Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Katherine was still the only woman in Michael’s life. The dates with Brooke Shields were just a show. Brooke had tried to kiss him a couple of times, Michael confided to one of his brothers, but he was grossed out when she put her tongue in his mouth. With Katherine, though, it was true love. And true love was the only thing that could change Michael’s mind. During a private meeting Katherine requested with Michael, she implored him to join his brothers on the reunion tour. They needed the money, badly in a couple of cases, she told her son. This was family. Finally, when all else failed, she pulled out the big gun: “For me, Michael, please?”

  It was a choice between the only two things Michael had, his mother’s love and his career. He chose his mother’s love, of course, but did not fold completely. He insisted that his involvement in Victory, the album that would launch the tour, be kept to a minimum: two songs that he would write and sing. One of them, a duet with Mick Jagger titled “State of Shock,” would be the only hit the album produced. That was fine with the brothers; this album and the tour that followed were about money for them and they intended to fill their pockets with as much of it as possible.

  An unanticipated problem developed when several promoters said they were afraid to book the Jacksons into the large outdoor stadiums they planned to pack with paying customers for fear of the crush of fans who would try to get to Michael. “I could not guarantee the safety of those in front of the stage,” New York promoter Ron Delsner told reporters. “I don’t think anybody can—if they do, they’re liars.” “Michael Jackson whips people to a fever pitch,” chimed in Atlanta’s Alex Cooley. “His fans are the root of the word ‘fan’—they’re fanatic about it. So, yeah, there’re problems.” Joe and Katherine joined forces to suggest a promoter who was not troubled by such concerns.

  Best known for his electroshock hair style and for staging championship boxing matches (including the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier “Thrilla in Manila”), Don King had served four years in an Ohio prison for killing a man in a Cleveland street fight. He was loud, coarse, controversial, given to outrageous and racially loaded statements. King had showed up for his first meeting with the family wearing a white fur coat and a gold necklace with a pendant on which a gold crown was topped by the name DON. Michael despised the man from the moment he met him: “Creepy,” he called King, and let everyone know he wanted the promoter kept away from him. After King forked over a $3 million cash payment he called “good faith money”—a pittance to Michael but a fortune to his brothers—King said the forty shows he had planned would gross at least $30 million, which, after expenses and the 15 percent management fee that he and Joe agreed to split, would leave about $3.4 million apiece for the brothers. King’s next coup was the negotiation of a deal with the Pepsi-Cola company to sponsor the tour for $5 million dollars, ten times what the Rolling Stones had received from the same company for their 1981 tour. Michael resisted, saying he didn’t drink soda, didn’t need the money, and didn’t want to appear in a commercial. Once again, the family pressured him into accepting.

  The dreaded Pepsi commercial was filmed on January 27, 1984, at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, which was filled with a crowd of 3,000 to simulate the atmosphere of a live concert. With his brothers, Michael was to sing the lyrics of a jingle titled “You’re a Whole New Generation” set to the music of “Billie Jean.” Paul McCartney warned Michael that appearing in a TV commercial would leave him “overexposed” and hurt his career in the long run. Bothered by the idea of shilling for a product he didn’t believe in and filled with a sense of foreboding about the shoot, Michael agreed to only a single four-second close-up.

  At 6:30 that evening, the Jacksons were beginning their sixth rendition of “You’re a Whole New Generation,” the highlight being Michael’s descent down a staircase to the main stage through a pyrotechnic arc of brightly colored explosions. He was posed at the top of a platform above the staircase when a magnesium flash bomb went off about two feet from his head. As he descended through the smoke and began to spin at the bottom of the stairs, he felt a hot spot near the crown of his head, but assumed it was the stage lights. As he finished his third spin and rose onto his toes, Michael realized his hair was literally on fire and fell to the stage floor, pulling his jacket up over his head as he shouted for help.

  Amid the screaming chaos, many of those in the audience believed that there had been an attempt on Michael’s life. Jermaine, standing less than ten feet away, thought his brother had been shot. Videotape of Michael being loaded into an ambulance, with one sequin-gloved hand poking out of the blankets, led all three national news broadcasts that evening. (Michael had told the ambulance attendants to leave the glove on so people would know it was him.) At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, doctors found a fist-size second-degree burn on the back of his head near the crown, with a spot of third-degree burn about the size of a quarter in its center. For his recuperation, he was transferred to Brotman Medical Center, which recruited six volunteers to answer phone calls about Michael’s status. Tens of thousands of cards and letters arrived, including one from the president of the United States. Pepsi paid Michael $1.5 million to avoid a lawsuit, all of which he donated to Brotman to establish the Michael Jackson Burn Center, earning an incalculable amount of goodwill from the city of Los Angeles in the process.

  Two negative effects of the accident on the Shrine Auditorium set, though, would endure far longer than the good publicity. His hair never grew back in fully on the spot where the third-degree burn had been. More important, after first refusing to take painkillers, Michael swallowed a Dilaudid pill that was the first narcotic ever to enter his system. His discovery that the drug not only eased the pain on the surface of his body but numbed an ache deeper inside would change him over time in ways that no one then could have imagined.

  His more pressing problem in the summer of 1984, though, was the runaway greed of his father and brothers, and Don King’s encouragement of it. The brothers and King had decided that tickets for the Victory tour concerts would be priced at $30 apiece and be made available to the public only by mail order in lots of four. This was at a time when the highest priced concert tickets in the country, for shows by Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, went for $16 a seat. News that no one who couldn’t afford to shell out at least $120 would get into the Jacksons’ shows not only roused the media to charges of gouging, but shocked and angered the group’s core fans: inner-city youth. Michael had opposed setting the ticket prices so high and objected to making them available only by mail order, but was again outvoted five to one.

  As the star of the tour, Michael suffered the brunt of the negative publicity. In the end, he had no choice but to threaten his brothers and King that if they refused to change the ticket policy he would refuse to perform. Shortly after they yielded, Michael announced that he would be donating all of his earnings from the tour to charity, dividing approximately $5 million between the United Negro College Fund, a foundation for cancer research, and Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times.

  The tour itself was sheer indignity from start to finish. At the first stop in Kansas City, Jermaine told a reporter, “Even though Michael is very talented, a lot of his success has been due to timing and a little bit of luck. It could have been him, or it could just as easily have been me.” Michael steadily distanced himself from his brothers as the tour progressed, refusing to stay on the same floor with them at their hotels and insisting his attorneys be present at the business meetings that, within the first few dates, became the only conversations he had with his siblings. The other Jacksons traveled to their concerts in separate vehicles before the tour was half finished and insisted upon collecting their payments immediately after each show. The brothers saw a chance to double their money when a producer offered millions for the right to tape the tour and edit Michael’s footage into a home video, but Michael threatened not to perform at one more show if his brothers agreed. By the time the tour arrived at its final stop—six dates at Dodger Stadium in Lo
s Angeles—the stress was so great that Michael had all but stopped eating, his weight falling to an all-time low of 110 pounds. Joe and Don King were already negotiating a deal to take the Victory tour to Europe, but when Michael learned of it he informed them there was no chance. No one in his family, though, was prepared for the shout-out Michael gave from the stage on December 9, 1984: “This is our last and final show. It’s been a long twenty years and we love you all.” Michael looked at the shocked expressions on his brothers’ faces and couldn’t quite suppress his smile.

  Michael was still flush with the phenomenal success of Thriller in 1985, well on his way to earning more than $200 million from sales of the album alone, when he taped a sheet of paper printed with “100 million” on his bathroom window that would remain in place during the two years he spent recording his follow-up to Thriller, 1987’s Bad. The note would become the artifact of a self-inflicted curse that shadowed the remainder of his career. “This has to be bigger than the last one,” Michael repeatedly told the musicians who were working on the album with him. “If it sold a hundred million copies, I don’t think he’d be totally satisfied,” Bad’s coproducer Bruce Swedien confided to Rolling Stone. “But he’d hold still for that.”

  Jackson was no less determined to create a private life that corresponded to the scale of his public success. Having grown up in a world where indulging one’s whims was the license of stardom, he increasingly insisted upon living without limitation. During the Bad world tour, he demanded that a bus, a plane, and a helicopter be available to him at all times, regardless of cost. Michael hired Martin Scorsese to direct the “Bad” video after Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola proved unavailable, then spent an unprecedented $2 million on the project. Such grandiosity could be justified when Bad went on to become the first album ever to produce five #1 records and racked up domestic sales of seventeen million units, plus another thirteen million internationally. The Bad tour grossed $125 million and the star of the show walked away with $40 million of that. Bad was an astounding success by the standards of almost anyone else, but a crushing disappointment for Michael Jackson. Rolling Stone’s review argued that Bad was “actually a better record than Thriller,” but other critics were less enthusiastic.

  The “Bad” video was greeted with outright derision. Scorsese shot from a script by gritty New York City novelist Richard Price, based on the story of Edmund Perry, a young black man from Harlem who had gone to prep school on a scholarship, only to be shot dead by a plainclothes police officer who claimed the kid had tried to mug him. Scorsese, Price, and Jackson all envisioned the Perry character as a solitary figure struggling to maintain footholds in two very different worlds where his isolation was bracketed by snobbish preppies and menacing street toughs. The story would come to a climax with the young man’s transformation into a rebellious badass intent on dishing out every bit as much pain as he had absorbed. Jackson and his dancers spent hours watching West Side Story and Michael intended to model his performance in the video on the one delivered by George Chakiris, who in the movie had played the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.

  The project appeared to be shaping up into a music video that would be every bit as big as “Thriller,” but the reaction of most viewers when Michael strutted onscreen in his tough guy getup had been to nearly suffocate on a simultaneous eruption of gasps and giggles. It wasn’t simply the black leather that encased the star from head to toe but a blinding array of metal accents affixed to every tuck, fold, and surface. The absurd silver heels and buckles on his boots were the most understated part of the costume, outshined—literally—by the glinting studs, buckles, and numerous zippers that decorated his wristband, belt, and jacket. Radio stations across the country held contests that challenged listeners to guess just how many zippers and buckles there were on the jacket. More startling was Jackson’s appearance. Pale-tone pancake makeup was slathered onto the surgically altered features of an androgyne who bore little resemblance to the young black man who had gazed pensively from the cover of Off the Wall only eight years earlier. The general public’s response to the star’s new album and video was encapsulated by the headline on the cover of People magazine: “Michael Jackson: He’s Back. He’s Bad. Is This Guy Weird or What?”

  The world’s reigning pop star had officially become a freak. Recognizing what he was up against, Jackson had taken the stage at the following year’s Grammys to deliver a blistering live performance of “Man in the Mirror,” then spent most of the rest of the evening sniffling in a front-row seat, barely able to blink back tears as he was shut out of the awards and watched the ceremony turn into a coming-out party for U2. By then his plastic surgery makeover and “Wacko Jacko” image (the nickname had become a staple of the British tabloids) were alienating more and more music lovers. In the United States, Jackson issued instructions that photographers at press conferences use only a medium telephoto lens with a shutter speed of 1/125, an f-stop of four, and film compatible with tungsten lighting, rules that were meant to disguise Jackson’s multiple plastic surgeries but only served to infuriate and disgust the media.

  In 1988, even as his three-and-a-half-octave tenor reached the peak of its power, Rolling Stone’s readers voted him “worst artist” in almost every category of the magazine’s annual poll. Still the biggest selling recording artist on the planet, Jackson felt massively unappreciated, especially by music critics. Bruce Springsteen (“He can’t sing or dance”) was called “The Boss,” while various newspaper and magazine polls were naming Madonna (“That heifer!”) Artist of the Decade. Don King, whom Jackson initially despised, finally got Jackson’s ear by telling him, “The white man will never let you be bigger than Elvis.”

  5

  A week before Christmas, in 2005, a group of Sony executives flew to Dubai to meet Michael Jackson face-to-face. Along with several of Sheikh Abdullah’s financial advisors, the execs assembled in Jackson’s $9,000-per-night suite at the emirate’s sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel. Sony CFO Robert S. Wiesenthal endured only a few minutes of chitchat before explaining to Jackson that he was on the brink of a bankruptcy that threatened the corporation’s bottom line.

  Late in 2003, concerned that Jackson had missed several seven-figure payments he owed, Bank of America sold his loan to Fortress Investment Group, an “alternative asset” management company accused of being one of the most predatory on the planet, specializing in the exploitation of financial distress. As Fortress began to ratchet the interest rate on Jackson’s debt up past 20 percent per annum, both Neverland Ranch and, more important, Jackson’s half of the Sony/ATV catalog were put into play. Then on July 11, 2005, just two weeks after his arrival in the Persian Gulf, Jackson was sued for $48 million by Prescient Acquisitions Group, a New Jersey financial services company that claimed it had brokered the deal with Fortress.

  What compelled the Sony executives’ trip to Dubai was their discovery that Fortress was about to call in Jackson’s loan. If that happened, Wiesenthal and the others gathered in the suite at the Burj Al Arab explained, Michael would be forced into bankruptcy and his half of the song catalog thrown up for grabs to the highest bidder. Sony, which for years had been maneuvering to take complete control of the catalog, could not let that happen.

  Jackson was remarkably subdued and compliant, with little to say beyond a few marveling murmurs about how the ATV catalog was saving him once again from financial ruin. It was quite a change from the Sony executives’ last encounter with the star. Although Jackson’s music had generated as much as a billion dollars in profits for Sony since the 1980s, the performer was increasingly seen by the company as more liability than asset, and the public relations catastrophe that had followed the release of Invincible encouraged that point of view. Sony had permitted Jackson to record eighty-four songs at the company’s expense—from which he selected the sixteen that appeared on Invincible—and in the process to run up production costs that were more than double that of any album ever before releas
ed by the company. Jackson had then called Sony Music Group’s CEO a racist for refusing to spend even more money on Invincible.

  Relations between the company and its erstwhile recording artist improved after Number Ones was released in late 2003 and sold ten million copies. Sony had been prepared to negotiate new agreements for loan guarantees and other compilation or anniversary albums when suddenly Jackson’s life and career disappeared into a two-and-a-half-year-long crisis of trauma and catastrophe. Sony watched Martin Bashir destroy most of what was left of Jackson’s reputation, then saw Tom Sneddon put him through the ordeal of a criminal trial that had left Michael, in Tom Mesereau’s words, “psychologically shattered.” The not-guilty verdicts at the end of that trial had done little to restore the entertainer’s public standing.

  What was now at stake was not simply the most valuable asset Jackson owned, but the most valuable asset ever owned by any recording artist. Jackson had purchased the ATV/Music Publishing Catalog in 1985 for what then seemed an astounding price of $47.5 million. Twenty years later, it was worth a billion dollars.

  As would be the case with his later purchase of Neverland Ranch, Paul McCartney was the catalyst for Jackson’s acquisition. McCartney’s impact on Jackson’s life was far out of proportion to their relatively brief relationship. The former Beatle’s fascination with cartoons and animation had served for Jackson as an enormous source of validation and encouragement. The revelation that a cultural icon of McCartney’s magnitude cherished and collected Woody Woodpecker cartoons not only eased Michael’s embarrassment about the hours he spent watching animated shorts but offered the first solid evidence he had seen that a determination to remain childlike was shared by other geniuses. Jackson’s later discovery that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were also major cartoon collectors pleased him tremendously, but it was McCartney who had provided Michael with a retort to the taunts he had endured for years from his father and brothers. Michael especially enjoyed telling his family that he and Paul had written their duet “The Girl Is Mine” while watching cartoons together.