Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (38 page)

And it wasn’t just the physical aspect. It was his demeanor. Some days he was upbeat, other days he was down. Like with Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday. He could be up, totally in a good mood, ready to go, but if one little thing threw off his day, that was it. He’d shut down. There’s no way he was going to be able to get through months and months of performances without some drama in his world shutting him down.

I wanted to believe it would happen. I wanted to root for this big comeback. But he was so unpredictable. Even with that press conference, I still didn’t believe that this concert was actually going
to happen. I wasn’t going to believe it until he was onstage with a mic in his hand, singing.

Bill
: Shortly after the press conference, things on our end started to move again. I was getting calls from Peter Lopez. Mr. Jackson was going to be renting an estate outside London. He wanted us to handle security. Javon and I were in touch with a company over there, telling them what equipment we would need. We were getting pictures of the house, floor plans, that sort of thing. Once the shows started, we were going to handle security at the estate and escort Mr. Jackson to and from the arena, where AEG’s people would handle everything. Again, I had the feeling that Mr. Jackson was trying to keep that barrier between his personal life and his professional life. So we were going to London. That was definite.

Pretty much everything with the house was set up through Peter Lopez. I’d been looking to reestablish that personal connection with Mr. Jackson we felt we’d lost, and for me, Peter Lopez was the anchor. He made us continue to feel like part of the team. He’d say, “Listen guys, Michael trusts you. All this other stuff is going on, but don’t worry about it. I spoke to Michael. He wants you guys in London.” I felt good about that. I also had several conversations with Brad Buxer, Mr. Jackson’s musician friend who spent all those nights with him in the studio on Monte Cristo. Brad would say, “Bill, you
gotta
go. You have to be part of this. Just sit back, and it’ll be cool when we get to London.”

Talking to Peter and Brad, hearing their enthusiasm, that made me feel a lot better. They were the guys who were there for Mr. Jackson even when there was no money to be made, so they were the only people I felt I could really trust. Once it was confirmed we were going to London, I drew up a proposal, a new contract to include provisions for our traveling and working overseas, and I sent it to Peter Lopez. That was passed on to the new management, but I never heard back from them.

There was a big management shuffle going on. Once the London announcement was made, and once the fifty shows were sold out, it was like blood in the water to all these sharks. You thought it was bad before? Now everybody was coming out, trying to grab onto this thing. Since the Palomino days, everything had been going through Tohme Tohme. Then, in April, right in the middle of the run-up to London, all of a sudden he was out. Mr. Jackson fired him. Whoever wanted Tohme out, they’d gotten in Mr. Jackson’s ear and convinced him that this guy couldn’t be trusted.

Joe Jackson had been trying to put together a Jackson reunion show at the Superdome. He was always trying to pull that one, trying to get the brothers back together. We knew Mr. Jackson didn’t want to do it. Whenever the subject came up, the boss would just shrug and roll his eyes and say, “That’s all Joseph.” Mr. Jackson did make the statement once that he would love for his kids to see him perform with his brothers. But he also didn’t want anything to do with his father’s business plans, and doing anything with his brothers would involve his father. But Joe was leaning on Katherine to get Mr. Jackson to do it. The family didn’t trust Tohme Tohme, so they were taking sides with whoever was trying to push him out.

Even after Tohme Tohme was fired, he was still going around, claiming to be Michael Jackson’s manager. Somehow this Frank DiLeo character had leveraged his way in and gotten himself hired by AEG in some capacity, and now he was claiming to represent Mr. Jackson too. It was chaos. Total confusion. These people were all out signing deals, saying they were Michael Jackson’s manager. And because Mr. Jackson would sign whatever was put in front of him, there were all these conflicting contracts and letters of agreement going around, and everybody was threatening to sue everybody else for violating this deal or that deal.

I was a step removed from all that, but I saw everything that was going on in the industry around the show. There weren’t many people who had Michael Amir’s direct number, and not everyone
knew that he was the new gatekeeper. My number was the last point of contact a lot of people in the business had for Mr. Jackson, and I was getting calls all the time. It was insane. All these producers and other types who’d worked on his older albums, they were calling me up and saying, “If Michael plays such-and-such song in the show, he’s going to owe royalties to so-and-so. He needs to call my attorney.” I was getting calls like that every day. Did anybody call just to say, “Hey, tell Mike ‘Good luck’?” No. There was nothing like that. It was a feeding frenzy. Everybody was calling to say why they should be involved and what they should get out of it. I just passed all the messages up the chain to Michael Amir.

Javon
: Even Ms. Raymone came back around, trying to get another cut. Back when we were living on Monte Cristo, she’d set up a dinner with Mr. Jackson and someone from AEG. It didn’t go anywhere at the time. She couldn’t put the deal together, but now that AEG had come back to Mr. Jackson to try again, she said she was owed something on that. Even though Mr. Jackson had paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to cut her loose, she came back after the London announcement and sued him for $44 million. When we first heard that, we were like,
What?
After all that damn money you got paid? You clown. You snake. You’ve been eating off this guy forever, and now you want $44 million off a deal you couldn’t make happen? What a joke.

We could tell he wasn’t being looked after properly, because all of a sudden, he was all over the news. The paparazzi had him everywhere. Seemed like pictures of him were popping up on
TMZ.com
practically every day. When I saw all those pictures of him in L.A., all I could think was, “What the hell is going on?” The paparazzi had him staked out, and the people handling his security were taking him in and out the front doors of places in broad daylight. We couldn’t believe he was out like that. We never took Michael Jackson through the front door of anywhere if we
could help it. Here they had him parading around in front of the cameras nonstop.

Part of it was just him being in L.A. and having all this new excitement around the show, but even in L.A., if you want to avoid the paparazzi, you can do it. It’s more difficult. It requires more planning and more effort, but celebrities do it all the time. Famous people who don’t want to be seen are not seen. But the people handling Mr. Jackson didn’t seem to care about his privacy. They cared more about putting him out there to generate buzz for this tour. Shame on anybody and everybody who allowed him to go out like that.

Bill
: Meantime, this whole massive production was gearing up, like a huge jet engine getting ready for takeoff. But the stories I was hearing about Mr. Jackson were pretty much what I expected. I knew some of the people working on the show just from being around the music business, and we knew a couple guys on the security team. I’d hear from them. They’d say, “He wasn’t himself today.” This wasn’t that new to us. I heard there were a few rehearsals that he missed because he was tired. I’d had a few calls now and then from Grace. She’d say, “The boss is tired working on them shows.”

Those rehearsals were seven, eight hours straight of intense, physical work. To do that every day, day in, day out, for weeks? You need rest. I knew he didn’t sleep much. But when he was on our watch, without the show, if he didn’t sleep, he could always take it easy the next day. Send the kids to a playground with us while he took some downtime. But if he was expected to grind out those rehearsals every day, he was going to have to get his sleep eventually.

That film they made of the rehearsals?
Michael Jackson’s This Is It
, the documentary? I’ve never seen it. I can’t watch it, because I know what was going on behind the scenes. I know everything that was happening. It’d be like watching a magic show after you’ve
already seen how the tricks are done—you know it’s fake. All those people talking about how great this show was going to be and how excited Mr. Jackson was. It all sounds fake to me.

Michael Jackson was a perfectionist, so if he was going to do this show, he was going to commit himself to doing his absolute best for his fans. He was committed in that sense. But did he really want to be there? I don’t think so. I think he wanted to be in Virginia, out in a field setting off firecrackers with his kids. I think he wanted to be in that bar in Georgetown, knowing what it’s like to just kick it having a beer with some friends. I think he wanted to be free.

At the end of May, after all this buildup, all this hype, they announced that the first London shows were being postponed by a week. Around that same time, Peter Lopez started asking about me and Javon going to L.A., that maybe we should be in L.A. for this last leg before going overseas. Peter and I would be on the phone talking about the house in London, and then eventually he’d ask, “So, when are you guys coming to L.A.?”

That kept coming up, and I just wasn’t—I don’t want to say I wasn’t excited, but there was still business that was not taken care of. The contract proposal I’d submitted to the management company, it’d been three months and I’d still heard nothing back. I trusted Peter and believed in what he was telling me, but he wasn’t in charge of making any of this happen. Management was. But Michael Amir never returned my calls, and with this changing cast of characters over there, I actually had no idea who was in charge. It was worse than the days with Raymone. At least with her, I knew who the point of contact was for day-to-day business. AEG was in charge of running the concert, but on Mr. Jackson’s side, in his organization, it was total confusion. I was even still carrying that outstanding iPhone bill, the one Mr. Jackson and his mom ran up. I had AT&T on me about paying this two-thousand-dollar bill, and I couldn’t even get anyone in Mr. Jackson’s camp to talk to me about that.

It didn’t exactly make you feel comfortable about working with them. I was cautious about it. I couldn’t leave my daughter again, and I knew Javon wasn’t leaving his family again, without certain reassurances. Travel schedules. Payment schedules. Accommodations. None of that was in place. So whenever Peter Lopez would bring up the subject of L.A., I would kind of drag my feet, waiting to see what kind of answer I was going to get on these arrangements.

Finally, around the middle of June, Peter called and he didn’t say, “Maybe you should be in L.A.” He said, “Michael wants you guys in L.A.” He told me to hit up Michael Amir to make the arrangements to fly over. I knew calling him was pointless. I tried anyway. No response. He wasn’t returning Peter Lopez’s calls on the matter, either. I didn’t really press it that much. Whatever Mr. Jackson wanted us there for, it didn’t really seem that urgent. And at that point, we were only a couple weeks out from leaving for London. What sense would it make for us to go to L.A.? I just sort of assumed nothing was going to happen until we left for overseas.

About a week later, I got another call. This one came in at around eight-thirty at night, that much I remember precisely. It was Mr. Jackson calling this time. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. His specific question was, “What happened to you guys? Where are you? Why aren’t you in L.A.?” I told him I’d been trying to make the arrangements but wasn’t getting anywhere. He told me to try Michael Amir again. I told him I would, and that was all we said. He didn’t give me a reason for wanting us there, nothing.

I felt like, What is going on? He was surrounded by people over there. What did he need us for? Did he want us in L.A. just because? There were only a couple reasons I could think of. I knew he didn’t like having the kids surrounded by strangers, and Grace was already in London. Maybe he just wanted a familiar face at the house. He also used me a lot when he needed someone to say no for him, to pull him out of meetings, to step in and say, “Mr. Jackson
needs to leave now.” Maybe people were getting to him and he needed that buffer. I honestly didn’t know. The last time he had me go to L.A., I’d driven all the way there and sat in a hotel lobby just to hand over those Oscars and turn around and come home. Was this just going to be that again?

It was the exact same situation I’d been in two years before, almost to the day. I was here in Vegas and he was in Virginia, saying, “Where are you guys? When are you going to get here?” I couldn’t get Raymone to make the arrangements, but it didn’t matter. He needed us; we went. Now, we hesitated. That’s what had changed. For Mr. Jackson, we’d drive cross-country without thinking twice about it. And if it was still just Mr. Jackson calling and saying he needed us, the kids needed us, I think we would have got in the car and gone, no questions. But were we willing to do the same, leaving our own kids, to get in the middle of all this King of Pop business? It just didn’t feel the same. So much had happened since then.

I did that thing I used to do sometimes when Mr. Jackson made strange or unusual requests, like when he asked me to find him a helicopter simulator or a Ferris wheel. I’d wait a few days before doing it to see if he’d drop it or if he’d bring it up again. That way I’d know if he was being serious or if it was just a whim. And that’s how I felt about him calling me to go to L.A. It didn’t seem urgent. So that’s what I told myself. I thought, If it’s important, he’ll call back. He didn’t call back.