MJ (21 page)

Few details escaped Michael’s attention. At one point during rehearsals, head carpenter Nick Luysterborghs banged his head while lifting something, and he heard a high-pitched voice from the stage:
“Oh, sir! Oh, sir! You know you’re bleeding?” It was Michael Jackson. And Michael was being watched carefully as well. When laser expert Steve Jander blew up a smoke-bomb device, Jermaine sternly warned his brother.
“Michael—Pepsi,” he said. “Michael—
Pepsi
.” Michael backed away.

The Victory tour lumbered to its opening date, at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, on July 6, 1984. Before the show, Michael, still wearing a hairpiece to cover small bald spots in his scalp, snuck quietly into the Brotman Medical Center to deal with the scar tissue on his head. Not even his family knew he was there for the
eighty-minute procedure conducted by his doctor, Steven Hoefflin. Michael arrived in a back entrance, checked in, ate his vegetarian meal, talked to burn-unit patients, then submitted to the surgery, which went without a snag, other than a bit of lingering pain. When he finally arrived at rehearsals in Birmingham, his weight had dropped from 125 to 105—disturbingly low for a five-foot nine-inch male. He asked that his cook, Mani Singh Khalsa, stick to nuts and herbs.

Meanwhile, promoter Chuck Sullivan was beginning to panic. Everything was going wrong. At the top of the list was the stage itself, which was so massive that it was cutting into the number of seats fans could buy on a given football field. Because of this, the Victory tour was selling far fewer tickets than Sullivan had anticipated, just as expenses were piling up. Losses were hitting
$1 million a week.

The Jacksons hired Irving Azoff, the longtime Eagles manager and MCA Records mogul, as a tour consultant for $500,000; he in turn hired production manager Ken Graham to solve the staging problem. Graham suggested creating a temporary structural
“front porch” on which to build the set, a complicated procedure that allowed the stage to be moved farther back into the stadium, restoring crucial seats. The move cost extra labor, but it wound up making Sullivan more money in the end.

The three opening dates in Kansas City sold out, racking up an impressive total of 135,000 tickets. But the shows also cost
$160,000 for
375 security guards, 170 local police officers, and 70 Pocket Redee metal detectors. The roadway that led to
Arrowhead was too low for a tractor trailer, forcing stadium officials to bulldoze the roadbed. Later, at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, a concrete beam built into the stadium was also too low to accommodate the big rigs, so stadium officials hired engineers to physically cut the beam. The expenses were high, but no stadium wanted to lose out on the Victory tour.

At the time, most concert special effects built slowly into a spectacular finale, Fourth of July–fireworks style. Michael felt differently.
“It was like, turn it all on right now, at the top of this show,” light man Robert A. Roth remembers. After Randy Jackson battled the Kreetons with his laser sword, the colored Victory lights thundered on, in banks of silver brackets framing the stage. Then came a blinding burst of green and yellow, after which the silhouettes of the five Jacksons (with Jermaine but minus Jackie, who’d injured his knee and could not participate) rose from a platform at center stage. They descended with thundering footsteps, amid more light and smoke, and dramatically removed their sunglasses. The first song was “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” and the brothers roamed the stage, as they did in the Jackson 5 days, only in tighter, more manly (some would say Village People–style beefcake) costumes. At the Dallas show, Tito dressed like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
, in a tight black leather jacket with a
sailor cap; Randy wore bright-red pants with tall white boots, a puffy shirt, and numerous scarves; Jermaine kept it simple with black leather pants and a low-cut white T-shirt; and Michael arrived onstage with a white sparkly jacket, which he stripped off by the second song. During pretour rehearsals, Tony Villanueva, who handled Michael’s wardrobe and was in charge of sewing missing crystal rhinestones back onto the $5,000 glove, couldn’t find the glove anywhere. Mercifully, Michael did not fire him, but the star kept asking:
“Really? What do you think happened to it?” Villanueva commissioned several backups and devised a system of dots, which he marked inside each glove with a Sharpie. Once the tour began, nobody stole MJ’s glove again.

The Jacksons’ set lists rarely changed. The brothers whirled behind Michael in movements they’d perfected over years of Jackson 5 touring, and Michael occasionally fell in with them, doing the familiar kicks and arm rolls throughout the Motown medley of “I Want You Back” and “The Love You Save.” After years of dutifully crooning “Ben,” Michael went into his usual spiel about how it’s one of his favorite songs, and how it had earned him an Academy Award nomination, but he abruptly cut himself off: “Listen, we’ve been doing this song for years and years. I’ll tell you what, for a change, give me something . . .
new
.” He swapped in “Human Nature,” the ballad from
Thriller
. Sweaty and glistening, Jackson perfected his rock-star pose, sweeping his arms in broad gestures. MJ’s most spectacular dancing didn’t come in until “Billie Jean,” when he more or less reprised his routine from the
Motown 25
special—holding the pose on his toes for a second or two longer than he’d managed the previous year on television.

*  *  *

One interesting omission from the Victory tour was any song from
Victory
, the album the Jacksons had spent much of late 1983 and early 1984 putting together as a follow-up to
Destiny
and
Triumph
.

Victory
was loosely organized, conceptually thin, and not so much a
cohesive album as a collection of singles by different people. Michael himself recorded only two tracks, including “State of Shock,” his duet with Mick Jagger. The Jacksons receive credit for writing and producing the songs, but the Toto musicians, having worked with Michael on
Thriller
, were heavily involved as well.
“Pretty much each brother had their own session with their own guys,” remembers Jack Wargo, who played the guitar solo on “Torture.” “It really wasn’t like a whole gang of people hanging out.”

The video for Jackie’s song “Torture” was
“aptly named,” recalls producer John Diaz. CBS Records budgeted $300,000. “Anytime a question came up to [Michael], Jackie would answer it, because Michael wasn’t talking about it: ‘Michael’s really shy,’ ” Diaz says. “You got the feeling he was being pushed by his brothers.” In the end, Michael didn’t show, and Diaz had to fly in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not wax dummy of the pop star from Nashville. Then Teamsters picketed the video because Diaz had employed nonunion workers. The shoot ballooned from three days to nine, all stretching to twenty-four-hour work days. The budget expanded to $1 million—mostly paid by Diaz’s company. Originally, Perri Lister, a veteran actress and director of Billy Idol videos, was supposed to be the choreographer. But on the last day of rehearsals, Jackie showed up with his girlfriend and they began whispering on the other side of a glass partition. The director turned to Lister and said,
“I’m sorry, Perri, Jackie Jackson’s girlfriend has decided she wants to choreograph the video.” His girlfriend happened to be Paula Abdul. She was a Laker Girl whom the Jacksons had met while attending a game. To complicate matters, Jackie was still married.
“It was the
Heaven’s Gate
of music video,” Diaz says.

*  *  *

Within the Jacksons’ compound on the tour, life was calm. Michael, the star, flew on his own private plane. His brothers flew on a separate one. Jermaine had been collaborating with actress-turned-singer Pia
Zadora, and she convinced her receptive husband, millionaire
Meshulam Riklis, to loan his fleet of seven private jets to the Jackson brothers so they didn’t have to cram into flights with members of the band. The brothers took separate limousines from the shows to the hotels, and, being family men, for the most part they stayed in different rooms. Tito invited Mike Merkow, the brothers’ old high school friend, to travel with the band, and
MJ was available for babysitting so Merkow and his wife could go out with Tito’s wife, Dee Dee. (The Jacksons couldn’t go out in public during the Victory tour, or they’d be mobbed.) Michael helped wean Merkow’s son off his pacifier by throwing it off a hotel roof in Chicago. Merkow recalls a placid family existence, with the brothers enjoying their families and coming together socially in the privacy of their hotel rooms. But Howard Bloom, the tour’s publicist, describes more ominous
relationships.
“If there was jealousy, it was only coming from one brother—that was Jermaine,” he said. “He wasn’t part of the family. He had set himself apart totally.”

More than 2.7 million people bought tickets for fifty-five performances in twenty cities. Barbara Walters, Yoko Ono, Cyndi Lauper, Elizabeth Taylor, Sugar Ray Leonard, Robin Williams, and Dustin Hoffman made their way backstage at various parts of the tour. But most of the Jacksons’ fans were regular folks—
People
called the audience
“a Whitman’s sampler of Middle America.” The mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, told the City Council that Victory would amount to $70 million in hotels, food, gas, and other fan expenditures during the Jacksons’ three-day stay. Michael was the pop star just about everybody could agree on. When Victory went to Buffalo, the local
News
ran a front-page headline:
HOLD YOUR BREATH—V-DAY IS HERE
. A firefighters’ convention was in the same hotel that weekend, and the fire truck parked at the hotel entrance prompted lobby murmurs that Michael himself was using it as a personal limousine. The Jacksons finally emerged at 6:05
P.M.
, with fans and firefighters jockeying for position to catch them, and the brothers ran as fast as they could to a van with
black-tinted windows. Michael covered his face with a towel, but once he emerged safely in the van, he could be seen, barely, waving through the window. When Victory didn’t stop in Pittsburgh, the local
Post-Gazette
printed a story lamenting the
$250,000 that wouldn’t go to tax revenues and the 225 local college athletes who wouldn’t be pressed into service as security guards.

The Jacksons themselves continued to adhere to their father’s unwavering policy from early in their careers: no drugs. Michael’s personal assistant, Nelson Hayes, who served as Victory’s road manager, was dispatched to communicate that law to every band and crew member.
“Michael said it was going to be a drug-free tour, and it was far from that,” tour consultant Ken Graham recalls. “Because of the stresses and schedule, all of your usual stimulants were being applied.” While Michael may not have indulged in groupies—he was too busy rehearsing his dance steps well into the night, using a portable wooden platform, as guitarist Wright, who occasionally had the room beneath him, remembered all too well—the crew certainly did. “They’d swarm the hotel,” recalls head carpenter Luysterborghs:
“It didn’t take anything to get laid. Head out to a bar with a laminate on. I used to joke about trawling with the laminates—putting ’em on a line and just drawing them through a crowd.”

Even today, at age seventy, Chuck Sullivan adopts a tone of “it wasn’t that bad.” Reports over the years have pegged his Victory losses at
$20 million. Sullivan claims
$8 million. But the tour stress affected him deeply at the time. By the end, as the Jacksons were playing six shows at Dodger Stadium, Sullivan turned to Jim Murray, his friend and Victory PR man, and said,
“Jimmy, I’m gonna fly back to New England. My heart hurts.” Murray persuaded him to not get on a plane—and to see a doctor immediately. Sullivan took an EKG, and sure enough, he’d suffered a mild heart attack.

Sullivan eventually lost so much money off the Victory tour that his corporation went bankrupt and he was forced to sell his family’s
beloved Patriots, paving the way for a paper-products magnate, Robert Kraft, to take over the team. One night, a reporter showed up unexpectedly at a Sullivan Stadium box to discover Chuck Sullivan had apparently spent the night there. Chuck became a sort of Boston urban legend, the millionaire who lost so much money off Michael Jackson that he became homeless.
“I was not homeless,” Sullivan responds. “I had three homes at the time. I had an apartment in the Ritz Tower hotel in New York, which was one of the most beautiful apartments in the world, and I had views of both rivers. And we have a family estate on Nantucket Sound with five acres of land and three homes and sixteen bedrooms and gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.”

In any event, the Victory tour worked out well for its musicians. Many of the band and crew would use their Victory experience to graduate to greater heights—bandleader Patrick Leonard moved on to touring with Madonna, and lighting man Robert A. Roth’s company, Christie Lites, works today with the biggest brands in the music business, from Lollapalooza to MTV’s Movie Awards. Michael’s brothers received their money, of course, although Victory would clearly be the peak of each of their careers. And MJ emerged from the whole thing unscathed, bigger than ever, a pop star for the entire world. At the end of the tour, onstage at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, he told the crowd to listen up. “I’d like to say this is our last and final tour,” he said. “I think this is our farewell tour. You’ve all been wonderful. It’s been a long twenty years, and we love you all.” Jermaine, beside him onstage, kept smiling. But you could tell one of those words registered—not a
great
twenty years, not a
triumphant
twenty years, but a
long
twenty years. This was the diplomatic phrasing of somebody ready to move on.

I
. It helped that DiLeo spent $100,000 per single on “independent promotion,” a shady variation on payola involving middlemen who took money from record labels and gave it to radio programmers, according to Fredric Dannen’s
Hit Men
.

II
. In still another version of the story, Jermaine writes in his autobiography that his mother talked Michael into it, as she’d often done on behalf of Michael’s brothers. The account ends the same way, with Michael saying, “Okay.” But Ikeda doesn’t buy it.