Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (35 page)

I could see the stress getting to him. There was this weight just coming down on his shoulders. I remember a conversation we had at the Palms. I’d just driven him back to the hotel, and we were in the elevator headed up to his room. We were coming from a meeting where he’d finalized some deal. Probably it was those loan papers, something big. And as we rode up in the elevator, he had this look on his face. It was like he was getting himself ready for something he knew was about to happen, something he was dreading. He said, “You weren’t here before, Bill, so you haven’t seen it yet. But you’re going to.”

“Haven’t seen what, sir?”

“The vultures,” he said. “They’re going to start coming now. Everybody is going to want something, and nobody is going to trust anybody else. You’re about to see the ugliness in people. Just wait.”

16

While talk of a possible Michael Jackson comeback began to circulate, the March 19 deadline to save Neverland from foreclosure still loomed on the horizon. Just days before the cutoff, Jackson’s attorney Londell McMillan made a statement to the Associated Press, claiming that “a secret deal” had been made to keep the estate from going to auction. In reality, that “deal” was simply another extension, giving Jackson an additional two months to locate an investor willing to bail him out.

Then, in April, through his brother Jermaine, Michael met a man named Tohme Tohme, a heavily accented Lebanese businessman of somewhat mysterious origin. Tohme referred to himself as “Dr. Tohme Tohme,” even though, as near as anyone could tell, he was not a doctor of any kind. Tohme was a middleman, a facilitator, someone adept at leveraging his network of relationships to broker deals in the real estate and entertainment worlds. After meeting with Michael and learning of Neverland’s impending fate, Tohme tapped into that network to connect the singer with billionaire Tom Barrack, owner and CEO of the private equity firm Colony Capital.

Barrack met with Jackson in Las Vegas and subsequently agreed to buy out Jackson’s $23 million loan in exchange for a 50 percent stake in the property. Properly restored, Barrack believed, Neverland could easily be worth $60 million or more. Colony would cover the cost of rehabilitating the estate, and then together they would sell it,
each pocketing a share of the proceeds. Tohme Tohme was in for a finder’s fee, and soon would be in for a lot more.

The speed with which the Neverland deal came together convinced Jackson that Barrack and Tohme were the kind of people he ought to be in business with. That summer, he hired Tohme to succeed Raymone Bain as his manager. After seeing the state of Jackson’s financial affairs, Tohme began aggressively pushing his new client to go back onstage. Tom Barrack, too, saw the potential in a Michael Jackson comeback; he knew what restoring the singer’s public image would do for the resale value of Neverland. Colony Capital, among its many interests, was owner of the Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis Presley had made his historic comeback in 1969. Barrack broached the idea of Jackson performing there, but Jackson still balked at the idea of a Vegas show.

Barrack then put in a call to his friend and fellow billionaire Philip Anschutz, owner of the Anschutz Entertainment Group, with the notion to put Jackson and AEG together for a show at AEG’s O2 Arena in London, not knowing that AEG was already thinking along identical lines. The promoter was very keen to get in the Michael Jackson business and had been ever since Raymone Bain set up the first meeting between Jackson and AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips the year before. During their first sit-down, Jackson had been deeply ambivalent about the deal AEG was proposing. Since then, circumstances had changed.

Bill
: Once I handed things over to Michael Amir, I started to be less aware about what was going on with the business side. I didn’t want to know. Who his new manager was? Didn’t care. Who his new lawyer was? Didn’t care. It had nothing to do with me.

I had a few dealings with this new person Tohme Tohme. His office tried to get me and Javon to sign non-disclosure agreements. Because of the way we’d come on, when there was a gap in security,
there was no one around to make us sign them. Then pretty quickly we were the ones in the position of getting other people to sign them. So now this Tohme Tohme guy was trying to get us to agree to one retroactively, saying we couldn’t get all of our back pay until we did. Our paychecks were being used as leverage again. I wouldn’t do it. I took it as a sign of disrespect. I knew it wasn’t coming from Mr. Jackson; he’d never asked that of me. I felt I’d earned his trust by the way I did my job. So now that I was being asked to do it, I saw it as a sign of what was going on in the organization: all these new people maneuvering for control, inserting themselves between me and Mr. Jackson.

After that, I didn’t deal directly with Tohme Tohme’s people. I let all that go through Michael Amir. But I’d still pick up bits and pieces of what was going on. In June, we took Mr. Jackson to a meeting at the Las Vegas Hilton with the owner, Tom Barrack. They had dinner at the Japanese restaurant there, Benihana. Barrack was there to talk to him about their plans for fixing and saving Neverland, about him possibly being a headliner at the Hilton. All those Vegas headliner discussions had been going on for over a year, but that summer, I started hearing not just about the Vegas gig but maybe a tour, a concert overseas. London, maybe. But by that point, I’d heard about so many different things—concerts, appearances, whatever—and none of it ever panned out, so I didn’t put much stock into it.

Javon
: I didn’t feel like he wanted it. I didn’t feel like he ever wanted to go back onstage. When he was with us, it didn’t seem like he missed it at all. He was more excited about starting a new chapter of his life, being around his kids every day. He didn’t jump into performing at the Wynn, and they made some really good offers to perform there. If he talked about music or dancing, it was purely from the creative side. Any time the conversation turned toward the business or commercial side, there was no joy, no enthusiasm.

Bill
: Every now and then, though, you’d get a glimpse of this other part of him, like when we were at the
Ebony
photo shoot in Brooklyn. I always called it the King of Pop mode. There were two sides of him. There was Michael Jackson, the family man, the father, and there was the King of Pop. Michael Jackson wanted his privacy. He was desperate for a normal life, but at the same time, if you’ve been the greatest in the world at something, I think it’s hard to let that go. He would say, “I want everyone to leave me alone.” But then when we took him out on details and got caught out by the fans and he was getting that love? Oh, yeah. He liked that. He’d light up. When the stylist used to come and get his hair and makeup looking good and he had his new Roberto Cavalli outfit on? When we had dinner at the Wynn and we’d walk through those casinos and people were shouting his name and saying, “We love you”? All that King of Pop stuff? He’d eat that up.

Javon
: There was one night when we were at the Palms. He wanted to go to the club downstairs. He didn’t want to make an appearance or be seen; he just wanted to slip in and hang out for a little while, do some people watching. This club had a private upstairs balcony that overlooked the crowd, so we set it up for him to go down there.

We were in the club for maybe two to three minutes when all of a sudden the DJ started playing one of his songs. They were mixing it with a lot of samples from other artists. Mr. Jackson was bopping his head along to it, and he said, “Wow, I didn’t know that they still played my music.”

We were like,
What
?! We told him, “Sir, they still play your music all the time. In bars, clubs. You still hear it everywhere.”

He said, “Really?”

He seemed surprised. I think he felt like a lot of people had forgotten him or he wasn’t as popular anymore. It really made him happy to hear his songs in the club like that.

Bill
: People often reached out to get permission to sample his music. Peter Lopez handled a lot of that. He would call me and say, “Bill, tell Michael that Kanye West wants to sample such-and-such tune. What does he want to charge?”

I’d relay the message to Mr. Jackson, and he’d say, “Nothing. Tell them it’s fine if they just use it. The more they use my music, that means my music stays alive.”

He could have charged a fortune, but he didn’t. He just wanted his music to be out there in the world. It was important for him to keep that King of Pop title, to be remembered.

One time I was driving with him, and I had on this morning radio talk show and they started doing one of those call-ins. They were asking listeners, “Who do you think was better, Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley? Call in and let us know how you feel.”

I turned it up. I wanted to hear what his reaction would be. People were calling in and giving their opinions, saying they liked one or the other. For a while, Mr. Jackson was just being quiet in the back. He wasn’t making any comments, but I could tell he was listening. Then he just burst out, “Elvis couldn’t
touch
me! I sold more records than him
and
the Beatles! They can’t touch what I’m capable of doing.” He still had that performer’s ego. It would come out of him from time to time.

Javon
: Being the entertainer he was, it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He didn’t want the bad side of fame. He wanted to be left alone when negative stuff came up, but he didn’t want to be left alone on a good day. Any time he did talk about performing again, he’d say it was because he felt he owed it to his fans. What do you do as an artist if you leave your audience behind? If he didn’t tour or do any records or anything, he’d be turning his back on his fans, and he was
huge
on his fans. They were his biggest supporters. So that weighed on his decision. “I need to do it for them,” he’d say.

Bill
: He’d also talk about doing it for his kids. He’d say that now that they were old enough to appreciate who their father was and what he did, he wanted them to see it themselves. He’d say that he would have loved for his kids to see him and his brothers perform together, to see how it all started. But then that’s all he’d do. He’d just say it. Any time a deal or an opportunity to do it came up, like with the Vegas thing, he’d drag his feet, back away, make some excuse.

So there was some desire on his part to perform but, in our opinion, not that much. That’s not why he went back to work when he did. This concert everybody was talking about, it was being put together because of his financial obligations. It wasn’t “Hey, we should do a show.” No. It was “Hey, you
gotta
do a show. You have to do a show to get out of this hole.” Who wants that? He was a perfectionist. He wanted to do things on his own time with his own personal stamp on them, and who can do that under that kind of pressure?

I had my doubts about why he was being steered in this particular direction. He had other options. He still owned half the Sony catalog. Why not sell that and settle your debts and go somewhere and start over? If he really wanted to be left alone, why not do that? Part of the reason he wouldn’t sell it was that he hated Sony. Letting them take the catalog would have felt like they’d beaten him. But from the things I was hearing, I also got the sense that people didn’t want him to sell the Sony catalog. If Michael Jackson sells his half of the Sony catalog, nobody gets paid except Michael Jackson. If Michael Jackson endorses something, nobody gets paid except Michael Jackson. But if Michael Jackson does a show?
Everybody
gets paid.

That’s where the pressure was coming from. They were starting to put dollar figures in his face, saying, “This will wipe out your debts. This will pay off every lawsuit.” And that was always how he wanted to handle things. “Take care of it.” “Get rid of it.” “Make it go away.” He became convinced he could put everything
behind him if he had enough money to pay everyone to get lost. That’s not how it works. If you’re at the top, people come after you. More money, more problems. That’s the game. You know that, and I know that, but I don’t think he saw it that way. He was inside the bubble, thinking about the glory days.

When
Thriller
first came out, he was
the man
in everybody’s eyes. What issues did he have? What drama did he have other than making badass music? You didn’t hear all the negative crap. Back then, he really did have enough money to buy his way out of just about anything. He could buy a place like Neverland and escape. That’s why he wanted to be able to buy the house on Durango. That place was like Neverland. It was so huge, you couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see you. That’s the time he wanted to get back to. He thought he could buy his way back there. In his experience, that was the answer: get enough money to get out.

So I think that’s why he agreed to do a concert. And knowing him? The way he handled money? The suitcases full of cash? That’s why he agreed to something overseas. He came to Vegas to be a headliner, but if he’d been a headliner here, everybody suing him could have put liens on that show. Do the same show in London, and it’s a lot harder to go after that money. My guess is a lot of it was going to stay overseas. Numbered accounts. Cash in safety deposit boxes. Keep it hidden from everyone, including his own lawyers and managers. That’s how his mind worked. That’s why he decided to do this concert. He thought if he could make enough money over there, he could get out with his kids, and this nightmare of all the vultures and the lawsuits and the drama would finally end. But it wasn’t really going to end. As long as he was Michael Jackson, it was never going to end.

17

By late September 2008, Tohme Tohme and Tom Barrack’s preliminary talks with AEG had borne fruit, leading to a handshake agreement to stage a series of concerts at the O2 Arena in London the following year. Shortly after the deal was struck, Jackson left Las Vegas for an open-ended stay at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, where he began taking meetings with the various choreographers and musicians he hoped would join him for the new show.