In early 2008, Michael Jackson was subjected to the most invasive and thorough examination of his finances that had ever been performed, courtesy of Washington, D.C.–based accounting firm Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio and Associates. The good news was that Michael had credibly claimed a net worth of $236.6 million. The bad news was that only $668,215 of that wealth was liquid. Thompson, Cobb calculated that Jackson owned $567 million in assets, including $33 million in equity on Neverland Ranch, his $390 million share of the 750,000-song Sony/ATV catalog, and $20 million worth of cars, antiques, and collectibles, but that his total debts amounted to $331 million. Given his refusal to surrender his ownership of the song catalog, the only alternatives were to borrow more money or file for bankruptcy.
In the short term, London-based Barclays Bank saved him from the latter fate by assuming more than $300 million in Jackson debt held by Fortress Investments in a new loan secured by the Sony/ATV catalog. Additionally, HSBC bank and a hedge fund called Plainfield Asset Management were loaning Michael $70 million against MiJac Music, the company through which he controlled the rights to his own songs, as well as those of Sly and the Family Stone and others he had purchased before buying the Beatles catalog. The loan came with a 16 percent interest rate on terms that allowed him to defer payments for more than a year. None of that money would go into Jackson’s pocket, though. Much of it had been used to settle thirteen outstanding lawsuits (not including Sheikh Abdullah’s), among them the cases involving Marc Schaffel and Dieter Wiesner. In addition, Michael had agreed to pay John Branca $15 million to buy out the attorney’s share of the ATV catalog (Branca had already earned an estimated $20 million from the ATV deal) and to sever their relationship. What remained, plus all dividends, profits, and payments from the two song catalogs, would be used to service Michael’s debts. Sony had agreed to guarantee all of the loans through September 2011 in exchange for the right to purchase half of Jackson’s share in the ATV catalog for just under $200 million and Jackson’s agreement that the company could spend up to $400 million to purchase the 125,000-song Famous Music LLC catalog, which included rights that ranged from the Footloose theme song to Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” What Michael would receive in exchange was the guarantee of a cash distribution of $11 million per year through 2011.
Among the obvious problems he was left with was that living on $11 million a year wouldn’t work for Michael Jackson, not when his “personal expenses” were at least $8 million per annum and dozens of legal matters remained pending. Furthermore, he would have to discover a major new stream of income before September 2011 to avoid losing everything. On top of that, Fortress Investments still held the note on Neverland Ranch and intended to wring every penny from him that it could.
Still, encouraging signs were appearing in Michael’s life. Most significant was the surprisingly successful release of Thriller 25. Sony had waited until November 30, 2007, to announce the release, timed to the exact date that the original version of Thriller had appeared in record stores a quarter century earlier. Thriller 25 began showing up on shelves only a little more than two months later, in early February 2008, and Sony knew within days that it had struck at least a minor pocket of gold. The first week’s domestic sales totaled 165,805 units, putting Thriller 25 in the #1 spot onBillboard’s top pop catalog chart. If eligible, the album would have entered Billboard’s top 200 in the #2 spot. It was selling even better overseas. Thriller 25 was eligible for full placement on foreign charts and within a week was #1 in France and Belgium; #2 in Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland; #3 in the UK and Denmark; #4 in Spain; #5 in Spain, Austria, and Ireland; and #6 in Italy and the Czech Republic. Sensing what it had, Sony committed to a level of promotion for Thriller 25 that few of the company’s original releases received, making agreements in the weeks before the album went into distribution for midnight showings of John Landis’s Thriller video at Odeon cinemas throughout the UK, followed by a forty-episode “ThrillerCast” Internet podcast, a “Thrillicious” Sobe Life Water campaign that would kick off at halftime of the Super Bowl, and the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award to Michael at the NRJ Awards in Cannes, among numerous other PR and advertising events. The largest retail music chain in Britain, HMV, planned to host an event featuring twenty-five Michael Jackson impersonators, plus the “Thriller LIVE” dancers on the day Thriller 25 CDs and vinyl records began appearing in its stores. Even the critics were being kind, especially to the remixes of “The Girl Is Mine 2008” (by will.i.am) and Akon’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ 2008.” Rolling Stone was so impressed that it gave Thriller 25 five stars, compared to four for the original version.
Michael’s spirits were lifted to the point that he began to show real commitment to the long-promised “comeback album” he was recording at Studio X. Reports from those who were spending time in the studio with him verged on the ecstatic. “Michael Jackson is working day and night on this great, great record,” will.i.am told the audience at the Cannes MIDEM conference. “I heard and seen him in the studio and he is creating a masterpiece . . . Before the year is over Michael Jackson will be back on top of the charts.”
Reports that release of the comeback album was imminent had been appearing for months in the media. An HMV store in England had actually advertised the release date as November 19, 2007, under the title 7even. There would be fourteen songs on the album, the promotional materials said, divided by half into an A side and a B side with Michael appearing on the cover shaped into the figure of a seven. That date passed without any sign of the record, of course, and one new scheduled release after another was postponed without explanation. The public was teased with leaks that came in tiny drips spaced far apart. Michael harmonizing with The Fugees’ Pras on “No Friend of Mine” was posted briefly on the producer Tempramental’s MySpace page and stirred a rhapsodic response from fans stunned by how smooth and powerful Jackson sounded. “Man, he still sings like a bird,” will.i.am told MTV. The cut quickly disappeared. Michael’s collaboration with Akon on a song called “Hold My Hand” was leaked to YouTube, and again fans went wild, but the cut was pulled from the Internet thirty-six hours later. Chris Brown, 50 Cent, Syience, and Carlos Santana all said they were hoping to work with Michael.
By the time Michael left the Palms at the end of February 2008 he had recorded more than a hundred new songs but still had not selected the ones he would include on his comeback album. Michael was nervous about the public reception and kept putting off the release. “It’s tough when all eyes are on him and there is so much young competition out there,” Ne-Yo explained to Rolling Stone. Michael had told him “this album needs to be better than Thriller,” Ne-Yo added. Who could live up to that standard? “He needs killer melodies,” Ne-Yo said. “He’ll call me back and say, ‘I really like song number three. Song number four, the hook could be stronger. Song number one, change the first verse. Okay, bye.’ Click. And then I redo them and he’s like, ‘Okay, they’re perfect. Send me more.’ So I don’t know what he’s keeping and what he’s getting rid of.”
Michael refused to talk about the album with Rolling Stone or anyone else. All he would say even to those who were working with him was that whatever he came out with next had to be the best work he had ever done. Otherwise, the world would ask why he had even bothered.
When Michael left the Palms at the end of February in 2008, it was for the most modest residence he had called his own in many years. Not that the hacienda-style home at 2710 Palomino Lane was anything less than palatial, 20,638 square feet of luxurious living space that included a spectacular Spanish Chapel, set among gardens and trails that wound through a nearly two-acre lot set among the equestrian properties of an established community situated just west of downtown Las Vegas. Michael and his children wouldn’t be living in the main house, though. Instead he had rented the property’s 3,982 square foot guesthouse, agreeing to move in without having the premises painted or repaired. The monthly rent was $7,000, less than a tenth of what it had cost Michael to live in the Monte Cristo house; he paid $49,000 cash to cover the full six months of the lease agreement, including the security deposit, and for that price was able to negotiate use of the main house’s 8,500 square foot basement for the storage of his memorabilia and art collections. The kids were happy that the property included a large swimming pool for them to splash around in and that the horse trails provided plenty of room for them to run with their new puppy, Kenya. There was room for a small security trailer just inside the front gates and neighbors likely would imagine that the Jacksons were living in the mansion, not the the guest quarters. Rancho Circle Shopping Center was within walking distance.
Michael was still hoping to buy the Sultan of Brunei’s estate at 99 Spanish Gate Drive. Even Ron Burkle, though, had not been able to find a bank that would loan Jackson the money to buy the place. The 37,000-square-foot main house that the sultan’s wastrel younger brother, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, had commissioned nearly a decade earlier remained unfinished and uninhabitable, needing “a million or so just to get the house up to par to a move-in condition,” as one Las Vegas real estate broker described it. Underwriting a mortgage on the property—even at the reduced price of $60 million—made no sense to anyone who looked at Michael Jackson’s finances. Michael grew increasingly despondent, especially when Sony informed him it would be withholding his royalties from Thriller 25 in order to cover what it was costing the company to service his share of the song catalog.
The person who signed the lease on the Palomino property was Michael Amir Williams, a Nation of Islam foot soldier who had taken responsibility for the fleet of automobiles that Jackson had assembled in Las Vegas. At a moment when Jackson was vulnerable, Louis Farrakhan had dispatched a small contingent of NOI members to Las Vegas. One of Farrakhan’s own sons was installed in the Palomino guest house as the family’s cook and Williams (whom Jackson and his children addressed as “Brother Michael”) began identifying himself to other people not as the star’s driver but as “Mr. Jackson’s executive assistant.”
“The Muslims made Michael nervous, and he got tired of having them around pretty quickly,” said one of the several attorneys representing Jackson during 2008. “But he didn’t want to offend Farrakhan, so he felt sort of stuck with them. And then I guess he started to trust Brother Michael.”
Only after settling in at Palomino Lane did Michael finally acknowledge the looming catastrophe of a foreclosure on Neverland Ranch. Fortress Investments had given him until March 19, 2008, to ante up $24,525,906.61 or face an auction that day on the steps of the Santa Barbara County courthouse at which the ranch and everything on it would be sold to the highest bidder. One week before the scheduled sale, Londell McMillan told the Associated Press that Michael had worked out a “confidential” agreement with Fortress that would allow him to retain ownership of Neverland. The clock was still ticking, though, according to Fortress, which had given Michael just a few more weeks to find either a new lender or a buyer for the ranch. The timing was just right for another would-be white knight to gallop onto the scene, and an interesting candidate showed up at precisely the right moment, almost as if he had answered a cue.
Dr. Tohme R. Tohme was a cryptic character who complained constantly that his penchant for privacy was misread by a media that described him alternately as “mysterious” or “shadowy.” Various news reports identified Tohme as a Saudi Arabian billionaire who had trained to be an orthopedic surgeon before becoming what the Associated Press would call “a financier with a murky past.” In fact, Tohme was a Lebanese-American raconteur-slash-real estate investor whose principal place of business was the bar of the Hotel Bel-Air. There, Tohme exercised his extraordinary gift for facilitation, brokering assorted deals that drew alternately on sources of Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian money, as well as an impressive range of international contacts. Tohme had grown wealthy—or at least apparently wealthy—in the thirty-plus years since arriving in America by diversifying into almost every conceivable kind of business enterprise, working nearly always as a highly paid middleman.
“I have a relationship all over the world. I can find money,” he modestly explained. “Doc,” as he preferred to be known among his American friends, was a compact but broad-shouldered man in his late fifties whose heavy, broken features and rolling gait gave him the look of someone who had spent years boxing in the welterweight division. He wore custom-made suits but spiced his conversations with growls, barks, snarls, and singularly colorful curses. Many people in Los Angeles, when first introduced to Tohme, were intimidated by his gruff manner. He did not mind letting a person he had just met know he was tired of explaining that having the same first and last names was not uncommon among Middle Easterners, and yet could charm just about anyone on the rare occasion he chose to do so. As he told it, many wealthy Arabs and Asians, including members of various royal families, counted him among their friends. So did Jermaine Jackson, who saw an opportunity in his brother’s distress.
He and Jermaine had been introduced by mutual acquaintances in the Los Angeles Muslim community, said Tohme, who was “intrigued but not impressed” when his new friend asked him, in April 2008, to meet with his brother Michael in Las Vegas. “Jermaine came to my house to see me and he said, ‘Michael needs your help. His house is going on the auction block. You gotta help him save it,’” Tohme recalled. “I said, ‘I gotta look what it is, then we’ll see.’” In other words, he and Jermaine made some sort of deal.
Tohme traveled to Las Vegas the next day in a white Rolls-Royce driven by Jermaine. A story would spread later that Tohme provided the Rolls to Jermaine to secure a meeting with his brother. Both men deny this. What Tohme recalled best about their arrival in Las Vegas was being startled by the circumstances in which he found the world’s most successful recording artist. “I couldn’t believe that this is Michael Jackson living in an environment like this and in a house like this,” he recalled. “It was a pretty average place and it really needed to be cleaned and painted. It was messy. He was a single guy with three kids and there was a dog and he didn’t have any housekeeper.” Grace Rwaramba had been ordered out of Michael’s life yet again shortly before they left the Palms, so “he was taking care of the kids and the dog and the place all by himself,” Tohme recalled. “He had hurt his right foot and he couldn’t move around too well, so stuff was piling up. He was sitting in a wheelchair when Jermaine introduced us, wearing pajama bottoms and two different-colored slippers.”
Amid the squalor and disarray of the Palomino house, Michael’s demeanor was plaintive. He seemed desperately lonely. According to the security guards, they had been the only guests, besides the nanny and the children’s teacher, at Paris’s tenth birthday party on April 3, and for them it had been a sad affair. Grace would say later that she had been forced to pay for the balloons they used for decoration with her own credit card and that the people she had brought in to clean the house for the party would not come back because they were never paid. “I am thinking, ‘This is Michael Jackson! This is the King of Pop!’” Tohme recalled. “And he was so humble. I looked in his eye and I could tell he was sad. Not embarrassed, but sad. A combination of many things. I was really shocked about how he was living and I wasn’t shy about it. I told him, ‘This is not a place for you, Michael. What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘Everybody abandoned me. I don’t have anybody. I have no friends. They all turned their backs on me.’ He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself, though. It didn’t sound like that at all.
“Michael told me, ‘Please, please help me save Neverland.’ He didn’t want to go through the embarrassment of foreclosure, and he knew that the media hated him and would make a joke of him.”
Tohme agreed to do what he could, shook hands, and left with Jermaine. They were driving back to LA, Tohme recalled, when his cell phone rang: “It was Michael. He said, ‘I want you to come back and talk with me.’ So we went back and he said to me, ‘I have no one. I want you to be with me.’”
Tohme returned to LA again and began calling every big real estate investor he knew. One after another turned him down. “I got a couple of friends of mine to visit Neverland with me,” he recalled, “but they said, ‘No, I don’t wanna do it. It’s full of problems.’”
Finally, Tohme tried his American friend Thomas Barrack, a billionaire real estate investor for whom he had arranged financing on a previous deal. Barrack, who as a young man had served as a deputy undersecretary in Ronald Reagan’s Interior Department, boasted a reputation as a prescient fellow. Donald Trump conceded that no one, including himself, had a better eye for the value of a property than Tom Barrack. Back in 2005, Barrack had told Fortune magazine that he was just about ready to get out of the U.S. real estate market because, “There’s too much money chasing too few deals, with too much debt and too few brains.” In 1991, Barrack founded the private equity firm Colony Capital, a company that had done more than $35 billion in transactions in the years since. “Tom was in Europe when I called,” Tohme remembered, “and when I asked if he would like to buy the note on Neverland, he said no. When he came back to LA I went to see him and said, ‘Come on, man, do it.’ And he said no, he doesn’t wanna be involved with Michael Jackson. So I said, ‘Why don’t I introduce you to Michael, so you can see what kind of human being he is.’ Because, see, I know already that Michael still has that magic in him. You sit with him and he will take you over. He had that flair. So I convinced Tom to go to Las Vegas and meet Michael. And after just a few minutes I can see that Tom Barrack is becoming very interested in Michael Jackson.”
He had been charmed by Michael’s wit and surprised by his focus, Barrack would admit later. The polo-playing Barrack, whose own sprawling ranch in Santa Barbara County bordered Neverland on one side and Ronald Reagan’s Western White House on the other, shared a laugh with Jackson about being next-door neighbors, given that their houses were eleven miles apart. His sons had attended a number of the “field day” events that Michael staged at Neverland, Barrack said, and came back each time raving about what a great time they’d had. Ten minutes into their meeting, the odd couple found that they liked each other. Ten minutes after that, Barrack agreed to see if he could swing a deal to rescue Neverland from the clutches of Fortress Investments, which had rescheduled its auction of the ranch for May 2008.
“Tom knows it’s a fabulous property,” Tohme observed. “He’s not a stupid guy. But it was a long, hard negotiation, because there was one issue we got stuck on. Under the Fortress loan, whoever held the note on Neverland owned everything on the property: all of Michael’s art, his books, his clothes—even his animals and his rides, whatever there is. I told Tom, ‘This is not right. I gotta take everything out.’ So we had a lot of back and forth, attorneys and stuff like that, but finally they agreed we can remove Michael’s personal things.”
In May, just days before Neverland was to be sold to the highest bidder, Colony Capital announced that Tom Barrack had personally written a check for $22.5 million to “save” Neverland as part of a deal the company had made with Michael Jackson. Under the terms of the agreement, Colony and Barrack agreed to defer Jackson’s loan payments (for more money later) and to finance the refurbishment of the ranch with an eye toward selling it at a substantial profit. Tohme had cut himself in for a finder’s fee. It was a Tom Barrack kind of deal. He had never been the sort of investor who wanted to “chase yield” by buying properties with secure tenants and predictable returns, preferring to seek out undervalued assets that could be rehabilitated and sold for a big profit. That was exactly how he’d made a killing on London’s Savoy Hotel. Neverland Ranch, he imagined, might sell for as much as $50 million if it was marketed properly. Aside from being relieved of payment obligations, Michael was guaranteed to receive whatever profits were left after Colony deducted its investment in the note, plus accrued interest, management, upkeep expenses, and a 12 percent “success fee.” If Barrack was right about the eventual sale price, Jackson stood to come away with as much as $20 million.
Michael had been wrestling with the problem of what to do with Neverland ever since arriving in Bahrain in the summer of 2005. During his long stay in Ireland, he had invited Bob Sillerman, the Wall Street deal maker who acquired Elvis Presley Enterprises, to visit him at Grouse Lodge to discuss ways they might make the ranch over into a fan destination. One tentative plan after another fell through, and it had looked almost certain that Fortress would sell the place out from under him before Barrack showed up in Las Vegas.
For Michael Jackson, Tohme Tohme became “my partner Dr. Tohme” after the Colony deal was sealed. “Michael was very happy,” Tohme recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to be in charge of everything.’ He said, ‘You and I, we are gonna make billions, not hundreds of millions.’ He said, ‘I trust you like nobody else, and I’m gonna give you a free hand to do whatever you want.’”
While the deal with Barrack seemed to have settled Michael’s Neverland problem, it had barely chipped the giant boulder of debt that was going to crush Michael if he didn’t begin to break it down. After reading through the refinancing agreement Michael had signed six months earlier, Tohme realized he would have to convince his prospective client that the day of reckoning would be upon him before he knew it. “I could see that this deal had put Michael in a position of losing the Beatles catalog and his own MiJac catalog—basically everything he had,” Tohme recalled. “He only had until 2011 to fix his finances, or this will definitely happen. I told Michael, ‘We need to eliminate as much of your debt as possible.’” The only way Tohme could see that happening, though, was to persuade Michael to mount another major tour. “But he doesn’t want it,” Tohme recalled. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to sing. I don’t want to perform. All I want to do is make movies and do projects.’”
Filmmaking had become a fixation for Michael in the years following the HIStory tour. He came much closer to realizing the dream of owning his own movie studio than most people knew, according to Dieter Wiesner: “It was more than a dream, it was a plan.” The acquisition of Marvel Comics was at the core of that plan and Michael had tried for three years to pull it off. Back in 1999, he met with the primary creator of Marvel’s best-known characters, Stan Lee, to ask if they could be partners. “Michael wanted to make a Spider-Man movie long before there was a Spider-Man movie,” Wiesner explained, “and he told Stan Lee about that.” Lee, who was on the outs with Marvel at the time, has confirmed that such a conversation took place.
“Michael was thinking about playing Spider-Man himself,” Wiesner continued. “He asked Stan Lee to help him run Marvel if Michael was able to buy the company, and Lee said he would. I really believed it would happen and it almost did.” Michael actually retained the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perrella to negotiate a sale with Marvel’s then-owner, Ike Perlmutter. “Michael thought this would be like his second buying of the Beatles catalog,” Wiesner recalled. “It was that big for him.” Reports at the time suggested the deal had fallen through because Perlmutter was demanding a billion dollars for the company. “That’s not true,” Wiesner said. “In 2002, Michael was willing to pay $1.4 billion for Marvel, which was the asking price then.” The financing fell apart, though, Wiesner said, when Sony refused to let Jackson use the ATV catalog as collateral: “Sony was constantly blocking his projects. They wanted to have complete control over him. And today Marvel is worth $4 billion. The Spider-Man movies have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Michael was right.”
As an alternative, Wiesner and Jackson had negotiated a deal with Cinegroupe, the famed animation studio in Montreal, that would have given Michael a 51 percent share of the company and creative control of its projects. Michael possessed “plane hangars full of footage” from the film and video shoots he had commissioned over the years, Wiesner explained, “and he said, ‘Dieter, with the new technology we can make all of this—doesn’t matter if it’s Thriller tour stuff or whatever I have—we can make this completely new for the new generation. We can put everything together in a new light.’”
Michael was initially encouraged by friends that included Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, according to Wiesner, who promised to go in as partners with him on several film projects but never followed through: “He said they had taken his ideas, but didn’t want him. He was always talking about this, about Spielberg especially. He was very hurt and angry with Spielberg. He said they promised him, Spielberg and Disney, but then they kept him out.”
Michael had never really given up on his dream of becoming a movie star. His love of role play had actually triggered his separation from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A pair of elders were on the set of the “Smooth Criminal” video Michael had shot in 1987, shortly before the song was released as the seventh single from Bad, and had shaken their heads in disapproval as they watched Michael revel in the scene in which he had mowed down a battalion of alien invaders with a machine gun. Michael arrived late to the set the next day, his makeup artist Karen Faye would remember, and was obviously distraught. When she asked what was wrong, Faye recalled, Michael’s eyes filled with tears. “Mother called last night,” Michael answered, sobbing as he spoke. “The church called her and told her that I held and fired a gun yesterday. They ordered that I have to make a decision. I must leave the church or leave the entertainment industry.” His mother “felt horrible,” Michael choked out: “She told me it was up to me. She said she would stand by me with whatever I decided.” So here he was, back on the set, Faye observed. “Yes,” Michael told her, and prepared to shoot the day’s scenes.
When Phantom of the Opera first opened on Broadway in New York, he had showed up backstage night after night to talk to Andrew Lloyd Webber about playing the lead part in a feature film. “He had a connection to that lonely, tortured musician,” Webber would explain years later. Michael and Flashdance screenwriter Tom Hedley spent dozens of hours in a hotel room where the lamps were switched off and the curtains drawn, watching the 1939 black-and-white adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame over and over again as they discussed a remake in which Michael would replace Charles Laughton in the role of the hunchback. “This is awfully dark, Michael,” Hedley observed at one point. “Don’t you want to think about maybe doing something lighter?” “I like the dark,” Jackson replied. Even after those projects and others came to naught, Michael continued to take private acting lessons from Marlon Brando for years.
Michael made his most determined effort to become the screen star he believed he should be in 2000 when he learned that Warner Bros. was developing a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with director Tim Burton. Working in secret, he recorded an original soundtrack for the film at a small studio in Los Angeles. “He wanted to play Willy Wonka in the worst way,” explained Marc Schaffel. “He thought it was the perfect role for him, and he planned to use the soundtrack, basically, to bribe his way into getting the part.” Schaffel attended several meetings at Warner Bros. to discuss the idea. “The execs at Warner were intrigued and went nuts over the soundtrack, absolutely loved it,” he recalled. “But then they came back later and said, ‘You know, this may not be the perfect marriage for us. But we would one hundred percent pay anything for the soundtrack.’” Michael demanded to know why the studio wouldn’t give him a chance at the Willy Wonka role. “I think Tim Burton wanted Johnny Depp all along,” Schaffel said, “but the reason Warner Brothers gave, when I pressed them, was, ‘We can’t have this guy starring in what would be a children’s movie. As a marketable idea, it doesn’t work.’ I had to tell Michael, and he was very hurt, very upset. He said these people were ignorant, that they were still rehashing all that ’93 stuff.” Warner Bros. told Schaffel that if Michael would sell them the soundtrack he could name his price and they would find a part for him in the movie, just not the lead. “Michael said, ‘If I can’t have the Willy Wonka part, then they’re not getting the soundtrack,’ and he just basically shelved it. It was such a shame, because he had done an incredible job with that soundtrack. I’m sure it would have won him an Academy Award.”
What ultimately gave Tohme leverage to get Jackson to commit to live performance again was a realization that the key to motivating Michael Jackson was his children. “Tohme, who has a large family of his own, pointed out to Michael that his children had never seen him perform, and that he owed them the opportunity,” said Dennis Hawk, the attorney who was in the best position to observe the discussions between the two men. “Tohme also told Michael that unless he went back to work now—right now—he was in danger of having nothing to leave his kids. That got to Michael.”
Several months would pass, though, before this approach took full effect. In the meantime Michael continued to list and drift, often without enough cash on hand to pay his bodyguards or entertain his children in anything like the style to which they had become accustomed. He was spotted out in public in Las Vegas only once that entire spring, on May 16, when he took the kids to an early showing of the second installment of the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. “I can tell that part of what Michael needs is to get his oxygen back,” Tohme recalled. “He needs to remember that he is the King of Pop. Michael knows this, but he doesn’t know it. Because of the criminal trial and all the lies that were told about him, he wasn’t sure how people saw him. I wanted him to go back out in public and look good doing it. I told him, ‘Michael, no more wheelchair, no more umbrella, no more masks, no more of this two-colored slippers.’”
With Tohme’s encouragement, Michael made his most public appearance in Los Angeles in nearly five years during the last week of May 2008, flying in to attend the fiftieth birthday party of Christian Audigier, the French designer behind the Ed Hardy label. Michael was photographed dancing and smiling, wearing high-heel boots, black leather pants, and an elaborate periwinkle tunic with white lace flowers strung like bandoliers across the chest and sergeant’s stripes on the shoulders. Audigier proposed that the two of them collaborate on a clothing line, and Michael said it sounded like a good idea, but then flew back to Las Vegas to face a financial bind that was squeezing him tighter by the month.
On June 3, Jackson ate dinner with Tom Barrack in the Las Vegas Hilton’s Verona Sky Villa and confessed that he knew he’d have to go back onstage or risk losing the ATV catalog, the one asset that had propped him up for years. Barrack had ideas. Colony Capital owned the Las Vegas Hilton, the same hotel where Elvis had staged his famous 1969 comeback concerts and performed for another seven years after that. Colony also held a 75 percent stake in the Station Casinos that dominated the locals market in Las Vegas. Michael could relaunch in Vegas as a headliner at either venue, Barrack suggested, performing as often as he liked, up to 180 shows a year, and earning tens of millions in the process. Or, if he preferred, Michael could include his brothers in an extravaganza that would be staged perhaps twenty or thirty times a year and still make him at least ten million. Michael had no interest at all in the second idea, and very little in the first, but was in desperate need of a patron, and so promised Barrack that he would think about both proposals.
Michael’s recognition that going onstage again was probably his only way forward was, for Tohme, the fissure of hope that promised a breakthrough. “I was workin’ on it, and I was workin’ on him,” Tohme recalled. “Because he still wasn’t really ready to say he would do it. But he said, ‘See what you can do. Keep continuing.’ And I am telling him, ‘Michael, you have to do it. For the kids. For you. Show the world.’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’” More significantly, perhaps, Michael decided to suspend work on the “comeback album,” so that its release would be timed to whatever event he chose for his “comeback concerts.”
In July 2008, Michael certified his faith in Tohme by signing not one but two separate powers of attorney (each witnessed by a lawyer) that gave the Arab nearly absolute control over his financial and business affairs. One month later, the two men signed a service contract that named Tohme as Jackson’s manager and guaranteed him 15 percent of any deals he negotiated. “Michael understands the love I have for him,” Tohme said. “He knows I want only the best for him. Before we sign, we make an agreement: He will never interfere in any of my business decisions and I will never interfere in any of his artistic decisions.”
There was considerable overlap in those two apparently discrete areas of interest, however, as Tohme would eventually discover. In the meantime, according to Michael Amir Williams, what most impressed Michael Jackson about his new manager was Tohme’s claim of a close relationship with the royal family of Brunei. “This was the main reason Michael wanted Tohme around,” Brother Michael said. “He thought that Tohme was associated with this family and could easily get him the [Prince Jefri Bolkiah’s] Spanish Gate Drive estate.”
“Michael really, really wanted that house,” Tohme said. “Michael has vision, he wanted to make it a residence, but also a museum. All the stuff he was buying— and he was criticized in the media for it—but he wanted to have a place like Graceland that would be a monument to him while he was alive and after he died. And he knew it couldn’t be Neverland.” The Spanish Gate property had the space to accommodate even Michael Jackson’s vast collection of art and antiques, by then spread out in warehouses that stretched from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica to Las Vegas. In addition to the immense main house, the estate Prince Jefri had created for himself included a 47,000-square-foot “sporting house” that featured an Olympic-size swimming pool, assorted fitness rooms, a squash court, a racquetball court, and a disco hall, plus two 4,500-square-foot guest villas. “I did my best to make it happen for him,” Tohme explained. “I am very, very close friends with a high government official in Brunei. I called and told him, ‘We’re gonna do it like Graceland.’ I eventually got the price down to $45 million. But then I find that financing for a place like that in Las Vegas is difficult. There are lots of houses that cost that much money in Los Angeles, but not so many in Las Vegas. They will finance maybe $20 million, maybe $25 million, but no more.”
Collecting the money Michael would need to take possession of the Spanish Gate house became another carrot Tohme could use to motivate his client’s return to the stage: “I told Michael, ‘One more time. We’re gonna conquer the world. You will be back on top and you will get that house, too.’”
In the meantime, Tohme was urging Michael to return to Los Angeles while they searched for the right concert package. “I told him, ‘The action is all in LA. People don’t want to come to Las Vegas to meet with you.’ But Michael was reluctant.”
Michael’s resistance to the idea of leaving Las Vegas softened considerably after his fiftieth birthday. On August 28, dozens of British fans had showed up outside the gates of the Palomino hacienda to serenade Michael until the wee hours of the August 29. He was still glowing, despite not having slept a wink, when he did a telephone interview with Good Morning America that began before sunrise in Vegas and he was delighted to learn that millions of people had switched channels to ABC to catch some of it. “I’ll probably just have a little cake with my children and we’ll probably watch cartoons,” he answered in reply to a question about how he intended to celebrate.
Michael’s mood was shattered later that same day, though, when he received a letter that had been signed by many of his neighbors. “He called me and he was crying like a baby,” Tohme remembered. “I said, ‘Michael, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘They’ve sent me something saying they don’t want a child molester living across the street.’” What especially hurt him, Michael said, were the complaints that Wasden Elementary School was just down the street, visible from the windows of Jackson’s home, and that it did not seem fitting to have an accused sex criminal so close by. As a “concerned mother” explained to the Review-Journal, “Of all the residences he could have purchased—why one across from an elementary school? I understand he was never convicted of anything and can live wherever he wants, but . . .”
His new manager flew to Las Vegas the next day. “I told him, ‘Michael, it’s time to get the hell out of here,’” Tohme recalled. “I wanted him to come to Los Angeles. He was still not sure about that. So I said, ‘Why don’t you come to LA for a few days to meet my family, to stay with us?’ So I brought him to my house, we had lunch, he stayed there, but then he went back to Las Vegas.”
Not to the Palomino property, though. Although he continued to use the house as an enormous storage unit, Michael moved once again into the Palms, where his visits to the recording studio were both less frequent and more informal than during his previous stay. He’d roll in after noon with all three of his kids, leading Blanket by the hand, dressed in black jeans and a silk shirt, noodle at the keyboards, working on melodies and trying lyrics, then leave an hour or two later.
Back in Los Angeles, Tohme discovered an ally in his campaign to find the right “performance situation” for Michael when he took a call from Peter Lopez, one of the dozens of attorneys who had represented Michael in recent years. Like most of those who tried out for a role as “the one,” Lopez had been left with unpaid bills. “Peter knew I was now Michael’s manager,” Tohme recalled, “and he told me, ‘I’m owed money.’ He asked if I could pay him. I said, ‘At this time, there’s no money. But if you are owed I will see you get paid. Prove it to me.’ So he came to meet me at the Hotel Bel-Air. And I told him he had a chance to help me put Michael back on top. I told him, ‘Forget all the rumors. Michael is gonna go back to work. Help me find the right concert series for him.’ And I could see that he was a lot more interested in talking about that than about the money he was owed.”
Lopez was the best-known Latin entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Among his closest friends was the new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had appointed Lopez to the State Athletic Commission. Lopez was married to former Dukes of Hazzard actress Catherine Bach and his list of clients, past and present, included the Eagles, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Andrea Bocelli. But “Peter knew that nothing would compare to helping Michael Jackson make a comeback,” Tohme recalled.
Lopez first set up a meeting with Live Nation that left Tohme unimpressed. “I don’t like those guys,” he recalled telling Lopez, who then suggested AEG. Tohme claimed to be unaware of Michael’s previous meeting with Randy Phillips, who had never entirely given up on signing Michael to an AEG Live contract. What really moved things along was a phone conversation between a pair of billionaires, Barrack and Anschutz. Barrack told Anschutz how impressed he’d been when he met Michael Jackson in person. Anschutz pointed out that if Michael Jackson’s public stature was elevated and his career reinvigorated, the value of Neverland Ranch could easily double. Beyond that, a series of shows at AEG’s O2 could easily lead to some sort of resident performer arrangement in Las Vegas that might be staged at one of the Colony’s hotels or casinos. Immediately after Anschutz got off the phone with Barrack, he called Randy Phillips and asked him to meet with the Colony Capital CEO to talk about what it would take to secure a commitment from Michael Jackson to perform a series of concerts at the O2 in London. Barrack passed Phillips on to Tohme, who suggested that the AEG Live chief meet him for a drink at the Hotel Bel-Air.
“So we sat, we talked, I liked him,” Tohme recalled. “He will do anything to have Michael Jackson. He said that. I said, ‘We need advances, we need this, we need that. Let me think about it and talk to Michael.” Phillips’s stock got a boost when Dennis Hawk, the attorney who had been brought in to assist Tohme in managing Michael’s affairs, told Jackson and Tohme that Phillips was “a classy guy” who could be trusted to help put on a show that would be everything they hoped for.
Within days, a summit with Phillips and Anschutz had been scheduled to take place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, where the AEG principal owned a villa. “Michael and I talked a lot about it ahead of time,” Tohme recalled, “and I told him, ‘You gotta look sharp, show them who they’re dealing with.’” AEG Live’s “co-CEO” Paul Gongaware was advising his associates to take exactly the opposite approach to the meeting: Wear casual attire, he suggested to those who would be attending, “as MJ is distrustful of people in suits.” Also, they should be prepared to talk some “fluff” with “Mikey,” Gongaware added. Tohme, Hawk, and Lopez were already seated on one side of a conference table across from Anschutz, Phillips, Gongaware, and AEG corporate president Tim Leiweke when Michael arrived with Blanket. “He looked superb,” Tohme remembered. “He was dressed in his best and he was in great shape, had great color, his expression was happy, and his eyes were clear. I could tell from the first second they were very impressed by him.”
Phillips would admit later to being startled by how changed Jackson was from the distracted, uninterested star he had encountered at their previous meeting months earlier. Michael now seemed “very laser focused,” Phillips said, intent not only on looking into the eyes of Philip Anschutz but also on working out some sort of deal.
Anschutz, a business titan most often described as either “reclusive” or “secretive” in the media, “seemed to me a very nice man,” Tohme said, “a very honest man, a very kind man. I could see Michael felt it, too.” They had agreed beforehand that, after some introductions and a brisk, general conversation about what he hoped to accomplish with a new live show, Michael would stand up again, shake everyone’s hands, and say good-bye. “Because this is Michael Jackson,” Tohme explained. “He doesn’t sit there for hours talking to these guys. I always want to elevate him as much as I can, make him feel he’s the King of Pop. We had already arranged for his security and his driver to be waiting right outside. As soon as he is gone, we start negotiating for a comeback concert at the O2. Michael had told me he would never do any concert in the United States.”
By the time the guests left Anschutz’s villa, they had a handshake agreement that Michael Jackson would perform a series of ten concerts at the O2 in London in the fall of 2009. Phillips and Tohme agreed on a presentation of the idea they believed would please the entertainer: “This way, Michael, fans from all over the world will be coming to you, instead of you having to go to them.”
“And Michael Jackson did like the sound of that,” Tohme recalled. “He was starting to fill his lungs again.”
Two weeks later, Michael agreed to move back to Los Angeles and live there until he left for London. Tohme arranged for Michael to have a huge suite in the rear of the Hotel Bel-Air, “away from everybody,” where the management would allow him to create a home studio, complete with a portable dance floor. Within a week of his arrival at the hotel, Michael began testing himself in sessions with a parade of musicians and dancers. He was eating regularly and sleeping better than he had in years. “It is a beautiful thing to see,” Tohme recalled. “He wants to prove to the world that he is still Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. And I am watching it happen in front of my eyes.” Tohme showed up at the hotel one day with Mina Shafiei, the finest tailor in Beverly Hills, best known for creating celebrity wedding dresses, to measure Michael for a wardrobe of silk jackets and the brocaded shirts he loved. “I want Michael to look like the biggest star in LA any time he steps out his front door,” Tohme recalled. “I want him to feel like the biggest star.”
Michael had been tremendously encouraged by the news that a compilation album called King of Pop, released on his fiftieth birthday, had charted in the top ten in every country where Sony made it available, and that the company intended to expand the King of Pop concept into a series of records. Spreading rumors of a Michael Jackson comeback also resulted in a slew of interview requests. Tohme refused to approve any publications that would not guarantee, in writing, that his client be identified on first reference as “Michael Jackson, the King of Pop.” The number of musicians, producers, and songwriters calling to say they’d love to arrange a visit at the Hotel Bel-Air was doubling by the week.
“Michael became very happy,” Tohme recalled. “He is working out every day, dancing, he looks fantastic, smiling all the time, always very sharp and clear. The wheelchair is gone, the umbrella and the two-colored slippers are gone. There are no drugs, no problems with sleeping. I know because I was there all the time. I was seeing him two, three times a day. We’d talk on the phone five, six times a day. I can see and hear him becoming better by the week.”
Tohme appeared to be delivering in his role as Jackson’s business manager, closing one deal after another. A “Michael Jackson Dance” application for MySpace and Facebook released three days before Michael’s birthday had turned into a big seller online. In September, the German teen publication Bravo launched its Legends series with a special issue dedicated entirely to Michael Jackson. That same month, Hot Toys announced a deal for a new Michael Jackson action figure that would be released in Japan during the coming Christmas season. Four weeks later, the same company scheduled the worldwide release of a Michael Jackson Cosbaby line, seven small figurines that featured the star in various incarnations that ran the gamut from his Motown 25 “Billie Jean” performance to the persona he had created for the HIStory tour. Tohme had also compelled Sony to pay Jackson $12 million in royalties from the worldwide sales of Thriller 25. “They really don’t have a right to hold that money for servicing the catalog; they have to turn it over,” Tohme explained. “Sony was not used to having someone representing Michael be so forceful with them, to threaten an audit or a lawsuit. But I don’t care about my relationship with Sony. I don’t care about my relationship with AEG. All I care about is my relationship with Michael Jackson. And that is what he needed.” Jackson instructed his manager to hold on to everything that was left from that $12 million after-debt payments in what the two of them called “The Lockbox,” a fund Michael would use to buy the Bolkiah Spanish Gate estate when the London shows were finished. The entertainer’s new manager had already told AEG that a condition of any agreement they signed was that a certain sum (eventually $15 million was agreed upon) must be paid as an advance before Jackson began performing in concert, so that he would be certain of returning to the United States with enough money to complete the work on the abandoned Bolkiah’s Las Vegas mansion.
Tohme understood by then that the promise of a new home that would replace Neverland motivated Michael more than anything else that had been offered to him. “He talked about it constantly, more than making a comeback or anything else,” Tohme recalled. “It was his goal, his reward, and he was determined to reach it.” Between now and the completion of the London shows, Michael told Tohme in the early autumn of 2008, he wanted every penny that came in from outside the AEG deal to go into the Lockbox with the Thriller 25 royalties. “He said to keep it a secret,” Tohme recalled. “He doesn’t want anyone to know about it or touch it. He doesn’t want to touch it himself. And especially he doesn’t want his family to touch it. He made me promise they would never know about the Thriller 25 money. He wanted no contact with his family, whatsoever. We were changing his phone number every two weeks so that they wouldn’t be able to get it. He said they could have my number, they could contact him through me. And he was very kind. He said, ‘Help them.’ When one of his brothers calls and needs money, he says, ‘Give it to him.’ And he would always be generous to his mom. He loved his mother and trusted only her, no one else in the family. But even her he didn’t want to have his phone number, because he said the others would use her to get things from him.”
The family had picked up on the increase in the buzz around Michael, though, and in late October Tohme had felt obliged to issue a statement from Michael about the rumor that Jackson was about to embark with his brothers on a Jackson 5 reunion tour: “My brothers and sisters have my full love and support, and we’ve certainly shared many great experiences, but at this time I have no plans to record or tour with them. I am now in the studio developing new and exciting projects that I look forward to sharing with my fans in concert soon.”
By November, the O2 negotiations were advancing rapidly, Randy Phillips recalled, and Michael seemed more enthusiastic by the week about resurrecting his career. During a meeting with Michael at the Hotel Bel-Air, Phillips recalled, “I asked him straight off, ‘Why say yes to the tour now? Is it the money?’” Michael replied that cleaning up his finances was part of it, but the single biggest reason was that his children were finally old enough now to see him perform and understand why people chased him on the street. And he wanted people to start talking about his work again instead of his “lifestyle.” In that meeting, Phillips for the first time sensed that Michael Jackson still harbored grand ambitions. He described the movies he wanted to make, spoke about the comeback album he would release in tandem with the O2 concerts, talked about how much he wanted to settle down again, about finding a new home, some place he loved enough to let go of Neverland.
Still, all of the people involved in working out the details of the contract for the London shows knew they were walking on eggshells. “Everybody said two things about him,” Tom Barrack would tell Fortune magazine. “Firstly, if Michael Jackson came back it would be the greatest thing in music history. And secondly, it would never happen.”
“People told me I was crazy, that I would get my heart broken,” Randy Phillips admitted to Rolling Stone. “But I just believed in him. How many times in your career do you get to touch greatness?”