MJ (39 page)

Then McDonald’s began to hear complaints from the public: What was this family-friendly chain doing with an alleged child molester? The executives retreated.

Adding to Michael’s disappointment, Sony Music was uninterested in “What More Can I Give?” as his record label was focusing on his other 2001 project—the
Invincible
album, expenses for which had ballooned to
$51 million. In the video for 2001’s “You Rock My World,” a
$75,000 exploding-building scene starring Chris Tucker had to be deleted in the days after 9/11.
“That was a crazy job that should have taken two weeks but took almost two months with all the false starts that we had,” producer Rubin Mendoza recalls. “There was a huge sense of deflated relief when it was done.” Suffice to say, Sony was not excited when Michael asked for roughly
$8 million to fund the video.

Michael became irate. Although Mottola, the Sony Entertainment chief, had been his ally for more than a decade, their relationship was frequently tense.
“The problem for Michael Jackson was when Tommy got married,” recalls Michael Schulhof, Sony Corp.’s US chief executive in the nineties, referring to the label chief’s 1993 wedding with pop star Mariah Carey. “Michael was worried that she would divert the company’s resources in favor of her. . . . It was always touchy.” As the
Invincible
marketing campaign dragged on, Michael became more and more frustrated. He clumsily attempted to elevate his clash with Mottola into a civil rights issue. He turned to Al
Sharpton, but the
outspoken reverend was a friend of Mottola’s and didn’t consider the record mogul a racist.

Alone in his crusade, in June 2002, Michael attended a London fan-club event and called Mottola “a devil.” He rallied his fans for support and displayed photos of his boss wearing devil horns and carrying a pitchfork. He called him “very, very devilish.” In his 2013 autobiography,
Hitmaker
, Mottola called the attack
“sad and pathetic,” and responded: “It had nothing to do with race, heaven or hell. It had to do with an artist who was starting to melt down because he couldn’t adjust to his shrinking album sales.”

Traditionally, pop stars who wanted to promote their albums went on tour, and nobody could generate more worldwide publicity through a tour than Michael Jackson. But he had no interest. One of his many business advisers at this time, James Meiskin, was meeting with Michael in his Neverland office when a fax arrived from a prominent Asian promoter. He was offering $11 million to
$15 million for one concert. Michael threw the document into the trash. “No way I’m gonna do that, Meiskin,” Michael told him. “I lose eleven pounds per performance. These promoters, they break me. I never make any money from these concerts. They don’t know what I have to go through.”

In lieu of making money from concerts, Michael told Meiskin, Konitzer, and others, he wanted to buy Marvel Comics, home of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk—something for which he’d taken a few meetings with Stan Lee, the company’s founder, as early as 1999. The investment idea was savvy. The 2002
Spider-Man
movie was about to open the door for a flood of smash comic-book hits, from
X-Men
to
Iron Man
to
The Avengers
. The price, though, was
$800 million. Far too high.

Rather than lecturing Michael about financial prudence, Konitzer returned to his home in Vancouver and spent two or three months coming up with a new concept—MJ Universe, a multifaceted plan involving investments in technology companies, providing new content for
short films and commercials, developments such as theme parks and school programs, and licensing MJ’s image. Everything but singing and dancing. Konitzer and his ally, manager Dieter Wiesner, came up with an animated presentation they considered
“light and funny.” Jackson loved it. He began to call Konitzer with ideas three or four times a day. Wiesner and Konitzer built a team of what they called “new, fresh, motivated people—at least to some degree, non-Hollywood.” They secured power-of-attorney documents, enabling them to speak on Michael’s behalf when approaching companies.

To deal with expenses, Michael needed a specialist of a different kind—essentially, somebody who would pay for everything. Every ninety days, past-due invoices came in from a variety of sources that billed Michael for a total of roughly
$10 million. Some of this was for Four Seasons hotel rooms and shopping. Some of it was . . . unusual. After November 1993, when police searched Katherine and Joe Jackson’s home on Hayvenhurst in Encino, looking for evidence that Michael had molested Jordan Chandler, he decided to wipe the physical memory of that unpleasant incident out of his system. Michael leased an eight-thousand-square-foot hangar at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport and hauled everything he had from Hayvenhurst into the space for storage—an inoperable Rolls-Royce, pinball machines, a bureau full of clothes. He also owed a Santa Monica electronics store $80,000 for TVs he purchased for his friend Marlon Brando.

“He owed money to everybody,” says David LeGrand, his attorney at the time, who later tried to sort through his finances.

In 2001, Michael developed a close friendship with Miami entrepreneur
Al Malnik, whose forty-year-old Miami steakhouse, the Forge, had served Sinatra, Judy Garland, and President Nixon. By this time, Michael had become a father for the third time. Prince Michael II, known as Blanket, was to outsiders the singer’s most mysterious child; MJ announced he’d had a surrogate mother, and Debbie Rowe clarified the baby did not belong to her. Blanket was blond-haired and, like
his siblings, obviously white, suggesting Michael himself may not have been involved in the conception, either—although friends would say Blanket inherited his father’s dance talent, pulling off popping-and-locking moves as he grew up and nailing a perfect version of the “Billie Jean” moonwalk. Michael and Al Malnik, who had a younger wife and children around the ages of Prince, Paris, and Blanket, frequently gathered their children for family get-togethers. They became so close that Al agreed to become
Prince’s godfather—and “bring up Blanket in the event anything happened to him.” Every few months, the press asked Malnik whether he was
Blanket’s father, scuttlebutt he denied.

Malnik met with Jackson’s advisers. He met with Bank of America executives. With the help of Charles Koppelman, a veteran record executive advising Michael at the time, Malnik began to turn things around. Malnik and Koppelman worked with Fortress Investment Group, which had expertise in taking over distressed debts, to buy the Bank of America loans and stave off any kind of Jackson bankruptcy—at
sky-high interest rates. Their meeting with Goldman Sachs would have
“solidified all of Michael’s assets in the music-publishing world,” as Koppelman recalls, then pay Michael a stipend to handle his prolific expenses. But, Koppelman adds, “Michael was spending probably double the amount of money he was earning. And he had loans that were coming due that, if he wasn’t able to pay them, he was in jeopardy of losing his most valuable assets.” Also, Malnik loaned MJ a total of
$7 million to $10 million over time.
“Al personally wrote checks to pay down a lot of Michael’s bills,” Marc Schaffel says. “Al almost had Michael’s finances to the point of a turnaround. And then it all just blew up.”

*  *  *

Back in 1994,
Michael Clayton had paid $185,000—$50,000 more than he wanted to—for a small white building in the center of Santa Maria, California. It was worth it, he figured, because he was a lawyer,
and the one-story former single-family adobe home was across the street from the Santa Barbara Superior Courts. For ten years, he enjoyed the short walk between the buildings, but one day in January 2004, Clayton left his office and noticed, to his dismay, that the City of Santa Maria had erected chain-link fences on both sides of the street, forcing him to detour two blocks out of his way, cross at a street light, and enter the courthouse through the back door.

Clayton was annoyed, but soon people began to enquire about his roof. Before the forty-something lawyer knew it, roughly
two thousand reporters—not to mention fans, gawkers, people promoting random dot-coms, and one woman wearing a promotional bikini top made of lettuce—had descended on his city of eighty thousand to cover Michael Jackson’s trial for child molestation. Could the BBC pay to set up cameras on his roof? Could Sky TV, the BBC’s New Zealand–based competitor, do the same? What about CNN? “Sure!” Clayton told them. He marked off ten-by-seven-foot spots on the roof, each of which could fit four people, and charged the networks $2,500 apiece for the space.

Clayton took a hiatus from his legal work, becoming a sort of journalistic concierge. After Michael Jackson showed up for the first time to attend a hearing, he famously stopped his black SUV in the street, climbed to the top of the vehicle, and did an impromptu dance. The spectacle happened to be immediately underneath Clayton’s roof. Upon seeing this, TV producers who’d been uncertain whether to make a deal with Clayton told him: “We want our spot. We will sign for this spot right now.
We want it
.” In the end, he made $300,000. “If I didn’t do what I did,” he says, “I would’ve been the worst businessman, at that moment, in the United States.”

*  *  *

The end of Michael Jackson begins with a ten-year-old boy who had a
sixteen-pound tumor in his abdomen and lesions in his lungs. In the early 2000s, Gavin Arvizo was living with his mother Janet, his father
David, his thirteen-year-old sister Davellin, and his nine-year-old brother Star in an East Los Angeles studio apartment. He underwent chemotherapy for a year, which caused him to lose much of his hair and made him so frail that people gasped when they saw him.
Doctors told his family to prepare for his funeral.

The Arvizos had famous and influential friends. Before he got sick, Gavin and his siblings attended a summer camp at the
Laugh Factory, a comedy club that opened in 1979 and went on to book just about every major stand-up—Redd Foxx, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman. The club’s founder, Jamie Masada, was a philanthropist in addition to a businessman, and he held a summer comedy camp for underprivileged kids.

The Arvizos became a sort of personal charity for several comedians. Gavin gave Masada a list of famous people he wanted to meet—comedians Chris Tucker and Adam Sandler and Michael Jackson—and the Laugh Factory founder dutifully spent hours working
his contacts, including someone who gave him
Quincy Jones’s office number. Some of the savvy stars who took these calls perceived the story of this sweet family with the sick child had cracks in its foundation. Jay Leno said he detected something
“scripted” about the voicemails Gavin left for him. Others, such as writer-producer Louise Palanker, were touched by their story. She befriended the family, arriving at the Arvizos’ apartment one Christmas with a Sony PlayStation and a microwave oven.

Using his famous contacts, Masada landed a phone number to Neverland. Soon MJ was making his first of many calls to Gavin at the hospital. One day in 2000, a limo arrived to pick up the entire Arvizo family to take them to the ranch. The kids spent the night in a
guest room; Janet and her husband, David, a grocery warehouse employee, were in a nearby room facing a lake. At first,
Gavin’s father
didn’t want him to ride on the rides, because he had just had surgery, but Gavin talked him into it. The kids played in Michael’s arcade, drove his go-karts, and toured the zoo and the movie theater on his grounds that
seemed to go on forever in the perfect California weather. The kids grew close to Michael Jackson. Michael called Gavin “Doo-Doo Head” and “Apple Head” and nicknamed his brother Star “Blow Hole.” The family became a ubiquitous presence at Neverland, indulging in the staff help, high-class meals, and luxurious bedrooms. “The kids genuinely liked Michael, but I also remember people taking care of the mom—spending time with her, giving her money,” recalls Christian Robinson, Jackson’s videographer at the time.

One day, Michael asked Gavin Arvizo if he still wanted to be an actor. Gavin said he did. Michael told him a British broadcaster, Martin Bashir, was on the way to Neverland and would like to interview Gavin and his siblings.
“I’m going to put you in the movies,” he told him. “And this is your audition. Okay?” Gavin agreed.

Over his eighteen-year career, Bashir, a British journalist, had interviewed numerous high-profile celebrities, including Princess Diana. He spent five years trying to score an interview with Michael Jackson.
“Michael adored Princess Diana . . . and when Bashir knocked on my door to ask me to introduce Michael to him, he showed me a crumpled letter he carried in his wallet—a thank-you letter from Princess Diana,” says Michael’s friend Uri Geller, who introduced MJ to Bashir and calls it “my devastating mistake.”

Michael granted approval to Bashir, who at the time was working for ITV, the UK’s biggest network, to visit him at Neverland, as well as at his posh suite in Las Vegas. Filming began in late 2002 and lasted through January 14, 2003.
Living with Michael Jackson
came out in February, almost exactly ten years after Michael’s big Oprah interview. For much of the first hour of the episode, which drew fifteen million viewers when it first aired on British television, Michael attempted to seduce the camera and charm the interviewer, as he’d done repeatedly since he was a kid. He told the old stories, like the one about yearning to play with the kids in the park across the street from his Jackson 5 studio, and the one about how his musical inspiration arrived as a gift
from God. Early in the episode, Bashir dutifully played the wide-eyed journalist, cowed by Neverland, gleefully racing Michael in a go-kart.

Slowly, almost undetectably, Bashir’s tone shifted from bemusement to scolding incredulity. “You never want to grow up?” he asked. “No,” Michael said. “I am Peter Pan.” Bashir corrected him: “You’re Michael Jackson.” At this point it was clear, to both Michael and the audience, that this interviewer wasn’t empathetic Oprah. “I’m Peter Pan at heart,” Michael clarified. Over time, as Bashir’s tone continued to change, Michael’s people began to piece together what the interviewer was doing. At one point, driving with MJ in Berlin, Dieter Wiesner, his manager, came to believe Bashir was asking
“really, really bad questions,” and put his hand over the camera to stop the interview.