MJ (19 page)

Publicly, Michael’s split with Weisner-DeMann played out in the worst possible way. In the pages of
Billboard
, Joe Jackson declared the duo’s contract
expired, adding, “There are a lot of leeches trying to break up the group. A lot of people are whispering in Michael’s ear. But we know who they are. They’re only in it for the money. I was there before it started and I’ll be there after it ends.”
After it ends?
Joe said he hired Weisner and DeMann in the first place “because there was a time when I felt I needed white help in dealing with the corporate structure at CBS and thought they’d be able to help. But they never gave me the respect you expect from a business partner.”
White help?

Michael responded to his father’s limited perspective by declaring himself a citizen of the world. “I don’t know what would make him say something like that. To hear him talk like that turns my stomach. I don’t know where he gets that from. I happen to be color-blind. I don’t hire color; I hire competence. The individual can be of any race or creed as long as I get the best,” Michael said in a statement. “I am president of my organization and I have the final word on every decision. Racism is not my motto. One day I strongly expect every color to love as one family.”

Without Weisner and DeMann, Michael was rudderless at the
moment of his ascendance. He couldn’t possibly revert to his father. John Branca had become a trusted adviser, but he was an attorney, not an experienced music manager.

Frank DiLeo, Michael’s promotion man at Epic Records, had been bonding with the singer for months. Round-faced and heavy, with a look so
Godfather
that Martin Scorsese later cast him in
Goodfellas
,
DiLeo had grown up an old-school soul fan. He was tone-deaf, but he spent his career working in music. And he had a playful side that appealed to Michael; he’d drive him nuts by singing
“Born to Run” off-key. In August 1983, in the middle of lunch in a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Michael asked DiLeo to be his manager.
“Gee, Michael, that’s nice, let me think about it,” Frank responded. He accepted within two days. He became the ultimate gatekeeper—Jim Murray, a public-relations man on the Victory tour, called him Michael Jackson’s
“blocking back.”

Before he became Michael’s manager, DiLeo had been instrumental in picking the video to follow up “Beat It.” Actually, Michael hadn’t wanted to do another one, but Epic’s promotional staff, having witnessed MTV’s effect on
Thriller
sales, desperately did. In early 1983, DiLeo, then head of Epic promotion, had visited Michael at Hayvenhurst to give him a simple pitch:
“I think it should be ‘Thriller,’ ” he said. And the video should be scary. Michael agreed. He’d been thinking along the same lines.

Michael invited John Landis, director of
An American Werewolf in London
,
The Blues Brothers
, and
Animal House
, to Encino along with Landis’s producing partner, George Folsey Jr. Together they brainstormed for four hours. Michael, still just twenty-four, charmed them.
“He lived in a room upstairs. It was kind of odd—mostly boxes,” Landis recalls. “He had a life-size Shirley Temple figure. He was very isolated from his family.” Michael didn’t have a specific concept for the film, but he knew he wanted to transform into a monster.

Landis wrote a fourteen-page outline, with dialogue, and he and Folsey began working on finances. The production team had estimated
the video’s budget between $600,000 and $700,000—it wound up hitting
$1.1 million, roughly twenty times the most expensive video ever made at that point. It wasn’t easy to find the cash. CBS’s Yetnikoff agreed to put in a meager $100,000. His phone call to Landis involved plenty of cursing. “Who wants a single about monsters?” Yetnikoff said.

The team approached MTV.
“Michael Jackson wanted to do ‘Thriller,’ ” MTV’s cofounder Bob Pittman recalls, “and he came to us and said, ‘CBS won’t pay for it. Will you pay for it?’ Now, we have a problem, because MTV did not want to set a precedent for paying for videos, because God knows where that would end.” Michael offered to make up the difference, but Folsey came up with an alternate
idea. In addition to the big-budget “Thriller” video, they’d film a forty-five-minute
The Making of “Thriller”
documentary for $50,000. For this kind of exclusive behind-the-scenes content, Pittman agreed to kick in $250,000. A new movie channel called Showtime and prominent home-video company Vestron added another $300,000.
Making
cost
$29.95 on VHS and Betamax and made $1 million in sales and rentals within a year.

Landis said he and Michael were totally compatible on the “Thriller” set, and the documentary footage in
The Making of “Thriller”
bears this out—Landis seems to know how to talk to Michael, teasing him, hugging him, even physically lifting him. Landis’s wife, Deborah, who had handled the costuming for his movies in the past, was in charge of dressing Michael. She picked red to stand out from the sober nighttime set.
“The socks and the shoes were his own,” she said. “He took that directly from Fred Astaire, who always wore soft leather loafers to dance in, and socks.”

At the same time, Michael was obsessed with his face. He watched Ola Ray, his costar, get made up on the set every day. Then he asked her for tips. “I have a shine on my nose that I can’t get off,” he told her. Ray recalled: “So I’m seriously talking to his makeup artist, trying to explain what to do, and she looked at me and said, ‘Girl, don’t you know that no matter how much powder I put on his nose it’s going to
shine?’ Then Michael started laughing, because I didn’t know he had had nose jobs!”

Unlike Ray, most of Michael’s colleagues who noticed the changes in his nose had a hard time broaching the subject.
“It was within what I would call reason, I guess, for somebody that was in Hollywood that was caring about their looks,” says Anthony Marinelli, one of the
Thriller
synthesizer specialists. “For
Thriller
, it seemed like what an actor would do. I don’t know the Michael Jackson after that, which is when, I consider, it went to unreasonable. And of concern.” The singer was always secretive about the
details, and the gradual, mysterious changes disturbed those around him.
“When you’re a foot away from his face, I couldn’t help but notice—he had on really big makeup—but you could still see some scars around his nose and his lips,” says Steve Jander, who would work with Michael on special effects for the Victory tour. Michael went through his second facial surgery in 1981, two years after the first one. For four weeks at the time, he stayed with his old friend from high school, David Gest, by then a music journalist for
Soul
magazine.
“I always felt he looked so good after that second one, he never needed to do more,” said Gest, no stranger himself to facial surgery.

For Landis and Ray, the “Thriller” video set would take on a surreal quality as Michael’s friends—including Jacqueline Onassis (whose Doubleday Books would publish his
Moonwalk
memoir), President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, Lillian Disney, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando, and Rock Hudson—stopped by. One day, Folsey accepted an invitation to Michael’s trailer, and when he arrived, MJ said,
“George, I’d like to introduce you to Mrs. Onassis.” Another day, Michael brought a portly, older gentleman in a polyester suit to see Landis:
“John, do you know Spanky McFarland?” Of all the people Landis expected to meet on the set of a music video, the former child star of
Our Gang
was not among them. Michael’s parents showed up one night at the set, and Michael instructed Landis to tell Joe to leave.
“What’s the matter?” Landis asked. “He just makes me uncomfortable,” Michael said. Landis did as he was instructed, and Joe Jackson did not take the news well.
“Do you know who I am?” came the response.

Michael Peters, choreographer for “Beat It,” returned for “Thriller.” On the first day, Peters told his dancers,
“This is not a glamour gig. It’s going to be uncomfortable makeup and dentures in your mouth and twelve hours of being really weird looking.” Adding to that discomfort was the routine, a counterintuitive repeating pattern. The hip-thrusting, shoulder-twisting, arm-raising zombie steps turned out to be hard to learn. “It always makes me sore the next day,” says Kim Blank, one of the dancers, who still teaches the moves in classes. “There’s a way you catch the move and contract your muscles.”

After Landis and Folsey finished filming and prepared for the editing, Michael freaked out. He called his attorney, Branca, and instructed him to destroy the video. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had found out about the werewolves and other demons and threatened to excommunicate him. Branca, Folsey, and Landis secured the canisters containing the “Thriller” negatives and locked them in Branca’s offices. Later, Michael’s security chief, Bill Bray, called Landis to say the singer had been in his room for three days. Landis drove to Hayvenhurst and helped Bray kick in the door. They found Michael, lying in his room, saying,
“I feel so bad.” Michael hadn’t been eating. Landis pushed him to see a doctor, and the next day he was more conciliatory. He apologized to Landis and both agreed the video was fantastic. Michael was still worried about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Landis suggested he attach a disclaimer at the beginning. “Due to my strong personal convictions,” the “Thriller” video begins, in white-on-black print, forevermore, “I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” “No matter how wacky something was, it always had some amazing benefit,” Landis says. “That disclaimer caused a lot of talk, and it generated a lot of interest.”

The premiere at the Crest Theatre, in Westwood, drew stars such as
Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, Prince, and Eddie Murphy, who was moved to shout at the end:
“Show the goddamn thing again!”

MTV had already paid for the “Thriller” exclusive, even though Showtime, then a tiny pay-cable network, ran it four times first.
“We saw the ratings spike every single play,” MTV’s Les Garland recalls. “The ratings would jump ten times what they were.” MTV’s premiere was on December 2, 1983, and by the end of the following year, the
Thriller
album had sold
thirty-three million copies.

*  *  *

By fall 1983, it was obvious to everyone that Michael Jackson needed to do something he’d never done: tour as a solo artist. He was growing apart from his brothers. He didn’t want to continue collaborating with them. Creatively, the brothers were stagnating.
“After
Thriller
came out, we saw him less and less,” Marlon said.

Michael had centered his business team on manager DiLeo, attorney Branca, and accountant Marshall Gelfand, but Joe Jackson was desperate for a way back in. He was in financial trouble, and so were Michael’s brothers. They’d spent the years since the
Triumph
tour making little money—they weren’t exactly dominating MTV—yet continuing to spend like pop stars. They had sports cars and large LA homes. So, unbeknownst to Michael, in April 1983, Joseph began meeting with promoters for a Jacksons tour.

“The best offers coming in were for $200,000,” Joe said. “That was too little. I just couldn’t let it happen for that amount.” The last Jacksons tour had netted each Jackson brother
“only a fairly small sum,” Joseph complained. He was determined to give the rest of the Jackson brothers, whom he still managed, a chance to make some cash, too.

Joe put out inquiries and wound up with an invitation to a press party for a boxing match in Las Vegas. When he showed up, he could hear Don King’s voice in the distance. The promoter wore his usual black tuxedo and frilly white shirt, holding a cigar between two fingers
adorned with diamond rings.
“I found him extremely impressive,” Joe said. The public side of Don King was the fast-talking boxing promoter, the man with the pointy Troll-doll, salt-and-pepper hairdo. But King once served four and a half years in prison on manslaughter charges. He attributed his behavior to “the frustration of the ghetto expressing itself.” Years later, the governor of Ohio pardoned him.

After Joe and King met in Vegas, the boxing promoter met with the Jackson brothers and their attorneys at their Encino home. King made his pitch.
“You know why you’re not as big as Elvis? Because Elvis was white,” he said, addressing Michael. After King left, the brothers moved to make their decision. They kicked their attorneys out of the room. Peter Paterno—attorney for Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy—went to the kitchen and ate chicken with seventeen-year-old Janet. Randy assured him they’d never pick the boorish King. But when the brothers invited Paterno back in, Randy had his head down. He muttered, “Don’s going to be the promoter. Go negotiate a deal with him.”

King offered a guaranteed
$3 million to the family, including
$500,000 to each brother, plus a cut to Joe and Katherine. Jermaine was impressed, but Michael didn’t like King. In family meetings, Michael had repeated the same thing: “No. I’m not going.” Joe and the brothers were desperate. They tried guilt, anger, stomping out of the room, and reverse psychology.
“Would you get on a plane with a pilot that never flew before?” Michael kept asking them. “Why are we thinking of having him promote our tour?” Responded Joe:
“A salesman is a salesman. He can sell anything.” Finally, Joe and the rest of the Jacksons tried the nuclear option, which always worked: they called Katherine. She met with Michael, quietly, privately, and the next thing anybody knew, he was on board. Reluctantly. “Michael didn’t want to do the tour,” Marlon said. “He wasn’t happy about it. Not from the word go. Even after rehearsals started, Michael was still making demands and arguing about various details, threatening not to participate at all unless he got his way.”

True to character, King asserted himself immediately.
“It was constant
fights with Don, who was always trying to get a leg up,” Paterno remembers. He and King made sport of hollering at each other. The brothers began to court sponsors, and the one that interested Michael most was Quaker Oats.
“Had the Jacksons tour sponsorship been shopped, we probably could have had multiple sponsors and perhaps collected twenty million dollars,” recalls a source close to the tour. But King was doing his own sponsor-shopping. He met with PepsiCo’s chief executive officer, Roger Enrico, and after talking mostly about himself, casually mentioned he’d spoken to Pepsi’s archrival, Coca-Cola. He said Coke was interested. That turned out to be untrue.
“Nonetheless, we ended up doing a deal with him,” Enrico recalls.