Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (9 page)

I left Javon and the others to watch Randy and went in the house to talk to Mr. Jackson. “Your brother Randy’s crashed the gate,” I told him. “He says he’s here to see you about some financial matters, and he won’t leave until he talks to you.”

Mr. Jackson raised his eyebrows for a moment. Then he winced and looked away. “Get rid of him,” he said.

I went back down to try to talk to Randy again. He wouldn’t move. He just sat there in his car, screaming and cussing about his money.

Javon:
I had the idea to block Randy in with one of the trucks, bring the boss out through the side entrance, hop into a different car, and then slip away. But Mr. Jackson shot it down. He said, “He’ll just find out how to follow us to Liz’s party and cause a huge scene; she doesn’t deserve that.”

Bill:
After about thirty more minutes, I went in the house and told Mr. Jackson again that Randy wasn’t leaving. Mr. Jackson sat there for a moment, then he let out a sigh and said, “Okay. I’m just going to go to bed.”

He went upstairs, closed the door, and didn’t come back out.

Javon:
That killed us. We were devastated, for Mr. Jackson and for ourselves. I was proud to work for him, and I wanted the chance to do that in public, to show people I worked for Michael Jackson. We had brand-new suits; we were very excited. Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday party? Are you kiddin’ me?! I’m just a normal guy. It was just human nature for us to be excited.

And Mr. Jackson? He’d been making plans for two weeks. This was so important to him. It would have been one of the last times he and Ms. Taylor ever saw each other, and they were old friends. So for him to write it off and go to bed? That was a moment that let us know, okay, this family has some real power over him. If it had just been some ordinary person that busted through the gate, Mr. Jackson would have been like, “What are you guys waiting for? Escort him off the property and let’s go.” But this? This threw off his whole night.

Bill:
I was pissed. I didn’t even want Randy to take the car off the property anymore. I
wanted
him to get out of the car, because I wanted to whip his ass for ruining Mr. Jackson’s night.

He sat in the driveway for another two hours. We had to call his father. That was the only option we could think of. Randy’s a grown-ass man, and here we were calling his daddy to come and clean up his mess. Joe Jackson showed up, and at first Randy wouldn’t even listen to him. He just kept saying how he was going to call the press, saying, “I’m here to get my money.”

Joe said, “This is not the place. What the hell are you doing?”

Joe finally convinced Randy to leave, and they drove off. Mr. Jackson’s bedroom was right above the driveway. He had to have heard a lot of it. By that point, it was too late to make the party. We tried to make arrangements for him to see Ms. Taylor while she was in town, but she was already leaving that next morning. So they talked on the phone and that was it.

Javon:
After that, he didn’t leave the house for three days. We didn’t hear from him. No phone calls, no communication, nothing. He just shut down.

Bill:
A week or so after that, the whole family showed up—all of them. We’d had a long day taking Mr. Jackson to the studio at the Palms, where he was in a recording session with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas; they were working on the
Thriller 25
album together. Around midnight, I’d wrapped up my shift and was just getting back to my house when the team called me on the radio. “Bill, his family’s here!”

Again? I called Javon. He’d already left the house too. I told him to turn around immediately.

I raced back. Took about fifteen minutes from my place. I went in through the side entrance, met up with Javon. We walked out to the front and saw a bunch of people standing outside the gate. There were a whole lot of familiar faces. Looked like everybody except Randy and Marlon. For a minute it was like I was looking at some kind of Jackson reunion special.

Javon:
They all had on hats and sunglasses. It was very incognito. It was so late and so cold that there was only one fan camped out on the street, and there were no paparazzi or anything to make a scene. Which made it even more strange. This big family of famous people standing out on the sidewalk in the middle of the night, and quiet all around.

Bill:
I walked up to the gate, asked them what their business was this time of night. They said, “We heard our brother’s sick. We came to make sure he’s okay.”

I told them I hadn’t seen any signs that Mr. Jackson wasn’t okay. They told me they wanted to see for themselves and weren’t leaving until they did. So now I was in a jam. We had strict instructions from Mr. Jackson not to bother him, but at the same time we couldn’t just leave the entire Jackson family standing in the street at one in the morning without it turning into a scene, which Mr. Jackson also wouldn’t want.

I told them to hold on. I went back to the house, rang the doorbell, waited for Mr. Jackson to come down. The whole time I was thinking, This is not going to go well. When Mr. Jackson came to the door, I said, “Sir, your family is out front, and they insist on seeing you.”

He was not happy. He was pissed, and I could tell he was pissed at me for not handling the situation myself. I said, “They heard you were sick and they want to know if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “Tell them I’m fine.”

“Sir, they’re not leaving until they see you.”

He went quiet for a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll meet with them. But I don’t want them in the house.”

“I can bring them over to the security trailer. You can talk to them in there.”

“Fine. But I’ll only speak to my brothers.”

Then he asked if Randy was there. I said I didn’t see him. “Good,” he said. “I don’t want to see Randy.”

I went back to the gate and said, “Mr. Jackson just wants to see his brothers.”

This voice from the back said, “What about me?”

At first I couldn’t see who it was. Then I realized it was Janet. Part of me wanted to yell,
Wow!
That’s Janet Jackson! But I just said, “Sorry, ma’am. He said only his brothers.” She was not happy about that.

The brothers came in. I escorted them over to the trailer, and they stepped inside. Then I called Mr. Jackson and he came down and joined them. They closed the door and talked for about twenty minutes. Mr. Jackson came out first. Walked straight into the house. Didn’t say anything. The brothers came out, walked to the gate, and that was it. What they talked about, I don’t know.

Javon:
Later on, we found out that they’d come because of a rumor they’d heard. There were always rumors going around about Mr. Jackson. Sometimes it was completely made up and sometimes it was sort of half true.

This particular time, they’d heard that their brother was sick, but Mr. Jackson wasn’t sick. The kids were. Back in January, they’d all come down with colds. Arrangements were made to see a private doctor at his office one evening, after regular hours. The receptionist in that office leaked the story that Michael Jackson had come in, and the family had heard about it. It seemed suspicious to them. They heard he was seen going to a doctor’s office in the middle of the night, and they wanted to make sure he was okay.

Bill:
That was the difficulty of being Michael Jackson and trying to move around in the world. Just to take his kids to the doctor required days of planning and advance work. You’d use every precaution, and all it took was fifteen seconds walking past the wrong person, some nosy receptionist, and all of a sudden you’ve got this rumor circulating.

Paris didn’t get better. Her cold wouldn’t go away, and Mr. Jackson was worried she was coming down with the flu. We couldn’t go to the emergency room, and Mr. Jackson didn’t trust going back to some strange office. He wanted a doctor who would come to the house. So the word was put out there to find a private physician who made house calls. Jeff Adams, my associate and Javon’s cousin, who’d first brought us onto the detail, said his
family doctor would stop by as a favor. I was given a name and told when to expect him. On the scheduled night, this silver BMW 745i pulled up to the driveway and a tall, slender gentleman stepped out. He was wearing light blue medical scrubs. He walked up to the gate and introduced himself. “I’m Dr. Conrad Murray,” he said. “I’m here for a visit.”

I told him he was expected, opened the gate, and directed him as to where he could pull his vehicle in. He drove in, parked, and got out.

I had a confidentiality form waiting. Before I pulled it out, I asked him if he knew who he was here to see. He said no. I told him he’d need to sign the agreement before I could allow him to go inside. He said sure. I pulled it out, and he glanced at the heading on the document and saw the name Michael Jackson. His eyebrows raised up and he gave me this look, like, Are you serious?

I gave him a nod. He signed his name. We walked to the front of the house, and I rang the bell and we waited. I could see the silhouette of Mr. Jackson through the glass as he came over toward us. He opened the door, and I said, “Mr. Jackson, this is Dr. Murray. Dr. Murray, this is Mr. Jackson.”

6

In the fall of 1979, after the success of
Off the Wall
made him independently wealthy, Michael Jackson began putting the pieces of his solo career in place. His first move was to hire John Branca to serve as his legal counsel. A corporate tax attorney with considerable experience in the music industry, handling everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beach Boys, Branca renegotiated Jackson’s contract with CBS, securing him a royalty rate equal to that earned by the top talent in the business. Branca also succeeded in severing Michael’s recording contract from his brothers’. Now, Jackson would only have to record or perform with his family if and when he chose to; the label couldn’t make him. In 1983, at the peak of
Thriller
mania, Joe Jackson’s managerial contract with his sons came up for renewal, and Michael wanted a professional divorce from his father as well. Always averse to dealing with conflict himself, to avoid having to fire his father directly, Michael had severance papers drawn up and delivered to his dad by messenger.

John Branca had drafted the papers; he was now Michael’s closest and most trusted adviser. Riding alongside Jackson and Branca during these years was Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager, hired shortly after Joe Jackson was let go. DiLeo had been the head of promotions at Epic Records during
Thriller
’s release, and Jackson gave him considerable credit for the album’s success. As Jackson’s manager, DiLeo served as executive producer for the full-length
movie
Moonwalker
, negotiated Michael’s landmark endorsement deal with Pepsi, and managed the record-setting world tour for
Bad
.

Michael Jackson’s team was, for a time, unstoppable. In 1984, John Branca negotiated Jackson’s purchase of the ATV music catalog, which contained the publishing rights to thousands of songs, including hundreds written by the Beatles. Jackson purchased the catalog for $47 million, but it would soon grow to be worth considerably more, becoming the bedrock of the singer’s vast personal fortune. Five years later, in the fall of 1989, Branca negotiated Jackson’s contract renewal with Sony, the new corporate parent of CBS/Epic Records. Sony agreed to give Jackson a record-setting $15 million advance for each album. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen’s advance was just $2.5 million. Billy Joel earned $1.7 million. Branca also negotiated for Jackson to receive a royalty rate of 25 percent; most acts earned only 12 percent. The new deal with Sony was the most lucrative recording contract in the history of the music business. At the peak of his success, Michael Jackson was worth an estimated $700 million.

Jackson’s talent—and the unlimited earning potential it represented—served as a magnet, drawing the most powerful people in the business to his side. When the singer surrounded himself with the right people, he flourished. When he surrounded himself with the wrong people, he faltered. By the late 1990s, more and more of the wrong people started coming around. In 1989, Jackson had abruptly fired Frank DiLeo, accusing him of mishandling funds. As the decade progressed, Michael’s relationship with John Branca went through ups and downs as well, and Branca would eventually get his walking papers in 2003. The accusations of child abuse that hit Jackson in 1993 left him emotionally devastated, vulnerable. A scrum of celebrity lawyers latched onto the singer, jockeying with each other to be the lead attorney on what promised to be the trial of the century. Those same attorneys would ultimately convince Jackson to settle the case, causing irrevocable damage to his life and career.

By the turn of the century, estranged from his family and the team that backed him during
Thriller
, Jackson had lost the anchors that kept him grounded. His affairs were being managed not by a recognized industry heavyweight but a little-known German businessman named Dieter Wiesner, who was steering the singer’s career in odd directions, such as launching a Michael Jackson–branded energy drink in Europe. Jackson also launched a number of business endeavors with a financier named Marc Schaffel, who had a history as a producer of pornographic films—hardly the best association for a performer whose public image had been tarnished by allegations of sexual misconduct.

After Randy Jackson’s brief spell as Michael’s manager had torn the two brothers apart, Jackson turned to the woman Randy had hired to serve as his publicist, Raymone Bain. Bain, a relative outsider in the music business, was primarily known as the political crisis manager responsible for resuscitating the scandal-ridden career of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry. During the summer of 2006, Jackson put out a press release announcing that Bain would be taking over as general manager and CEO of The Michael Jackson Company, a new corporate umbrella that would consolidate the singer’s increasingly disorganized empire.