Not one of the people who attended to Michael at Blackwater had been aware that cable news networks back in America were providing nightly coverage of the Schaffel v. Jackson civil trial at the Los Angeles County courthouse in Santa Monica. Michael barely seemed to have been aware of it himself. The only appearance he made in court was via the videotaped deposition that Howard King showed the California jury during Jackson’s fifth day in Ireland.
“I played some of it that first day just to buy myself time,” King recalled. “I really wasn’t prepared to go to trial, to tell you the truth, because I just didn’t believe there would ever be a trial. I thought this would be settled right up until the moment they brought the jurors in. All the accounting had been done, so it was pretty clear. Some of it was embarrassing to Marc. He wasn’t quite as pristine as we had thought, and so we were ready to settle.” King had already whittled his original demand of $3.8 million down to $1.4 million and would have taken half that to avoid a trial. “But they wouldn’t offer any money,” King remembered.
What King didn’t know was that the day before the scheduled trial date, Raymone Bain had announced a massive “restructuring” of Michael Jackson’s business relationships that involved the dismissal of his attorneys in both the United States and Bahrain, and the termination of his relationships with 2 Seas Records, Sheikh Abdullah, and Guy Holmes. Bain, who had orchestrated the entire thing, was now Jackson’s “general manager” and in that capacity had hired New York–based entertainment lawyer Londell McMillan to supervise the “turnaround” of Michael’s affairs. McMillan, whose other clients included Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Spike Lee, would be taking charge of all financial and legal matters involving Michael, effective immediately, according to Bain.
“All I knew,” King recalled, “was that Michael suddenly had this new attorney, Londell McMillan, who was running things, and that Londell was committed to being a hard-ass: ‘Michael doesn’t have any money and he’s not paying.’ Even the judge was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ The judge, God bless her, spent two solid days with us, trying to get this settled. She said, ‘Do you really want all this dirty laundry aired?’ And Londell’s answer was yes. What was obvious was that here was another new advisor who felt he had to prove to Michael how important he was. And prove it by showing how tough he could be with Michael’s money and reputation. I got used to seeing it in their eyes, the next in the long line of people who think they are going to be Michael’s savior and his advisor for the rest of his career. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, right.’ But I have to deal with it so off to trial we go. I was shocked, but also delighted. I mean, there was a lot of press. I was on CNN every night. It couldn’t have been better for me.”
It couldn’t have been much better for them, either, most of the reporters in the courtroom agreed: Liz Taylor insisting on a $600,000 bracelet, Marlon Brando demanding a million in cash, Celine Dion in tears, Marc Schaffel delivering his supersize fries. They had Michael only on video and in tape-recorded messages, true, but that was enough to support the “Two Jackson Personalities Emerge” headlines that appeared in newspapers across the country after the first day of the trial. Michael had whispered “meekly” that he wasn’t sure when or how Schaffel was paid, according to the wire service story that became the most widely distributed account of his deposition testimony. Yet only moments later the jury heard the tape of a message Michael had left for Schaffel in a voice that was much louder and deeper: “Marc, call Al Malnik. I do not want any ifs, ands, or buts about releasing ‘What More Can I Give?’ at this point. Do it now!”
Hearing these two very different voices “left those who listened wondering if they had any idea who Michael Jackson really is,” one TV reporter breathlessly informed her viewers. Fans, critics, and creditors alike were startled and amused by the revelation that for the past several years one of Jackson’s main sources of spending money had been earned by leasing hundreds of acres of pasture at Neverland for cattle grazing.
Schaffel himself took the stand on July 5, the day after Michael and his children left Blackwater Castle. On cross-examination, he was immediately confronted by the fact that he had backdated eighteen checks totaling $784,000 after receiving a termination letter from Jackson’s attorneys on November 21, 2001, and that he had used $54,000 of that money to make a prepayment of the rent on his home. When Schaffel was questioned about his claim that Michael owed him for the $300,000 he had delivered to a “Mr. X” in South America, he could produce neither a receipt nor a canceled check to show the jury. Schaffel claimed he had taken the money in cash from a safe in Brazil where he was keeping it and without prompting told the jury about being asked by Michael to find children in South America who could join his family. Several jurors squirmed; one shielded her eyes.
The full panel delivered a “split verdict” on July 14, 2006, awarding Schaffel $900,000 of the money he claimed to be owed and Michael $200,000 that jurors agreed had been skimmed by Schaffel. Raymone Bain and Londell McMillan fell all over themselves declaring victory. The jurors had “turned back” Schaffel’s claims against Mr. Jackson, said Bain, while McMillan declared, “It’s a new day for Michael Jackson. We were unwilling to pay one penny more than the amount Schaffel was owed, and the verdict proved us successful.”
His client had won a net judgment of $700,000 and immediately placed a lien on Neverland. King pointed out: “I guarantee you I was better paid for my time than Michael’s attorney was.”
The three jurors who spoke to the media after the verdict were unsympathetic to either the plaintiff or the defendant, saying that neither was “the most upstanding character,” as one put it. A young woman from Tarzana who was now a nursing student at Brigham Young University said she hadn’t held Schaffel’s background against him because of what she believed about Michael Jackson: “I have issues with adult entertainment, but I also have issues with child molestation.”
Jackson and his traveling party spent the last ten days of the Schaffel trial at Ballinacurra House near Kinsale, a harbor town on Ireland’s south coast. Though not a castle, Ballinacurra was an even more gorgeous property than Blackwater, surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls and, beyond that, by thirty acres of woodland and lawns. The residence offered its own ballroom, formal dining for ninety-six people in its Garden Room, and twenty-two bedrooms with sleeping accommodations for as many as fifty-three guests. Michael’s group numbered only seven persons, three of them children, but he took the entire place. The entertainer spent much of his time in the African-theme bedroom he had chosen for writing songs, while his children were “in school,” then joined the kids in afternoon walks along the banks of the Whitecastle and Ballinacurra creeks. He had not left the grounds at Blackwater once during his two weeks there, and seemed similarly disinclined to venture forth from Ballinacurra. Michael sent the house’s proprietor, Des McGahan, on several runs into Cork to pick up what had for years been the staple of his diet: KFC original chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. One day, though, Michael had decided to venture into Kinsale proper, where his costume of silk pajamas and a surgical mask did little to discourage the attention of townspeople. “A furor,” McGahan described the ensuing scene. “People were all askin’ one another, ‘Didjya see Michael Jackson around town in his pajamas?’”
Other than that one mad excursion into town, Michael seemed to be seeking at Ballinacurra the same simple pleasures he had found at Blackwater. After a week or so, he and his wife began to feel sorry for the man, McGahan said: “He was lookin’ for a home. He was tryin’ = to look for normality.” Still, the most memorable moment of his famous guest’s stay for him, McGahan would recall, had come late one night when he ventured into the garden to satisfy his curiosity about why Mr. Jackson insisted that the outside lights be left on between dusk and dawn: “I popped my head through the hedge and saw him moonwalkin’ across the lawn. I thought, ‘This can’t be true. Michael Jackson is dancin’ on the grass.’”
Michael would rent a number of Irish castles and country homes during his six-month-long stay in the country. Back in the United States, though, gossip columnist Roger Friedman wrote that Jackson was “mooching” off Lord of the Dance creator Michael Flatley at the tapmaster’s CastleHyde during his summer in Ireland, and that claim would be repeated in “news” stories for the next four years. But if the entertainer and his children stayed with Flatley at all (Flatley claims they did), it was a very short visit, because by the beginning of August 2006, Michael, Grace, and the children were ensconced at the most luxurious of the properties they would occupy in Ireland: Luggala Castle in County Wicklow, on Ireland’s east coast, just south of Dublin. The six-thousand-acre estate included not only the exquisite lake Lough Tay and a beach of imported sand so white that it looked like granulated sugar against the black rocks of the Irish Sea’s shoreline, but also a two-mile-long driveway that wound up what the Irish called “Fancy Mountain” to the magnificent Gothic Revival house where the “Golden Guinness Girls” had once cavorted. Luggala rented for a reported 30,000 euros per week, which meant that Michael Jackson had paid upward of $300,000 for the eight weeks he occupied the castle. That price included use of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce but not the cost of the helicopters Jackson was using to scout out recording facilities where he could continue work on what Raymone Bain persisted in calling his “comeback album.”
In the last languid weeks of the Celtic summer, Luggala offered Prince, Paris, and Blanket a variety of outdoor adventures boasted by few other properties on the planet, but their father swiftly discovered that he couldn’t go outside himself unless he was covered head to toe in netting, because the midges swarmed to him in clouds, gorging on his blood wherever they found a patch of exposed skin. Retreating indoors, he probed the chefs, butlers, and cleaners for stories about previous guests like Mel Gibson, then asked what they would say about him when he was gone, and laughed when they answered, “Oh, nothing at all, sir.” The Rolls-Royce took Michael and the children to Wicklow town for visits to cinemas and restaurants and Michael created his largest local stir when he stopped at a store in Dun Laoghaire to buy a book of Beatles lyrics. Paris got a book about fairies.
Like everything in his life, of course, this peace was fragile. On the morning of August 29, word came that a towering brush fire had broken out at Neverland, near the amusement park. A firefighting helicopter extinguished the blaze; beyond burned ground, damage was minimal, but the Santa Barbara Fire Department was unable to say how the inferno had been set off. Michael naturally suspected arson. He pictured the ranch falling into decay, its windows shuttered, the grounds around it blackened. The news from Neverland was not an auspicious beginning to his forty-eighth birthday. If Michael had learned anything during the past few years, though, it was compartmentalization, and he said nothing about the fire to his children as they helped Grace prepare their father’s “surprise party,” or when he joined them for a trip to the Lambert Puppet Theatre in the coastal village of Monkstown, just outside Dublin.
It was Grace who finally found the ideal place for Michael to resume making music, in the Irish Midlands of County Westmeath. Viewed from the main road between Dublin and Galway, Grouse Lodge looked to be nearly as far removed from the splendor of Luggala Castle as the Jackson family dwelling back in Gary, Indiana. All that showed from the unsigned entrance just outside the village of Rosemount was a gravel driveway filled with bumps and potholes that wound through a screen of trees, then disappeared behind the stone walls of a three-hundred-year-old Georgian estate that appeared to have fallen into a sad state of neglect. It was here that Jackson would make the most serious sustained effort at producing new work that he had managed in years.
Proprietor Paddy Dunning was a renowned sound engineer whose Temple Bar studios in Dublin had served U2 and many others. Working with a family of local stonemasons, along with assorted other skilled tradesmen, Dunning and his wife Claire had spent nearly five years converting the assorted cowsheds and other outbuildings of Grouse Lodge into a unique collection of cottages assembled around a grassy courtyard filled with flowering plants. The manor house was now outfitted with two state-of-the-art studios where the slab-cut stone created acoustics that, since 2002, had delighted recording artists as diverse as REM, Manic Street Preachers, and Shirley Bassey.
During her visit to Grouse Lodge in the late summer of 2006, though, all Grace Rwaramba would tell the Dunnings was that on behalf of someone she would identify only as “an A-list pop star” she wanted to book the larger of the two studios plus a three-bedroom cottage that had once been a cowshed for at least a month and perhaps longer. They had absolutely no idea who this new lodger might be, the Dunnings would say later, until the day when a bus rolled down the gravel driveway, pulled up outside the main building, and opened its doors to release three excited kids who were followed by their shy but smiling father, Michael Jackson. The stunned couple waited for the rest of the entertainer’s entourage to emerge from the bus, but the only other passengers were Grace Rwaramba and the children’s tutor.
From the day of his arrival, Michael made it clear that he thought of himself first and foremost as a father, Paddy Dunning would recall. What had sold him on Grouse Lodge, Jackson explained, was that it offered an atmosphere that encouraged “family living.” The Dunnings and their staff were known for protecting the privacy of their guests, and Claire’s reputation for fabulous home cooking was another major draw. He wanted a place where his children could eat well and find plenty to do while he was working, said Michael, who seemed every bit as interested in the estate’s big indoor pool, archery range, billiards, and Ping-Pong tables, along with its close access to horseback riding stables and fishing platforms, as he was in the recording equipment at Grouse Lodge. He didn’t even want to go into the studio until he had set up a school for his children and organized their schedules, Paddy Dunning remembered.
During the weeks that followed, the Dunnings and their staff would say later, they witnessed none of the Wacko Jacko antics they had been reading about in newspapers for years. “We just saw a pure and utter gentleman who was an extremely great parent to his kids,” Paddy Dunning said. Even though he had no real idea of how miserable Michael had been during the past several years, Dunning couldn’t help but be touched by the joy his new guest seemed to be experiencing in Ireland. “He ate well here, and he looked healthy,” said Dunning, who saw no indication that Jackson was strung out on drugs as had been reported only recently in the English papers. Michael began taking long walks in the Westmeath countryside within days of arriving at Grouse Lodge. Dunning accompanied him at the beginning and was impressed by how fit the supposedly ill entertainer seemed: “Michael could move really quickly—I’ve never seen anyone move so quickly. He was like a ballet dancer.” Jackson was both astonished and delighted by the willingness of the local people to let him wander freely through the fields, allowing him to pass by with no more than a wave. Dunning had ordered his staff not to tell anyone that Michael Jackson was staying at Grouse Lodge, but was especially touched by the willingness of his neighbors and the shopkeepers in nearby Rosemount to join in the conspiracy of silence that surrounded the most famous visitor the area had ever seen.
Scattered rumors of Michael Jackson sightings circulated after Michael and his children ventured into the nearby villages of Moate and Kilbeggan. The Dunnings and the Grouse Lodge staff denied all knowledge. “If someone told me, ‘I’ve heard Michael Jackson is there,’ I would tell them, ‘Yeah, so is Elvis Presley,’” Dunning said.
Actually, Elvis was in the area. Dunning had purchased the dilapidated National Wax Museum in Dublin earlier that year and was in the process of rehabilitating it. Unhappy with the likeness of Presley that was among the most featured items in his collection, Dunning had ordered a new Elvis made, then carted the old wax figure back to Rosemount, where he stuck it under a tree out back of Grouse Lodge and forgot all about the thing. He would never forget the shaken expression on Michael’s face, Dunning said, when Jackson returned from one of his afternoon walks and breathlessly told him, “Paddy! I just met my father-in-law in the woods!”
After a month in the converted cowshed, Michael and his party moved into a more luxurious accommodation nearby. The Dunnings also owned Coolatore House, a neighboring estate where fifteen acres of gardens and woodlands surrounded a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian country home that the couple had restored to high standard.
Like Patrick Nordstrom before him, Dunning was at once surprised and impressed by how constantly inquisitive Jackson seemed to be. Michael read the Irish Times cover-to-cover every day and could discuss the booming economy of the “Celtic Tiger” as well as any business executive Dunning knew. He had been fascinated by the discovery that the legendary hills of Cnoc Aiste and Uisneach were each within walking distince of Coolatore House, and read extensively about the two rises, thrilled to learn that Uisneach was the traditional geographical center of Ireland, home to the “Stone of Division” that had been used to mark the nation’s original provinces.
Michael’s love of Irish music was at least equal to his fascination with the country’s history, said Dunning, who was constantly being encouraged by his famous guest to invite as many traditional performers as possible to play at Grouse Lodge. Michael was enthusiastic about performing with every one of the musicians who visited, and invited Dunning and the members of his staff to join in the jam sessions that became an almost nightly occurrence. He was utterly flabbergasted, Dunning would say later, to discover “just how incredible Michael was at playing any instrument.” He had not a clue beforehand that his celebrity lodger was an outstanding drummer, Dunning confessed, but was even more astonished by Jackson’s demonstration of his abilities as a guitarist who could play both lead and bass. It was when Michael sat down at the piano, though, Dunning recalled, that he the rest of the staff at Grouse Lodge were truly blown away. Jackson had traveled with a Casio keyboard for years, including the old beat-up one that he was using in Ireland. Before he played piano for them, Dunning and the others assumed that Michael’s keyboard was essentially a songwriting tool, something he noodled on while working out melodies. It was well known that Jackson had produced most of the early songs credited to him by first writing out the lyrics longhand, then singing the melody or humming the rhythm line into a tape recorder that he handed off to someone he paid to put it on paper. He had no formal music training and couldn’t write notes. Michael had taught himself to play keyboards, though, and for more than a decade now had been using them to work out tunes. How far he’d advanced in that time was revealed to the people at Grouse Lodge the first time he sat down to perform a medley of Beatles songs. The sing-alongs that formed around Michael’s sessions at the piano were the highlight of his stay for most of the people who worked at Grouse Lodge, even though the rest of the room regularly went silent so that everyone could listen to his solos. “You can’t overstate his singing voice,” Dunning would say later. “Pitch-perfect.”
Will.i.am, whom Jackson had chosen as his principal collaborator on the new album, agreed. “As far as [Jackson’s] vocal abilities are concerned, he’s still killing everybody,” the Black Eyed Peas front man told Rolling Stone shortly after returning from a week with Michael at Grouse Lodge in the autumn of 2006. Within a month of Jackson’s arrival in County Westmeath, a slew of high-profile collaborators were streaming toward Rosemount aboard helicopters and limousines and many more were making their appearances at Grouse Lodge via satellite hookups. “New Jack Swing King” Teddy Riley, who had worked with Michael on Dangerous, coproduced at least a couple of new Jackson songs in the Grouse Lodge studios. Shortly after Riley’s departure, his onetime protégé Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, now one of the most sought-after producers in the world, jetted into Dublin and made his way to Westmeath to talk about what he and Michael might do together. Jenkins had produced Jackson’s one hit single from Invincible, “You Rock My World,” which had garnered Michael his first Grammy nomination since 1997’s “Earth Song.” Michael was meeting with as many as a dozen other producers, feeling them out, searching for some sign of inspiration that would convince him he could deliver another Thriller. Akon, RedOne, Syience, and Giorgio Tuinfort all received either requests for transoceanic phone conferences or invitations to visit Michael in Ireland. Top hip-hop talent manager Charles “Big Chuck” Stanton not only flew to Ireland with his nephew, producer Theron “Neff U” Feemster, for a series of meetings with Michael, but also had the temerity to tell the Los Angeles Times about it afterward, assuring the newspaper that Michael was more focused than he’d been in years. “He’s ready to take over the world,” Stanton told the Times. “He’s got some hot records . . . We’re giving Michael a lot of edgy street records. He’s putting melodies to some hard party records.”
Jackson only really got down to business, though, when will.i.am arrived at Grouse Lodge. The two of them had been speaking three times a week before he flew to Ireland, will.i.am recalled: “He’d be like, ‘I need you to dig deep inside! Do something that’s unprecedented!’ He’d hum a little melody over the phone or something. Eight song sketches were conjured out of phone conversations.” Three of those sketches became finished songs during the week will.i.am spent at Grouse Lodge, though only one was tracked—a number Michael had titled “I’m Dreamin’.” They would spend a solid month together in January, Michael promised, and work out the rest of the material. Will was almost as impressed as Paddy Dunning by how Michael seemed to have taken to Irish country living. “One day I was like, ‘I’m hungry,’” he remembered. “And Michael goes, ‘Take the horse. Take the horse and pick apples. It’s wonderful. We love doing it. The horses love going apple picking.’ I’m like, ‘Allll righhht.’”
As his sense of being in a protected space grew, Michael explored farther and wider. Dunning hired a local taxi driver to drive Michael and Grace and the kids around Westmeath in a borrowed van with blacked-out windows. They made regular trips to the cinemas in the surrounding towns of Mullingar, Tullamore, and Athlone. In Rosemount, Michael could even walk into the pub unannounced, take a seat without being fussed over, and get some feeling for what normal life must be like among the locals. Upon returning to Grouse Lodge, Michael commented again and again on how incredible it was to be staying in a place where people seemed delighted to see him, but at the same time perfectly willing to let him be. He’d never experienced anything like it.
Dunning himself drove when Michael wanted to visit Dublin. “We’d pull up to a red light and Michael would look out the window, because he’d be sitting up front with me, and a person would not believe their eyes,” Dunning recalled. “They would go into semishock at the sight, not knowing what to believe—is this Michael Jackson that’s pulled up alongside me on Dame Street?” As they drove back home through the Irish countryside, the two of them sang duets, recalled Dunning, who especially enjoyed their rendition of “The Girl Is Mine.” Michael sang the Paul McCartney part, Dunning remembered, “and I did Michael Jackson.”
One of Michael’s regular stops on his trips to Dublin was the Ailesbury Clinic in Merrion Court, where he spent many hours with the clinic’s medical director, Dr. Patrick Treacy. For going on two decades, it had been Michael’s practice to cultivate relationships with cosmetic surgeons in any city or country where he spent significant time. The enormous number of procedures that had been performed on his face required constant maintenance, and the trust he invested in the physicians who did this work for him inevitably resulted in something that resembled friendship. He tried to become familiar with the doctors he sought out even before they met. In researching Patrick Treacy, Michael had been pleased to learn that the doctor was not only an advanced Botox, Dysport, and dermal filler trainer who instructed physicians worldwide, but was also renowned for his implants of permanent facial prostheses and for his skill with radiofrequency lasers. During his visits to the clinic, Michael usually made a beeline for the glass room where the high-end cosmetic creams and lotions were stored, Treacy recalled. His famous patient would fill his pockets with tiny bottles of Nicholas Perricone, Agera, and Matriskin potions that cost as much as $200 apiece. “What have you got?” the doctor remembered asking Michael one day when he arrived at the glass room just as Jackson was coming out. Michael, looking sheepish, laid out what he had collected on the counter. “Well, you certainly have good taste,” the doctor said, “but there’ll be nothing left for the Irish ladies.” Michael apologized, grinning “mischievously,” Treacy recalled, then said, “Just put them on my bill.” Of course, he didn’t think of what Michael had done as “stealing,” the doctor was quick to say, because, well, he was Michael.
Treacy traveled to Grouse Lodge almost as often as Michael came to Dublin. The two also drove together to the Crumlin Children’s Hospital, in a suburb north of the city, where Treacy was attending to a brother and sister, ages five and seven, who had been horribly burned by a gasoline bomb set off during a gang war in Limerick. Michael wouldn’t stop asking about these two children, Treacy remembered. “He continually asked me, Were they in pain? Would they be given morphine? Would they be scarred? Why could he not go in and see them?” This last question came up again and again. He refused, Treacy explained, because “it could be read totally the wrong way by seeing him go into a pediatric hospital so soon after the pedophilia case.” Michael, though, refused to take no for an answer. “Do you think I would ever harm a child?” he demanded to know, and the doctor knew they had come to a pivotal moment in their relationship. He most decidedly did not believe Michael would harm a child, said Treacy, but he still refused to let Michael come into the hospital with him.
Michael’s excursions were almost always made in the afternoons or early evenings because while his kids were “in school” he spent nearly every minute working. Only after dark would he let himself truly “play.” He recorded dozens of songs in Studio Two, where he loved the acoustics. The only disquieting note was that none of the tracks were finished. It was as if Michael wanted to start as many new projects as possible to avoid reaching the end of any of them.
By the time Michael had been in residence for a couple of months, Dunning was practically convinced that Jackson would be settling down permanently in the Irish Midlands. Michael was in contact with at least a couple of property agents who were showing him estates in Westmeath and the adjoining counties. When Dunning bought a derelict Georgian estate called Bishopstown House about a mile down the road from Grouse Lodge, his famous guest visited it with him and the two discussed in detail what sort of renovations should be done, all with an eye toward Michael settling in for at least a long visit at some future point. “He found a comfort here in Westmeath,” Dunning recalled. “I felt he didn’t want to leave.”
The idyll had to end, of course, as Michael must have known all along. The tabloid press still didn’t have a fix on him, but they were closing in. Unconfirmed reports of Michael Jackson sightings in nearby villages captured the attention of local journalists, who were especially intrigued by stories about the big-time, bling-wearing rap producers who were being ferried into Westmeath County from Dublin’s Shannon Airport. Three guards had been posted on rotation at the top of the drive at Grouse Lodge, put there to intercept unwelcome visitors, according to the Westmeath Independent, which in October 2006 took note of the “heavy security presence” in Rosemount.
Jackson was actually given some cover by the embarrassing imbroglio that flared up in the south of France during the second week of October, when assorted British tabloids and the New York Daily News published photographs that purported to be of Michael dressed as a woman out shopping with his daughter Paris on the sidewalks of Saint-Tropez. The slightly blurred images of a slender figure outfitted in high-heeled shoes, a short-sleeved silk top, skinny jeans, and a floppy women’s sun hat, while carrying a fluorescent orange handbag and holding a young girl’s hand, were accompanied by stories that breathlessly informed readers that it was the first time one of the entertainer’s children had been seen out in public without a veil. “In keeping with Jackson’s love of the eccentric,” as one of the British papers put it, “Paris was dressed almost identically to her famous father.” Within days of the shots’ worldwide publication, however, the photographer who had snapped them admitted that it might not have been Michael Jackson after all, and the public was left to ask, as it had been doing for years, “Who knows?”
Perhaps in response to the Saint-Tropez photos, or maybe because Raymone Bain and will.i.am combined to convince him that it was time to “do some publicity,” Michael agreed a few days later to allow Access Hollywood to send its correspondent Billy Bush to Grouse Lodge with a camera crew to shoot tape of the world’s most famous missing person working with will.i.am. on his new album “at a remote location in Ireland.” Michael clearly did not want Bush’s visit to turn into a full-scale interview and insisted upon answering questions as obliquely as possible while seated at a studio control panel, seemingly absorbed in mixing a song. Bush tried several times to create a conversation about Michael’s “comeback,” but gained little traction.
“Do you see something big with the music that you make again, or getting that groundswell going?” Bush asked. “Doing clubs and intimate things and getting it bigger and bigger and bigger?”
“You know, I’m not sure, on that level,” Michael said.
Fortunately for Bush, will.i.am was not so reticent. “Big!” was his reply to the question about the scale of Michael’s plans for the future: “Something needs to put a jolt back in the music industry. And the only thing that can do that is the jolt itself. The energy that sparked the imagination of the kids that are . . . me, you know, the Justin Timberlakes, we’re all products of this [man]. So the only person who can put that jolt back into that monstrosity of entertainment and music is the one who created that.”
“Are you writing new material?” Bush asked Michael.
“I’ve never stopped,” Michael answered softly, with a smile. “I’m always writing a potpourri of music, you know. It’s how it is.” He turned his head and moved away before Bush could follow up. Bush was so desperate for footage that he sought out Paddy Dunning, who told him, “Michael gets up in the morning and makes breakfast for [the kids], usually porridge and fruit.”
The most revealing moment of the Access Hollywood crew’s visit to Grouse Lodge had come during the setup that preceded Bush’s attempted interview, when Michael and the cameraman discussed how he would be lit. “Less shadow,” Michael suggested.
“Less shadow,” the cameraman repeated. “It’s more frontal. You like that?”
“I like that, but can you pump more?” Michael asked. “Like a little hotter?”
“You mean warmer?” the puzzled cameraman suggested. “Like a little hotter?” “No, brighter,” Michael told him. “Take away the shadows. I’m trying to look like I slept,” he added with a laugh, “and I need your help.”
The insomnia that plagued Michael Jackson for more than two decades had grown steadily worse since the airing of the Bashir documentary two and a half years earlier. Before discovering drugs, he had tried to put himself to sleep with bedtime stories. During the Triumph tour in 1980, he traveled with a custom-calibrated recording machine with three separate clocks that switched on in the middle of the night to resume playing whatever book on tape he was listening to at the time. He almost always awoke within two or three hours of closing his eyes. He began to use pills or injections to sleep after the Chandler affair in 1993, but built up tolerances that required higher and higher doses. Frank Cascio, who was working for Jackson full time by then, recalled collecting his employer’s stashes of Xanax, Percocet, and Valium and keeping them with him every night before Michael went to bed. “I wanted to always make sure I had them with me and not have anything in his room where he didn’t wake up and say, ‘I can’t sleep tonight,’ and not realize what he’s taking,” Cascio explained.
By the time the Chandler case was settled, Michael was going days at a time without slumber. “Lisa I truly Need This Rest I Haven’t slept litterally (sic) in 4 Days now,” Michael had written to Lisa Marie Presley in a sprawling sloppy scrawl that filled up an entire sheet of legal notebook paper at one point during their relationship, explaining his failure to communicate. “I need to Be Away from phones and Business people.”
Only after prescription drugs began to fail him as soporifics did Michael discover the one medication that gave him everything he wanted in a sleep aid. The syrupy white liquid propofol (marketed by AstraZeneca as Diprivan) is a short-acting, intravenously administered hypnotic agent better known as “milk of amnesia” among the medical professionals who use it as an anesthesia for day surgeries. Its many benefits include the fact that patients wake up (or come to) after a propofol injection in a state that is both alert and euphoric. This latter result has produced an archive of amusing anecdotes that date back to the time that the drug was still in its testing stage. Dr. Mike Roizen, the Cleveland Clinic physician who performed one of the earliest clinical studies of propofol, recalled that the first patient to give informed consent to be administered the drug was a young woman who came out of anesthesia after a knee operation, promptly grabbed her surgeon, and gave him “perhaps the most sensuous kiss I’ve ever seen in an operating room.” Similar reports emerged from other studies, but so, also, had concerns about the drug. Propofol was limited by a very narrow “therapeutic window”: a medical way of saying that taking even a little more than the recommended dosage could stop a person’s breathing. Among those who had discovered propofol as a recreational drug—somewhat like ecstasy in its effect—there had been a number of deaths, some of them classified as suicides.
Michael had begun using propofol to sleep in 1996 while on the HIStory tour. Reportedly, the drug was administered either by a Beverly Hills doctor who was traveling with Michael, or by a pair of German anesthesiologists whose inclusion in the tour was arranged by Dieter Wiesner. Wiesner insisted the latter story was not true: “There were doctors there but I did not bring them. I was completely against it.” However the doctors who gave it to him were hired, Michael came to rely on the propofol drip they fed him because it allowed him to go unconscious for hours every night no matter what his travel schedule and wake feeling refreshed each morning.
The propofol drips stopped, though, after the HIStory tour ended. Jackson again resumed the use of antianxiety medications and painkillers to get him through the night. His sleep disorder not only persisted, but was exacerbated by the bedsores he’d developed during the two-plus years between the airing of the Bashir documentary and his acquittal at the criminal trial in Santa Maria, a period when he had spent days at a stretch on his back in an immobilized drug haze.
Although he’d regularly resorted to OxyContin and Demerol while living in Bahrain, Michael’s use of synthetic opiates was more restricted during his months in Ireland than it had been at any time during the previous three years. The price he paid for the last concerted effort he ever made at weaning himself off painkillers and antianxiety medications was a steady increase in sleepless nights. And yet, according to Patrick Treacy, Michael resisted asking for Diprivan or even Demerol with more determination than he’d managed in years. “The only prescriptions I wrote him were for minor things like colds,” the doctor said.
Treacy and his colleagues at the Ailesbury Clinic did use propofol to put Michael under during an operation on his nose in 2006. Afterward, Treacy visited Michael at Coolatore House and found his patient in extreme discomfort: “He was running around the room covering his face and saying, ‘It hurts! It burns!’” Yet Michael did not ask for another dose of Diprivan, Treacy said, and even refused the doctor’s offer of other pain medications to see him through the week. Michael also did not ask for anything to treat his insomnia, according to Treacy, who claimed later that his patient had made it clear he understood the dangers of using propofol without an attending anesthesiologist. “Michael would never have done so,” the Irish doctor insisted.
Without the drugs, though, Jackson was sleeping no more than a couple of hours a night. Amid the lawsuits, the scandals, and the tabloid gossip, not to mention the urgency he felt about restoring his finances and reviving his career, it was nearly impossible to make his mind rest. On top of that, all his best ideas came to him at three in the morning, Michael said.
One of those ideas was triggered by a question Billy Bush had put to him about a “second chapter” to Thriller, given that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the album’s release would arrive in late 2007. “It’s a great thought,” Michael had said at the time. Sony agreed. After the meeting at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, the company had become quite receptive to the idea of another Michael Jackson retrospective. His criminal trial in Santa Barbara County had been bracketed by the enormous success of Number Ones in 2003 and the impressive follow-up of The Essential Michael Jackson(six million copies sold) in late 2005. Only a few weeks after will.i.am flew back to the United States, the Black Eyed Pea signed on as executive producer on a special anniversary edition of Thriller that would include remixes, duets, and perhaps a few new songs. They would title the project Thriller 25, Michael and Sony agreed, after the company agreed to release the album on its reissue label, Legacy Recordings. This decision would ease at least a little of the pressure he felt to deliver what was now being described on six continents as his “comeback album,” Michael realized, and earn him some good credit at Sony if it sold even a million copies. More important, it offered him the opportunity to show the music industry that his best work was relevant to young artists even a quarter century later. That all sounded a lot better than risking another experience like the one he had endured upon the release of Invincible.
This happy development did not change the fact that Michael was becoming more and more restive as the end of October approached. The weather was turning chill and damp. Darkness came sooner. Worst of all, Billy Bush had shredded his veil of privacy. Right after shooting the interview at Grouse Lodge, Bush stopped over in nearby Moate, where “he told the men, women, children, and dogs in the street where Jackson was,” as a reporter for Britain’s Observer described it. “Stupid man,” a sorrowful Paddy Dunning would say.
The paparazzi and tabloid reporters asking about Michael Jackson in the pubs and shops of County Westmeath multiplied steadily after that. Michael was moved to tears when he heard about a local farmer who had threatened to empty his slurry trailer on the car of a paparazzo who was trying to sneak a snapshot from a neighboring property. He knew it was only a matter of time, though, before one of the photographers succeeded. Sure enough, during the last week of October, a grainy image of Michael entering the main building at Grouse Lodge appeared in several Irish newspapers. In the days that followed, drive-by gawkers on the Dublin-Galway road stalled traffic like nothing ever seen before in Rosemount. For the first time since his arrival at Blackwater Castle back in June, Michael was implicitly criticized in the Irish press, on October 28, when one of the small Midlands newspapers published an article about his visit with the children to a Tullamore play center called Jumping Jacks. Michael Jackson had come in dressed all in black, it was reported, wearing a cowboy hat outfitted with a veil as he watched his children play with six or seven local kids. One mother complained that Mr. Jackson’s burly “minder” had asked rather sternly if another woman was taking photographs of Michael’s children; later she herself had been followed outside by the same man, who wanted to know if she was making a phone call. Even the Westmeath Independent became so desperate for Michael Jackson news that it built a story around a sighting of the star carrying a Mickey Mouse bag as he left the studio after an all-night recording session.
Word of Jackson’s stay at Grouse Lodge went worldwide after the Access Hollywood segment aired in early November. The inns and pubs of County Westmeath crawled with people who carried cameras and microphones. There were no more walks in the countryside.
Michael’s nerves were not calmed by thoughts of his impending appearance in London on November 15, at the World Music Awards ceremony, where Beyoncé was to present him with the fifth-ever Diamond Award (for selling more than 100 million albums). From the moment he accepted the invitation, Michael began to dread the event. His performance would be broadcast to one hundred and sixty countries worldwide and on top of that he was “terrified of having to meet the queen,” Patrick Treacy recalled. Jackson’s deepest fear, though, was of Fleet Street. There was no place on earth where he had been subjected to either so much adulation or so much ridicule as in London. The English tabloids couldn’t get enough of Wacko Jacko. They would all have their knives and forks out by the time he arrived, Michael knew, waiting for the feast to begin.