Chapter 22

On May 20, 2009, AEG Live announced that the debut of Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” concert series had been pushed back five days, to July 13, and that three other July dates would be rescheduled for March 2010. For thousands of people who had already purchased tickets and made travel plans, it was devastating news. Stung by the “We told you,” gibes from Roger Friedman and others, Michael lashed out as he left the Burbank Studios after one of his infrequent rehearsal appearances, saying he was angry at “them” for “booking me up to fifty shows when I only wanted to do ten.”

Marc Schaffel and Dieter Wiesner told each other they had seen this coming. “As soon as I heard fifty concerts,” Wiesner recalled, “I knew it would never happen.”

“My guess was that Michael would quit after three shows,” Schaffel said. “And I knew there was no way he would do those London concerts on the schedule they wanted. It would have taken much longer, at the very least. I think he realized he had to do it, but the less he had to perform, the better Michael liked it.”

For years, Michael had insisted (to Wiesner and Schaffel, among others) that he found it far more satisfying to work on a movie, or even a video, than to perform in concert. He was forced to do an enormous amount of work to prepare for a concert, Michael complained, “but when it’s over, it’s over.” There was nothing captured, nothing permanent, nothing you could show your children. Live performances were here and gone. Afterward, you felt like you’d wasted your energy.

In London, the tabloids reported that Jackson was still hardly ever leaving the Carolwood chateau, even when the “This Is It” dancers and musicians began their intensive, seven-days-a-week practice sessions at CenterStaging. He preferred to work from home, Michael told Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips. “I know my schedule,” he crisply informed Ortega, then added that he was still working out three times a week with Lou Ferrigno and getting in shape for the shows. Like Randy Phillips, Ortega was hearing reports that while Jackson wasn’t showing up at rehearsals, he was still making at least a couple of trips every week to see Arnold Klein. Michael would remain inside Klein’s office for up to five hours at a time. The paparazzi who had staked the place out reported that on at least a couple of occasions Michael had emerged from the Bedford building so incapacitated that his bodyguards literally had to carry him to his vehicle. British tabloids that knew Klein had been giving the entertainer injections of Demerol since the 1990s began running stories about Jackson’s drug use “spiraling out of control.”

For Phillips and AEG Live, Jackson’s health—physical as well as mental —had become the biggest issue hanging over the preparations for the O2 shows. Insurers were understandably reluctant to underwrite a policy that would cover a production headlined by a performer whose collapses and no-shows had torpedoed one extravaganza after another during the previous fifteen years. Rumors that Michael was suffering from an assortment of major medical issues had been dogging plans for the London concerts ever since the previous December. Publicly, Phillips waved away worries about his star’s health. “Making up rumors about Michael Jackson is a cottage industry,” he told a London reporter. “We were having dinner when I got a Google alert that he had a flesh-eating disease. He was sitting opposite, healthy as ever.”

What Phillips did not tell reporters was that AEG still had not found insurers for all fifty of the O2 concerts (less than thirty were covered so far) and might have to write its own policy for the rest. And the company had only obtained what insurance coverage Lloyd’s of London was willing to extend by convincing Michael to submit to a nearly five-hour battery of medical tests. The examination had been conducted by Dr. David Slavit, a New York City–based ear-nose-and-throat specialist best known for his work with opera singers, and resulted in a certificate of health stating that the doctor had found nothing more serious than a slight case of sniffles attributed to hay fever. Yes, he was aware that Mr. Jackson had cancelled past performances and tours, Slavit noted in his report, but this had been the result of “dehydration and exhaustion”—easily avoided if he received appropriate medical care. All in all, Michael Jackson was in excellent health, and more than fit enough to perform the London concerts, AEG announced shortly after receiving Slavit’s report. The company didn’t mention that the policy Lloyd’s had issued (under the pseudonym “Mark Jones”) specifically stated that, “This insurance does not cover any loss directly or indirectly arising out of, contributed to, by or resulting from . . . the illegal possession or illicit taking of drugs and their effects.” Nor did anyone at the company take public note of the fact that, on the questionnaire he completed as part of his medical examination, Michael had responded to the query, “Have you ever been treated for or had any indication of excessive use of alcohol or drugs” by circling “no.”

In order to prepare Michael physically for the O2 shows, AEG had agreed to pay for the services of a chef/nutritionist named Kai Chase who would live full-time at the Carolwood chateau. Like Lou Ferrigno before her, Chase reported that no matter how concerned others might be about his sporadic appearances at the CenterStaging show rehearsals, Michael was embracing the disciplines of health and fitness at home. He had sworn off the KFC chicken dinners he loved and was eating only healthy food during the run-up to the O2 shows, Chase said—meals like spinach salad with free range chicken for lunch and seared wild tuna for supper. He needed a diet that would help him avoid cramping up when he was performing, Michael told Chase, who was as struck as others had been that he referred to himself constantly as a dancer, but only rarely as a singer. The one meal of the day at which neither Chase nor the children saw Michael was breakfast, because the specially mixed fruit drinks and organic granola the chef prepared for him were always carried upstairs by the only member of the staff who was admitted to the master bedroom: Dr. Conrad Murray.

Of all the demands that Michael Jackson made during the negotiation of the contract for the O2 shows, his requirement that AEG pay for the services of a “personal physician” had been the one that Randy Phillips and the company attorneys resisted most vigorously. Jackson’s refusal to compromise on this point suggested that his sense of self-importance had made a comeback every bit as extraordinary as the one Randy Phillips hoped to see onstage at the O2. “Look,” Michael told Phillips, “my body is the mechanism that fuels this entire business. Just like President Obama, I need my own doctor attending to me twenty-four/seven.” Paul Gongaware remembered Jackson pointing to himself and saying, “This is the machine. You have to take care of the machine.” Frank Dileo pointed out to Phillips and Gongaware that hiring a personal physician might be a good way to separate Michael from Arnold Klein, whom all three men believed to be Jackson’s primary drug supplier. AEG agreed to pay for a private physician, even yielding to Michael’s demand that he alone be permitted to pick the MD who would live with him.

The doctor Jackson selected was Conrad Murray, a Las Vegas cardiologist whose services had first been arranged more than a year earlier by Michael Amir Williams. Brother Michael had urged his employer to hire a black physician. Supposedly, Dr. Murray had treated Jackson and his children for flu symptoms shortly after the move from Ireland. A native of Trinidad who had attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Murray was living large in a 5,268-square-foot home with a spectacular pool near the Red Rock Country Club in Vegas when he and Jackson met. He had been running Global Cardiovascular Associates out on East Flamingo Road since 2000 and had just opened the Acres Homes Cardiovascular Center in Houston, Texas. Behind that facade of success, though, Conrad Murray was something of a deadbeat.

Murray had first come to the attention of Nevada authorities back in 2002, when a child support case out of California’s Santa Clara County that followed the doctor through three states finally caught up with him in Las Vegas. By spring 2009, when he received the call inviting him to work as Michael Jackson’s physician, Murray was under siege from a phalanx of creditors. Capital One bank had won a default judgment against Murray in October 2008, and in March 2009, HICA Education Loan Corporation was awarded a $71,332 judgment against the doctor for his failing to repay student loans that dated back to his days in Nashville. Separate lawsuits filed by Citicorp Vendor Finance and Popular Leasing USA had ended with judgments against Murray totaling $363,722, and the doctor was still facing court claims lodged in Las Vegas by Digirad Imaging Solutions and Siemans Financial Services that demanded another $366,541 for unpaid debts.

The call that came out of nowhere offering him a job as Michael Jackson’s personal physician must have seemed to Murray a miracle cure for all that ailed him. Murray, though, showed no sign of that to Michael Amir Williams, who had phoned to say that Jackson “very much wanted” the doctor to be part of his London concert tour, then explained that the deal would have to be negotiated with AEG. When Paul Gongaware called, Murray represented himself as a highly prosperous medical professional who would have to be very well compensated if he was going to not only abandon a successful medical practice but also close thriving clinics in Las Vegas and Houston. He would need $5 million a year, Murray told the AEG executive. “I told him there was no way that was going to happen,” Gongaware recalled. Murray eventually agreed to work for $150,000 per month, but even then insisted to AEG attorney Kathy Jorrie that his contract would have to guarantee such payments for at least ten months, from May 2009 to March 2010. “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Jorrie told Murray, who eventually agreed to be paid on a month-to-month basis. During their negotiations Murray told her that Michael Jackson was “perfectly healthy” and in “excellent condition,” remembered Jorrie, who passed this reassuring news on to Gongaware and Phillips.

Murray himself was “giddy with excitement” once the deal was made, recalled one of his friends from Las Vegas. The doctor’s assorted creditors, like the Nevada legal authorities, would have a tough time finding him in Los Angeles, and no chance at all once he traveled with Michael to London. If the O2 shows turned into a world tour, as everyone involved hoped, Murray would be out of reach for the next couple of years. In the meantime, he would not only be making $150,000 per month, but also have plenty of free time for a personal life during the evenings when Michael was in rehearsals. Dr. Murray fancied himself as quite the ladies’ man, and almost immediately after making the move to LA became a regular at the kind of clubs where sticky-haired, hot-bodied young women flocked to a fellow who could introduce himself as Michael Jackson’s personal physician.

At least one of Jackson’s entertainment lawyers saw it as significant that Dr. Murray’s entrance into Michael’s life had coincided with Dr. Tohme’s exit. “There’s no way Murray would have gotten in the door if Tohme had still been around,” that attorney said. “Tohme would have driven Murray away the moment he met him. But Tohme had been pretty much destroyed by what Frank Dileo and Leonard Rowe and Michael’s father were able to do through Mrs. Jackson. Joe Jackson and Rowe were using Katherine Jackson to bad-mouth Tohme nonstop.”

Still, that attorney was among several people startled by a copy of a letter that arrived at his office during the middle of May 2009, sent to him by Brother Michael. Jackson’s Muslim aide phoned first, the attorney recalled, to say that Tohme Tohme had been fired as Michael’s manager and was being replaced by Frank Dileo. The letter, dated May 5, 2009, was delivered a short time later, informing its recipients that Michael Jackson had dispensed with the services of Dr. Tohme and that all future correspondence and communication should be sent through Frank Dileo. Among the several odd things about the letter was that, although it read as if written by Michael personally, Dileo had actually composed and typed it. Stranger still was that no copy had been sent to Tohme himself. When he finally saw the letter more than a year later, Tohme took one look at the signature and pronounced it a forgery. “I was never fired,” he insisted. “I continued to represent Michael. I was still handling his business. I had millions of dollars of Michael’s money. If he had fired me, don’t you think he would have asked for that money back?”

Frank Dileo, though, had a letter dated May 2, 2009, and signed (apparently) by Michael Jackson that appointed him as “one of [my] representatives and tour manager.” After an absence of more than twenty years, Dileo’s restored presence in Michael’s life was undeniable.

The pillow-bellied, gravel-voiced Dileo had achieved a soft landing in the years immediately following his 1989 dismissal as Michael Jackson’s manager. He’d used a reported $5 million severance package to purchase the forty-acre Tookaroosa Ranch near Ojai, California, where he was raising Tennessee Walking Horses. Even more satisfying, his old pals Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci had convinced Martin Scorsese to give Dileo the part of Tuddy in the film Goodfellas. Though he’d bought in as a partner in De Niro’s New York restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, Dileo’s career in the entertainment business hadn’t exactly soared in recent years. Managing people like Taylor Dayne and Laura Branigan hardly measured up to being Michael Jackson’s main man, and his Dileo Entertainment Group (formed around Frank’s purchase of a Nashville recording studio) was strictly small-time. Dileo did better for himself by taking advantage of his unique appearance (at a height of five feet, two inches, he weighed nearly three hundred pounds) and raspy voice to win minor roles in Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2. Jackson had little good to say about Dileo after dismissing him in 1988, but Frank had won his way back into Michael’s good graces during the spring of 2005, when he showed up to offer support during the criminal trial in Santa Maria. Tears had welled up in Michael’s eyes when Dileo walked into the courtroom one day and he embraced his former manager warmly and publicly. Dileo had been trading on that moment ever since, and four years later intended to take full advantage of it.

He made an ally of Randy Phillips by persuading the AEG Live president that he could handle the Jackson family and keep Michael focused on performing in London. According to Dileo, after the phone conference in which the two men were introduced by Jackson, Phillips called back to remark that “Michael seems to have a real comfort level with you.” Phillips also liked that Dileo seemed more committed than Tohme to the idea that Michael should not only complete the entire series of fifty concerts at the O2, but also be persuaded to continue with a world tour. Deep down, Dileo and Phillips agreed, Michael wanted to return in triumph to the United States before hanging it up. Together, they had the moxie to make that happen.

The attorneys who had put together the deal for the O2 shows read the writing on the wall when they learned in early May that Dileo was now working out of an office at AEG Live. “I don’t blame Randy,” one of them said. “For him and for AEG, it was all about protecting their investment. But Tohme was getting screwed in the process. He had made a fantastic deal for Michael. It was literally going to rescue his life and protect his kids and save the Sony catalog, all at once. And Tohme worked night and day on this thing—I witnessed it. But all the knives came out when people saw the potential for a huge success and big, big money. They didn’t know Tohme, and he had a funny-sounding name and a funny-sounding accent, so they all went after him. And Tohme didn’t realize that Dileo was moving him out until it was too late. Tohme’s a pretty savvy guy, but he’s not savvy in terms of the entertainment business, which is far more cutthroat than the Middle East.”

Dennis Hawk, who had been handling a double-load as Michael’s attorney since the dismissal of Peter Lopez, recalled that from the second half of May 2009, “It was like there were two parallel worlds going on at the same time. Dileo phoned me four or five times and he wanted to know about a document concerning the movie deal he was involved in. But he never said he was Michael’s manager, and he never mentioned Dr. Tohme. It was odd. It was like he had positioned himself, but he hadn’t really closed the deal. He was there, he was part of the ‘team,’ but he didn’t seem to have any formal title.”

Even with Dileo in position, though, the question of Michael Jackson’s commitment to the O2 shows continued to concern Randy Phillips and the other executives at AEG. None of them was happy to learn that on the evening of May 14, Michael had arrived with his children at the Indian restaurant Chakra in Beverly Hills to join a celebration dinner marking Joe and Katherine Jackson’s sixtieth wedding anniversary, which, strangely, was being held six months before their actual anniversary in November. Michael, the AEG execs had learned from Tohme, always became susceptible when he was trying to convince Prince, Paris, and Blanket that they belonged to a large and loving family. That evening at Chakra, surrounded by every one of his brothers and sisters plus more than a dozen of his nieces and nephews, Michael had allowed Katherine to convince him to join her the next day for a lunch meeting with Joe and Rowe at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Was this the actual reason for the celebration dinner all along? Whatever the case, when Randy Phillips and Paul Gongaware learned of the scheduled meeting, they insisted upon joining it.

On the afternoon of May 15, at a table in the Polo Lounge, Phillips and Gongaware listened glumly as Joe Jackson explained that AllGood Entertainment had agreed to schedule the “Jackson Family Reunion Concert” at the Dallas Cowboys’ football stadium on July 3, which would give Michael plenty of time to get to London and prepare for the O2 shows. Patrick Allocco was ready to guarantee the family a fee of $30 million. His brothers really needed their piece of that money, and “I do, too,” Joe told his son. Leonard Rowe pointed out that Michael would be much better paid, on an hourly basis, for that one AllGood concert than he would be for fifty shows at the O2 Arena. “Who’s paying you?” Phillips demanded of Rowe at one point during this conversation. “It’s none of your concern,” Rowe answered. Flanked by Phillips and Gongaware, Michael explained that the deal he had signed with AEG Live was an exclusive one. He couldn’t perform anywhere else until he had finished the concerts in London. With Katherine urging her son to listen, Joe spent most of an hour trying to convince Michael that, at the very least, he and Leonard should be cut in on the AEG deal. “You owe me!” Joe shouted at one point, startling people at nearby tables. Again, Michael said that what his father asked was impossible.

“But we all knew how hard it was for him to say no to Mrs. Jackson,” explained one of the attorneys who had negotiated the AEG contract. “And they were coercing him so hard that we worried he might just go ahead and sign something to please his mother and make his father go away, which would have been a disaster. It might have cost him the AEG deal, and it certainly would have given either AEG or AllGood, or both, grounds for a successful lawsuit. Thankfully, though, Michael listened to reason and refused to sign.”

Michael went further than that. First, he insisted that his brothers issue a public denial of their involvement with AllGood Entertainment in a Jackson 5 reunion concert that was supposedly to take place in Texas on July 3. Then on May 25, five days after the postponement of the O2 shows, Leonard Rowe received a letter in which Michael informed his father’s partner, “You do not represent me and I do not wish to have any oral or written communications with you regarding the handling of my business and/or personal matters.”

“No one was sure whether Tohme had been fired and whether Dileo had been hired or what was going on,” said one of the attorneys who had received the earlier letter that was supposedly from Michael but had actually been written by Dileo. “Was Dileo just writing letters and sending them out? Was he getting Michael’s okay? Or was he just putting something in front of Michael and telling him to sign it? Was that even really Michael’s signature? The whole thing was very mysterious.”

“Basically,” said one of those who remained in Jackson’s employ, “the situation surrounding Michael was such that you were either creeping around with a knife in your hand, or you were holding your breath, waiting to see when you’d be stabbed in the back.”

The O2 Arena concerts were “a do or die moment” for Michael Jackson, Randy Phillips observed in a May 30 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “If it doesn’t happen, it would be a major problem for him, career-wise, in a way that it hasn’t been in the past.”

Sending a warning through the media was not, in general, an effective tactic for dealing with Michael Jackson. Phillips was smart enough to know that, but the AEG Live boss was beginning to feel the stress of a highly leveraged and increasingly exposed position. As costs quickly consumed the $12 million budgeted for preproduction, then more than doubled that figure, the joke Phillips had cracked to the London Telegraph back in March about making Phil Anschutz “into a millionaire from a billionaire” did not sound nearly so amusing. Michael’s absences from the CenterStaging rehearsals continued and what the Los Angeles Times referred to as Jackson’s “track record of missed performances and canceled dates” began to loom larger by the day.

“We finally made Mohammed come to the mountain,” an exuberant Phillips had told the London newspapers at the announcement of the O2 shows back in March. Making Mohammed climb that mountain, though, was another task entirely. “In this business, if you don’t take risks, you don’t achieve greatness,” Phillips had gamely asserted in the Los Angeles Times. By the end of May, though, AEG Live’s head man was looking to cut corners and tie up loose ends. He refused his star’s request to shoot Victoria Falls from a helicopter equipped with an IMAX camera as part of the environmental theme that Jackson wanted for the O2 shows, insisting that it was an expense the company couldn’t afford. And when Michael proposed arriving onstage for the jungle section of the show by riding with three live monkeys on the back of an elephant, accompanied by panthers led on gold chains while a flock of parrots and other exotic birds flapped in the air around him, Phillips was grateful for the objections of animal rights activists from both sides of the Atlantic.

Phillips and AEG Live had begun reminding Jackson that he had put up his own assets as collateral on the $6.2 million they had already advanced to him, and that he would be on the hook for a lot more if the O2 concerts were canceled because of his failure to perform. When a promoter involved with the O2 concerts questioned Jackson’s ability to deliver on his promise of fifty concerts, Phillips wrote back, “He has to or financial disaster awaits.”

“We [need to] let Mikey know just what this will cost him in terms of him making money,” Gongaware wrote to Phillips. “We cannot be forced into stopping this, which MJ will try to do because he is lazy and constantly changes his mind to fit his immediate wants.” The performer needed to be reminded regularly that, “He is locked,” Gongaware added. “He has no choice . . . he signed a contract.”

Michael understood his position, according to his longtime makeup artist Karen Faye: “He was scared to death because AEG was funding everything. He said he would have to work at McDonald’s if he didn’t do these shows.” Phillips’s “do or die moment” comment, though, was AEG’s first public attempt to get tough, to demand that Michael commit himself fully to the preparations for a show that was scheduled to open in a little more than a month. The stakes were now truly enormous. The CEO of the UK’s biggest secondhand ticket seller, Seatwave, told the BBC that “There’s gonna be somewhere near on a billion pounds’ worth of economic activity brought to London through hotels, restaurants, shops, pubs, people coming to see Michael Jackson. It’s the Michael Jackson economic stimulus package.” AEG Live was now out of pocket nearly $30 million and its commitments to the O2 concerts amounted to a good deal more than that. As the preparations for the staging of the show in London mounted toward a climax, Randy Phillips was relieved to hear from his director that the star of the show at least appeared to have a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve at the O2.

All along, Kenny Ortega said, he and Michael had imagined the O2 concerts as a Broadway musical on a giant scale. He wanted to make his initial appearance onstage in a number constructed around “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” Michael told Ortega, and “I don’t want to hold anything back. I want this to be the most spectacular opening the audience has ever seen. They have to ask themselves, ‘How are they going to top that?’ I don’t even care if they’re applauding. I want their jaws on the ground. I want them to not be able to sleep because they are so amped up from what they saw.”

The enormous stage for the “This Is It” concerts was being designed and built by Michael Cotton, who had designed the sets for the HIStory tour, in close collaboration with Bruce Jones, whose visual effects for The Spirit had impressed Michael, even though the film was widely regarded as a failure. Jones and Cotton, plus lighting designer Peter Morse and art director Bernt Capra, were filling the four biggest soundstages at the Culver Studios (235-feet-by-150-feet-by-45-feet tall—the same stages used to create the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind) with, among other things, the largest LED screen ever assembled: 100 feet wide. The screen was to provide a background of 3-D videos for the O2 shows that would run throughout the concert, designed to create a hologram effect by blending seamlessly with the real sets and the live dancers performing in front of them so that, during the “Thriller” number, “live” wolves and ravens would be running through and flying around a cemetery set that Capra had populated with mummies, zombies, and a decomposed pirate.

The crew had been given five weeks to make the transition from conceptual design to working set, an overwhelming task that left, as Capra put it, “no margin for error.” Integrating elements that were not only physically immense but also at the extreme edge of technology required degrees of both exactitude and flexibility that had never before been demanded of anyone involved in the production. The stage at the O2 Arena would have to be equipped to accommodate a cherry picker as tall as a two-story building that would be used to fly a spinning Michael Jackson through the air above his audience while a video and light show literally played inside his clothing—his costume made of a high-tech fabric rigged with circuitry. The stress of coordinating dozens of complex effects in such a tight window might have been unbearable if not for the fact that Michael seemed so confident they could pull it off, said Capra, who was collaborating with the star on restaging scenes from five Jackson music videos that stretched from the early 1980s to the late 1990s: “Thriller,” “Smooth Criminal,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” and “Earth Song.”

As was so often the case among those who worked with him for the first time, Capra had been bowled over by the level of Michael’s intellectual and artistic literacy. He was stunned and delighted, the art director said, when Michael began their meeting on the “The Way You Make Me Feel” video with a dissertation on one of his favorite photographers, Lewis Hine, a social worker who had made his name during the Great Depression with photographs of young children working in mines and mills. He wanted to base both the set design and the choreography for “The Way You Make Me Feel” on the photos Hine had taken of men constructing steel beams for the Empire State Building, Michael explained: The whole thing should feel like it was happening among a group of workmen taking a lunch break atop a half-finished skyscraper.

Michael had showed up every day at the Culver Studios between June 1 and June 11 to shoot footage for what became known as the “Dome Project,” the adaptation of the music videos he had worked out with Capra, plus a pair of short 3-D videos. One was “MJ Air,” in which a 707 jet rolled into the frame just as a hole opened in the screen, allowing Michael to enter and board the jet, which then flew away. The other new video, “The Final Message,” featured a young girl from an Amazon rain forest tribe embracing the Earth. Michael brought his three children to the set one day and sat them all in director’s chairs to watch the scene from “Smooth Criminal” where he would be chased by the likes of Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. “This is the first day that we’ve seen Daddy on a movie set,” Paris told Kenny Ortega. At that moment, Ortega remembered, Michael walked over and asked, with real concern, if the kids were “behaving.”

During the third week of June, Michael was working out his choreography with Travis Payne in two-a-day sessions, one held in the afternoon at the Carolwood chateau, the other in the evening at the Los Angeles Forum, where rehearsals for the O2 shows had been moved to give the performers more space. John Caswell, the co-owner of CenterStaging, said that the move to the Forum was due entirely to the enormous scale of the production. “By the time he left my facility, he had graduated through several studios and was on a soundstage taking up ten thousand square feet,” Caswell explained—and even that wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t Michael Jackson’s health or erratic attendance at rehearsals that had delayed the opening of the London concerts, Caswell insisted, but rather the stupendous nature of what the entertainer was attempting: “He was trying and succeeding in structuring the biggest, most spectacular live production ever seen . . . The show was getting so damn big, they couldn’t finish it in time. That’s why they had to delay.”

There was still an ambient skepticism on the sidelines, of course, and plenty of cause for concern among the attorneys and accountants clustered around the preparations for the O2 shows. On June 12, AllGood Entertainment filed a $40 million lawsuit against Michael, AEG Live, and Frank Dileo, claiming that there had been multiple breaches of Jackson’s “contract” to perform at a Jackson family reunion concert, including Michael’s promise not to appear onstage anywhere else before that event or for three months after it. When AllGood’s lead attorney told Britain’s Guardianthat the lawsuit could be settled by cutting the company in on the O2 shows, the newspaper rattled London with a headline on its article that read: “Michael Jackson Comeback Concerts in Jeopardy?”

Internet gossip columnists warned that Jackson was nowhere near ready to perform in London, and wondered if he was even really trying after Michael skipped rehearsals to spend the afternoons of June 9 and June 16 at Arnold Klein’s office in Beverly Hills. Karen Faye would later say that Michael was “self-sabotaging” with drugs because he didn’t believe he could do all fifty shows for AEG. Some of the most cold-eyed number crunchers involved with the O2 project, though, claimed to be impressed by the level of focus with which Michael was engaging the financial opportunities presented by his London concerts. During May, he had met with representatives of the Universal Music Group’s merchandise division, Bravado, to sketch out designs for more than three hundred items—from jigsaw puzzles and children’s games to leather handbags and rhinestone dog tags—that would be sold in conjunction with the “This Is It” concerts. “He really did understand the opportunity he had to repair his finances if he fulfilled his contract for the London shows,” said one of the entertainment attorneys working with him that spring. Simply by performing all fifty concerts at the O2, Michael would stabilize his finances through the end of his contract with Sony, this lawyer was advising him. If he did a world tour, he could likely eradicate most, if not all, of his debt and regain control of the Beatles catalog. With a U.S. tour, he might once again aggregate a net worth of a billion dollars. “He got it, he really did,” the attorney said. “I think he was ready to do what he had to do.” Kenny Ortega agreed: “There are those out there who say, ‘Michael didn’t want to do “This Is It,” he wasn’t capable.’ Michael didn’t just want to do it—his attitude was, ‘We have to do it.’” After nearly two solid decades of ridicule and excoriation over his lawsuits and plastic surgeries, his sham marriages and sperm donor–sired children—not to mention the molestation allegations against him—Jackson’s excitement about the London shows “was giving him back something that had been sucked out of him,” Ortega said, “his dignity as an artist.”

Marc Schaffel and Dieter Wiesner remained “out there” among the doubters: “Just because Michael knew something was good for him didn’t mean he’d do it,” Schaffel said. “Performing the same songs the same way, night after night, Michael would be very unhappy,” Wiesner observed. “He didn’t like to do what he had done already. I know he was mad at them for making him.”

After his visit to Arnold Klein’s offices on June 16, Michael again skipped rehearsal. Frank Dileo already had suggested to a fretting Randy Phillips that they reassemble the “old team” by inviting John Branca back aboard as Michael’s entertainment attorney. “I’m pretty sure Dileo wanted to bring Branca in as a way of protecting himself,” said one of the attorneys that was being pushed out the door. “He knew he had some legal exposure here, and not just from the AllGood deal. Dileo was planning to take the entire AEG commission and that was a deal Tohme had done. But if he brought Branca in, he had to figure John would help protect him. I mean, John wasn’t going to be taking an hourly fee. He was going to take his five percent commission and make a big killing. He would owe Frank.”

Branca’s recollection was that Dileo had phoned him in late May to say, “Michael wants you to come back. He wants you to give some thought to what you can do for him, what kind of deals.” He spent three weeks drafting an “agenda” that detailed his plans for a concert movie, books, and assorted merchandising deals, Branca said, then drove to the Forum on the evening of June 17 to present it to Michael during a break in rehearsals. At least five years had passed since the two men had seen each other, and their reunion was “very emotional,” as Branca recalled it: “We hugged each other. He said, ‘John, you’re back.’” Branca’s account sounded more than a little strange to people who had heard Michael repeatedly denounce Branca as a devil in recent years.

Tohme claimed that Michael had made it overwhelmingly clear he did not trust Branca. The attorney had arranged to be introduced to Jackson’s new manager by Randy Phillips at the 2009 Grammy Awards ceremony, and afterward Branca phoned to arrange a lunch meeting, Tohme said. When he told his client about it, though, “Michael told me I had to cancel the lunch. He said, ‘You can’t have anything to do with Branca. I don’t want him near me.’”

Michael Amir Williams, who by the middle of April 2009 was almost exclusively handling the details of Jackson’s business affairs, said he never once heard the name John Branca, and was not aware of any meetings with the attorney or communications with him of any kind.

Whatever the arrangement was between Branca and Dileo, picturing Michael Jackson flanked by the two men who had steered the entertainer’s affairs during the most financially successful period of his (or any other artist’s) career was reassuring to Randy Phillips and the executives at AEG Live, who also encouraged the hiring of Michael’s former accountant, Barry Siegel. AEG execs were distraught, though, when Jackson failed to show for rehearsal on the evening of June 18. Randy Phillips was furious when he received an e-mail from Kenny Ortega suggesting that if the star of the show wasn’t going to come to rehearsals it might be time they “pulled the plug.” Phillips drove to the Carolwood chateau for a meeting in which he demanded, in the presence of Dr. Murray, that Michael stop seeing Dr. Klein and stop taking any drugs that Klein had provided. It was almost ten p.m. when Michael arrived at the Forum looking “very shaky,” as one person who was present put it.

The frustration of the AEG executives now extended to Ortega. Only a couple of weeks earlier, during “The Dome Project” shoot, the director had told them that Jackson appeared to be responding to the pressure of a deadline by accelerating the pace of his preparations, and that his focus was sharpening as the cast and crew prepared for the move to London. Now, though, Ortega said he was watching Michael go off the rails again. He was seeing “strong signs of paranoia, anxiety, and obsessive-like behavior,” Ortega wrote to Phillips, adding “it is like there are two people there. One (deep inside) trying to hold on to what he was and still can be and not wanting us to quit on him, the other in this weakened and troubled state.”

The show’s music director Michael Bearden advised AEG that, “MJ is not in shape enough yet to sing this stuff live and dance at the same time.” Production manager John Hougdahl wrote after he watched Jackson stumble and mumble through a rehearsal at the Forum, “He was a basket case. Doubt is pervasive.”

Scores of other observers on the scene, though, had maintained all along that Michael Jackson wasn’t either strong enough or sane enough to pull off a comeback at this stage of his life. Michael’s physical health was the main concern of those who actually cared about him. He had been losing weight at an alarming rate since the announcement of the O2 shows in London, and those who hadn’t watched it happen gradually were especially startled when they saw him for the first time after several months. Michael’s filmmaker friend Bryan Michael Stoller was one of them. Stoller and Jackson had become friends twenty years earlier after Jackson saw The Shadow of Michael, the young director’s short-film parody of the infamous 1984 Pepsi commercial. Stoller had paid his last visit to Michael just before the beginning of May, and recalled that when he greeted his old friend, “It was like hugging bones. After seeing him, I never thought he would complete the tour.” From the high of 157 pounds he had reached at the time of the announcement of the AEG deal, Michael’s weight fell as low as 130 pounds that spring. “We did talk a lot about his weight,” Kenny Ortega admitted. “We would always try to get him to eat something, but he said, ‘I’m a dancer and this is how I like to feel.’” Michael showed Ortega photographs of Fred Astaire at the height of his career, pointing out that his old friend Fred had been just as thin back then as he was now. Newspapers reported that Ortega was literally fork-feeding Jackson his chicken and broccoli dinners. “It’s not true,” the director said. “I would unwrap his plate and slide it over in front of him. But I didn’t feed him.”

Also back in the picture were that pair of powerhouse women Tom Mesereau had tried to warn his client about back in 2005; Raymone Bain and Grace Rwaramba. Bain and her Washington, D.C., attorneys had attempted to take advantage of Michael’s absorption in preparing for the O2 shows and long-standing inattention to legal affairs by filing a ten-day notice of application for a default judgment at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. With just forty-eight hours left on the ticking clock, a team of three attorneys from the New York offices of Dewey and LeBoeuf appeared in court pro hac vice alongside a D.C.-based colleague to inform the judge hearing the case that a response to Bain’s suit would be entered before the deadline passed. Among the many ironies of the day’s legal drama was that the attorney Michael had put in charge of dealing with Bain was Londell McMillan, the same lawyer that Raymone herself had brought in to represent Michael (in the Marc Schaffel case, among others) more than two years earlier. Once the default judgment motion was set aside, Bain’s only real hope for a payoff would be to harrow or exhaust Michael into a settlement that saved him the cost of defeating her in court. And Raymone’s friend McMillan was the very attorney who had counseled Michael against settling cases on that basis, urging his famous client to battle every one of them through to a jury verdict.

Grace Rwaramba had been given formal notice of her dismissal as the nanny to Michael’s children in early April, when she received a letter signed by Paul Gongaware that read: “It is with regret that I must inform you that your employment with Michael Jackson will be terminated as of Monday, April 20, 2009 . . . In an effort to try to reduce the impact of this termination, the company has worked out a severance arrangement that will pay you a final sum of $20,000.” Shocked and angry, Grace had accepted an invitation from “celebrity interviewer” Daphne Barak to sojourn at Barak’s expense in London. For that hospitality, plus an undisclosed fee, Grace had agreed to spend several days spilling secrets in a series of interviews (some videotaped) that painted her former employer as a drug-addled incompetent so lost in a chemical haze that he really believed his contract with AEG Live was for ten shows at the O2 Arena, not fifty. “He didn’t know what he was signing,” Rwaramba told Barak. “He never did.” At the same time, Michael was impossibly controlling, Grace told the interviewer, and did all he could to prevent her from developing a relationship with anyone who was important to him. While they were staying in New Jersey with the Cascios, “I tried to develop a friendship with Frank’s mother, just to tell them thank you, but when Michael saw we were getting friendly he said, ‘Don’t trust her. She is not interested in you. She just talks to you because of me.’” Grace was even scoffing at Michael’s image as a doting father. She and she alone had provided the three kids with a stable and loving environment, Grace told Barak: “I took those babies in my arms on the first day of each of their lives. They are my babies . . . I used to hug and laugh with them. But when Michael was around they froze.” The nanny described an afternoon when Blanket had put on a concert of Michael Jackson songs, singing and dancing for her and the two older children. “I was laughing so hard. Prince and Paris were playing around. It was such a happy moment. Then suddenly Michael walked in. He surprised us. Usually, the security would alert me that he was about to come. Blanket immediately stopped. The kids looked frightened. Michael was so angry. I knew I would be fired. Whenever the children got too attached to me, he would send me away.”

Any number of times during the months they lived in Las Vegas, Grace said, she had been forced to keep the children away from their father so they wouldn’t see the pathetic state he was reduced to by his drug addiction. In the weeks after she was first ordered out of the Carolwood chateau at the end of 2008, Rwaramba went on, she regularly received distress signals from security guards and other members of the staff concerned about Michael and the kids: “These poor babies . . . I was getting phone calls that they were being neglected. Nobody was cleaning the rooms because Michael didn’t pay the housekeeper. I was getting calls telling me Michael was in such bad shape. He wasn’t clean. He hadn’t shaved. He wasn’t eating well. I used to do all this for him, and they were trying to get me to go back.” Without her, their former nanny lamented, those three kids were essentially alone in the world, and so was their father, even if he didn’t realize it.

Friends who ranged from Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika to Marc Schaffel would insist later that Grace had been “tricked” into giving Barak those interviews. “Daphne is a vulture,” Schaffel said. “She waits and watches to see who is in trouble.” The Israeli-born, British-based Barak was a determined and resourceful vulture, though, one who over the years had induced women as varied as Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa, and Benazir Bhutto to speak into her microphone. Giving Barak the time of day made you a “dear friend” in her self-flattering autobiography, and the list of famous people she counted among her intimates was pages long. Back in 2003, Barak had persuaded Jackson’s parents to cooperate with her (for a substantial fee, of course) on a documentary broadcast in the UK (part of it aired in the United States on CBS) under the title Our Son: Michael Jackson. Barak and Joe Jackson followed Michael around for weeks, attempting to get him to speak to Barak on camera. “I had to have her kicked out of the lobby of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when she showed up with Joe,” Schaffel recalled. “She had offered him money to get an interview with Michael, and refused to go away when Michael said he wasn’t going to do it. He didn’t want anybody to talk to Daphne about him, and was very upset when he found out his parents had taken her money to do it anyway.”

Michael would have been even more upset to learn that Rwaramba—who knew far more about the past fifteen years of his life than his parents ever would—had done the same thing. Grace’s stay with Daphne Barak went undetected, however, and the ex-nanny began telling people that she and Michael were back in business. “In late May, Grace sent a message through a mutual friend that she wanted my new phone number,” Schaffel recalled. “She said Michael wanted to speak with me. I said, ‘Of course.’ But it was Grace who called. She said she was in London looking for a house for Michael that she was going to help set up for him.”

The escalating intensity of the demands that he prepare for the London shows had, among other things, worsened Michael’s insomnia. His obsessive-compulsive tendencies were always exacerbated by pressure, and what would preoccupy him was never predictable. Around the middle of June, he began to make phone calls in the night to talk for hours on end about apocalyptic imagery from the Bible and its associations with predictions of the world’s end in 2012 that had been extrapolated from the ancient Mayan calendar. “We only have a little time left,” he kept saying.

What made slumber even more difficult for Michael as the move to London approached was that his stress was now shot through with an accelerant of excitement. He was simply, as Frank Dileo put it, “too wound up” to turn off his thoughts when he got into bed. “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” was Michael’s constant refrain even after he began attending rehearsals regularly. His principal creative collaborators, Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, both suffered from insomnia themselves and so were less troubled than others might have been by Michael’s calls at three or four in the morning to talk through the ideas that had come to him during yet another sleepless night. Such middle-of-the-night conversations seemed to him a normal part of being “immersed in the process,” Payne said: “That was when we’d be able to get a lot done because the phones weren’t ringing and we didn’t have a schedule.” Ortega offered a more ethereal memory of Michael’s predawn phone calls: “He would say, ‘I’m channeling. I’m writing music and ideas are coming to me and I can’t turn it off.’”

Over time, though, even Ortega grew concerned about the noticeable drop in his star’s energy level on the days when Michael reported to rehearsals—or, more often, failed to report—complaining that he hadn’t slept the night before. Maybe he should “hold off” working on writing new songs until after they opened in London, the show’s director suggested. “He would say when the information was coming, when the idea was coming, it was a blessing,” Ortega recalled, “and he couldn’t turn his back on a blessing . . . I would say to him, ‘Can’t you make a little pact with your higher power to have this put on the shelf for you until a later date? We need you healthy. We need you nourished.’ He’d laugh at me and say no. ‘When they come, you have to be ready for them and you have to take advantage of them when they’re there. Or they won’t be yours.’”

After a few hours of tossing in his bed at home, though, the star wasn’t so sanguine about his sleeplessness. Michael turned to his old friend from the HIStory tour Dr. Allan Metzger, pleading for “some form of an anesthetic,” as the doctor recalled it. Metzger sympathized, having learned from the time they spent together on tour that after the high of a performance Michael simply “could not come down.” Sleep medications that were fine for other people simply did not work for Michael Jackson, Metzger would explain. During a meeting at the Carolwood chateau, Dr. Metzger remembered, Michael had attempted to sway him by explaining how “fearful” he was that the O2 concerts would fail because he wasn’t well rested enough to perform the way he needed to in London. Metzger, though, by his account, would write a prescription only for what the doctor’s attorney later described as “a mild sleeping pill.” When Arnold Klein also refused to prescribe anything beyond sedatives, painkillers, and muscle relaxants, Michael began seeing a second plastic surgeon, Dr. Larry Koplin, hoping that the nurse who administered anesthesia in Koplin’s office would help him obtain propofol. That effort, too, apparently failed.

He was getting getting plenty of other drugs, though, from somewhere. Michael appeared “groggy and out of it,” as one witness put it, when, after nearly a full week’s absence, he showed up for rehearsals on the evening of June 19. “He didn’t look well,” Kenny Ortega would testify later. “Michael was chilled and soft-spoken . . . He wasn’t in the kind of condition to be at rehearsal.” AEG executives were infuriated again when “This Is It” site coordinator John Hougdahl sent an e-mail to Phillips and Gongaware on the evening of June 19 telling them that Jackson had been sent home because he “was a basket case and Kenny was concerned he would embarrass himself onstage, or worse yet—get hurt.” Ortega was at once graphic and distraught in the e-mail he sent to Phillips a short time later to describe Michael’s condition: “He appeared quite weak and fatigued this evening. He had a terrible case of the chills, was trembling, rambling, and obsessing . . . I was told by our choreographer that during the artist’s costume fitting with his designer tonight they noticed he’s lost more weight.” He had personally wrapped Michael in blankets and massaged his feet to calm him down, Ortega wrote Phillips, and was truly concerned that Michael might be slipping into a downward spiral.

According to one person in a position to know, AEG’s executives were unhappy that Ortega had instructed Michael to just go home and come back when he was ready to work. “We have a real problem here,” Randy Phillips wrote to Tim Leiweke. After conferring with his bosses, Phillips told Frank Dileo to make sure his client understood what was at stake, reminding him of language in the contract that required Michael Jackson to put on a “first-class performance” in London while maintaining a “positive public perception.” Phillips also got Conrad Murray on the phone and told the doctor he needed to keep a closer watch on his patient. Michael needed to be kept away from Arnold Klein, Phillips told Murray and kept off whatever drugs Klein was giving him. Dileo left a voice mail on Murray’s iPhone in which he told the physician, “I’m sure you are aware he had an episode last night. He’s sick. I think you need to get a blood test on him. We got to see what he’s doing.”

Ortega, though, thought Michael might need a different kind of doctor. “My concern is now that we’ve . . . played the tough-love, now-or-never card is that the artist may be unable to rise to the occasion due to real emotional stuff . . . everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated,” the director warned Phillips. “It’s going to take a strong therapist as well as immediate physical nurturing to help him through this.” He was concerned that there was apparently no one taking care of Michael Jackson “on a daily basis,” Ortega wrote to Phillips: “There were four security guards outside his door, but no one offering him a cup of hot tea.” He thought it was “important for everyone to know” that Michael truly wanted the O2 shows to happen, Ortega ended his e-mail to Phillips. “It would shatter him, break his heart if we pulled the plug. He’s terribly frightened it’s all going to go away. He asked me repeatedly tonight if I was going to leave him. He was practically begging for my confidence. It broke my heart. He was like a lost boy. There still may be a chance he can rise to the occasion if we get him the help he needs.”

Back in his bedroom at the Carolwood chateau, Michael made more of the early morning phone calls that had become almost a ritual during the past couple of weeks. “He kept telling people he was saying good-bye,” Arnold Klein’s office manager Jason Pfeiffer recalled. “Everyone was creeped out by it.”

Even Michael’s daughter was becoming concerned about him. It seemed strange to her that Daddy always had a big fire going, even on the warmest days, Paris would explain later. She and the new nanny, Sister Rose, would come into a room where he was sitting and “it would be so hot,” the girl recalled, but Daddy would keep saying he was cold, that he couldn’t get warm.

Cherilyn Lee was convinced that Michael had secured a supply of propofol after she received a phone call from the Carolwood chateau on the evening of June 21, just as the “This Is It” cast was about to begin full dress rehearsals at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. According to Lee, the caller was a member of Jackson’s staff who said that Michael needed to see her right away. “I could hear Michael in the background: ‘Tell her. Tell her that one side of my body is hot, it’s hot, and one side of my body is cold, it’s very cold,’” Lee remembered. “I knew somebody had given him something that hit the central nervous system.” You have to get him to the hospital, the nurse told the man who had phoned her. Michael wouldn’t do it, the caller replied. Why should I go to the hospital when I have my own doctor on call? Michael wanted to know.

Conrad Murray had been spending nights at the Carolwood chateau since at least May 12, 2009, the date the physician had used a Visa card to pay $865 (plus $65 for FedEx shipping) to Applied Pharmacy Services in Las Vegas for a supply of Diprivan in 20-milliliter and 100-milliliter bottles. Included in the May 12 package sent to Los Angeles were three vials of antianxiety sedatives from the benzodiazepine family, plus a vial of Flumazenil, an “antidote” to the benzos that could counteract their effects in case of an overdose. During the next few weeks, Murray would make several more purchases of Diprivan from the Las Vegas pharmacy, gradually collecting enough propofol (some of it in 1,000-milliliter bottles) to last well into the London concert series.

According to Dr. Murray, he spent six weeks using an IV to feed 50 milligrams of Diprivan into Jackson’s veins after the performer returned home from rehearsals, enough to let Michael “sleep” (it’s more accurate to describe patients under propofol as unconscious than as asleep, anesthesiologists say) for at least a few hours, then wake up feeling not just rested, but actually exhilarated. Kai Chase, Michael’s chef, would say she knew nothing about any sleep medications, but did see Dr. Murray carry a pair of oxygen canisters downstairs each day after his morning consultation with Mr. Jackson in the master bedroom. Oxygen is one of the two medical gases (nitrous oxide being the other) that are commonly mixed with anesthesia in continuous-flow machines during surgeries.

The degree to which Murray had assumed control of all decisions being made about Michael Jackson’s physical well-being was evident to Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips when they showed up for a meeting on June 20 that the doctor had demanded. Dr. Murray insisted that Michael was “physically and emotionally fine,” Ortega remembered, and seemed infuriated by the decision to send Michael home from rehearsal on the previous evening: “He said I should stop trying to be an amateur doctor and psychologist and be the director, and leave Michael’s health to him.”

He was reassured when Dr. Murray “guaranteed us that Michael would get into it,” recalled Phillips, who sent out an e-mail that afternoon in which he expressed his confidence in Murray, “who I am gaining immense respect for as I get to deal with him more.”

“This doctor is extremely successful (we check everyone out) and does not need this gig,” Phillips added, “so he [is] totally unbiased and ethical.”

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