By the time the Chandler case was settled, Michael was going days at a time without slumber. “Lisa I truly Need This Rest I Haven’t slept litterally (sic) in 4 Days now,” Michael had written to Lisa Marie Presley in a sprawling sloppy scrawl that filled up an entire sheet of legal notebook paper at one point during their relationship, explaining his failure to communicate. “I need to Be Away from phones and Business people.”
Only after prescription drugs began to fail him as soporifics did Michael discover the one medication that gave him everything he wanted in a sleep aid. The syrupy white liquid propofol (marketed by AstraZeneca as Diprivan) is a short-acting, intravenously administered hypnotic agent better known as “milk of amnesia” among the medical professionals who use it as an anesthesia for day surgeries. Its many benefits include the fact that patients wake up (or come to) after a propofol injection in a state that is both alert and euphoric. This latter result has produced an archive of amusing anecdotes that date back to the time that the drug was still in its testing stage. Dr. Mike Roizen, the Cleveland Clinic physician who performed one of the earliest clinical studies of propofol, recalled that the first patient to give informed consent to be administered the drug was a young woman who came out of anesthesia after a knee operation, promptly grabbed her surgeon, and gave him “perhaps the most sensuous kiss I’ve ever seen in an operating room.” Similar reports emerged from other studies, but so, also, had concerns about the drug. Propofol was limited by a very narrow “therapeutic window”: a medical way of saying that taking even a little more than the recommended dosage could stop a person’s breathing. Among those who had discovered propofol as a recreational drug—somewhat like ecstasy in its effect—there had been a number of deaths, some of them classified as suicides.
Michael had begun using propofol to sleep in 1996 while on the HIStory tour. Reportedly, the drug was administered either by a Beverly Hills doctor who was traveling with Michael, or by a pair of German anesthesiologists whose inclusion in the tour was arranged by Dieter Wiesner. Wiesner insisted the latter story was not true: “There were doctors there but I did not bring them. I was completely against it.” However the doctors who gave it to him were hired, Michael came to rely on the propofol drip they fed him because it allowed him to go unconscious for hours every night no matter what his travel schedule and wake feeling refreshed each morning.
The propofol drips stopped, though, after the HIStory tour ended. Jackson again resumed the use of antianxiety medications and painkillers to get him through the night. His sleep disorder not only persisted, but was exacerbated by the bedsores he’d developed during the two-plus years between the airing of the Bashir documentary and his acquittal at the criminal trial in Santa Maria, a period when he had spent days at a stretch on his back in an immobilized drug haze.
Although he’d regularly resorted to OxyContin and Demerol while living in Bahrain, Michael’s use of synthetic opiates was more restricted during his months in Ireland than it had been at any time during the previous three years. The price he paid for the last concerted effort he ever made at weaning himself off painkillers and antianxiety medications was a steady increase in sleepless nights. And yet, according to Patrick Treacy, Michael resisted asking for Diprivan or even Demerol with more determination than he’d managed in years. “The only prescriptions I wrote him were for minor things like colds,” the doctor said.
Treacy and his colleagues at the Ailesbury Clinic did use propofol to put Michael under during an operation on his nose in 2006. Afterward, Treacy visited Michael at Coolatore House and found his patient in extreme discomfort: “He was running around the room covering his face and saying, ‘It hurts! It burns!’” Yet Michael did not ask for another dose of Diprivan, Treacy said, and even refused the doctor’s offer of other pain medications to see him through the week. Michael also did not ask for anything to treat his insomnia, according to Treacy, who claimed later that his patient had made it clear he understood the dangers of using propofol without an attending anesthesiologist. “Michael would never have done so,” the Irish doctor insisted.
Without the drugs, though, Jackson was sleeping no more than a couple of hours a night. Amid the lawsuits, the scandals, and the tabloid gossip, not to mention the urgency he felt about restoring his finances and reviving his career, it was nearly impossible to make his mind rest. On top of that, all his best ideas came to him at three in the morning, Michael said.
One of those ideas was triggered by a question Billy Bush had put to him about a “second chapter” to Thriller, given that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the album’s release would arrive in late 2007. “It’s a great thought,” Michael had said at the time. Sony agreed. After the meeting at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, the company had become quite receptive to the idea of another Michael Jackson retrospective. His criminal trial in Santa Barbara County had been bracketed by the enormous success of Number Ones in 2003 and the impressive follow-up of The Essential Michael Jackson (six million copies sold) in late 2005. Only a few weeks after will.i.am flew back to the United States, the Black Eyed Pea signed on as executive producer on a special anniversary edition of Thriller that would include remixes, duets, and perhaps a few new songs. They would title the project Thriller 25, Michael and Sony agreed, after the company agreed to release the album on its reissue label, Legacy Recordings. This decision would ease at least a little of the pressure he felt to deliver what was now being described on six continents as his “comeback album,” Michael realized, and earn him some good credit at Sony if it sold even a million copies. More important, it offered him the opportunity to show the music industry that his best work was relevant to young artists even a quarter century later. That all sounded a lot better than risking another experience like the one he had endured upon the release of Invincible.
This happy development did not change the fact that Michael was becoming more and more restive as the end of October approached. The weather was turning chill and damp. Darkness came sooner. Worst of all, Billy Bush had shredded his veil of privacy. Right after shooting the interview at Grouse Lodge, Bush stopped over in nearby Moate, where “he told the men, women, children, and dogs in the street where Jackson was,” as a reporter for Britain’s Observer described it. “Stupid man,” a sorrowful Paddy Dunning would say.
The paparazzi and tabloid reporters asking about Michael Jackson in the pubs and shops of County Westmeath multiplied steadily after that. Michael was moved to tears when he heard about a local farmer who had threatened to empty his slurry trailer on the car of a paparazzo who was trying to sneak a snapshot from a neighboring property. He knew it was only a matter of time, though, before one of the photographers succeeded. Sure enough, during the last week of October, a grainy image of Michael entering the main building at Grouse Lodge appeared in several Irish newspapers. In the days that followed, drive-by gawkers on the Dublin-Galway road stalled traffic like nothing ever seen before in Rosemount. For the first time since his arrival at Blackwater Castle back in June, Michael was implicitly criticized in the Irish press, on October 28, when one of the small Midlands newspapers published an article about his visit with the children to a Tullamore play center called Jumping Jacks. Michael Jackson had come in dressed all in black, it was reported, wearing a cowboy hat outfitted with a veil as he watched his children play with six or seven local kids. One mother complained that Mr. Jackson’s burly “minder” had asked rather sternly if another woman was taking photographs of Michael’s children; later she herself had been followed outside by the same man, who wanted to know if she was making a phone call. Even the Westmeath Independent became so desperate for Michael Jackson news that it built a story around a sighting of the star carrying a Mickey Mouse bag as he left the studio after an all-night recording session.
Word of Jackson’s stay at Grouse Lodge went worldwide after the Access Hollywood segment aired in early November. The inns and pubs of County Westmeath crawled with people who carried cameras and microphones. There were no m
ore walks in the countryside.
Michael’s nerves were not calmed by thoughts of his impending appearance in London on November 15, at the World Music Awards ceremony, where Beyoncé was to present him with the fifth-ever Diamond Award (for selling more than 100 million albums). From the moment he accepted the invitation, Michael began to dread the event. His performance would be broadcast to one hundred and sixty countries worldwide and on top of that he was “terrified of having to meet the queen,” Patrick Treacy recalled. Jackson’s deepest fear, though, was of Fleet Street. There was no place on earth where he had been subjected to either so much adulation or so much ridicule as in London. The English tabloids couldn’t get enough of Wacko Jacko. They would all have their knives and forks out by the time he arrived, Michael knew, waiting for the feast to begin.
10
In July 1988, when he arrived in England at the climax of his Bad tour, Michael had been treated literally like royalty. Ahead of the first of his seven scheduled concerts at Wembley Stadium, Jackson was honored with a dinner at Guildhall, the historic town center of the city of London. The centuries-old building had survived the trials of the Gunpowder and Overbury plot leaders, and a fire from a World War II Luftwaffe raid that burned off its timber roof, but it had seen nothing like the visit of Michael Jackson. Dressed in a bright red-and-blue tunic that was likened by reporters to the uniform of a military dictator, Michael had become (with the permission of Queen Elizabeth II herself) the first commoner in history admitted to Guildhall through the building’s royal entrance, his arrival heralded by the trumpeters of the Life Guards cavalry. Amid the memorials to Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and Winston Churchill, dancers dressed in Olde English costumes scattered rose petals at Michael’s feet as he was escorted to the head of the long table in the Great Hall where so many affairs of state had been conducted over the centuries. A huge platter of roast beef was paraded through the room by the Corps of Drums of the Honourable Artillery Company, but Jackson never touched it, instead nibbling at a vegetable salad prepared by his personal chef.
After the meal, the star was led into the courtyard with Frank Dileo and the ten-year-old boy who was his constant companion on the Bad tour, Jimmy Safechuck. He saluted as the band of the Corps of Royal Engineers marched past, then walked up and down a line of liveried troops, as if sent by the queen to inspect them. Michael began to dance when the band broke into its version of “Billie Jean,” then turned, startled by the sound of hooves clattering upon cobblestones as a knight in armor rode into the compound astride an enormous steed. Leaping from the horse, the knight pulled a sword from a stone, went down on one knee before the American pop star, then handed him what was supposed to be Excalibur. “Do you realize that you’ve just become the King of England?” one of the entertainment writers in attendance called out. “Gee,” Michael replied. “A king? I never knew.”
Nothing would surpass the London event for pomp and ceremony, but similar deference was shown to Jackson at virtually every stop on the Bad tour. The press dubbed him “Typhoon Michael” in Japan. Six hundred reporters and photographers clamored and jostled upon his arrival at Narita Airport in Tokyo; nearly three hundred remained to meet the cargo plane that touched down more than an hour later with Bubbles aboard. In Japan, he dedicated each performance of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” to a five-year-old boy named Yoshioka Hagiwara, whose recent kidnapping and murder had traumatized the entire nation. Dubbed “Crocodile Jackson” by the Australian press, he sold out stadium dates in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane weeks in advance. Frantic camera crews followed him on a round of visits to seriously ill children in the Sydney suburbs and he made the front page of every major newspaper in the country when he tucked several sick children into bed after hearing pleas from their mothers. Visits to orphanages or to the children’s wards of hospitals, as well as charitable donations, were principal features of Jackson’s stay in each of the cities he visited on a sixteen-month-long world tour that included a hundred and twenty-three concerts in fifteen countries.
Michael Jackson was a phenomenon like nothing the world had seen before him, greeted outside the United States with a level of crazed enthusiasm that far exceeded what Elvis and the Beatles had generated decades earlier. The nearly four and a half million tickets purchased made the Bad tour the largest grossing concert series in history. References to “mass hysteria” were part of the press coverage at every stop. “There was a peculiar religiosity to his concert reviews,” entertainment writer Simon Frith would write for his “Brit Beat” column in The Village Voice, “as if people were going to Wembley (a common setting for revivalist meetings) to be redeemed.” A granddaughter of Emperor Hirohito attended the first concert in Tokyo; in London, Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, were among those in Wembley’s private boxes. Meeting with Michael before the concert at Wembley, the princess urged him to perform “Dirty Diana.” Bob Dylan and Elizabeth Taylor were among the crowd at the concert in Basel, Switzerland, where Michael met privately with Oona O’Neill, the widow of his idol Charlie Chaplin. Headline writers in every country he visited felt compelled to give him a new nickname—“The Earl of Whirl” or “The Peter Pan of Pop”—but in England the adulation went hand in glove with open ridicule.
The Sun had started it with the 1986 headline that asked, “Is Jacko Wacko?” Jackson’s reputation for weirdness dated at least as far back as the Destiny tour, and was rooted in his remarkably earnest curiosity. In 1980 he had spent time on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a largely abandoned downtown stretch of Spring Street where a large number of the city’s homeless population gathered and lived. He had gone in disguise, of course, in a stubbly fake beard, a battered old hat, and the tattered clothing that he imagined would allow him to blend in. All he wanted, Michael said, was to get a feel for what life was like for the people down there. A year later he was wearing the same disguise when he wandered into an Atlanta antique store and, for some reason, tried to conceal himself inside an antique armoire. He was spotted by the owner, who made the scruffy-looking fellow for a drunk. The owner ordered him to come out and leave the store but Michael refused to budge. The man called the sheriff’s department, which sent a deputy who walked into one of the strangest scenes he had ever encountered: The proprietor was holding the bum in a headlock as the man thrashed about wildly, trying to explain that he was the Michael Jackson. The deputy arrested both men, one for criminal trespass and the other for assault. No charges were filed but it was the first public record of Jackson’s determination to cope with fame by going undercover.
He went incognito throughout the eighties. He delighted in playing with makeup and costumes, and continued to experiment with disguises when he went out “pioneering” for the Jehovah’s Witnesses until he broke from the church in 1987. In 1985 he was spotted pedaling a bicycle along Ventura Boulevard in what Rolling Stone would call “a daringly thin disguise”: faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and a khaki cap with desert flaps jammed down over the hood of his windbreaker. Jackson had also taken to going out in public wearing a gorilla mask. “I love it when people stop and are scared,” he offered. “And I love it when they don’t know it’s me inside the mask.” And yet at the same time he wanted them to know. The producer, arranger, and songwriter David Foster, who began working with Jackson as early as Off the Wall, would recall a visit of Michael’s to New York in which the star prepared for a surreptitious trip to the movies by permitting Foster’s children to dress him in their own clothes; baggy jeans, a scarf, and a cap turned to the side, “gangster-style,” with his hair tucked up inside it. However, when the kids told him he had to push the curled lock of hair on his forehead into the hat as well, because it had become such a signature look, Michael refused. “It was a dead giveaway, but he was adamant,” Foster remembered: “‘No, no, I’ve got to have my curl out!’ I thought that was very telling. He didn’t want to be seen, but he kind of wanted to be seen.”
The confusion about the difference betw
een telling lies and doing public relations that Berry Gordy and Diana Ross conspired to lodge in Michael’s mind at the age of ten had morphed into a belief that there was no such thing as bad publicity. He began to idolize P. T. Barnum and planted a story himself that he was sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber so he’d stop aging, posing inside one of the $200,000 contraptions for a photo that ran worldwide. When a rumor started that he was trying to buy the bones of Joseph Merrick, Britain’s famous “Elephant Man,” Michael made an actual offer in order to give the story legs. He collaborated with the National Enquirer on articles reporting that he refused to bathe in anything but Evian water and had been carrying on conversations with John Lennon’s ghost. Frank Dileo was Michael’s chief aider and abettor in planting such stories in the tabloids, going so far as to insist that his client be described as “bizarre” in a report by the Star that ran under the headline: “Michael Jackson Goes Ape. Now He’s Talking with His Pet Chimp—In Monkey Language.” Most people were unaware that Michael’s chimp companion Bubbles (who had been rescued from a cancer research laboratory) lived most of the time with his trainer, Bob Dunn.
The problem with such strategies was that the tabloids began to print almost anything about Michael Jackson and felt they could get away with it. This included such concocted items as Jackson paying $1 million for a potion that would make him invisible so he could go shopping with his pet chimpanzee and not be stared at. An Enquirer report claimed that Jackson’s musical rival, Prince, was using ESP to drive Bubbles crazy. “Prince has gone too far this time,” the Enquirer had Michael saying. “What kind of sicko would mess with a monkey?” His supposed terror of the HIV virus was made into a tabloid treat and an invented story that he had refused to kiss the Blarney Stone on a visit to Ireland because he feared catching AIDS gained so much credence that it was printed as fact in Rolling Stone.
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