In 2009, during the week that followed the death of
Michael Jackson, I found myself frantically attending to an update of the
Omnibus Press book Michael Jackson: The
Visual Documentary which had run to several editions but which was last
published in 2005, just before the much publicised child molestation trial from
which he was acquitted. The book was written by Adrian Grant, who had met
Michael many times and once ran his UK fan club, and because of this Michael
had endorsed the book, even going as far as to mention it in the credits in the
booklet accompanying one of his compilation CDs.
In
the years between the publication of the 2005 edition and his death I hadn’t
paid much attention to whatever might have been happening in the world of
Michael Jackson but I now realised that in the intervening years he didn’t
appear to have done very much at all in terms of real work; no albums of new
material, no concert tours, not many public appearances apart from the odd
awards ceremony or shopping expedition. There was no real evidence of any new
recordings, only vague statements about ‘writing new material’, though there
were obviously recordings in the can as posthumous releases now indicate. What
he did seem to have done, though, was travel a lot, often with an entourage of
25 or more, including his three children and attendant nursing staff, personal
doctors, bodyguards and other ‘staff’, from America to Bahrain, where he was
based for a while though he and most everyone else on his payroll took trips to
Dubai, Paris, London, Hamburg and Tokyo, and to Ireland where he rented a
castle for a while, and back to Bahrain again, and finally to America where,
having fallen out with his hosts in Bahrain, he settled for a while in Las
Vegas before finally returning to Los Angeles. The enormous expense of this
nomadic lifestyle, the private planes, limousines and whole floors in five star
hotels or the rented luxury homes with ten or more bedrooms, clearly explains
why he was in financial difficulties. No one apart from Bill Gates and a few
oil sheiks can afford to live like this, constantly on the run with huge
entourages, yet he seems not to have cared one iota. Somehow the cost was paid
from his mounting overdraft.
In
the meantime he was the focus of all manner of expensive legal actions, from
former managers and lawyers claiming unpaid fees, from financial institutions
with million dollar claims for ‘restructuring debt’ or ‘asset management’, from
employees at Neverland claiming unpaid wages, from the mother of his two elder
children claiming maintenance, legal fees and changes in visitation rights,
from people selling Jackson memorabilia which may or may not have been stolen
from his various homes, and from assorted bandwagon jumpers with spurious
claims about being sexually assaulted, all of which were thrown out of court,
but all this must have been costing Jackson big money too. Indeed, a whole
Jackson-led legal industry seemed to have developed to feed off him like a pack
of vultures.
There
also appears to have been an attempt by a racially motivated political
organisation to recruit Michael to their cause by claiming that CBS/Sony had
somehow fraudulently underpaid him in royalties, with the implication that this
wouldn’t have happened had he been a white performer. Michael went along with
this but the underlying perception is that the ‘black power’ set-up wanted the
Jackson name for the publicity it ensured, while the claim against CBS/Sony
was, at best, spurious and, at worst, complete fiction. Either way, the issue
wasn’t resolved and the only parties to gain from it would have been lawyers
and accountants charged with investigating the claims whose fees were no doubt
debited to Michael’s account.
Crucially,
his family, his mother, brothers and sisters, are largely absent from the
diary-style day-to-day reportage I was editing. Also, he didn’t seem to have
had one key advisor on whom he could depend and who was loyal unto him in the
manner of say, Paul McGuiness to U2 or Jon Landau to Bruce Springsteen, to name
but two premier league music acts with whom he might be compared. Managers came
and went, and when they went they sued.
In
amongst the entries were odd announcements about this or that project, a
Hurricane Katrina benefit record, a ‘new album’ that he was ‘writing himself’,
a business venture with some wealthy individual, a newly created label, but
nothing seemed to have come of these plans beyond a press release dripping in
optimistic hyperbole. Then there were appearances at awards ceremonies where, reading
between the lines, the impression is given that a new award had been created
especially for Michael – the ‘Legend Award’, the ‘Diamond Award’, the
‘Millennium Award’ – purely in the hope that he would attend the event to
collect it in person and thus attract sponsors or boost publicity, both of
which might or might not have benefited some charity or commercial interest
somewhere along the line, but you somehow know that although someone somewhere
would benefit financially from his appearance, it wasn’t Michael. Also,
invariably, there were controversies over these appearances. Something would go
wrong, a crowd security problem, a ticketing issue, or a misunderstanding over
whether or not he was expected to actually perform, and through no fault of his
own other than that he seemed to have appointed advisors who could not
discriminate between what was good for him and what was not, between integrity
and schlock, Michael ended up with egg on his face and the tabloids lapped it
up.
The
dreadful rootlessness of this lifestyle, the quagmire of endless trouble, the
appalling uncertainly of everything surrounding him, not least the forthcoming
O2 concerts that in the end never happened, seemed to me to be what drove him
to escape reality with the prescription drugs that finally killed him. Somehow,
when I’d finished editing this book, I couldn’t help but think he was better
off out of it all.
There are two postscripts to this melancholy story.
The
first is that although Michael had endorsed this book, said endorsement – which
involved no financial transaction whatsoever – was withdrawn after Michael’s
death. This was communicated to us by threatening letters from lawyers
representing Michael’s estate after we failed to delete our tagline on the cover
of the book stating that it was ‘Endorsed by the King of Pop’. A nasty court
battle was avoided when we argued that it wouldn’t look good in the press if it
became known that the estate appeared to be going against Michael’s wishes when
he was alive, but we did remove the tagline on subsequent print runs.
The
second is that in November 1972, believe it or not, I met Michael. A preamble:
he was in London with the Jackson 5 to perform four concerts in the UK, and at
a press lunch for the J5 at the Talk of the Town in Leicester Square (which
became The Hippodrome and is now a casino), I happened to be sitting opposite
John Peel, with whom I was on nodding terms at the time. Before the J5
performed we were served roast chicken, delivered to us on plates by waiters. Peel
sniffed at his and frowned. “Waiter,” he said in his inimitable Liverpool
drawl, “kindly remove this dead animal.” During the J5’s performance there was
an absolutely magic moment when Michael, then aged 14, did a spin during the
song ‘I’ll Be There’ just at the point where he screams, ‘Girl, just look over
your shoulder’, which is exactly what he did. I gasped, and so did JP, and in
that instant we caught each other’s glance, silently acknowledging our shared
awareness that we had witnessed a moment of true pop wonder, and knowing
without need to comment that we had felt exactly the same rush of excitement at
exactly the same moment.
The
following day I, along with several other writers, went to meet the J5 at their
hotel, the Churchill in Portman Square, now a Hyatt Regency. The square was chock
full of fans, almost all of whom hissed at me as I showed my invitation and was
allowed through the police lines that held them back. MJ and his brothers were
at tables in a reception room and we were shuffled amongst them. When it came
for my turn to sit at Michael’s table, I stared into the eyes of the boy who
would one day become pop’s biggest star and marry Elvis’ daughter. He told me
he ‘loved being here in London’, he ‘loved his fans’, he ‘loved being in the
J5’; indeed he loved just about everything and everyone and had clearly been
pre-programmed what to say to the press to the point of extreme blandness, but
then again what else could I expect? He’d just turned 14, but he seemed much
younger to me, still a little boy, and a rather shy and timid one at that. In
the following week’s MM I wrote: “Michael Jackson is poised to become the
biggest coloured show business sensation the world had ever known. Put his name
in neon lights, splash him across the front page, write it in the sky, tell
everyone you know… Michael will be a brighter star than anything the milky way
can serve up.”
I
got that right, didn’t I? But at what cost?
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