Michael Jackson, Inc.

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  About a dozen lines into the song, he says, “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me / Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.”29 The New York Times called the lyrics “a burst of anti-Semitism” days before the album was released, and Jackson was slammed by scores of media outlets and organizations including the Anti-Defamation League (interestingly, the Times also opined that Jackson remained “one of the most gifted musicians alive”).30

  Jackson insisted that he’d been misunderstood, and apologized for any pain he’d caused. In a press release issued days later, ADL director Abraham Foxman said, “We have always believed that Mr. Jackson never intentionally meant to be offensive.”31

  The damage had been done, though, both externally and internally. Shortly after the Times review was published, Jackson asked Gallin, who is Jewish, to go on television and explain that he wasn’t an anti-Semite. Gallin knew his client didn’t have a bias against Jews, but didn’t think getting on the talk show circuit was a good idea. He figured nobody knew who he was, and that they’d expect Jackson’s manager to stand up for him anyway.

  In fact, Jackson thought all his Jewish friends, including David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, would take to the airwaves to defend him. He soon found they shared Gallin’s view. “I don’t think they really thought he was anti-Semitic,” says the manager. “But they weren’t going to go on television. He wrote the lyric and he had to stop and explain it.”32

  This only made Jackson push Gallin harder, to no avail. “He tried to convince me to do it,” Gallin recalls. “I knew it was the wrong thing to do, I wouldn’t do it. He was very upset about all of this, and he thought that maybe I thought he was anti-Semitic. And he fired me.”

  Jackson immediately stopped talking to Gallin, and his relationships with Geffen and Spielberg suffered a similar fate. The firestorm came at a bad time for Sony, which had paid Jackson $50 million in advances for the album and reportedly spent $30 million on promotion (which included loading massive statues of Jackson onto barges and floating them down rivers in major European cities). They’d been hoping HIStory would sell 20 million copies.33

  Despite the negative publicity, the album did eventually meet those lofty goals, making it the bestselling double-disc set of all time. And Jackson wanted a tour to match. As usual, his goal was perfection, and in an effort to prove to the world that he was back and bigger than ever, he was willing to spend just about anything to make that happen.

  Jackson selected a stage setup so large that it couldn’t fit into a 747; instead, his team had to use the world’s largest plane, the Russian-made Antonov An-225.34 The craft was initially designed to carry Soviet space shuttles on its back, boasting a payload capacity of 551,150 pounds (the equivalent of about ninety full-grown elephants35). Nearly the length of a football field, the An-225 was big enough to accommodate objects up to 230 feet long and 33 feet in diameter.36 The planes were too big to land at many civilian airports, so Jackson often had to shell out $200,000 for landing fees at military fields.37

  “There was always someone in Michael’s life like [accountant] Marshall Gelfand who would say to him, ‘Look what this is costing,’ ” says Branca. “And the response always was, ‘I’m the artist here, I know what I’m doing, this is my vision, this is the way we’re going to do it.’ ”

  Then there were lodging fees for security guards, publicists, and managers; the latter group included Tarak Ben Ammar, a Tunisian businessman whom Prince Alwaleed had introduced to Jackson and who briefly served as his manager. Another figure who maneuvered his way into the singer’s life around this time was Dieter Wiesner, a German operator with a penchant for tale-telling38 who’d promised to help launch a Jackson-themed energy beverage called Mystery Drink. Though the product fizzled, Wiesner somehow gained the singer’s trust and ended up as one of his advisors.39

  The tour went on to gross $165 million,40 but Jackson also had to cover the massive cost of loading his stage in and out of fifty-eight cities in thirty-five countries around the globe (he didn’t play any shows in the continental United States). All in all, Jackson likely cleared only about $10 million to $20 million for the entire excursion—about 10 percent of the gross.41 Most big pop tours take in closer to 30 percent. Profits weren’t the only casualty of the HIStory album cycle: Jackson and Presley’s relationship started to deteriorate not long after it began.

  “Their worlds revolved around them—but that dynamic made it hard for them to take care of each other,” wrote Frank Cascio, who’d remained friends with Jackson. In late 1995, the King of Pop and the King’s daughter parted ways,42 and Presley filed for divorce in January 1996. Around the same time, Wiz director Joel Schumacher received a phone call from Jackson. The two hadn’t spoken much over the years, and now the singer was asking the director about landing the role of the Riddler in his 1995 film Batman Forever. “I didn’t think that was an appropriate role for him,” says Schumacher. “[But] he was always very sweet with me on the phone.”43

  When Jackson called again after the HIStory tour to see if he’d be interested in directing a film, Schumacher was more than willing to take a meeting. He joined the King of Pop in a very large conference room filled with a mix of security guards and creative types, and prepared to listen to a pitch.

  Jackson had envisioned a film about a protagonist who lived in the shadows of an imaginary city. (“A little Dickensian,” says Schumacher. “Although not period.”) He would only come out at night, to help children—particularly the orphans, the rejects, the needy—but the rest of the townspeople thought he was a monster.

  “[It] can be read as any kind of metaphor you want,” says Schumacher. “I did not think I was right for that project but thanked him for thinking of me and gave him a hug. And never saw him again, except on television.”

  Jackson would go on to release the film, Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, which he scored, produced, and wrote (along with Stephen King). He also played five different roles himself, including the villain—the town’s chunky, pasty mayor—and the film’s misunderstood protagonist, the Maestro. After a much-ballyhooed premier at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, the production was released straight to television and video;44 it seemed a different sort of specter continued to haunt Jackson.

  “It was always his desire to be in the movies . . . but I do know there was a doubt and a shadow cast upon Michael,” Schumacher remembers. “And I don’t know if that affected people’s thinking [that] he was bankable or viable.”

  * * *

  In the late 1990s, Jackson added a new title to his résumé: father. Shortly after splitting with Lisa Marie Presley in 1996, he married Debbie Rowe, the longtime nurse of his dermatologist. That relationship ended in a generally amicable divorce in 1999, but resulted in the birth of Jackson’s first two children—Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., in 1997, known as Prince, and Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson, in 1998 (his third, Prince Michael Jackson II, known as Blanket, was born in 2002 by a still-undisclosed mother).

  There was more than grandiosity at play when Michael Jackson named his sons. The singer’s great-great-grandfather was a cotton plantation slave in Alabama who passed on his name, Prince, to his son and grandson. The latter moved north to Indiana to work as a Pullman porter. “So the ridiculous moniker given by a white man to his black slave, the way you might name a dog, was bestowed by a black king upon his pale-skinned sons and heirs,” explains writer John Jeremiah Sullivan.45

  In 1997, Jackson released Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, which included eight remixed tracks from his prior album and five fresh songs. The effort earned praise from some and complaints from others expecting a traditional full-length studio effort. Though sales started slowly, the album would go on to move over 11 million copies worldwide—making it the most successful remix album of all time.46

  Most of the new material was penned and produced by Jackson himself, and the album’s dark subject matter gave listeners a window into the reality of his life. He sings propheticall
y about the allure of painkillers like Demerol on “Morphine,” and of marginalization and alienation in “Is It Scary.”

  “The best writers write what they know, and this is what he knew, and this is what he experienced—this was his way of telling people what was happening to him,” says sound engineer Matt Forger, adding: “He was often in pain due to various physical conditions and injuries. One can only imagine what this was like.”47

  By the late 1990s, Jackson was leaving more and more of his business to the new advisors who seemed to be popping up with the haphazardness and frequency of dandelions on a poorly maintained lawn. They ranged from sketchy (Dieter Wiesner, of Mystery Drink infamy) to random (Al Malnik, a Florida real estate mogul) to—occasionally—logical (music executive John McClain).

  The latter did not grant an interview for this book and rarely speaks to the press, but former ATV president Dale Kawashima describes him as “a very smart, sharp person who actually knew Michael Jackson and the Jacksons as a kid growing up as a family friend.”48 McClain started out at A&M Records in the early 1980s and was the driving force behind Janet Jackson’s 1986 breakout Control. He later moved on to Interscope, eventually convincing label boss Jimmy Iovine to go into business with Death Row Records and hip-hop legend Dr. Dre.49

  At the dawn of the new millennium, McClain became one of Michael Jackson’s managers alongside Trudy Green (who has also managed Aerosmith, Def Leppard, and others), but the singer still handled some moves himself. In 1999, he met with Kawashima to discuss reuniting to make some more publishing acquisitions, namely a catalogue owned by legendary songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. This wasn’t the famous set of their own copyrights that included Elvis Presley’s biggest hits (“Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock” and others, which Sony/ATV would buy in 2007 for $65 million). Rather, it was a catalogue of songs they’d purchased as investments, including hits like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree”50 (named one of the one hundred biggest songs of all time by Billboard51).

  Before Jackson left on a trip to Africa, where his itinerary included an audience with Nelson Mandela, he asked Kawashima to look into what it might take to buy the catalogue—and made sure to check in. “Dale, it’s Michael Jackson calling,” the King of Pop said a few days later in a voice message Kawashima played for me. “I’m in Africa right now. I hope you are getting the work done . . . don’t forget our major goal, the acquisition.” A couple of weeks later, Kawashima received another phone message from Jackson saying that he wouldn’t be able to rehire him after all. It seemed the King of Pop was short on funds, and the deal fizzled.52

  That same year, Jackson was performing a charity show in Munich when something reminiscent of his Pepsi commercial accident occurred. While singing “Earth Song” from the top of a hydraulic bridge onstage, the structure suddenly malfunctioned, sending it plummeting from a four-story height—with Jackson on board. A last-second emergency stop button triggered by a nearby engineer slowed his fall, and may have saved his life, but he still had a very rough landing.53

  Incredibly, Jackson got back to his feet and completed his performance, only to pass out as soon as he arrived backstage. He was rushed to the hospital to treat a back injury that, according to Jermaine and others, troubled him for the rest of his life—and led him to seek more prescription drugs to relieve the pain. Perhaps more ominous, given the circumstances of Jackson’s eventual demise, were his words to a band member who’d been with him that night in Germany: “Joseph always taught us that no matter what, the show must go on.”54

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  INVINCIBLE?

  In a penthouse suite one hundred feet above the streets of Beverly Hills, Justin Bieber sits at the head of a glass table, musing on his recent successes. It’s the spring of 2012—before any major publicity gaffes or run-ins with the law—and he has ridden the last crest of his cherubic adolescence to earnings of $108 million in two years.

  He and manager Scooter Braun explain their guiding philosophies: don’t endorse products you don’t like, and include a charitable component in every deal. When I ask them if there’s any artist Bieber is directly trying to emulate, both in terms of music and business, they share a knowing glance.

  “For me, it’s only one person,” says Bieber. “Michael Jackson.”1

  From his early days, the Canadian singer has tried to model his career after the King of Pop’s, part of the reason he picked Rodney Jerkins to produce a handful of tracks for his album Believe. The Grammy-winning hitmaker was among the principal architects of Invincible, Jackson’s final studio album.

  Having a manager who discovered him as a teenaged YouTube sensation didn’t stop Bieber from getting into a great deal of trouble. By the time the King of Pop linked up with Jerkins, he had even less of a support structure in place.

  “Michael had always felt like he had to look over his shoulder,” says Jerkins. “There were a lot of trust issues.”2

  * * *

  Jackson started working on Invincible in 1997, shortly after returning from the HIStory Tour. It seemed he’d have little trouble completing an album within the next couple of years, which would keep him on the same four-to-five-year cycle he’d followed during much of his solo career.

  The studio experience had changed quite a bit over Jackson’s twenty years as a solo artist. In the Thriller days, the record industry was totally reliant on magnetic tapes; by the mid-1990s, most acts recorded on analog tapes before transferring songs to digital hard drives. At the dawn of the new millennium, recording directly to computers became the standard, opening the door to nearly limitless options for sound manipulation.3

  “Having more options and more possibilities doesn’t reduce the time that you invest in something,” says sound engineer Matt Forger. “It actually increases the time that you invest in something. So consequently, things just grew.”

  Jackson had another reason for wanting to take his time with the album. He believed he could get out of his latest Sony contract in 2000 and simply sell the new material to the highest bidder. Back when he signed his first solo contract with Sony’s predecessor, CBS, Branca had insisted that the agreement be governed by California law, which would allow Jackson to terminate it after seven years if he saw fit. The singer assumed the same statutes held true.

  As Jackson discovered in the mid-1990s, however, the contract had been reworked by one of Branca’s replacements. Three albums were added to his original five-album deal, along with massive penalties for early termination—as much as $20 million for each album he didn’t complete—which effectively nullified the benefits of the California law clause. Jackson eventually determined that he could leave the label only after delivering Invincible and a greatest hits album.

  To make matters worse, Jackson’s old ally Walter Yetnikoff was long gone, and Tommy Mottola had been running Sony’s music division for nearly a decade. He helmed a label that was home to legacy acts such as Bruce Springsteen, Céline Dion, and Billy Joel while launching the careers of artists including Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey, whom he married in 1993 (and would divorce five years later). When it came to Invincible, he and Jackson clashed over recording budgets. “[I] considered an album that would cost $1 million like an overtly expensive, crazy, ridiculously expensive album,” Mottola explains.4

  Jackson’s latest effort would end up costing far more. At one point during the recording process, he was running six studios simultaneously—each with its own producers and engineers—working around the clock, whether he was there or not. Says sound engineer Bruce Swedien, who worked on the album: “Anybody else would have settled for Michael’s take number one. . . . He wanted to make it as perfect as he possibly could.”5

  Jackson had always admired the great draftsmen of the world. But even for Picasso, there would come a point when another brushstroke wouldn’t improve a painting, and might even hurt it. In the current iteration of Michael Jackson, Inc., there were no longer any advisors who
could tell Jackson when to stop trying to improve his musical canvases. “Not one central figure or anybody saying, ‘No, I don’t advise you to do this,’ ” recalls Mottola, who estimates that Invincible ended up costing Sony $30 million to $40 million. “Because if he said, ‘No,’ Michael would go to the next person who would say ‘Yes.’ ”

  By this point, Jackson’s personal expenses might have made even Prince Alwaleed blush. Neverland had a hundred and twenty employees at its peak. There were bills for everything from flowers to flamingos, not to mention the additional staff needed to handle the busloads of underprivileged children whose visits continued even when Jackson wasn’t around. Then there were the expenses for Jackson and his entourage. All in all, the singer’s overhead was approaching $20 million per year in the early 2000s.

  That was fine even half a decade earlier, when Jackson earned nearly $200 million in a span of two years. But as the new millennium dawned with Invincible still incomplete, there were five years between Jackson and his last studio album—and seven since he’d played a concert in the continental United States. He hadn’t gotten an endorsement deal after the Chandler allegations, either, and his spending had overtaken his income.

  Jackson would have been in immediate trouble if it weren’t for his half of the Sony/ATV catalogue, which enabled him to continue to take out loans to support his lifestyle and provided some income as well. Coupled with continued sales of his own music, he was still pulling in low double-digit millions—and he remained quite cognizant of the value of his copyrights.

  “I learned the publishing game by Michael,” says Jerkins. “He taught me . . . how to locate the right catalogues to buy.”6