Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (36 page)

In addition to landing the AEG deal, Tohme Tohme continued to make things happen for his new client. He even strong-armed Sony into forking over the $12 million in royalties it had withheld from the sales of
Thriller 25
; since Sony Music and Sony/ATV Music Publishing are two separate entities, the company had no right to hold revenues from one to cover administrative costs from the other. Jackson instructed Tohme to take the
Thriller 25
windfall and save every penny of it for one thing and one thing only: to use as a down payment on the massive estate on Durango that he had been eyeing since the year before. That house, his soon-to-be Wonderland, was the reward Jackson promised himself for going through with the concerts in London.

The music industry was now buzzing with the news that Michael Jackson was going back to work, and everyone began elbowing their way in to get a piece of the action. Second in line, behind AEG, was the Jackson family. While making a public appearance in Australia
that October, Jermaine Jackson announced to local reporters that the Jacksons, including “Michael, Randy, and the whole family” were “in the studio and planning on being out there next year.” This was news to Michael, who was not in the studio with his brothers, wasn’t speaking to Jermaine, Randy, or anyone else, and had no intention of joining them in any kind of tour. The day after Jermaine’s comments to the Australian press, on Halloween, Michael released a statement saying that he loved his family dearly but had “no plans to record or tour with them.”

From that point, the jockeying around Jackson’s comeback started to get strange. Joe Jackson began meeting with a concert promoter, Patrick Allocco of AllGood Entertainment, promising a Jackson reunion that included Michael. In spite of Michael’s public denials, Patrick Allocco decided to believe what Joe Jackson was telling him—the lure of being in the Michael Jackson business was just that powerful. Joe Jackson instructed Allocco to reach out to Frank DiLeo, whom Joe described as “Michael’s manager.” But Frank DiLeo had no business relationship with Michael Jackson and hadn’t since he was fired in 1989. Still, DiLeo met with Allocco and claimed to be in a position to bring a deal to Michael for a family reunion. On November 26, DiLeo signed an agreement with AllGood Entertainment to produce a Jackson family reunion concert.

Even if Michael Jackson had been interested in the idea of a reunion, there was little chance that AllGood or any other promoter would be able to match what AEG was willing to put on the table. Tohme Tohme had started negotiations for the London concerts, and he was making steep demands—a large cash advance, a house in Los Angeles for Jackson and his family to live in until the show. AEG agreed to all of it.

On November 17, Sheikh Abdullah’s case against the singer went to trial in London. Grace Rwaramba was called to testify, and Jackson was subpoenaed to testify as well. To avoid the public spectacle of the singer going back on the witness stand—and because no
deal for the O2 shows could be finalized until Abdullah’s claim was resolved—AEG stepped in and paid the sheikh a $5 million settlement, releasing Jackson from the contract he’d entered into three years earlier. But just as Sony did not keep refinancing Jackson’s debt out of simple charity, AEG wasn’t helping the singer out of the kindness of its heart, either. Jackson’s obligations didn’t go away. They merely shifted from his wealthy Middle Eastern benefactor to his corporate American one. AEG expected a return on its investment.

Philip Anschutz, Tohme Tohme, Tom Barrack, Randy Phillips, Joe Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, Patrick Allocco, Frank DiLeo, Londell McMillan, Peter Lopez, Michael Amir Williams—the list of players jockeying to be a part of Michael Jackson’s billion-dollar comeback was growing longer with each day. Before it was over, Jackson’s former adviser and longtime attorney John Branca would rejoin the pack as well. Some of these people had only the best of intentions, a true desire to see the singer free of debt and back on top. Others were driven by different motives. But all of them shared one thing in common: they now had a vested interest in seeing Michael Jackson back onstage in the summer of 2009, whether he was ready for it or not.

Bill
: Once the plan for the concert started to take shape, that took precedence over everything else. Now it was King of Pop mode, full-time. We’d take him on a detail once a week, maybe every two weeks, but he was going to L.A. for a lot of meetings, spending more time there.

I would still get phone calls because I was the keeper of a lot of information. Anything anybody needed from the past year—a phone number, a document—I’d get a call to help locate that. All that stuff we put in storage in Vegas and in Virginia, we were still handling that. From the minute Mr. Jackson got back to the Palms, he was asking about all the film equipment that we’d left in Virginia, so we were making arrangements to have a lot of that shipped back.

It was like he was trying to create two different worlds. There was his personal life, and then there was this whole show-business machine that was gearing up, and he was trying to keep them separate. There were things on a personal level, things that he didn’t want the concert people to become a part of. The schoolteacher, her working visa was up, so she was going to have to go back to Bahrain. Mr. Jackson was trying to get her citizenship. So he had me taking her back and forth to meet with an immigration attorney, working on her papers. I was dealing more with personal matters like that.

We were trying to maintain a connection to him, handling those sorts of things. But that private, personal realm was getting pushed more and more to the side, and we were getting pushed out with it. We didn’t feel that it was being done through him; it felt like we were being shut out by others. I had the impression Mr. Jackson didn’t really know how much we’d been pushed aside, either. Even though I wasn’t right there with him all the time, he acted as if I was still handling some of the things that I had been handling before, that I was just one layer removed. He was still telling people, “Call Bill.” I would still get calls from lawyers, production people, business people, some of them I’d never heard of before. They’d call me and say, “Hey Bill, I just spoke to Michael. He said to send you these documents to have signed.” But I wasn’t handling those things anymore. That was all Michael Amir now.

I certainly didn’t expect that Javon and I would be the top thing on Mr. Jackson’s mind now that there was so much going on. But I felt like his not knowing about our situation was a symptom of his not being fully aware of what was going on underneath him. When he spoke to me about Michael Amir, he spoke as if the two of us had a good working relationship, like we were partners and everything was cool. “Oh, just call Michael Amir.” He didn’t know what was really going on.

Javon
: Michael Jackson had an effect on people. It’s hard to describe. Once he let people in, they started feeling possessive of him. Like, He’s
mine
! People didn’t do it on purpose; he brought it out of them because he was bigger than life. He’s calling them personally, giving them leeway to dictate certain stuff, and they start to feel like, Okay, he trusts me. They see how vulnerable and hurt he is. They see all these other people trying to use him and take advantage of him. So they start to think, If
I’m
the one in control,
I’ll
make sure he’s okay.

So once he lets someone in, pretty soon they’re starting to speak on his behalf, as opposed to letting him make his own decisions. They know if they do it, they won’t get that much flak, because they know Mr. Jackson doesn’t question things. They start to feel like they’re in control, but to keep that control, they’ve got to manipulate everybody else that’s trying to get at Mr. Jackson. So they’re spreading lies about this person or telling Mr. Jackson not to trust that person.

Then they start lying to Mr. Jackson too. They’re telling him, “Yes, sir. No problem, sir,” and at the same time, they’re going behind his back and doing something else because they feel that they know best. They convince themselves that they’re lying to him for his own benefit. That’s what everyone around him did, in front of my eyes. That’s what Feldman did. That’s what Raymone did. Greg Cross. Michael Amir. Everyone. If Michael Jackson let you in his circle, it’s inevitable that you’d do it too.

Bill
: He had that effect on people, making them feel special, and we certainly felt it too, the way he made us feel that working for him was more than just a job. We felt protective of him in that way, but we didn’t succumb to the petty fights like everyone else. Javon and I, we saw all that going on and we made a conscious decision to stay out of it.

It wasn’t necessarily that those other people were bad people. There was just a force that dictated a lot of this madness. Bad
energy. It surrounded Mr. Jackson. Raymone and Michael Amir? I was cool with both of them when we met. Under different circumstances, I don’t know that I ever would have had a problem with either one. But the way it was around Mr. Jackson, nobody trusting anybody, so much money and power in play, it just sucked you into all this drama. People look at what happened to Mr. Jackson and they want to blame somebody. “It was Dr. Murray.” “It was Tohme Tohme.” “It was his family.” Nah. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t any one person. It was everything.

The fact that someone like me wound up in that gatekeeper position, that was an accident. I fell into it because there was nobody else there. Most of the people in his orbit were there because they were trying to get something by being associated with him. I wasn’t. I wasn’t trying to be a player in the music industry. I wasn’t trying to use Mr. Jackson’s celebrity to make myself a film producer. My ambition is to do what I’m doing. I like doing personal protection, I’m good at it, and it’s where I want to be. So my only concern was to take care of this person’s well-being. When it came to all that business with the loans, people playing games and whispering in his ear, “Don’t trust this one,” or “Don’t trust that one,” I wanted no part of it. And when people realized I wasn’t getting sucked into that? That’s what made me the bad guy. You’re the bad guy because you won’t be one of the bad guys. Mr. Jackson trusts you, so therefore we can’t trust you. That’s how corrupt his world had become.

Javon
: It’s not that we’re better than the people who came after us. We’re not. It had more to do with the time we were with him. It was more personal on our watch. When we came in, there were no shows in progress. It was such a small circle, a skeleton crew. That’s what I always try and explain to people. At the Monte Cristo house, during those months in Virginia:
it was just us
. We were it. Grace would be gone for long stretches, other people might pass
through here and there, but for days and weeks at a time, there were no other people around. We’d be out in a field in Middleburg popping firecrackers, alone with Michael Jackson and his kids. It was surreal. We didn’t believe we were living it half the time.

The only people there were me and Bill, and we weren’t going to compete against each other. But let’s call a spade a spade. If there’d been ten, fifteen other people around? Bill would have had so much hatin’ on him. Somebody would have tried to cutthroat him the minute Mr. Jackson put him in that gatekeeper position. Bill would have
had
to play those games, or he wouldn’t have lasted three weeks in that spot.

Bill
: Around late October, Mr. Jackson took another trip to L.A. He was staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, which was where a lot of meetings were taking place. This time he didn’t come back. There was no “We’re out of here.” It just happened.

Javon and I were still in Vegas. We didn’t know what our standing was at that point. I only got one call to go out to California. His
Gone with the Wind
Oscars, he wanted those again for whatever reason. I drove all the way to L.A., passed the briefcase off to Michael Amir in the lobby of the hotel, and was told that was all they needed me for. I got in my car and came back home. Couple weeks later, word came down that he was moving out of the hotel and renting a house, this mansion in Holmby Hills. I got a call that he wanted everything from the storage facility in Vegas, all five of those huge units. Arrangements were made for everything to be picked up and shipped to L.A.

I was worried. Going back to California was something Mr. Jackson had to do for the show. I didn’t think he would have ever moved back there by his own choice. The past few months, I’d started to see a side of him I’d never seen before. This was not the same guy that we worked for in Virginia. He was falling into a mode, I felt, of doing what others wanted him to do. You talk to
people who worked with him and they tell you how, onstage or in the studio, he was in total control. That wasn’t him when he was sitting down and dealing with people for business.

It was like when he was on that three-way call with Raymone and Greg Cross and he threw the phone and screamed, “I should have my father kick their asses.” Your father? Really? You’re fifty years old. But his whole life, whether it was Joe Jackson, Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, he always had these powerful figures around him, moving him in this direction or that direction. That’s what he knew.

I’ll never forget this one time we were driving in the car. Normally we’d listen to classical music when we were driving, but this time I had the radio on an R & B station and Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” came on. When the song ended, Mr. Jackson said, “Bill, can you play that again?”

I said, “I’m sorry, sir. That wasn’t a CD. That was the radio.”

So he asked me to go out and get a copy of the album for him. I went to Best Buy, picked it up, and for the next few days, he had me play that song again and again, all day long. Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” was the only thing Michael Jackson ever asked to listen to in the car besides classical music. He said he wanted to record it, make it part of his comeback. He played it over and over and over, singing along until he’d memorized every last word: “I don’t need permission. Make my own decision. That’s my prerogative.” He’d be in the backseat singing those words, and he sang that shit with conviction. It’s
my
prerogative. Do what the fuck
I
want to do.