Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (37 page)

I keep that song on my iPhone today. I listen to it every now and then. But I don’t hear it the way Bobby Brown sings it. I hear it the way Michael Jackson used to sing it.
Just leave me alone. I made this money, you didn’t
. But he didn’t know how to get there.

By January, once we’d shipped most of his stuff out to L.A., things in Vegas were basically dormant. We’d get a call once a week
or so from Peter Lopez or Michael Amir, some errand Mr. Jackson needed us to do, but that was about it. Javon and I both started picking up some part-time clients to fill in the gaps. I was in a difficult position. Part of me felt like I should be in L.A., watching his back. I’d gone from running errands and watching the front gate to receiving documents and handling sensitive information, and he had faith that I wouldn’t sell him out to the tabloids. I felt like he trusted me, and it’s nice to feel trusted. He had so little faith in other people, I liked that I was able to give him that feeling of being able to count on someone. I missed that part of it. I knew some of the guys on the L.A. security team. I could have reached out to them, talked to Peter Lopez, inquired about getting out there. I didn’t.

The truth is I chose to back up. I took pride in working for Michael Jackson, for
Mr
. Jackson. But that was in Virginia. This was a different time. He was no longer Mr. Jackson. This was King of Pop mode now. I didn’t know this dude. I didn’t know this era. It was a world that I didn’t want any part of. You saw what was happening. You saw these people coming at him from all angles, everybody with their hands out. You saw him becoming this character, putting on this persona, in order to deal with them. I didn’t like those people and I didn’t trust them and I didn’t want to work with them.

We kept hearing that this was just a lull, that we’d be going back to work soon, that something was coming up in London that would involve an overseas trip. I didn’t believe any of it at the time. That was one thing you learned quickly in Mr. Jackson’s world. You didn’t believe anything until you saw it happening with your own eyes. I didn’t feed into what I heard from people inside his camp, and I definitely didn’t feed into anything I was hearing on the news. When it came to Michael Jackson, the media knew very little of what was actually going on; they just circulated a lot of rumors and gossip. So even as all these reports started leaking out about a comeback tour, something big on the horizon, I paid that
no mind. In my experience, nearly everything the media said about him was wrong pretty much all the time.

I was actually with him when I heard that he died. The first time I heard that he died. We were in Virginia, driving. We’d just left Walmart and we were heading back to Chuck E. Cheese’s to pick up the kids. Mr. Jackson was sitting in the seat behind me when the radio announcer came on and interrupted the broadcast and said, “Hold on, we have an announcement . . . Hold on just a minute, folks . . . Yes, we’ve just received breaking news that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, has passed away.”

I turned around and said, “Mr. Jackson, did you hear that?”

“No, what?”

“On the radio. They’re saying that you died.”

He just laughed. He said, “Yeah, I get that all the time.”

18

On March 5, 2009, Michael Jackson stepped onstage at the O2 Arena in London. Dressed in black and standing at a podium before a striking red backdrop, he waved to the four hundred journalists and seven thousand screaming fans assembled to hear him, and announced the multimedia stage show spectacular he called
This Is It
.

“And
This Is It
,” Jackson said, “really means this is it. This will be the final curtain call. I love you. I love you all.”

To the casual observer, Jackson looked to be mounting the comeback of all comebacks. Three months before, in early December, AEG had agreed to move him out of the Hotel Bel-Air and into a new home at 100 North Carolwood Drive in the exclusive neighborhood of Holmby Hills. The seventeen-thousand-square-foot mansion cost $100,000 a month, an expense the promoter was holding against Jackson’s earnings from the O2 concerts. Shortly after New Year’s, Tom Barrack and Colony Capital had deployed a small army of contractors to rehabilitate Neverland, spending millions on the landscaping and repairs needed to return the estate to its former glory.

By the end of January, Jackson and AEG had agreed on the terms for
This Is It
. Jackson was given an advance of $6.2 million, which he guaranteed with a commitment to perform ten shows in London that summer. What Jackson didn’t know at the time was that AEG was already forecasting that the demand for tickets would far outstrip the seating capacity of just ten shows. And Tohme Tohme,
having seen Jackson’s finances up close, knew that ten performances alone would never be sufficient to wipe out the singer’s debt. Tohme and AEG had already explored raising the number of performances if consumer demand called for it.

Immediately following Jackson’s March 5 announcement, fans were told they could register online for a pre-sale drawing of tickets. Over a million people registered in just the first twenty-four hours. Tohme and AEG immediately began to talk about increasing the number of shows, first to twenty, then to thirty-one, and finally to a total of fifty live shows. Jackson reluctantly agreed to the increase on certain conditions. AEG had to rent him an estate outside London for the extended residency. And, to ensure that he remained in proper health, AEG had to hire a personal trainer, a personal chef, and a personal physician. For this last position, Jackson insisted they hire Dr. Conrad Murray, his private physician from Las Vegas. When tickets for
This Is It
went on sale the following week, all fifty shows sold out in a matter of hours, and seats were soon being auctioned off on eBay for as much as fifteen thousand dollars apiece.

Back in Los Angeles, preparations for the concert’s July 8 launch date were already underway. Kenny Ortega, who had served as Jackson’s choreographer for the
Dangerous
and
HIStory
tours, was hired to helm the massive production. Hundreds of dancers were flown to L.A. from all over the world for auditions. The final show would include more than twenty production numbers, each one set against its own individually designed set piece, all at a cost that was rapidly approaching $30 million.

As the production geared up for launch, the maneuvering that had been going on behind the scenes ramped up as well, reaching new heights of absurdity. When Frank DiLeo failed to secure a deal for AllGood Entertainment to stage a family reunion show with Michael Jackson, Joe Jackson partnered instead with a longtime acquaintance named Leonard Rowe. Rowe, a concert promoter, was
an ex-convict who’d been imprisoned for wire fraud in the early 1990s.

At Joe’s behest, Rowe went to Patrick Allocco of AllGood Entertainment, claiming that he, not Frank DiLeo and not Tohme Tohme, was Michael Jackson’s manager. Allocco paid Rowe a fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer on the promise that he could set up a meeting with Katherine Jackson—the only person in the family whom Michael actually spoke to—in the hopes that she could convince her son that joining the family for a reunion would be the better deal. Leonard Rowe prevailed upon Katherine to intervene. Fearing that fifty shows in London would jeopardize his health, she agreed that the reunion was best and started lobbying her son. Meanwhile, Frank DiLeo was busy forging an alliance with Jackson’s personal assistant, Michael Amir Williams, who by this point controlled virtually all access to the singer. Williams, who had never liked or trusted Tohme Tohme, saw DiLeo as a better ally to have inside the camp. And so the personal assistant opened the door for the former manager to get back in Michael Jackson’s ear.

By the end of March, Tohme Tohme, Frank DiLeo, and Leonard Rowe were all moving independently about Los Angeles, each claiming to be Michael Jackson’s manager. Underlining the confusion, on April 2, an industry news site published an article entitled, “Will Michael Jackson’s Real Manager Please Stand Up?” By that point, many in Jackson’s camp were actively working to counter the influence of Tohme Tohme, telling Michael that Tohme had served him poorly by backing him into the fifty shows in London.

On April 14, Jackson agreed to meet with his father and Leonard Rowe to hear out their proposal for the reunion concert. By the end of the meeting, Jackson had signed two letters, one naming Leonard Rowe as his manager and another stripping Tohme Tohme of any and all authority to represent him. Around the same time, Frank DiLeo started to take meetings while brandishing a letter, allegedly written and signed by Michael Jackson, naming DiLeo as his manager and representative. With Tohme Tohme out of the
picture, and Michael’s world in complete disarray, DiLeo convinced AEG that he could control the family and their access to Michael and keep everything running smoothly until London. By mid-May, DiLeo was working out of an office at AEG. The promoter also kept up cordial relations with Tohme Tohme, who was intimately involved with the London deal whether Jackson wanted him to be or not. AEG was covering all its bases.

On May 25, Jackson sent a letter to Leonard Rowe renouncing any business relationship the two had ever had, finally closing the door on the idea of a Jackson family reunion, a deal that had never actually existed but had somehow consumed a great deal of attention for close to six months. Two weeks later, its efforts stymied, AllGood Entertainment sued Jackson for $40 million, claiming that the singer and his manager Frank DiLeo—who, after being hired by AEG, appeared to be Jackson’s manager—had agreed to perform at a Jackson family reunion. Therefore the deal to perform at the O2 Arena was a breach of the “contract” with AllGood. As a compromise, AllGood said it would settle for a percentage of the profits from the London shows.

The “vultures” Michael Jackson had worried about were arriving right on cue, and the stress began taking its toll. Jackson was regularly missing rehearsals, showing up late, and exhibiting erratic behavior. He was losing weight, plummeting to a dangerously low 130 pounds, and his insomnia was worsening. On June 19, Kenny Ortega would later recount, Jackson showed up for rehearsal in an alarming state, too weak to run through the show. The director sent Jackson home and then, later that night, sat down and emailed AEG’s Randy Phillips, expressing his concerns. “He appeared quite weak and fatigued this evening,” Ortega wrote of his star performer. “He had a terrible case of the chills, was trembling, rambling, and obsessing. Everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated. If we have any chance at all to get him back in the light, it’s going to take a strong therapist to help him through this as well as immediate physical nurturing.”

“I believe that he really wants this,” the email concluded. “It would shatter him, break his heart if we pulled the plug. He’s terribly frightened it’s all going to go away. He asked me repeatedly tonight if I was going to leave him. He was practically begging for my confidence. It broke my heart. He was like a lost boy. There may still be a chance he can rise to the occasion if we get him the help he needs.”

Bill
: I watched the London press conference on TV. When I saw him at the podium, announcing the concerts, that was the first time I thought, Wow, this is really happening. Up until that point, I’d really paid no attention to it.

What struck me about the press conference was when he said, “This is it. This is the final curtain call.” I don’t think people knew exactly what he meant when he said that. He meant this is
it
. Over. Done. I’m not doing this no more. It wasn’t going to be like the Eagles or Frank Sinatra, these people who retire, come back, retire again, then go back on tour one more time. No. Michael Jackson was out.

As reluctant as he was to perform again, I believe he’d genuinely worked himself up to be excited about doing those initial ten shows. The King of Pop had taken over. He was excited because what was being asked of him was doable. When they upped it to fifty shows, he was livid. I remember there was talk of fifty shows back at the Palms. It was fifty before it was ten. Fifty was the original number, because that was how many shows he really needed to do to make this big money they were waving in his face.

Back when all these concert discussions were in the beginning stages, he’d talk to us about it in the car. He’d say, “They want me to do fifty shows. I
can’t
do fifty shows.” He didn’t say it like he was refusing to do it. He said it like it was ridiculous they were
even asking him to do it, like they were asking him to jump off a fifteen-story building and survive. Like, Can you believe they really expect this? He’d talk about his age, all the wear and tear of doing those world tours, how he’d messed up his back, his knee. It was the same way he spoke about not committing to five nights a week in Vegas. “I can’t do that many shows. I just can’t.”

It seemed like a bait and switch. It was originally fifty shows, then it was lowered to ten to entice him to do it, then they raised it back to fifty again. I heard they got Mr. Jackson to commit to it by saying he’d break the record for the number of shows sold out by Prince, because Mr. Jackson was always competitive about being compared to Prince. That was one story that was going around. But the reality was that Mr. Jackson was already in debt to AEG for so much money. He’d taken this multimillion-dollar advance on the shows, plus AEG was paying for that mansion in L.A. So when they told him it was fifty shows, it wasn’t like he could pay back what he’d already taken. He was boxed in. He didn’t have a whole lot of options.

Javon
: I never believed he was going to do fifty shows. After spending all that time with him? No way. Never. He was always so frail, so skinny. He could have gained ten pounds and he’d still be too skinny.