by Tavis Smiley
In the summer of 1990, when the production on Dangerous began, Michael turned thirty-two. The transition—going from the celebrated result of another producer’s art to a full-fledged auteur—felt natural and necessary. But when it came to music, Michael has always walked the fine line between daring and caution. Daringly, he explores new sonic innovations and dives into new genres, as with the rock-centric “Beat It,” from Thriller. But cautiously, he keeps his ear to the radio to discern what’s trending in the fickle marketplace. Consequently, he looks at collaboration as a happy medium, employing the hottest hit makers to help him stay ahead of the curve.
His chief cohort in Dangerous is Teddy Riley, the enormously successful architect of new jack swing, the sound that reshaped rhythm and blues in the early nineties. Because rhythm and blues represents Michael’s deepest roots, he feels most comfortable using that style as the basis for branching out with others.
“Michael wanted me to find new writers,” said Dale Kawashima, who ran Jackson’s publishing company from 1987 through 1991, “but primarily those working in R & B. He wanted R & B hits and wanted to collaborate with R & B songwriters. He was raised in the Motown paradigm of crossing over from R & B to pop. For Michael, R & B was the starting point.”
Now it’s March 29, 2009, and it’s time for Michael to start out for the office of Dr. Conrad Murray, time to institute their plan. His children remain behind with security in his hotel suite. Michael climbs into the black SUV and is driven through the glitzy desert city. He slips a CD of Dangerous into the audio player and leans back and listens to the explosive Teddy Riley dance tracks that open the record: “Jam,” “Why You Wanna Trip on Me,” “In the Closet,” and “She Drives Me Wild.” In the wake of other R & B hits—say, Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” or “Every Little Step”—Michael is new jack swing on steroids. His is a bigger, noisier, more complex sonic construction. The album is unapologetically ambitious.
On the mid-tempo “Remember the Time,” a look back on lost love, Michael, reflecting the percussive vocal influence of soul singer Billy Stewart, has never sung more passionately. The intensity never abates. “Black or White,” his disquisition on racial bias, has the quality of a sing-along anthem. Equally anthemic in the rock arena is the blistering “Give In to Me,” a song that Michael wrote with Bill Bottrell, another major collaborator on Dangerous. The vocal ferocity on this track and on “Who Is It,” with its magnetic, “Billie Jean”–like movement, is almost frightening.
In stark contrast is “Will You Be There,” which begins with a choral section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Easily Michael’s most remarkable opening, the hymn segues into a black church groove, with lush harmonies by gospel great Andraé Crouch, whose choir sustains a similar mood in “Keep the Faith.” Perhaps the most poignant moment on Dangerous is when Michael transitions from the ferocious to the fragile in “Gone Too Soon,” a touching eulogy for Ryan White, the courageous teenager felled by AIDS in 1990.
Michael considers the fallen. His heart aches for the abandoned and the sick, the neglected and the abused. Maybe, he thinks, that’s one of the reasons he finds it so difficult to quiet his mind, whether during the day or at night. Quieting his mind is the purpose of this trip.
The SUV pulls up at Murray’s office on East Flamingo Road, where the doctor is waiting. Michael remembers that Las Vegas is where Murray treated his children for the flu.
From Michael’s standpoint, Murray is just a doctor willing to accede to his patient’s wishes. Michael isn’t aware of the enormous financial pressure plaguing Murray. Deeply in debt, the cardiologist is facing a number of lawsuits and judgments against him. Now, with the guarantee of being paid $150,000 a month to serve as Michael’s personal physician, Murray is highly motivated to please the artist. His fiscal survival depends on keeping Michael happy and healthy.
When Michael and Murray arrive, Dr. David Adams, the anesthesiologist who sedated Michael and his son Blanket during dental procedures a year earlier, is waiting for them. It was Murray who, at Michael’s urging, invited Adams to this meeting.
The three men go into Murray’s office. There is an awkward silence. Adams has not been told the purpose of the encounter. Michael begins talking about the upcoming tour, explaining that he’s only doing it so that his children might see him in the role of live entertainer. He doesn’t want them to miss that experience.
Adams still isn’t clear what his job would be.
After Murray leaves the room, Michael proceeds to interview Adams, asking him a series of personal questions. Satisfied with the answers, Michael speaks of his own plans to one day open a hospital for children.
Then, without explanation, Michael excuses himself and leaves Adams, who is still bewildered about why he has been called to the office. After conferring with Murray in another room, Michael returns. He tells Adams that during the upcoming tour he will need his rest. He wants the anesthesiologist to accompany him to London and stay there for the duration of the shows. From time to time, Michael explains, he may need an IV.
Murray joins them, and the three men segue into a discussion of finances. Adams is asked whether he’d consider suspending his practice to go on the road. Michael tells him that he doesn’t need a decision today, but to please think about it. The meeting is over. Michael and the kids fly back to Los Angeles; he’s hopeful that Adams will come on board. He’s comforted by the thought that an additional physician—an anesthesiologist—will be there to treat his insomnia.
A few days later, Murray and Adams have a conversation. Adams wants to know the length of the commitment. Murray isn’t certain. He says it’s possible that there will be concerts beyond London, even a world tour. If he is to shut down his practice, Adams explains, he will need a guarantee of $100,000 a month for a minimum of three years.
The anesthesiologist never hears from Michael or Murray again.
12
April Fools’ Day
Michael likes to play. Surprising everyone at the Carolwood estate, he’ll impetuously answer the ringing phone and disguise his voice, taking on the persona of some loony character. He’ll engage the caller in a long conversation that sometimes concludes with Michael revealing his true identity and other times leaves the caller completely puzzled.
He loves water games. Ever since the sixties, when he and his brothers started dropping water balloons from hotel windows on unsuspecting pedestrians, he has kept up the routine in one form or another. He is famous for his prowess as a water gun fighter. “I’m the Michael Jordan of water guns,” he once boasted.
When, for the first time ever, Michael celebrated Christmas—not recognized as a holiday by Jehovah’s Witnesses—his first presents came from Elizabeth Taylor, who had taken it upon herself to lavishly decorate an enormous tree she had brought into his Neverland living room. She gifted him with a set of Super Soakers, state-of-the-art water guns. Michael couldn’t have been happier.
Many were the raucous times when, with Super Soaker in hand, Michael took on his sister Janet, his friends the young actors Emmanuel Lewis and Macaulay Culkin, his nephews and nieces, and whoever else might want to engage him in battle. He sees it all as high-spirited and harmless fun. To be soaked in water is to undergo a sort of secular baptism that bonds you with Michael and his sense of jocularity.
At the beginning of April of 2009, Michael calls his trainer, Lou Ferrigno, and, disguising his voice, identifies himself as “Omar.” Omar has a long story to tell—about how much he has admired Ferrigno as an actor, how he has closely followed his career, how he considers Ferrigno one of the greatest men in the world today. Ferrigno is puzzled. He has no idea who Omar is and how he got his number. Omar goes on talking. Ferrigno tries to interrupt, but Omar can’t be stopped. Only after ten minutes does Michael reveal himself. Ferrigno is amused and flattered that Michael Jackson has taken the time to joke with him.
Michael’s pranks help him forget the weighty matters that await him once the jokes have played
out. If he can maintain the mind of a child, he can avoid the decisions of an adult. And the more difficult those decisions, the greater the propensity for play. For decades, he has stolen away to Disneyland and other amusement parks the world over for weeks at a time, imagining such make-believe domains as permanent reality. From the day he bought the massive 2,700-acre property in the Santa Ynez Valley, in 1988, until the day he fled California for Bahrain, in 2005, Neverland was his own personal amusement park, an attempt to Disney-ize his day-to-day life in perpetuity.
“Michael’s like a little kid who isn’t happy till he has his playtime,” said Frank Dileo. “When I met him in the eighties, that was the first thing I realized about that. And then when I caught up with him in 2009, I figured, because he had kids of his own, he’d be different. But I was wrong. He was more a kid than ever. The older he got, the younger he acted.”
Back in 1995, six years after firing Dileo, Michael released HIStory, the most mythmaking of all his albums. Here he finally put to music the view he had adopted—and promulgated to the media—ever since he understood the importance of offering a thumbnail narrative of his life. He called the song, later used in the film Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, “Childhood.”
It is a plaintive ballad, with a schmaltzy but beautiful melody that could have easily been inserted into the score of Oliver! The refrain is the question, have we seen Michael’s childhood? The presumed answer is no, because in Michael’s mythology, he never had a childhood. In his autobiography and in many subsequent interviews, he bemoans the absence of a normal upbringing, which meant that he couldn’t go out and play like other kids and feel free from the pressures of pleasing an audience, winning contests, securing gigs, and making money.
In the video for “Childhood,” Michael sits alone in what seems to be a lost forest, his isolation echoing the sentiment that he’s looking for a past that he can neither recognize nor reclaim. He laments that he is forever misunderstood. And if he is guilty of “kidding around” like a child, that’s because he’s had to compensate for a childhood he never knew.
As he pleads to be not judged but, rather, loved, there is an ethereal image of young children on a revolving Disney-like ride of sail ships floating in a starlit sky. Michael sings of his “strange eccentricities” and his love of “elementary things,” the oddities formed, in his understanding, by an absent childhood. At the end of the song, which is not without self-pity, his voice cracks and he appears close to tears as he reflects on what he calls his “painful youth.”
In Michael’s world, pain is often juxtaposed with play. Just as play is pain’s antidote, pain is play’s unspoken subtext. The more you hurt, the harder you play. They seem to be flip sides of the same coin, just as “Childhood” was the flip side of the first single from HIStory, “Scream,” the space fantasy in which Michael and Janet play away their frustrations in an ingenious set of artistic games.
“Michael just doesn’t simply think about childhood,” said Bob Jones, the publicist who was a witness to both Michael’s early and later years. “He reads about it. People think all he does is watch cartoons, but Michael’s a serious reader. He reads Shakespeare, especially the tragedies and history plays, not just for the stories but for the psychology of the characters. He reads all sorts of psychology. It was Michael who also turned me on to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who wrote about childhood and the way to raise kids.”
The work by Rousseau that undoubtedly appealed to Michael is Emile, or On Education. Published in 1762, the book argues that children must be understood before they are taught; that they must be given the freedom to be children, not molded into precursors of themselves as adults; that they must learn morality through the natural consequences of their actions, not through corporal punishment. In short, Rousseau’s prescription for the ideal childhood was the exact opposite of Michael’s experience.
So on April Fools’ Day in 2009, Michael is delighted to play all sorts of innocent tricks on and childish games with his children. He revels in the emotional freedom he has afforded them. He is committed to making sure that they can, as Rousseau suggested, enjoy the beauty of childhood for its own sake.
The month starts off on an especially positive note, with the hiring of Kai Chase, a chef who has been interviewed and approved by Michael’s children. She observes what seems to her a happy household: a vigorous father who is attentive to his children and rarely misses a meal with them; children who respond beautifully to their homeschooling; a family interested in a healthy lifestyle; and, in Grace Rwaramba, the children’s nanny, a woman who lovingly plays the role of surrogate mother.
Michael’s mother would not approve, but on Friday, April 3, 2009, her son again refuses to reconcile himself with the religious practices of his past—practices that he once held sacrosanct. April 3 is Paris’s eleventh birthday, and in defiance of the Jehovah’s Witness directive that birthdays not be celebrated, Michael will celebrate this day and shower his daughter with loving affection and presents galore. There’s an enormous Lilo and Stitch birthday cake, plus circus performers in the backyard. For this one day, healthy foods give way to pizza, hot wings, and banana splits. Paris has chosen to decorate the dining room with a birthday theme: Michael Jackson. Concert posters are taped to the walls, and Michael’s music plays nonstop.
Later that day, Michael and the kids, with security in tow, head out in the blue Escalades to downtown Beverly Hills. Like most everyone in consumer-crazed America, he is vulnerable to the seductive delights of shopping. His history as an impulsive and intemperate spender is well documented. He buys impetuously and extravagantly. Big buying is another way to beat back the blues. Purchasing on a grand scale produces its own kind of high. Michael thinks back on the major purchases of his life—an extensive variety of exotic animals, the Beatles song catalog, Neverland—and remembers the joys that come with ownership.
He wants his beloved daughter to experience such joy. As they enter the Rolex store on Rodeo Drive, Paris is wearing a veil, a covering to protect her identity but also to signal her uniqueness. Like all three Jackson children, Paris has been made to feel special. Michael indulges his children, as any wealthy father would, but he also imposes restraints. They can only have so much. The last thing he wants to do is spoil them, yet he is conscious that he spoils himself. But is it spoiling himself or merely allowing himself pleasures denied during his youth?
Given a lifetime of relentless work, he reasons, doesn’t he deserve the comfort of surrounding himself and his loved ones with beautiful things? If he has amassed an enormous collection of art, much of it in the category of extreme kitsch, it’s because of the delight he takes in acquiring and displaying works that excite his spirit. Isn’t he entitled?
“People forget that we’re a working-class family who had to struggle and struggle hard for everything we’ve achieved,” said Janet Jackson. “For years, Michael denied himself the simple things people take for granted, like holidays and vacations. So when he achieved success, how could he not feel entitled to indulge himself in buying beautiful things? Who could blame him?”
“Just like a junkie gets hooked on smack, I’ve known a slew of entertainers hooked on spending,” said Ray Charles, who lived a frugal life. “’Cause they’re out there on the road, sweating and straining, they think they’ve earned the right to buy up everything in sight—houses, cars, jewelry, all kinds of junk they don’t even need. They do it to fill a hole in their soul. I can understand it, ’cause it’s lonely out there. Feels good to be in the spotlight. Feels good to hear all that applause. But when they turn off the spotlight and the clapping stops, you start hungering for something else to make you feel good.”
Indulging Paris on her birthday undoubtedly makes Michael feel good. Going on buying binges has always had a salutary effect. In Michael’s mind, making major purchases is an act that affirms his faith in his future. It reassures him that everything will be all right.
The fierce discipline
that he has used to hone his skills as a singer, dancer, and writer has never been applied to his finances. When the money started streaming in in the sixties and seventies, his father was in control. In the eighties, when Michael tried managing himself, there was so much money that the idea of fiscal limits seemed ludicrous. New managers—Ron Weisner, Freddy DeMann, Frank Dileo—ultimately became ex-managers when Michael resisted the idea of managerial restraint. Now, in the spring of 2009, as he continues to pit one manager against another, he falls back into the familiar pattern of acting as though his money will never run out.
And why should he think otherwise? He will always be able to write and record new songs. He will always be able to perform. He will always be able to entertain people the world over. He will always be able to earn their love and respect. In turn, they will always be willing to pay him handsomely for his artistic services. Their loyalty will never waver.
To Michael, these are plain facts. He can earn as much as he wants. He can buy as much as he wants.
He can’t restrain himself. He doesn’t try.
But at night, when he does try to sleep, the same battle ensues.
Why can’t he clear his mind?
Why can’t he, like his precious children, simply drift off and enjoy the simple satisfaction of deep and undisturbed sleep?
13
Milk
Some physicians call it the milk of amnesia. Michael simply calls it milk. In Michael’s mind, the resemblance of propofol, the powerful sleep-inducing agent, to the dairy product casts the drug in a friendlier light. Milk is good for you. Michael feels the same about propofol. Over the past decades he has tried countless sleep-inducing medicines, with increasingly frustrating results. None of them are able to shut down the machinery of his overactive mind. None of them can stop the all-night ruminations, the endless loop of entangled thoughts that torture him to the point of desperation. The relentless mental pain of chronic insomnia is enough to drive a sane man mad. Michael is convinced that no one understands the depths of his suffering. No one understands his body chemistry the way he does. As a studious observer of all things, he has closely monitored the impact of various medicines on his bodily behavior, and he believes he knows exactly what he needs to sleep.