the house on a regular basis. They would be in the studio with him for hours, even though there was no show lined up. It was just for pleasure, for the love of doing it.

Javon:
It wasn’t just musicians and producers coming through at that time. Lots of people were anxious to visit with him because he’d been out of the country for so long. Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta, came to visit him at the house. Jesse Jackson came to the house. Eddie Griffin, the comedian, he was a regular visitor. Chris Tucker came by; we took him and Mr. Jackson to see
Bridge to Terabithia
with their kids. Mr. Jackson talked to Nelson Mandela on the phone a number of times.

Bill:
Dr. Murray visited on a couple of occasions, maybe once every six weeks or so, usually to check up on one of the kids. He was never there for very long, a half-hour or forty-five minutes tops. I honestly didn’t pay him that much mind. There wasn’t anything unusual about it. He was just another one of these people who came and went.

There were plenty of people coming through Michael Jackson’s life, but there was nobody really
in
his life. He was friendly with these people who’d visit, but these meetings were business meetings, for the most part, like with Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson—that was to discuss some charity program in Africa. There was almost no one in his life on a personal level coming by to say, “Hey, let’s go hang out.” Never in the whole time I worked for the man did I hear anybody just call him up to say, “Hey, guess what movie I just saw?” There was nothing like that going on. It was business.

Javon:
His main contact with the outside world was through the fans. He got tons of fan mail. Ms. Raymone’s people would collect it and bundle it, and every few days it would arrive in these big sacks. It
came from all over the world—Canada, England, Egypt, Japan, India, Ireland, Spain. He read all of it.

Every so often, early on Saturday mornings, we’d take him on long drives and he’d immerse himself in his fan mail. I’d drive. Bill would ride shotgun. We’d load up a few boxes of mail in the vehicle and then we’d head out into the desert and just drive for three, four hours. We’d drive up into the mountains, where there was still snow on the ground. We’d go all the way across the Hoover Dam, into Arizona, then turn around and head home.