“To me, it was like watching them stick knives in his open wounds,” Mesereau said. “Michael had been drained of his strength, of his happiness, of his hope. He was so hurt by what had been said and written about him. He had been accused of things that he wasn’t even remotely capable of doing. He had told Martin Bashir that he would rather die than hurt a child, and I believed him. But he knew that many people—most of the people in the media—didn’t believe him. I really think that by the time the trial was over Michael wasn’t sure he wanted to live anymore. If not for his children, I’m not sure he would have lived as long as he did.”
On June 19, Michael flew with his children and Grace Rwaramba to Paris. Mesereau didn’t even know that his client had left the country until more than a week later, when Grace phoned Susan Yu to say they had settled in Bahrain. “I think he wanted to get as far away from Santa Barbara County as he could,” Mesereau said. “I think he was looking for the sort of safety, the sense of sanctuary that he had felt at Neverland. I didn’t think it was a bad idea. But at the same time, I think I just assumed that he would come back to the United States eventually. I mean, this was his country.”
22
On May 20, 2009, AEG Live announced that the debut of Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” concert series had been pushed back five days, to July 13, and that three other July dates would be rescheduled for March 2010. For thousands of people who had already purchased tickets and made travel plans, it was devastating news. Stung by the “We told you,” gibes from Roger Friedman and others, Michael lashed out as he left the Burbank Studios after one of his infrequent rehearsal appearances, saying he was angry at “them” for “booking me up to fifty shows when I only wanted to do ten.”
Marc Schaffel and Dieter Wiesner told each other they had seen this coming. “As soon as I heard fifty concerts,” Wiesner recalled, “I knew it would never happen.”
“My guess was that Michael would quit after three shows,” Schaffel said. “And I knew there was no way he would do those London concerts on the schedule they wanted. It would have taken much longer, at the very least. I think he realized he had to do it, but the less he had to perform, the better Michael liked it.”
For years, Michael had insisted (to Wiesner and Schaffel, among others) that he found it far more satisfying to work on a movie, or even a video, than to perform in concert. He was forced to do an enormous amount of work to prepare for a concert, Michael complained, “but when it’s over, it’s over.” There was nothing captured, nothing permanent, nothing you could show your children. Live performances were here and gone. Afterward, you felt like you’d wasted your energy.
In London, the tabloids reported that Jackson was still hardly ever leaving the Carolwood chateau, even when the “This Is It” dancers and musicians began their intensive, seven-days-a-week practice sessions at CenterStaging. He preferred to work from home, Michael told Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips. “I know my schedule,” he crisply informed Ortega, then added that he was still working out three times a week with Lou Ferrigno and getting in shape for the shows. Like Randy Phillips, Ortega was hearing reports that while Jackson wasn’t showing up at rehearsals, he was still making at least a couple of trips every week to see Arnold Klein. Michael would remain inside Klein’s office for up to five hours at a time. The paparazzi who had staked the place out reported that on at least a couple of occasions Michael had emerged from the Bedford building so incapacitated that his bodyguards literally had to carry him to his vehicle. British tabloids that knew Klein had been giving the entertainer injections of Demerol since the 1990s began running stories about Jackson’s drug use “spiraling out of control.”
For Phillips and AEG Live, Jackson’s health—physical as well as mental —had become the biggest issue hanging over the preparations for the O2 shows. Insurers were understandably reluctant to underwrite a policy that would cover a production headlined by a performer whose collapses and no-shows had torpedoed one extravaganza after another during the previous fifteen years. Rumors that Michael was suffering from an assortment of major medical issues had been dogging plans for the London concerts ever since the previous December. Publicly, Phillips waved away worries about his star’s health. “Making up rumors about Michael Jackson is a cottage industry,” he told a London reporter. “We were having dinner when I got a Google alert that he had a flesh-eating disease. He was sitting opposite, healthy as ever.”
What Phillips did not tell reporters was that AEG still had not found insurers for all fifty of the O2 concerts (less than thirty were covered so far) and might have to write its own policy for the rest. And the company had only obtained what insurance coverage Lloyd’s of London was willing to extend by convincing Michael to submit to a nearly five-hour battery of medical tests. The examination had been conducted by Dr. David Slavit, a New York City–based ear-nose-and-throat specialist best known for his work with opera singers, and resulted in a certificate of health stating that the doctor had found nothing more serious than a slight case of sniffles attributed to hay fever. Yes, he was aware that Mr. Jackson had cancelled past performances and tours, Slavit noted in his report, but this had been the result of “dehydration and exhaustion”—easily avoided if he received appropriate medical care. All in all, Michael Jackson was in excellent health, and more than fit enough to perform the London concerts, AEG announced shortly after receiving Slavit’s report. The company didn’t mention that the policy Lloyd’s had issued (under the pseudonym “Mark Jones”) specifically stated that, “This insurance does not cover any loss directly or indirectly arising out of, contributed to, by or resulting from . . . the illegal possession or illicit taking of drugs and their effects.” Nor did anyone at the company take public note of the fact that, on the questionnaire he completed as part of his medical examination, Michael had responded to the query, “Have you ever been treated for or had any indication of excessive use of alcohol or drugs” by circling “no.”
In order to prepare Michael physically for the O2 shows, AEG had agreed to pay for the services of a chef/nutritionist named Kai Chase who would live full-time at the Carolwood chateau. Like Lou Ferrigno before her, Chase reported that no matter how concerned others might be about his sporadic appearances at the CenterStaging show rehearsals, Michael was embracing the disciplines of health and fitness at home. He had sworn off the KFC chicken dinners he loved and was eating only healthy food during the run-up to the O2 shows, Chase said—meals like spinach salad with free range chicken for lunch and seared wild tuna for supper. He needed a diet that would help him avoid cramping up when he was performing, Michael told Chase, who was as struck as others had been that he referred to himself constantly as a dancer, but only rarely as a singer. The one meal of the day at which neither Chase nor the children saw Michael was breakfast, because the specially mixed fruit drinks and organic granola the chef prepared for him were always carried upstairs by the only member of the staff who was admitted to the master bedroom: Dr. Conrad Murray.
Of all the demands that Michael Jackson made during the negotiation of the contract for the O2 shows, his requirement that AEG pay for the services of a “personal physician” had been the one that Randy Phillips and the company attorneys resisted most vigorously. Jackson’s refusal to compromise on this point suggested that his sense of self-importance had made a comeback every bit as extraordinary as the one Randy Phillips hoped to see onstage at the O2. “Look,” Michael told Phillips, “my body is the mechanism that fuels this entire business. Just like President Obama, I need my own doctor attending to me twenty-four/seven.” Paul Gongaware remembered Jackson pointing to himself and saying, “This is the machine. You have to take care of the machine.” Frank Dileo pointed out to Phillips and Gongaware that hiring a personal physician might be a good way to separate Michael from Arnold Klein, whom all three men believed to be Jackson’s primary drug supplier. AEG agreed to pay for a private physician, even yielding to Michael’s demand that he alone be permitted to pick the MD
who would live with him.
The doctor Jackson selected was Conrad Murray, a Las Vegas cardiologist whose services had first been arranged more than a year earlier by Michael Amir Williams. Brother Michael had urged his employer to hire a black physician. Supposedly, Dr. Murray had treated Jackson and his children for flu symptoms shortly after the move from Ireland. A native of Trinidad who had attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Murray was living large in a 5,268-square-foot home with a spectacular pool near the Red Rock Country Club in Vegas when he and Jackson met. He had been running Global Cardiovascular Associates out on East Flamingo Road since 2000 and had just opened the Acres Homes Cardiovascular Center in Houston, Texas. Behind that facade of success, though, Conrad Murray was something of a deadbeat.
Murray had first come to the attention of Nevada authorities back in 2002, when a child support case out of California’s Santa Clara County that followed the doctor through three states finally caught up with him in Las Vegas. By spring 2009, when he received the call inviting him to work as Michael Jackson’s physician, Murray was under siege from a phalanx of creditors. Capital One bank had won a default judgment against Murray in October 2008, and in March 2009, HICA Education Loan Corporation was awarded a $71,332 judgment against the doctor for his failing to repay student loans that dated back to his days in Nashville. Separate lawsuits filed by Citicorp Vendor Finance and Popular Leasing USA had ended with judgments against Murray totaling $363,722, and the doctor was still facing court claims lodged in Las Vegas by Digirad Imaging Solutions and Siemans Financial Services that demanded another $366,541 for unpaid debts.
The call that came out of nowhere offering him a job as Michael Jackson’s personal physician must have seemed to Murray a miracle cure for all that ailed him. Murray, though, showed no sign of that to Michael Amir Williams, who had phoned to say that Jackson “very much wanted” the doctor to be part of his London concert tour, then explained that the deal would have to be negotiated with AEG. When Paul Gongaware called, Murray represented himself as a highly prosperous medical professional who would have to be very well compensated if he was going to not only abandon a successful medical practice but also close thriving clinics in Las Vegas and Houston. He would need $5 million a year, Murray told the AEG executive. “I told him there was no way that was going to happen,” Gongaware recalled. Murray eventually agreed to work for $150,000 per month, but even then insisted to AEG attorney Kathy Jorrie that his contract would have to guarantee such payments for at least ten months, from May 2009 to March 2010. “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Jorrie told Murray, who eventually agreed to be paid on a month-to-month basis. During their negotiations Murray told her that Michael Jackson was “perfectly healthy” and in “excellent condition,” remembered Jorrie, who passed this reassuring news on to Gongaware and Phillips.
Murray himself was “giddy with excitement” once the deal was made, recalled one of his friends from Las Vegas. The doctor’s assorted creditors, like the Nevada legal authorities, would have a tough time finding him in Los Angeles, and no chance at all once he traveled with Michael to London. If the O2 shows turned into a world tour, as everyone involved hoped, Murray would be out of reach for the next couple of years. In the meantime, he would not only be making $150,000 per month, but also have plenty of free time for a personal life during the evenings when Michael was in rehearsals. Dr. Murray fancied himself as quite the ladies’ man, and almost immediately after making the move to LA became a regular at the kind of clubs where sticky-haired, hot-bodied young women flocked to a fellow who could introduce himself as Michael Jackson’s personal physician.
At least one of Jackson’s entertainment lawyers saw it as significant that Dr. Murray’s entrance into Michael’s life had coincided with Dr. Tohme’s exit. “There’s no way Murray would have gotten in the door if Tohme had still been around,” that attorney said. “Tohme would have driven Murray away the moment he met him. But Tohme had been pretty much destroyed by what Frank Dileo and Leonard Rowe and Michael’s father were able to do through Mrs. Jackson. Joe Jackson and Rowe were using Katherine Jackson to bad-mouth Tohme nonstop.”
Still, that attorney was among several people startled by a copy of a letter that arrived at his office during the middle of May 2009, sent to him by Brother Michael. Jackson’s Muslim aide phoned first, the attorney recalled, to say that Tohme Tohme had been fired as Michael’s manager and was being replaced by Frank Dileo. The letter, dated May 5, 2009, was delivered a short time later, informing its recipients that Michael Jackson had dispensed with the services of Dr. Tohme and that all future correspondence and communication should be sent through Frank Dileo. Among the several odd things about the letter was that, although it read as if written by Michael personally, Dileo had actually composed and typed it. Stranger still was that no copy had been sent to Tohme himself. When he finally saw the letter more than a year later, Tohme took one look at the signature and pronounced it a forgery. “I was never fired,” he insisted. “I continued to represent Michael. I was still handling his business. I had millions of dollars of Michael’s money. If he had fired me, don’t you think he would have asked for that money back?”
Frank Dileo, though, had a letter dated May 2, 2009, and signed (apparently) by Michael Jackson that appointed him as “one of [my] representatives and tour manager.” After an absence of more than twenty years, Dileo’s restored presence in Michael’s life was undeniable.
The pillow-bellied, gravel-voiced Dileo had achieved a soft landing in the years immediately following his 1989 dismissal as Michael Jackson’s manager. He’d used a reported $5 million severance package to purchase the forty-acre Tookaroosa Ranch near Ojai, California, where he was raising Tennessee Walking Horses. Even more satisfying, his old pals Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci had convinced Martin Scorsese to give Dileo the part of Tuddy in the film Goodfellas. Though he’d bought in as a partner in De Niro’s New York restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, Dileo’s career in the entertainment business hadn’t exactly soared in recent years. Managing people like Taylor Dayne and Laura Branigan hardly measured up to being Michael Jackson’s main man, and his Dileo Entertainment Group (formed around Frank’s purchase of a Nashville recording studio) was strictly small-time. Dileo did better for himself by taking advantage of his unique appearance (at a height of five feet, two inches, he weighed nearly three hundred pounds) and raspy voice to win minor roles in Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2. Jackson had little good to say about Dileo after dismissing him in 1988, but Frank had won his way back into Michael’s good graces during the spring of 2005, when he showed up to offer support during the criminal trial in Santa Maria. Tears had welled up in Michael’s eyes when Dileo walked into the courtroom one day and he embraced his former manager warmly and publicly. Dileo had been trading on that moment ever since, and four years later intended to take full advantage of it.
He made an ally of Randy Phillips by persuading the AEG Live president that he could handle the Jackson family and keep Michael focused on performing in London. According to Dileo, after the phone conference in which the two men were introduced by Jackson, Phillips called back to remark that “Michael seems to have a real comfort level with you.” Phillips also liked that Dileo seemed more committed than Tohme to the idea that Michael should not only complete the entire series of fifty concerts at the O2, but also be persuaded to continue with a world tour. Deep down, Dileo and Phillips agreed, Michael wanted to return in triumph to the United States before hanging it up. Together, they had the moxie to make that happen.
The attorneys who had put together the deal for the O2 shows read the writing on the wall when they learned in early May that Dileo was now working out of an office at AEG Live. “I don’t blame Randy,” one of them said. “For him and for AEG, it was all about protecting their investment. But Tohme was getting screwed in the process. He had made a fantastic deal for Michael. It was literally going to rescue his life and protect his kids and s
ave the Sony catalog, all at once. And Tohme worked night and day on this thing—I witnessed it. But all the knives came out when people saw the potential for a huge success and big, big money. They didn’t know Tohme, and he had a funny-sounding name and a funny-sounding accent, so they all went after him. And Tohme didn’t realize that Dileo was moving him out until it was too late. Tohme’s a pretty savvy guy, but he’s not savvy in terms of the entertainment business, which is far more cutthroat than the Middle East.”
Dennis Hawk, who had been handling a double-load as Michael’s attorney since the dismissal of Peter Lopez, recalled that from the second half of May 2009, “It was like there were two parallel worlds going on at the same time. Dileo phoned me four or five times and he wanted to know about a document concerning the movie deal he was involved in. But he never said he was Michael’s manager, and he never mentioned Dr. Tohme. It was odd. It was like he had positioned himself, but he hadn’t really closed the deal. He was there, he was part of the ‘team,’ but he didn’t seem to have any formal title.”
Even with Dileo in position, though, the question of Michael Jackson’s commitment to the O2 shows continued to concern Randy Phillips and the other executives at AEG. None of them was happy to learn that on the evening of May 14, Michael had arrived with his children at the Indian restaurant Chakra in Beverly Hills to join a celebration dinner marking Joe and Katherine Jackson’s sixtieth wedding anniversary, which, strangely, was being held six months before their actual anniversary in November. Michael, the AEG execs had learned from Tohme, always became susceptible when he was trying to convince Prince, Paris, and Blanket that they belonged to a large and loving family. That evening at Chakra, surrounded by every one of his brothers and sisters plus more than a dozen of his nieces and nephews, Michael had allowed Katherine to convince him to join her the next day for a lunch meeting with Joe and Rowe at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Was this the actual reason for the celebration dinner all along? Whatever the case, when Randy Phillips and Paul Gongaware learned of the scheduled meeting, they insisted upon joining it.
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