Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

by Bill Whitfield

  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.

  19

  On June 25, 2009, at 12:26 p.m., paramedics burst into Michael Jackson’s bedroom at 100 North Carolwood Drive, responding to a 911 call placed just minutes before. They found Jackson unconscious and not breathing. After numerous attempts at resuscitation failed, at 1:07 they put him in an ambulance and rushed him to the UCLA Medical Center, just three miles away. A little over an hour later, at 2:26 p.m., Michael Joseph Jackson was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest. A full autopsy was ordered to determine the exact cause.

  Three hours later, Michael’s brother Jermaine emerged from the hospital and issued a statement confirming what the world had already known for some time. The tabloid website TMZ broke the news of Jackson’s death just minutes after the coroner’s pronouncement was made, triggering an unprecedented surge of media coverage. In the hours after Jackson’s death, Internet traffic spiked by 15 percent worldwide, crashing Wikipedia, Twitter, and the website of the Los Angeles Times. The rate of status updates on Facebook tripled.

  As the wider world Googled and tweeted and streamed the news of Jackson’s death, a crowd of fans and onlookers started to gather outside UCLA Medical Center to stand vigil. Other gatherings sprang up outside the Carolwood mansion and at the gates of Neverland. By the evening, huge crowds had assembled outside the original Motown headquarters in Detroit and the Apollo Theater in Harlem. By the next morning, spontaneous gatherings had spread to the streets of London, Paris, Mexico City, Nairobi, and Moscow.

  A televised public memorial was held for Jackson on July 7 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Jackson’s brothers, each wearing a single white glove, acted as pallbearers, bringing the singer’s casket out onto the stage. Eulogies were given by a range of luminaries, from Brooke Shields to the Reverend Al Sharpton to Motown’s Berry Gordy. In between the speeches, musical performances of Jackson’s greatest hits were performed by Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, and Jennifer Hudson. Over 31 million viewers watched the broadcast in the United States. More than 6.5 m
illion watched in England, 18 million in Brazil, and millions more in other countries. In addition to the television audience, 33 million streamed the video online, making Michael Jackson’s farewell the most-watched memorial of a public figure in world history.

  The global outpouring that followed Jackson’s passing demonstrated just how popular the singer remained. In just the week that he died, Jackson sold 2.6 million digital downloads and over 800,000 albums. In the last six months of 2009, he sold 9 million albums in the United States and 35 million albums worldwide. Michael Jackson’s This Is It, a documentary film compiled from the concert’s rehearsal footage, was later released for a two-week limited theatrical run. It earned over $261 million, making it the highest-grossing music film of all time. Billboard magazine estimated that in the year after Jackson’s passing, his fans generated over $1 billion in revenue for the parties that inherited control of his interests.

  On September 3, 2009, Michael Jackson was interred in a private ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. In the weeks that had passed since his death, the events surrounding it had started to become clear. The most jarring news had come on August 27, when the Los Angeles coroner’s office ruled Jackson’s death a homicide, citing its cause as “acute propofol intoxication with benzodiazepine effect.”

  Propofol, a powerful anesthetic, was a drug that most people had never heard of, as it is used only in hospital settings to render patients unconscious for major surgery; if used without the proper instruments to measure oxygen levels, heart rate, and blood pressure, it can be extremely dangerous. Under the intense physical and emotional stress of putting the London shows together, Jackson’s insomnia had become crippling. Desperate for sleep, he’d increasingly turned to his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, to help him by administering nightly doses of the drug.

  On the evening of June 24, Jackson had arrived at the Staples Center for full-dress rehearsals. After weeks of seeming weak and fatigued, the singer appeared full of renewed energy and ran through the entire program, giving a show-stopping performance that director Kenny Ortega described as “bioluminescent.” Jackson left the arena at twelve-thirty, returning home for yet another sleepless night. Trying to bring him down from the evening’s performance, Dr. Murray first administered heavy doses of the sedatives lorazepam and midazolam. But by the time the sun came up, Jackson still hadn’t slept, and at 10:40 a.m., Murray gave him a final push of twenty-five milligrams of propofol.

  An hour later, by the doctor’s own account, he discovered that Jackson wasn’t breathing. After several panicked minutes trying to administer CPR on his own, Murray ran downstairs screaming for help. Jackson’s L.A. security team, joined by Prince and Paris Jackson, followed Murray back into Jackson’s bedroom and witnessed the doctor frantically trying to bring their father back to life. Nearly half an hour passed between the time Jackson was found not breathing and when 911 was called.

  Eight months after Jackson’s death, in February 2010, Dr. Conrad Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter for administering the fatal dose of propofol. When the doctor’s trial finally got underway in the fall of 2011, Dr. Christopher Rogers, chief of forensic medicine for the Los Angeles County coroner, testified that while Michael Jackson was underweight and fatigued from the rehearsals, his health was otherwise normal for a fifty-year-old man. But for the events that transpired on June 25, 2009, the singer could have conceivably lived well into old age. On November 7, 2011, Murray was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.

  During the trial, Bill Whitfield, the head of Michael Jackson’s Las Vegas security, was called to testify in the hope that what he and his team had learned during their time on the job might offer a clearer picture, and a better understanding, of what happened on the day that Michael Jackson died.

  Bill: That morning, I was out running errands, still debating whether or not I should go to L.A. By the time I got home, I’d pretty much decided that I should. I should just get in my car and go. Find out what’s going on. But the second I walked into the house, my phone started blowing up. Blowing. Up. Emails. Text messages. Voice mails. I answered one call and it was a buddy of mine, and he said, “Yo, what’s up with your boy?!”

  “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “Your boy’s dead, man!”

  “Who?!”

  “Michael Jackson!”

  “Get the fuck outta here.”

  I didn’t believe him. I’d heard that before. Had to be a rumor. But my phone just kept ringing. I was seeing names of people I knew back in New York, people I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. I got scared. I got up and turned on the TV, and it was breaking news on every channel.

  Javon: I was at Best Buy doing some shopping, and all of a sudden, my phone started ringing like crazy. At the same moment that started, one of the sales girls in the CD section shouted out, “Oh, no! Michael Jackson dead!” I reached for my phone to answer it and it was my cousin Jeff. He said, “Mr. Jackson’s gone.”

  “Are you for real?!”

  “That’s what they’re saying. Let me find out more and call you back.”

  I took a pause. All I could think was, Where are the kids? Did they see their father when he died? Who has them right now? I rushed home so I could see the news for myself.

  Bill: On the TV, camera crews were camped outside the hospital. Now it was all real. The newscaster was saying, “We’re waiting for an announcement from one of the family members.” That’s when I saw Jermaine step up to the podium, and I was thinking, Is he really getting ready to say what I think he’s getting ready to say? Jermaine was pausing and taking deep breaths, and finally he said, “My brother, the legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has passed away . . .” I just fell back on the couch in shock.

  Javon: Once I heard it confirmed by the coroner’s office, I went in the bathroom by myself and I just broke down and started crying. I was looking in the mirror, and my heart dropped and my chest was really hurting. I just kept thinking about the kids. Where are they? How are they taking it? They didn’t really know the rest of his family that well. He kept them away from everybody. The only other person they’d ever really known was Ms. Grace. With their daddy gone, who were they going to go to now? Who was going to take care of them?

  Bill: When they showed the footage of the ambulance leaving his house, my first thought was, They waited for an ambulance? Why didn’t they take him to the hospital? Why didn’t they just grab him and rush him to the hospital at the first sign of something wrong?

  In the days after, all I could think was, What if I had been there? Could I have done something? Would it have been different if I’d just gone to L.A. when he called? Later on, when I heard the actual 911 call, I heard them on the phone telling the operator, “We have a gentleman here. He’s not breathing.” Fuck that. I would have thrown him in the car and rushed him to the hospital myself. It was only a couple miles away. I would have got him out of there. He’s not breathing? Let’s go! We gotta go! Maybe it would have been different if I’d actually been there. Maybe I’m just imagining how I would have reacted, but I really don’t think I would have just sat around waiting for the paramedics.

  That scenario kept running through my mind: What if? I kept playing it back and forth in my head. But I can tell you what did not cross my mind when I heard that he died. I didn’t even think about Dr. Conrad Murray. Didn’t imagine for a second that he might have been involved. Propofol? I’d never heard of it. He wasn’t using anything like that to sleep when he was around us, and we knew he wasn’t because he was never asleep.

  All I ever really knew about Michael Jackson and prescription drugs was what everyone else knew, what you heard in the media. There aren’t too many negative things I haven’t heard about Michael Jackson, and it’s all just rumors, so I always tried to go by what I saw with my own eyes, and I didn’t see much. There was the time he wanted to go to the hospital in Virginia in the middle of the night. That was unu
sual. The camera he tore up at the Four Seasons? There was something going on there. But that was really it. In all that time of being in really close, personal contact with him, that was all I saw. The Michael Jackson I knew, most of the time he’d be reading a book or helping the kids with their homework. That was the guy I worked for.

  Dr. Murray visited Mr. Jackson maybe three or four times in the months I was with him. And the few times he came, it was because the kids were sick. Paris had the flu, Blanket had an upset stomach, something like that. If Dr. Murray was treating Mr. Jackson, bringing him prescriptions on the side, I wouldn’t know, of course. But he was never at the house more than an hour, hour and a half, tops. Never overnight. If Dr. Murray was helping him to sleep, he wasn’t doing it on my watch. And why not? Why wasn’t Dr. Murray in Virginia? Why wasn’t he in New Jersey? He wasn’t there because Michael Jackson didn’t need all that. The King of Pop brought that on, because he had all these vultures after him, trying to do all these shows, all that pressure. The King of Pop brings all the drama.

  Javon: For weeks after, I was kicking myself. I kept thinking, What if I’d been there? I can’t say for sure how I would have handled it, but if I’d been there when they pronounced him dead, I know I’d have blamed myself. I would have said, “Was there something I didn’t do right? Did I wait too long to call the ambulance?” Something. That would have destroyed me, having him die on my watch, his kids thinking that we didn’t do what it took to keep their daddy alive. Not being there, at least I had some closure.

  Bill: I started to feel that we weren’t supposed to be there. We were not supposed to be a part of that, the scenery of him passing away. Everybody that was part of that has to carry it for the rest of their lives. Someone actually said that to me, too. One of his fans said that to me. She said, “He was going to die in L.A. This show, this pressure, it was going to happen, and maybe your relationship went the way it went because he wasn’t supposed to die on your watch. You weren’t supposed to carry that burden on you.” I think about that still. “I wasn’t supposed to be there.” Was I not? Maybe that’s some crazy thinking, but I wonder about it. I hold onto that.