MJ (29 page)

Michael’s musicians and crew noticed he was more distracted, less hands-on and perfectionistic, than he had been for Victory or
Bad
. For the
Bad
tour, Michael and his dancers had started the choreography together, working closely through the entire process; for
Dangerous
, the dancers opened rehearsals not with MJ but Kenny Ortega, the tour’s director and choreographer. After they put the steps together, Michael showed up, conferred with Ortega, and, Garcia says,
“changed stuff according to his liking.” Some who’d been involved with both tours noticed a steep drop-off in Michael’s enthusiasm. Sam Emerson, the tour photographer, recalls Michael requiring, in his contract for the 1984 Victory tour, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot
dance platform to be assembled in each of his hotel rooms. “He’d have cameras, and the crew set up the dance floor. I’d go there and his shirt literally would be soaking wet and there’d be pools of sweat on the dance floor. He worked himself into a frenzy. He was in the best shape ever. On the
Bad
tour, it was pretty much the same thing—he’d do rehearsal after rehearsal,” he says. “For the
Dangerous
tour, it wasn’t the same. ‘Are we going to go to dress rehearsals and run through this?’ ‘Nah, I’ll be fine.’ ” A new dancer, Jamie King, often stood in for Michael during rehearsals, and Michael showed up a few days before the tour began and learned all the moves in three long days. Still, Michael had reason to be confident. Rehearsal footage from those days shows the King of Pop fully in command, lean and flexible in black slacks and a white dress shirt, leading his
Dangerous
dancers in lockstep and breaking from the pack to stalk the stage.

What Michael’s dancers, musicians, and crew didn’t know was that, as he prepared for the tour, he was in severe pain—and seeing a platoon of doctors to help him with it.

The Pepsi-commercial fire had done more lasting damage than he’d let on in 1984. Over time, Michael’s scarring led to irritating, bumpy keloids, and the
balloons installed to repair his scalp were constantly painful. He began to seek comfort from a friend—
Debbie Rowe, a nurse who was the assistant to Arnold Klein, Michael’s dermatologist. When Debbie and Michael first met, they clicked immediately. “I said, ‘You know what? Nobody does what you do better, and nobody does what I do better. Let’s get this over with.’ And he laughed, and we just became friends,” she recalls. “It was just right away.” Rowe had first met Klein when he was a dermatology professor at UCLA and Stanford, working closely with AIDS patients. Later, she was with him when he opened up a dermatology office in Beverly Hills, specializing in collagen and Botox treatments for high-priced Hollywood patients.

David Geffen had referred Michael to Klein for acne treatment. It was Debbie who noticed Michael’s low pain tolerance. Over the next two years, Debbie and Michael developed a friendship outside the doctor’s office, speaking regularly on the phone, then sneaking past security to rent videos together, often fleeing from fans in the process.

In 1983, Klein diagnosed Michael with discoid lupus erythematosus, a skin condition that leads to uncomfortable rashes and scarring. Klein also noticed he had
vitiligo, a disease in which a person’s skin loses melanin, a pigment that establishes color, and creates off-putting white blotches. Like other African-Americans with the disease, Michael did his best to conceal the problem with makeup, but people who worked closely with him couldn’t miss it. Endre Granat, the veteran LA concertmaster hired to work on the
Dangerous
album, suffers from the same condition; he spotted discoloration on Michael’s face and asked him about it one day in the studio. “You have a little spot, like a dime, and suddenly that spot becomes an oval, then the next one doesn’t connect to it, so you have black spots or white,” Granat says. “He told me he was trying to lighten up his entire body.” When Granat saw photos of Michael wearing fedoras in public, he assumed this was due to extreme
sun sensitivity caused by the disease.
“He didn’t want to be spotted up,” Katherine Jackson added. “His hands and face and neck and chest—that’s the part he had bleached out so it wouldn’t look so bad.”

Until he divulged his vitiligo to Oprah Winfrey and the world in 1993, Michael kept the reasons for his bleached skin mysterious. He freaked out people who came in contact with him, and to some critics, he seemed like some kind of race traitor.
“I’d never seen skin that color before. It was, like, parchment colored,” recalls Sonya Saul, an MTV Europe correspondent who covered the tour. “It was very strange.” Greg Tate of the
Village Voice
declared in a 1987 essay:
“Jackson emerges a casualty of America’s ongoing race war—another Negro gone mad because his mirror reports that his face does not conform to the Nordic ideal.” Some MJ observers have suggested his vitiligo, while painful, gave him an excuse to mess around more than ever with racial boundaries. “We might say that his disease has liberated him from being bound to a black physicality,” critic Michael Awkward wrote. Just as he refused to limit himself to one producer or one musical style, he didn’t want to be limited to one look imposed by genetics or tradition. He belonged to everybody.

Michael’s health issues were distracting him more than ever when he opened the
Dangerous
tour in Munich, Germany, on June 27, 1992. He was still in superb shape, although Rowe worried about Michael’s
loss of eight or nine pounds of “water” weight every night due to his grueling performances.
“All I knew was that he wasn’t eating properly,” says set designer Tom McPhillips. “He was drinking fruit juice and eating lettuce or something like that. He was so worried about putting on weight that you felt that he wasn’t eating even enough to keep up his stamina for that dance.” During the Japanese leg of the tour, a doctor pushed Michael to consume more protein. Michael agreed, a security guard was dispatched for
Kentucky Fried Chicken, and presto—after following a dietary regimen for twenty years, Michael was no longer a vegetarian. Soon he was going in the opposite direction.
“He was eating cheese pizzas, cheese burritos. Can’t live on cheese,” says Johnny
Ciao, the celebrity chef who later cooked for the highly particular MJ at Neverland, rejiggering his diet to emphasize seafood and protein. “It was making him weak.”

Due to what Michael’s people termed throat problems, he canceled Park Stadium, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and other shows on the
Dangerous
tour. Michael’s European promoter, Barry Clayman, called one of Elton John’s longtime doctors.
“Can you please come and see Mike?” Clayman asked David Forecast, a gastroenterologist in his late thirties. The British doctor wound up traveling with the tour through the end of its European run in October. By that point, Forecast says, Michael was “happy and working.”

On tour, Michael brought with him a rotating crew of children—Brett Barnes, an eleven-year-old from Australia; Albert von
Thurn und Taxis, nine, a rich prince from Bavaria; and Eddie and Frank Cascio, nine and thirteen, kids from New Jersey whose father had been general manager of the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan and befriended Michael when he stayed there. Sometimes their parents came along, sometimes they didn’t. Their presence discomforted some on the tour.
“There was always this family around—this mother and father and these kids—that would be on this tour with us,” says a source who worked on the
Dangerous
tour. “I asked, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘They’re our advance family. We send them in front of the hotel before Jackson gets there.’ It was a very, very weird thing, because when you’re on these tours, they’re very expensive, and every body costs money, and the promoter is always looking for a way to save money.” MTV’s Saul, who hosted an interview-and-news segment called “Dangerous Diaries,” was doing interviews on the bus and noticed a big-bed-little-bed situation for Michael and his young friends.
“It’s just uncomfortable,” thought Saul, who has since become a London barrister specializing in rape and sexual-assault cases and other crimes. Also, Michael called Jordan Chandler, the kid he’d met at Rent-A-Wreck, several times
while on tour, and they talked for hours.

The shows on the
Dangerous
tour opened with “the toaster,” a machine that launched Michael from beneath the stage into a two-foot high-jump. He stuck the landing, then stood, silent and immobile, for three solid minutes, fists at his waist, staring into the distance in giant sunglasses. (He had first pulled off this statue move in rehearsal, without warning the crew.
“What’s he
doing
?” they asked each other.) Nobody—not Jagger, not Springsteen, not Prince—could hold a crowd with a single pose like Michael Jackson. “Some artists, with twenty dancers, you’ve got to kind of squint and pick out the artist,” says Peter Morse, the tour’s lighting designer. “With Michael, you could be back one hundred yards in a lighting tower, and there could be fifty-plus people onstage, and every eye would be exactly on Michael. He had that strong of an aura.” In Bucharest, Romania, after holding the pose underneath a rainstorm of orange fireworks, Michael finally, dramatically moved his head to the left (“AAAAIIIEEEEE!” went the crowd of seventy thousand people), then raised his arms and slowly removed his sunglasses. Enhancing this effect was Michael’s silver shirt, which seemed to change color underneath the lights, above a yellow onesie snugly wrapped around his crotch.
“The revelation of his sculpted, made-up face only deepens the mystery,” Susan Fast writes. “It is surely one of the most arresting and powerful ways an arena concert has begun in the history of the genre. This glitzy spectacle might be cheesy if it weren’t followed by two and a half hours of nonstop, spectacular dancing and singing that somehow justifies his self-deification at the beginning.”

HBO had paid $20 million to film the October 1 show in Bucharest. Producers spliced in screaming, crying, sweating, and fainting by young female fans every few seconds. During the performance, Michael shifts from heavily choreographed ensemble numbers like “Smooth Criminal” to his most loose and improvisational performances—he does an extra-long moonwalk in “Billie Jean,” then scats gospel noises throughout “Workin’ Day and Night” as he and Jennifer Batten chase each other around the stage.

As the
Dangerous
tour lumbered through Europe, musical director Greg
Phillinganes was having trouble getting an audience with Michael. He was beginning to worry about three upcoming nights at London’s huge Wembley Stadium, where the audience could detect every nuance. He tried to set up meetings. At first, he made repeated requests through tour security. Every time, someone told him, “No problem, we’ll do it this time.” Every time, it didn’t happen. Finally, on July 5, in Dublin, Phillinganes called security again and insisted. “Okay,” they said, “just stay in your room. We’ll call you.” Phillinganes waited, dutifully, until he became so bored that he turned on his TV—only to see a live report about Michael shopping at some local toy store. “I wasted a day in my room,” Phillinganes recalls. “Then I realize that actually he must not care, which was greatly disappointing to me.” Phillinganes stuck with the tour for a few months, through Istanbul in September 1993, then left Michael for good.

In three years, Michael Jackson had cut ties with Quincy Jones, Frank DiLeo, John Branca, and Phillinganes, four men who’d done more for his solo career than anyone else.

Earlier that year, Michael had returned home from the first leg of the tour. It wasn’t exactly R&R. He performed at the American Music Awards. He took his
Dangerous
band and dancers to the Super Bowl halftime show, where he replicated his hold-the-pose move, this time in a dark military jacket with gold tunic and belt, and did a fine performance of “Jam” before transitioning into “Billie Jean,” “Black or White,” “We Are the World,” and (surrounded by 3,500 singing children) “Heal the World.” At President Clinton’s inaugural gala, Michael sang “Gone Too Soon,” the song Buz Kohan gave him as a tribute to the late Ryan White. And he sat down with Oprah Winfrey.

Michael had been avoiding the press for more than a decade, but in 1993, his brand of dance music was slipping out of pop culture as grunge, alternative rock, and hip-hop continued to ascend. He needed a publicity boost, and he agreed to a ninety-minute interview,
preparing his responses so they were a mix of tantalizing truths and showmanship. He fleshed out what he’d only vaguely covered in his biography
Moonwalk
, including details about his vitiligo, his father’s beatings (which drove him to tears), whether his brothers were jealous of his fame
(“
Hmm
, let me think—no”), La Toya’s provocative book about the Jackson family (he hadn’t read it), the hyperbaric chamber (“Why would I want to sleep in a chamber?”), and the Elephant Man’s bones (“Why would I want some bones?”). It wasn’t so much a revealing interview as a performance, as Michael showed off his lighter skin, cleft chin, and proudly thin nose, oblivious to how viewers might have felt about his appearance, and delivered his answers in a high, sing-song voice. If his purpose was to dispel myths, he succeeded sporadically. But he didn’t exactly answer the questions, either. Why did he mess with his nose? Why did he claim he was dating Brooke Shields when, she said later, they were just good friends? Nobody was requiring Michael to answer questions on the witness stand, but viewers could see through his Motown-trained public relations. Had he been more honest and forthcoming in public, he might have made his very public life a little easier.

*  *  *

Two days after the interview with Oprah, which drew ninety million viewers, Michael called June Chandler and invited her family to hang out at Neverland for the weekend. He sent a limo. He stayed in the main house. June, thirteen-year-old Jordie, and seven-year-old Lily shacked up in the guest house. The
fifty-six staff members waited on them. They rode on the Ferris wheel. They visited the zoo. Michael and Jordie played video games. Michael arranged an after-hours visit to Toys “R” Us and bought the kids anything they picked out.