MJ (32 page)

This is where Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara district attorney, comes into the story. He was a former boxer who’d attended Notre Dame and UCLA law school. He had been known as “Mad Dog,” a prosecutor who was
“sharp-tongued and tenacious,” as
USA Today
once called him. He was not flashy, didn’t care for the spotlight, and
had been interviewed sparingly over the years, emerging in news stories only when he sought publicity for his crackdowns on toxic polluters and deadbeat dads. He and his staff had come to believe Jackson was guilty.
“We were pretty satisfied that he was molesting Jordan Chandler,” says Ron Zonen, Sneddon’s number two. “He would come over when Jordie got out of school and would spend the night with him for weeks.” Sneddon considered himself a crusader bent on ridding the world of a predator; one of Michael’s later attorneys, David LeGrand, would take the opposing view, widely held among MJ fans, saying Sneddon had a
“hard-on for Michael.”

Sneddon, along with the LAPD’s Sicard, was part of the team of investigators who arranged a trip to Neverland, on Sneddon’s turf in Santa Barbara County. After long discussions on how to access Neverland without media attention, they decided to hide in plain sight, driving down the narrow dirt road in Los Olivos toward the ranch entrance in a stretch limousine. They drove past the media trucks. They drove past the gates, about a mile down the main driveway, and parked by a pond and a replica of the Main Street in Disneyland. Michael’s own security team met them there. His guards had guns, too. The police investigators sat in the car for half an hour.
“People are getting ticked off, because that’s not usually how police are used to being treated,” recalls Richard Strick, a dermatologist working for the Santa Barbara DA’s office. “The guys had guns out and they were deciding if they had enough weaponry to take on [Michael’s] people.”

Finally, a half dozen helicopters flew in and landed on the other side of Michael’s house. They contained Michael’s dermatologist, Arnold Klein, and a team of his attorneys, including Howard Weitzman and Johnnie Cochran. Nobody bothered to turn off the harp music that had been blaring all this time through the Neverland speakers. When he left the car, Strick made a crack. “I’m glad we’re finally getting to do this—that harp music is driving me nuts.” Weitzman wheeled around: “I don’t appreciate that comment,” he snapped at Strick. “I don’t find
one fucking funny thing about this.” Strick returned fire: “Me neither, I don’t find one fucking funny thing about this,” he told Michael’s attorney, “especially with that
fucking harp music
.” The two of them approached each other with clenched fists and said, “Oh yeah?” a few times before Cochran, the high-profile celebrity attorney who had been one of Strick’s patients and knew both men well, calmed them down.

The police showed Weitzman the search warrant. For the first time, Weitzman realized the DA wanted a close-up
examination of what Jordie had described as the “splotches” on his genitalia. Weitzman whispered this into Michael’s ear, and he began to melt down:
“Get out! Get out!” he hollered. Weitzman called for Cochran, who had been downstairs negotiating with the visitors. The two attorneys huddled with Michael. Both sides agreed the team examining Michael Jackson would include Klein, Strick, Forecast (who was present as Michael’s personal physician), and Gary Spiegel, a photographer from the sheriff’s office. Two detectives accompanied them. Cochran ushered the group inside, and they met Michael’s security chief Bill Bray and his own photographer, Louis Swayne. Bray led them to a small room on the second floor. Michael was sitting on a couch, wearing a tan bathrobe. When Detective Russ Birchim of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office and Sicard introduced themselves, Michael gave a meek “Thank you.” Then he broke into a tantrum.
“He was whining and complaining,” Strick says.
Forecast, Michael’s doctor from the
Dangerous
tour, was the one to tell the pop star to calm down. Michael slapped him and told him to “shut the fuck up,” as Strick recalls. Forecast insists this slap never happened—he had long been out of the room by then. Detective Sicard says MJ slapped Forecast’s leg, not his cheek. Strick is sure it was the cheek.

Strick began his examination. He noticed the vitiligo, and could see Michael had undergone treatments to dye his skin into a more uniform color. It wasn’t working. He observed the discoid lupus erythematosus, Michael’s painful skin disease that had been diagnosed years earlier; he
could see the disease had destroyed nose cartilage, which might have explained some of Michael’s plastic surgery. Strick can’t say firsthand whether the photos he took of Michael Jackson’s genitalia fit Chandler’s description, but through conversations he had later with investigators, he concluded,
“It sure would appear that some young boy had pretty close views of his genitalia.” Did Chandler’s drawings match the real thing? This is a matter of historical interpretation, since the public has thankfully been spared photos of Michael Jackson’s genitalia. To
Vanity Fair
, Sneddon answered yes. But Reuters quoted an unidentified source in January 1994 who said, “Photos of Michael Jackson’s genitalia do not match descriptions given by the boy.” Either way, tellingly, as Ian Halperin points out, Sneddon did not indict MJ.

A civil trial between the Chandlers and Michael was scheduled for March 21, 1994. For months, despite the surreal negotiations over screenplay deals, Michael refused to give any money whatsoever to Evan and his family. He and his people considered the celebrity dentist an extortionist. But Elizabeth Taylor counseled Michael to fix the problem quickly:
“Get rid of this thing, you’ve got all the money in the world. Why do you have to fight it?” One of Michael’s attorneys, Bert Fields, disagreed. “I felt that paying any substantial amount would be a tragic mistake—that he should fight it,” he says. “I was convinced he would win.” He wasn’t Liz.

At the time, Michael had money to spare. In fall 1993, when Sony offered to buy half of the ATV catalog, containing the Beatles songs, for $75 million, he called his former attorney, John Branca.
“Are you crazy, Michael?” Branca asked. Michael rehired him. (Branca believed Bert Fields had made a huge mistake by not offering a comparatively small settlement with the Chandler family much earlier. Branca was the one who advised MJ to bring on Johnnie Cochran as a defense attorney to replace Fields.) Instead of selling out half of Michael’s crucial financial engine to Sony, Branca made a $150 million deal with EMI to administer the ATV catalog. It would not be the last time he
would use the ATV catalog as a life-saving money machine. The $20 million settlement Michael Jackson made with the Chandler family was something he could afford. Evan and June received $1.5 million apiece. Jordan received $15.3 million. Larry Feldman, the Chandlers’ attorney, has been widely reported to have received $3 million in legal fees due to the settlement, but he refuses to talk about it. After the settlement, Jordie Chandler essentially vanished, changing his name and moving to a $2.35 million home in eastern Long Island. Evan Chandler, too, changed his identity. In November 2009, his body was discovered in his sixteenth-floor waterfront home in Jersey City, with the gun he’d used to shoot himself. Tom Mesereau, Michael’s future defense attorney, would spend a lot of time overcoming the public assumption that Michael settled with the Chandler family because he was guilty.
“He would’ve been better off just beating them in court,” he says. The settlement, he adds, was a “Pandora’s box” leading to a wave of lawsuits that would continue through his death. “The word got out you can sue
Michael Jackson,” he says.

I
. Michael told this story many times, but he never specified the location. Notably, one of Motown’s former studios at 4317 Romaine Street in West Hollywood, where the Jackson 5 recorded, is across the street from a park.

II
. Michael’s rehab at this time has long been a mystery to reporters: “For the record,” Diane Dimond wrote in her book, “I could never independently confirm that Jackson really entered the London clinic touted to have been his rehabilitation program of choice.” One of Michael’s bodyguards at the time, Steve Tarling, gave a different, more detailed account of this scene to the British tabloid the
Mail.
Tarling described Michael’s pre-rehab appearance as “so drugged up he was like a zombie.” I opted for Forecast’s version, especially after reaching Tarling via Twitter, where he asked if I paid for interviews, and when I said no, he stopped responding to inquiries.

R
upert Wainwright’s two-year adventure with Michael Jackson began with a phone call on the Hollywood set of a TV commercial he was filming. The voice on the other line belonged to Sandy Gallin, Michael’s manager.
“You are Michael Jackson’s newest favorite director,” he said. Wainwright had only made one film,
Blank Check
, a 1994 flop starring Karen Duffy and Miguel Ferrer. The next thing he knew, a helicopter was picking him up in Santa Monica for a seven
P.M.
meeting with Michael at Neverland Ranch. Wainwright and his girlfriend had signed “like eight hundred non-disclosure agreements” and weren’t sure what to expect, but as they descended into the Santa Barbara–area mist and spotted the lights and rides, they were charmed despite themselves. They were ushered to an antechamber in an all-white house and a woman “who looks like something out of
Downton Abbey
” asked the young couple if they’d like a drink. Wainwright requested a gin and tonic. The woman responded, “I’ll see if we have it!” Beneath an eight-foot-by-two-foot painting of MJ as the pied piper, with dozens of children following him over a broad landscape, they dined on tofu and soft-boiled chicken with Michael Jackson before white-knuckling through the pirate-ship ride.

Michael called again, a few weeks later, at 11:45
P.M.
on a Sunday. He explained he had an idea for a short film, a
“teaser” designed to publicize his upcoming album
HIStory
, and he’d like to discuss it in person. So the British director was whisked to Orlando, where he took an anonymous passenger van, then checked in to a hotel under a pseudonym, for a meeting with Michael. The singer hired Wainwright, and his production company designed storyboards and planned a budget, hewing to Michael’s vision, for $4 million. Sony reps tried to secretly advise Wainwright to keep the costs down, but the director could see they had zero control over MJ.

Michael’s vision was to be dressed in full military regalia, shiny gold on his chest, with mirrored shades, benevolently waving to roped-off proletarians shouting “Michael!” as he and hundreds of jackbooted troops paraded down the streets. His factory-worker minions were to hold
KING OF POP
and
WE LOVE YOU!
signs, waving flags as a banner of Michael’s enlarged eye flew overhead.

“It was insane,” Wainwright recalls.

The director and his crew traveled to Eastern Europe without Michael, scouting locations before settling on Budapest, a city with the right mix of historic landscapes and modern accommodations. Wainwright’s producer hired four hundred real-life local soldiers in boots and jackets, flying in trainers from London, New York, and Los Angeles to school “these very confused Hungarian drill sergeants doing Jacksonesque choreography,” Wainwright recalls. The work was laborious and complicated. “Each day was like closing Wilshire Boulevard,” he says. Michael shot a few scenes on a green screen in New York, decided he was having a good time, then flew to Budapest to be part of the movie. Once MJ showed up, the director recalls, “You’d look in the skies and there’d be at least eight helicopters buzzing and dodging overhead.”

In Budapest, Michael began to slip storyboards underneath the door of Wainwright’s hotel room. Wainwright’s punishing schedule involved
filming all day, then unwinding with a couple of drinks before falling asleep at two
A.M.
This would have given him six hours of sleep before the next day’s shoot. But Michael regularly called at four
A.M.
from the presidential suite: “Do you have a pencil?” He had a specific vision for a scene involving two young women behind the barriers, one curly-haired, one blonde, and when MJ passed by, they would faint into a policeman’s arms. He described exactly how the women’s hair would look. “You’re writing this down, right?” Michael asked as Wainwright sleepily took dictation.

The Budapest shoot turned into a story more dramatic than the one depicted on film. Wainwright showed up to the set one day and all the troops were gone. They’d been called to defend the Hungarian borders during the Croatian War of Independence. In their place, one of Wainwright’s resourceful producers had imported 150 British paratroopers on a chartered 707, at a cost of
$500,000, for arrival the following morning. Wainwright’s people had to hire 150 Hungarian police cadets to stand in for the marchers. The catch: they were scheduled to take final police-academy exams on the Monday of shooting; the film crew stationed minivans outside the exams to whisk the cadets back to the set. (“You’re done, you’ve got an A, get in the van.”)
^I
In the end, the budget for the proposed $4 million video ballooned to $8 million.

Wainwright has fond memories of MJ, and he recounts these events with a mixture of humor and disbelief. “Michael was such a dreamer and such a perfectionist. I don’t know if he was ignorant of the finances, or chose to ignore them. But clearly in Michael Jackson Land, the financial consequences of choices in a creative manner—the reality of that was diminished in his mind. He knew it would cost something but he just figured it was affordable, or it just didn’t really matter, or it just had to be done right.”

It was MJ’s job to rescue and liberate the world, not remind people of its limitations.

*  *  *

To those who worked with Michael Jackson at the Hit Factory, a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot studio on West Fifty-Fourth Street in New York where stars from Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Wonder to John Lennon had made albums, the King of Pop arrived in a cloak of secrecy.
“He never touched New York City’s dirt,” says Tony Black, one of many assistant engineers who worked on his newest album. “He would go from the indoor garage in the Trump [Towers], where he was living, to his car or truck or van. They would drive him into the building of the Hit Factory, into the freight elevator, and go up from there into the studio.”