MJ (22 page)

III
. When Marceau died in 2007, MJ told
Jet
the moonwalk inspiration came not from the mime but from “watching the great, rhythmic, wonderful black children dance around the world.”

IV
. “We’re hanging everything, including the kitchen sink!” they joked to each other.

O
f all Michael Jackson’s pets—
Mr. Tibbs the ram, Spanky the dog, Jabbar the giraffe, Muscles the snake, Louie the llama—Bubbles the chimpanzee was by far the most famous. Michael had to beg to get him. His mother had told her animal-loving family: “You can have whatever animal you want, but you can never have a monkey.” Technically, Bubbles was an ape, not a monkey, and after he was born in a Texas biomedical lab in 1983, Michael’s mother couldn’t resist. At Hayvenhurst, Michael dressed baby Bubbles in
OshKosh B’gosh overalls, red designer shirts that matched MJ’s own outfits, and pajamas, which Bubbles adorably learned how to haul out of his own dresser drawer every night. He retrieved Häagen-Dazs ice cream from the freezer, dropped to his knees to say his nightly prayers, and appeared happily with MJ in endless photo ops. Dick Clark interviewed him. He sipped
green tea during a meeting with the mayor of Osaka, Japan. He drove Queen’s Freddie Mercury crazy by sitting primly between the superstar singers when they were supposed to be collaborating. A driver chauffeured Bubbles around Michael’s music-video sets in the
Bubblesmobile, a van filled with stuffed toys and monkey bars.
“Bubbles became a human,” La Toya said. “He became one of us.” Then he grew up.

As a tween, like most chimpanzees, Bubbles became aggressive, even competitive. His style of play was no longer cute, and he was too big to boss around.
“If there was a box of Kleenex in the room, when you came back, that box of Kleenex would be empty. Kleenex everywhere,” says Matt Forger, an engineer who worked at Michael’s Hayvenhurst home
studio. “If you left headphones in the room, he’d play a game of swinging them and throwing them everywhere.”

One day, Forger was working in the control room, mixing with analog tape machines. A mechanical pinch roller was spinning rapidly, with the intensity of a table saw, and Bubbles became curious. He cocked his finger as if to stick it into the roller, which might have destroyed the machine, and possibly the chimp’s finger as well. Forger, usually unflappable, turned to Michael with a startled look. Michael caught it. “BUBBLES, NO!” the world’s biggest pop star screamed, whacking his ape with a rolled-up newspaper. Humiliated by Forger’s betrayal to his master, Bubbles flashed Forger a devastating ape scowl—“like he would jump over his skin and be all over you,” Forger remembers. The engineer spotted keyboardist John Barnes doubled over with laughter.

“I saw Mike hit Bubbles with his shoe,” adds Chris Currell, who manned the Synclavier at the Hayvenhurst studio. “Mike told me that he does not like to hit Bubbles in public because the people would not understand.” MJ’s coworkers say he did what he had to do, according to chimp-training wisdom of the time, but it wasn’t easy.
“He hit that monkey so hard, it hurt to watch. He didn’t want to,” recalls Brian Malouf, another studio engineer. “It was just what his trainer told him he had to do. It was terrible.”
^I

Even with Bubbles in the room, over four years, Michael and his “B-Team” of home-studio producers, including Forger, Barnes, Malouf, Currell, and songwriter Bill Bottrell, managed to build “Dirty
Diana,” “Smooth Criminal,” “Speed Demon,” “Liberian Girl,” and “Man in the Mirror”—the backbone of what would become the
Bad
album.

*  *  *

“We Are the World” happened because Harry Belafonte was watching television. It was December 1984, just before Christmas, and a news show informed the veteran singer and social activist about Ethiopian famine. A drought had spread through sub-Saharan Africa, causing the soil to dry up and farmland to recede. One hundred and fifty million people were left with little food, water, or health care. The footage of malnourished children with ribs protruding through their skin was impossible to take. Moved by the report, Belafonte called his friend Ken Kragen, who managed country star Kenny Rogers, to say he was inspired to put on a concert for Ethiopian famine relief. This concert would star Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and Stevie Wonder. Kragen talked Belafonte down from a concert to a song.

Kragen called Richie, who agreed to write it. Kragen convinced Quincy Jones to produce. Richie called Wonder—who agreed, but only after Lionel’s wife, Brenda, ran into Stevie while Christmas shopping and demanded he call her husband at that moment. Lionel, at a doctor’s appointment at the time, took the call.

Quincy asked Michael to contribute to the songwriting. It was Michael’s kind of project. He was becoming known for his charitable acts, especially those involving children. In the years after
Thriller
, he’d paid for a nineteen-bed unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, for leukemia and cancer research, and he’d set up a $1.5 million scholarship for the United Negro College Fund. Before every show on the Victory tour, he insisted on meeting groups of disabled children near the stage, just before he went on.
“He always gave to kids on their death beds. Kids in wheelchairs,” recalls Hugo Huizar, a dancer who would work with MJ in the
Captain EO
film. When Michael agreed to
Quincy’s request, Kragen and Belafonte had a formidable celebrity five-man squad—Jackson, Wonder, Richie, Jones, and Rogers.

While Kragen set up a nonprofit corporation, soliciting donations, finding a recording studio, and rounding up his roster of celebrity singers—from Bruce Springsteen to Ray Charles to Tina Turner—Jackson and Richie set to work on the song. They fiddled for weeks, as Quincy called to gently prod them—at least write the hook, he said. During one ninety-minute songwriting session, which MJ captured on tape, they brainstormed and coaxed each other. They clapped along to their choruses and paused to scribble notes onto paper. “We didn’t mention ‘truth’ yet,” Michael fretted at one point. “No, no, ‘truth’ we have mentioned,” Lionel corrected him, “We didn’t mention ‘love’ yet.” Finally, after Richie’s baritone and MJ’s soprano come together on the newly shaped chorus, Richie exulted, “My brother, we have done it!” On the night of January 21, Jackson and Richie spent two and a half hours buffing the clunkiness out of Michael’s demo. In its final form, though,
“We Are the World” was less a song than a structure, a sort of musical coatrack on which the world’s biggest music stars could hang their voices and personalities. Trading verses on the bridge, Michael and Huey Lewis fail to bring out the same fierceness MJ displayed in his “Billie Jean” voice on the demo.

Jones dubbed a secret cassette and FedExed it to the celebrity musicians he’d lined up: Ray Charles, Springsteen, Turner, Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, on and on. Almost all of them accepted. The plan was to gather the stars after the American Music Awards on January 28 at A&M Studios in LA. Jones posted a sign outside the studio door that would become famous:
CHECK YOUR EGOS AT THE DOOR
. It turned out to be both necessary and effective.
“Everybody came in there with their character,” Louis Johnson, the session bassist who’d worked on
Off the Wall
and
Thriller
, recalls. “Cyndi Lauper came with all these chains. [Engineer] Bruce Swedien had to say, ‘You have to take those off. You’re bleeding into the mike.’ ”

The
CHECK YOUR EGOS
sign apparently didn’t apply to Michael Jackson, who showed up in military regalia and aviator sunglasses, hair perfectly
coiffed. Michael had a little compact and kept pulling it out, flipping the mirror open, pulling his glasses off,
touching a small spot on his nose and replacing his glasses.

John Oates of Hall & Oates remembers Michael
“as his typical quiet self, but commanding.” Stevie Wonder had an idea to get the group to sing a line in Swahili, which didn’t quite work out. The entire group debated this point for several minutes. Bob Geldof, the leader of the Boomtown Rats who would organize Live Aid just six months later, had to declare:
“Ethiopians do not speak Swahili.” It was Michael who solved the problem by rewriting the lyrics to include a nonsensical line, “Sha-lum, sha-lingay.” The only star who had trouble singing his verse was Bob Dylan, who had by this point spent more than a decade trying to run away from his archetypal sixties voice. He struggled to find his phrasing on a line he would have never written: “It’s true we make a better day / just you and me.” Quincy had to teach him how to sing it. Diana Ross bounced around the session hugging people, sitting in Dylan’s lap and snapping photos, and lite-jazz singer Al Jarreau was overwhelmed with emotion, crying constantly. Michael, though,
“would go off by himself, instead of starting conversations with the other artists there, which most people did,” says “Bette Davis Eyes” singer Kim Carnes, who stood next to Michael, by chance, in the chorus. “That’s where the shyness came out.”

When “We Are the World” hit the airwaves in March 1985, it went into heavy rotation everywhere. The song sold twenty million copies, the first single ever to go multi-platinum, and raised millions of dollars. But it had a cloying, self-aggrandizing quality, as if the stars were singing more about themselves than the starving Ethiopian children. It smashed through the overkill barrier. Radio playlists dumped it permanently. Even MJ rarely sang it live.

*  *  *

One night, Michael and his friend Paul McCartney were eating dinner at the ex-Beatle’s Tudor-style house about an hour away from
downtown London, after cooking with his wife, Linda, and their kids. McCartney showed Jackson a thick notebook full of song titles he had purchased over the years, including the entire Buddy Holly oeuvre. Jackson barraged him with
questions:
“How do you buy them? What do you do with them after you have them?”
^II
McCartney responded,
“You are now earning a lot of money. You are really hot. First of all, get someone watching the money that you trust. . . . It can all go out of the window and you won’t ever know about it. That’s an old show-business story.” He concluded: “Think about getting into music publishing.” It was great advice, even if McCartney himself hadn’t followed it.

The saga of the Beatles song catalog, which would become a life-saving asset for Michael Jackson, actually began years earlier with a conversation between John Lennon, McCartney, and a British song publisher named Dick James. He suggested the Beatle songwriters park their valuable copyrights for
early songs such as “From Me to You” and “Thank You Girl” into a company called Northern Songs in 1963. (Through a series of convoluted business deals, Lennon and McCartney would, over time, sign away the rest of their catalog, too.) James took 50 percent, and Lennon, McCartney, and their manager Brian Epstein took the other 50. The company changed hands several times, and by 1982, Australian businessman Robert Holmes à Court had taken it over and wound up controlling the entire Beatles publishing catalog. Sir Paul tried to buy it back, but, he would complain later, it was “too much money.”

Not long after Jackson’s hallway conversation with McCartney, the pop superstars ran into each other again. “I’m going to buy your songs,” Jackson told him. “Pfffffff!” was McCartney’s reaction. “Elder brother, get outta here! Good joke, though!”

One of attorney John Branca’s colleagues had a nickname for
Michael Jackson’s negotiations to buy ATV from Holmes à Court:
the Long and Winding Road. It began when Michael, flush with
Thriller
cash and fresh from his conversation with McCartney, called Branca to say he wasn’t interested in tax shelters or real estate. He wanted music copyrights. On MJ’s behalf, Branca bought the Sly and the Family Stone catalog and a few of his own favorite songs, including Dion’s early-sixties classics “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer.” One day, Branca called Jackson.
“I think we hit the mother lode,” he said. “ATV is for sale.”

Branca and Michael’s accountant, Marshall
Gelfand, estimated the value of the catalog at $46 million—and delivered Holmes à Court an offer to that effect. Michael was so excited about acquiring the catalog that he’d accumulated a small library of Beatles books and spent his spare time reading about the songs. (He later told the
Los Angeles Times
his favorites were “Yesterday,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Fool on the Hill,” “Let It Be,” “Hey Jude,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”) He eventually bought the catalog for $47.5 million.

To run ATV, MJ and Branca hired Dale Kawashima, a music journalist who’d written for the
Los Angeles Times
and
Cash Box
before working with Prince and others to “plug” their songs for potentially lucrative cover versions by other stars. Michael and Branca had decided never, under any circumstances, to license 60 or 70 of the most beloved Beatles songs in the catalog for commercials or TV shows—among them “Let It Be” and “Yesterday,” though Carly Simon’s version of “Good Day Sunshine” landed in a Sun Chips commercial in the early nineties. Kawashima worked for Michael for more than four years, but by the end of that time, the calls and meetings with MJ began to tail off.
“It became harder to get hold of Michael directly,” he says.

*  *  *

In 1985, Michael Eisner had just taken over as chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company. One of his first ideas, in his grand plan to
transform Disney from a stale theme-park-and-cartoon company into a media empire, was to make a new film to beef up the parks.
“They hadn’t made classics since Walter died,” Eisner says. The CEO spoke with George Lucas, creator of
Star Wars
, about collaborating. Lucas signed on, as did renowned director Francis Ford Coppola. Michael Jackson, who frequented Disneylands all over the world, sometimes after hours, agreed to star. “It was Michael Jackson doing something at Disneyland that said to the world, basically, ‘Disneyland is back,’ ” Eisner recalls.

Eisner contacted Disney’s theme-park construction company, Imagineering, and asked for story concepts to pitch to Lucas and Jackson. Michael picked one with himself as a commander of a
Star Wars
–type vessel who fights intergalactic bad guys. Using disguises (he sat in a rocking chair in old-lady makeup) and subterfuge (he’d pull into a backstage area after everything closed) to throw off fans and media, Michael met regularly with Imagineering’s Rick Rothschild at Disneyland outside LA.
“He knew his way around the park pretty well,” Rothschild says. Disney spent $30 million on the seventeen-minute 3-D film, hiring top actors (like Anjelica Huston as the evil queen) and commissioning more special effects than Lucas used in
Star Wars
. In contrast to his role in
The Wiz
, the Jackson who commands the spacecraft in
Captain EO
is stiff and heroic. His face seems frozen, his body a statue, as he barks out orders to the robots and puppets in his crew. Jackson wrote two songs for the production, “Another Part of Me” and “We Are Here to Change the World.” Both hinted at Michael’s new musical style, heavy on electronics.