Michael Jackson, Inc.

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  Fellow superproducer Swizz Beatz remembers visiting Jackson in Las Vegas around the same time. He brought some “magic toys” for the singer’s children, and remembers thinking that Jackson was a terrific father. During the visit, they discussed the idea of having Alicia Keys join them in the studio.

  “I was going to bring my wife in to write, and we were going to do one big collaboration,” the producer recalls. “He was a big fan of hers. I heard he had a crush on her, so I was like, ‘Wow, MJ got a crush on my wife!’ . . . It was getting ready to become a great recipe.”16

  Meanwhile, Jackson continued to generate entrepreneurial ideas of his own. In a series of notes handwritten to himself, he outlined plans to release one movie per year for the next five years, perhaps with the help of American Idol creator Simon Fuller. He also wrote of launching soda and cookie lines, all with the goal of becoming the “first multi-billionaire-entertainer-actor-director,” maintaining an all-encompassing focus on being the best. “Chaplin Michelangelo Disney,” he scribbled, without punctuation. “These men demanded perfection innovation always.”17

  Jackson thought he might start by convincing AEG to help him develop movies inspired by his time in the Gulf, namely the tales of Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Why the focus on motion pictures? “If I don’t concentrate [on] film,” he wrote urgently, “no immortalization.”

  * * *

  By 2009, Jackson hadn’t toured in more than ten years, and Invincible was nearly a decade behind him. Not performing may have been even tougher on his psyche than on his bank account. “I’m not alive unless I’m onstage,” he once told Walter Yetnikoff.18

  Jermaine Jackson claims he noticed a change in his brother that occurred around this time: “I saw the performer’s glint return to Michael’s eyes . . . his life was back on track, his health was nearing peak fitness, and he was physically preparing for the greatest comeback ever seen. He was, for the first time in a long time, just happy.”19

  Perhaps he was at certain moments, but the undercurrents of insecurity and addiction that had long circled him were continuing to pull him down. Though Jackson was all smiles at a March 2009 press conference to announce This Is It—the concert series that would take place at London’s 23,000-seat O2 Arena—he showed up ninety minutes late and seemed jittery. He appeared so unlike his usual self that some suggested it wasn’t Jackson, but an impersonator.20

  AEG’s then-chief Randy Phillips would later recount that Jackson was “drunk and despondent” before the event, characterizing him as “an emotionally paralyzed mess, filled with self-loathing and doubt now that it is showtime. He is scared to death.”21

  Regardless of what was happening behind closed doors, the outside world’s pent-up demand to see the King of Pop perform only seemed to be growing stronger. The ten concerts initially announced sold out in less than an hour; eventually AEG upped the total to fifty shows, all of which sold out or close to it. The concert promoter also entered negotiations with merchandiser Bravado to create Jackson-themed goods to sell at the shows.22

  But as Jackson returned to California to ramp up his rehearsals, he felt ambivalent. On the one hand, he was elated to see fans all over the world express their support. On the other, it was a lot of performing for someone who’d been on the sidelines for over a decade.

  “He wanted to do twelve and rest and then go do some more, but they kept adding dates,” says Joe Jackson. “One day I had a meeting with one of the producers of the tour. And my question to him was, ‘Why you all paying him American dollars when you should be paying him euros?’ ”23 The answer: It would be highly unusual for AEG, an American company that does business in dollars, to pay Jackson in euros for shows in the UK, where the currency is pounds. (Joe didn’t say which one of the producers he met with; given that he wasn’t involved in the planning of This Is It, it seems unlikely he was in contact with AEG.)

  For the fifty London dates, Jackson was expected to earn at least $50 million, with the potential to earn tens of millions more—if not hundreds of millions—through additional touring. As Barrack had predicted, the London shows would give Jackson a chance to prove he was ready for that.

  By this point, Jackson and Branca hadn’t spoken in years, and the lawyer wasn’t sure if they’d ever work together again—until he got a call from Frank Dileo, who’d just rejoined Jackson’s team. The singer wanted to reassemble the group responsible for running Michael Jackson, Inc. in its heyday.

  “Don’t just come in and say hi,” Dileo said. “Michael wants ideas.”24

  Branca put together an agenda. Among the projects he had in mind: a live album, a world tour, a 3-D version of “Thriller,” and a charity event involving the British royal family, Oprah Winfrey, and the newly elected president Barack Obama. Upon meeting with Branca, the singer signed a letter confirming he was bringing back his longtime right-hand man. The lawyer thought Jackson looked thin but reasoned that he always was—and that if the fifty-year-old could follow the example of “exercise fiend” Mick Jagger, he might even have another decade or two of touring left.

  Meanwhile, Jackson seemed intent on micromanaging some aspects of This Is It, as he often did with performances in his earlier years. Michael Bush remembers Jackson asking him to make a costume that included baseball catcher leg protectors made of glass for the This Is It shows.

  “There’s no way you can wear those,” Bush told him. “You’ll hurt yourself . . . they’ll break when you get down on your knees.”25

  “Bush, I’ve been in a bank,” Jackson replied. “They have bulletproof glass. Make it out of that.”

  “Michael, bulletproof glass is three inches think.”

  “Oh,” the singer said, pausing. Then: “I know you can do this for me.”

  Bush ended up designing the leg guards, making them out of Lucite. To the audience, it would look like they were glass, filling Jackson’s requirement without risking damage to his body.

  * * *

  As the rehearsals for the This Is It shows wore on, however, many of those close to Jackson grew worried about his physical and mental health. Bursts of optimism and liveliness were mixed with feelings of fear and doubt—as well as bodily symptoms, including sensations of extreme coldness.

  Kenny Ortega, the director who’d worked with Jackson on the Dangerous and HIStory tours, expressed his concerns in an email to AEG executive Paul Gongaware after Jackson missed a rehearsal on June 14:

  Were you aware that MJ’s doctor didn’t permit him to attend rehearsals yesterday? Are Randy [Phillips] and Frank [Dileo] aware of this? Please have them stay on top of his health situation without invading MJ’s privacy. It might be a good idea to talk with his doctor to make sure everything MJ requires is in place.26

  The doctor in question was Conrad Murray, who had quit his medical practice two months earlier to serve as Jackson’s personal physician. If This Is It was canceled or postponed because he couldn’t get Jackson to rehearsals, that would leave Murray without a much-needed job to pay off the debts of $1 million he had racked up while running his now-defunct practice.

  To help Jackson sleep, Murray had given him heavy doses of Propofol every night for two months. As Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler testified, though, Propofol is a surgical anesthetic and is not meant to be used for such long stretches of time. It interrupts normal sleep cycles and does not replace real sleep.

  “The thing nobody was focusing on was the problem with the drugs and a whole world of enablers,” says Burkle. “Somebody should have told him, ‘No.’ Somebody should have said, ‘I’m not going to give you this medicine.’ ”27

  Sure enough, by mid-June, Jackson’s symptoms—inability to regulate body temperature, difficulty with balance, feelings of paranoia and anxiety—were, according to Czeisler, “consistent with what one might expect to see with someone who was suffering from total sleep deprivation over a chronic period of time.”28

  Some of Jackson’s colleagues picked u
p on these effects. “There are strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive-like behavior,” Ortega wrote to AEG’s executives on June 20. “I think the very best thing we can do is get a top psychiatrist to evaluate him ASAP. It’s like there are two people in there.”29

  Hours after sending the emails, Ortega met with Phillips and Murray at the house AEG was renting for Jackson in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. The doctor said Jackson was physically and mentally capable of doing his job, and that Ortega should stick to his—and not try to be “an amateur doctor or psychologist.”

  Three days later, Jackson returned to rehearsals suddenly revitalized. It was as though he’d slept for the first time in two months. Murray had stopped using Propofol to knock Jackson out, and the singer had finally gotten some real, organic sleep. “He had a metamorphosis,” Ortega said.

  On June 24, 2009—just a few days before Jackson and his team were set to depart for London—Bush dressed Jackson for one of his last rehearsals at the Staples Center. Jackson seemed excited to get back on the stage, and when he left the arena that night, Bush thanked him for changing his life yet again. Jackson hugged him.

  “I thought he was never going to let me go,” Bush recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, but you’re changing mine again.’ ”30

  * * *

  The last time Tom Barrack talked to Jackson was in the spring of 2009. The singer was interested in making a down payment on a new home with cash advanced by AEG.

  As much as Jackson loved Neverland, he felt the property had been tainted by the allegations leveled against him while living there. He couldn’t bear to part with it, but he couldn’t bear to go back, either. So he was eyeing two houses: a $55 million mansion in Bel Air and a $45 million estate in Las Vegas that had been owned by the Sultan of Brunei and his brother.31

  He was particularly enamored of the latter, a 125,000-square-foot home with six guest houses, two of which had pools. There was also a 60,000-square-foot entertainment complex with an indoor Olympicsized pool that featured a drop-down movie screen. (Burkle believes the desire to buy this house was part of the reason the singer was willing to keep adding shows to the calendar for This Is It.32)

  Jackson wanted to know if Barrack thought he should try to buy it immediately, or if he should wait.

  “I told him in my opinion it was premature for him to be buried under a new load of debt,” the billionaire recalls. “I recommended that he do nothing.”33

  Jackson put his plans on hold. And in the end, there was only one Neverland.

  “Michael was Peter Pan, it was Neverland,” says Barrack. “It was the only place I think that he actually found peace.”

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  POSTMORTEM PAYDAY

  The reports started trickling in during the middle of the day on June 25, 2009: Michael Jackson was dead. The cause was acute Propofol intoxication; Jackson’s death would later be ruled involuntary manslaughter, for which Conrad Murray would be sentenced to four years in jail. Jackson was fifty years old.

  Not one for small exits, the King of Pop nearly took down the entire internet with him. TMZ was the first to report the news; when it began to experience outages, users shifted to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton’s site, which also buckled under the unprecedented virtual weight. Soon the load had swamped Google, Twitter, and the website of the Los Angeles Times, while CNN’s site reported a fivefold increase in traffic. Wikipedia went down—users made five hundred edits to Jackson’s page in twenty-four hours—as did AOL Instant Messenger.

  “Today was a seminal moment in internet history,” said an AOL representative in a statement. “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”1 At Forbes, the entire newsroom dropped what it was doing to produce a package of stories on the financial impact of Jackson’s death.2

  Later that evening, candlelight vigils were held in Jackson’s honor all around the world. In Gary, Indiana, supporters left flowers outside his childhood home; in front of London’s O2 Arena, fans donned sequined military jackets and rhinestone-laden single white gloves in his honor. Outside the Apollo Theater in New York, fans moonwalked deep into the night.

  Jackson’s memorial service was held on July 7, 2009, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, broadcast to a televised audience of 31.1 million Americans—just shy of the number that tuned in to watch President Ronald Reagan’s burial in 2004, according to Nielsen Media Research.3 Some estimates put the worldwide viewership in the neighborhood of 1 billion.4

  Jackson’s mother wanted her son interred at Neverland, but that required a permit and some legal wrangling. His billionaire backer Tom Barrack successfully lobbied California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for an exemption. But local politicians were so concerned about the potential influx of visitors to Jackson’s grave that they refused to issue the necessary documents.

  “It would have been the perfect resting place,” says Barrack. “Forget about the commercial aspects . . . that’s where he found tranquility.”5

  As a substitute, Jackson’s family selected Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale for his burial, calling on Michael Bush to dress the King of Pop one last time. The designer crafted a replica of the pearl-encrusted military jacket Jackson wore to the Grammys in 1993, this time with extra rhinestones. Before the singer’s body was moved to its final resting place, his parents placed a crown on top of his coffin. Grand as the departure was, the two Michaels once had a different sort of denouement in mind.

  “Michael and myself were going to be at Caesars Palace, Michael’s doing ‘Billie Jean’ with the walker, that’s how it was supposed to end,” says Bush. “And when they told us that Michael was gone, it was like, ‘But we’re not at Caesars yet!’ ”6

  * * *

  When John Branca heard the news that Jackson had died, his first reaction was disbelief. “It was completely unexpected, one hundred percent shocking,” he says. “It was really not possible.”7

  Branca had left for a family vacation in Mexico just days earlier, planning to rest up before meeting Jackson in London to help launch his comeback. When he returned to Southern California, he asked his colleagues if they had a will for Jackson. They did—two, to be exact—and a different firm found another, from 1997 (the singer had continued to create new documents as his children were born), and Branca had been named as an executor on all three of them.

  Along with John McClain, the music industry veteran and longtime Jackson associate who’d been named as a coexecutor on the most recent will (dated July 7, 2002), Branca submitted the document to probate court. Since he hadn’t been involved with Jackson’s affairs for the bulk of the past few years, he didn’t know if a newer will existed. But as time went on and nothing surfaced, it became clear that the duo would be leading Michael Jackson, Inc. after its founder’s death.8 It also became clear that the estate was going to have more than its share of legal woes, starting with the claims of dozens of creditors.

  These ranged from petty to outrageous: the State of California sought $1,647.24 for its franchise tax board, a company called Intermedia Productions claimed an amount “not yet determined . . . in excess of $1 million,” and a man named Erle Bonner insisted Michael Jackson had stolen his cure for herpes—and filed a suit for $1,109,000,503,600.00.9

  Katherine Jackson initially disputed the appointment of Branca and McClain but dropped her challenge when one of her lawyers indicated the pointlessness of trying to overturn a will that named her as a chief beneficiary.10 That didn’t stop a host of other Jacksons who’d been left out of the will, notably Joe and Randy, from continuing to publicly challenge the document and its executors.11 Joe couldn’t have liked the thought of his son’s estate being run by Branca (the first person Michael hired after firing Joe) and McClain (whom Janet had selected to replace her father as manager right before her 1980s breakout).

  Randy insisted the will was fake, arguing that Michael was in New York on July 7, 2002, the date the document was marke
d signed in Los Angeles. Indeed, the King of Pop appears to have been in the Big Apple on July 6 to protest his treatment by Tommy Mottola, and on July 9 for meetings with Al Sharpton; a spokesperson for the latter confirms this.12 But this sort of discrepancy wouldn’t be enough to render the will invalid, according to attorney Andrew Katzenstein, who serves as a partner at law firm Proskauer and teaches the Estate and Gift Tax class at the University of Southern California.

  It turns out the King of Pop’s postmortem planning was remarkably consistent over the years. Branca is listed among the executors in his four latest wills: the two from 2002, one from 1997, and one from 1995. The documents are consistent in specifying the distribution of Jackson’s assets: 20 percent to charity and the rest split between his children and a lifetime trust for his mother. Upon her death, any of her leftover funds would go into a trust for his kids.13

  Even if the July 2002 will were somehow voided, “the last will prior would be given full force and effect,” says Katzenstein.14 In other words, nothing would change—the virtually identical March 2002 document would become the will of record; were that document to be invalidated, the prior will would be next in line, and so on.

  As Jackson’s family continued to sound off, Branca and McClain hunkered down and attacked their new task. The former says their first goal was to refinance Jackson’s debt and lower the interest rates; the second was to create income; the third was to come up with new projects; the fourth was to perpetuate the singer’s legacy. They would begin to accomplish all four within a matter of weeks—and just in time for Jackson’s heirs, who appeared to be in danger of losing control of the Sony/ATV catalogue.15