MJ (26 page)

The other camp interpreted these romps in a more sinister way. Tom McPhillips had been the set designer for
Bad
; by the time he reupped for the
Dangerous
tour a few years later, he was becoming uncomfortable.
“There were these Australian kids who just seemed to be running
wild around the set all the time, and they were part of the entourage. And the question was, ‘Where are their parents?’ ‘Well, they’re in Australia,’ ” recalls McPhillips, a father of two sons. “At that point, I didn’t believe anything anybody was saying. Seeing those kids unsupervised for such a long time just seemed to be very wrong.” Eric Henderson, the dancer on the
Captain EO
set who had seen Michael spending all his time with an
eleven-year-old boy, recalls:
“On the back of the set, they were alone, playing this game—you try to smack the other person’s hand. This was a private moment that nobody else could see. I saw how innocent it was. But in my mind, I said, ‘That is just not good.’ ”

*  *  *

During the
Bad
tour, DiLeo gave interview after interview, making the case that his longtime client truly wasn’t that weird. The press could relate to DiLeo. He was an amiable schlub, overweight and balding, constantly smoking a cigar, charming in his own way, amazed at his own good fortune for having hooked up with Michael Jackson.
People
ran down the laundry list of Jackson eccentricities and DiLeo debunked them.

Did Michael propose to Elizabeth Taylor?

“No, he didn’t. And no, there’s no shrine to her in his house.”

Did Michael take hormone shots to deepen his voice?

“Ridiculous.”

Did he have eye surgery?

“He has never had his eyes done.”

What about the nose?

“Yes, he did have his nose done, as every person in Hollywood has. Elvis did, Monroe did.”

Cheekbones too?

“No.”

Did he add a cleft to his chin?

“Yes. He wanted one.”

Did he lighten his skin?

“Preposterous.”

The hyperbaric chamber?

“He has a chamber. I don’t know if he sleeps in it. I’m not for it. But Michael thinks it’s something that’s probably healthy for him. He’s a bit of a health fanatic.”

Did he try to buy the Elephant Man’s remains?

“Well, everyone has a skeleton in their closet.”

DiLeo had a sense of humor, and he kept Michael centered. He kept costs low.
“Frank was hard and pretty stern. He just didn’t brook any nonsense,” says Branton, the
Bad
lighting designer who worked closely with DiLeo. “There was a lot of financial discipline, and everybody kept up with what everything was costing and how long it would take.” Along with Branca, DiLeo was one of the few in Michael’s circle who could tell him no, sometimes in such a way that Michael would listen.

After the
Bad
tour ended, on January 27, 1989, at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, Michael Jackson fired him.

I
. A source close to Bubbles denied Michael ever hit his beloved pet.

II
. McCartney’s recollection of this meeting departs slightly from Michael’s account: He and Linda were on their way to lunch at British actor Adam Faith’s home. “Can I bring a friend along?” McCartney asked. Faith agreed, then was shocked to encounter Michael Jackson walking through his door.

III
. Prince did not respond to a direct e-mail asking why he played bass in Michael Jackson’s face.

IV
. Larry Stessel, the Epic Records executive who worked closely with Michael, remembered DiLeo as the connection to Scorsese.

V
. The programmer in question, who shall remain nameless, denies this ever happened.

VI
. Safechuck argued for Michael’s innocence while he was alive, but changed his
story in a 2014 lawsuit against the Jackson estate, saying Michael sexually abused him and they shared a bed on the
Bad
tour.

N
obody forgets a trip to Neverland Ranch. Will Vinton, who directed MJ’s “Leave Me Alone” video, accepted an invitation with his wife to view
Star Wars
at the
$2 million Neverland Cinema. They stayed for a long weekend at one of the guesthouses. Would anybody mind, Michael Jackson asked him, if his buddy Greg and his girlfriend tagged along for the movie? Not a problem, Vinton said. “Greg” turned out to be
Gregory Peck.

“I stayed overnight and had Mickey Mouse pancakes,” adds Nathan Watts, the veteran bassist who played with Stevie Wonder and MJ. “I had never seen a Mickey Mouse pancake. He had a Disney pancake maker. With the ears and everything.”

Aqil “A-Plus” Davidson of hip-hop group Wreckx-n-Effect, who supplied the rap in “She Drives Me Wild,” was nineteen when he and his girlfriend secured an invitation in 1991. They arrived early in the morning and left after dark, part of an esteemed group of musicians including
Dangerous
producer Teddy Riley and two members of the super-hot R&B group En Vogue. They drove around in Michael’s golf buggy. They watched
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
before it came out in commercial theaters—with Michael’s video for “Liberian Girl” as the
opening short. Davidson looked up from the Zipper roller coaster to see Michael Jackson in the cage above him shouting,
“Woo! The Zipper!” They saw lions, giraffes, and a llama in the zoo. They ate Hershey bars with Michael’s own picture on the wrappers. “Mike was our chaperone for the entire day,” Davidson says. “An Indian guy with a turban on, with a Latin-style mustache, made us food outside.”

Michael’s attorney John Branca had not wanted him to buy the property—at least, not for the asking price of $60 million. Its owner, William Bone, a real estate developer, had sentimental ties to the ranch, perhaps leading him to overinflate its value. (It had once been used in
The Beverly Hillbillies
.) Bone was responsible for the 13,000-square-foot Tudor-style main house, elaborate gardens, and four-acre lake. Branca talked Bone down to $17.5 million. Just as Elvis filled Graceland with personal touches such as the Meditation Garden tribute to his late parents, Michael redesigned Neverland as a sanctuary for children, a homage to Peter Pan. One of his newest friends,
Home Alone
star Macaulay Culkin, spent vacations there, traversing the grounds in a black-and-purple cart matching the colors of the Foot Clan from
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
. Michael had a thirty-four-inch
stallion named Cricket, a pot-bellied pig named Paula, and an elephant named Gypsy (a gift from Elizabeth Taylor).

The path to Neverland begins in Los Olivos, California, population 1,132. It’s just across the highway from the town square, where the weather is almost always mild and wine-tasting rooms outnumber restaurants. When he was in town, Michael used to drop in to this square every now and then, when he needed supplies for last-minute guests, his driver wedging a black limousine into a parking spot next to the sidewalk. He’d pop in to the
R-Country Market early in the morning, seeking to avoid public recognition, then pull the friendly owner into a rear office anytime somebody showed up to shop. Locals who grew up in Los Olivos recall Michael
summoning their grade-school classes to watch movies, look at the animals, and bounce on the trampoline.

Visitors in the early nineties rarely questioned Michael’s motives for focusing so much of his life on children. In 1993, he told Oprah Winfrey, not long before he put the sentiment in verse on his song “Childhood,”
“I remember going to the recording studio, and there was a park across the street
^I
and I’d see all the children playing, making noise. And I would cry.” When Michael showed Will Vinton his living quarters, Vinton couldn’t help but notice the pictures of children—some famous, some the director had never seen before—lining his bedroom. Vinton pushed back, gently.
“You know, Michael, a lot of people wouldn’t understand this,” he said. But Michael didn’t budge: “I just love children. I think children are this wonderful thing, and they bring me happiness.” Vinton backed off. He bought into the notion that Michael was an eccentric recluse who seized on children as an innocent life raft to help him navigate the world. It was easy to give Michael the benefit of the doubt.

*  *  *

In the early nineties, Michael was dumping father figures at a ferocious pace. He’d long since separated from his actual father. For his upcoming album, he decided not to work with Quincy Jones. And although his avuncular manager, Frank DiLeo, was perhaps more of an older brother than a father, Michael ditched him, too.
“Simply put, he wanted to be his own boss,” songwriter Brad Buxer said. Without this group of men, however, Michael began to run perilously low on people who could tell him what not to do. When Michael fired DiLeo, he gave no warning. Branca, Michael’s longtime lawyer, made the call:
“Michael doesn’t want to work with you.”

“Guy doesn’t want to work with me, I don’t want to work with him,” DiLeo told Branca. “What do you want me to do? Kill myself?”

People
speculated DiLeo lost his job because he had been unable to put the big-budget
Moonwalker
into theaters. (The film did, however, make a killing in the home-video market, shipping three hundred thousand copies in its first week, at $24.98 apiece, in 1989.) The truth was more complicated. In 1989, David Geffen, the smooth-talking record mogul, insinuated himself into Michael’s advisory team. Geffen didn’t get along with Branca, and he hated Walter
Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records and a longtime Michael adviser. Geffen had recently come out as a gay man, and Yetnikoff, ever the crude needler, spread around a story, as he later wrote in his autobiography, that he wanted Geffen “to show my girlfriend how to give superior blowjobs.” Geffen engineered a coup. He teamed up with Yetnikoff’s CBS number two, Tommy
Mottola, and a top music-business attorney, Allen
Grubman. Together they worked to sever Yetnikoff’s ties to CBS and its new parent company, Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp. Geffen convinced managers for longtime CBS artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand to pull away from Yetnikoff. DiLeo had been a loyal Yetnikoff underling when he worked at the CBS affiliate Epic Records. As Michael’s manager, he provided a stable line of communication between the record company and his client. To break the link between Michael and Yetnikoff, Geffen convinced MJ to dump DiLeo.

Another reason: Michael’s goal at the time was to act in movies—he felt
The Wiz
and
Captain EO
were just the beginning. Geffen convinced Michael that DiLeo knew nothing about Hollywood. Geffen’s old friend Sandy Gallin was the man for him. In addition to managing music stars such as Dolly Parton and the Pointer Sisters, Gallin was a well-connected Hollywood hand who’d produced
Father of the Bride
and would later help create
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The
Los Angeles Times
declared he had
“an instinct for recognizing talent, hard-nosed negotiating skills [and] a bottomless schmooze capacity.” Michael hired Gallin to replace DiLeo. Thus, Geffen’s plan to cut Yetnikoff’s connections
in Michael’s world succeeded. Sony’s executives, weary of Yetnikoff, installed Mottola in his place at the influential record label.

Michael continued to retool his management team. In 1990, he asked Branca to deliver him a new CBS Records contract that was bigger than any other pop star’s deal. Branca came up with a suitably impressive, unprecedented proposal, which would have earned Michael an
$18 million advance, a royalty rate of roughly 25 percent of each album sale, and a guaranteed $5 million per album (up to $120 million total if he hit certain sales levels). The deal was to begin with an album that had been Branca’s idea—a greatest-hits package,
Decade
, with a few new songs, intended to buy time and ease Michael’s pressure to create. Branca met with Michael in spring 1990 and asked for equity in the publishing company he’d helped purchase. Michael said he’d think about it. He called Geffen for advice. Geffen, who liked Branca almost as little as he liked Yetnikoff, convinced Michael to dump Branca, just as he’d dumped Quincy and Frank.

Michael’s deal with CBS Records had essentially expired by March 1991. The company, now owned by Sony, wanted to keep its
biggest superstar, even though his sales power had been diminishing since
Thriller
. Michael’s new attorney, Geffen loyalist Grubman, negotiated a new record deal with Sony Music, including a
25 percent royalty rate and a $50 million advance. The deal was lucrative and imperfect—it added a couple of albums to Michael’s existing recording contract. But for Michael, the real enticement to the new contract was movie connections.
“He admired Elvis Presley’s career greatly, and he felt that his career should be modeled against that,” says Rusty Lemorande, who wrote and produced
Captain EO
and worked closely with Michael on movie projects through the early nineties. “He felt Elvis Presley was more remembered because of his films than because of his performances.” In addition to signing with Gallin, Michael hired well-known Creative Artists Agency to represent him for film projects. The new connections paid off immediately—Sony Pictures executive
Jon Peters attached him to a project with
Batman
production designer Anton Furst (who committed suicide before he could direct his first movie). Later, Michael was supposed to star in
Angels with Dirty Faces
, an update of the Jimmy Cagney gangster film.

The
Decade
greatest-hits concept aside, Michael had begun to record demos for his next album the day after he finished
Bad
.
“He never starts an album,” says Bill Bottrell, his songwriting partner and producer at the time. “He always starts two bonus tracks on a greatest-hits.” By early 1990, MJ was commandeering rooms at several LA studios, at great expense, and was beginning to communicate the music he heard in his head to his collaborators. Some responded with concern. They worried about Michael’s ability to focus without Quincy in charge. Others heard the music he was working on and decided he was following, not leading.
“He was desperately searching for something,” says Chris Currell, who had manned the Synclavier for
Bad
. “He started going to a whole bunch of different producers, throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks—famous people’s names.” Currell told him: “You don’t have to do that. Your only competition is yourself. Just do what you do.” Michael didn’t take his advice, and Currell, a collaborator for nearly seven years, finally quit. But Michael had a vision for what his next record should sound like, and he was okay with losing collaborators who wouldn’t follow it. At Westlake studio, where he’d made much of
Thriller
and
Bad
, Michael first
hummed the main hook for “Black or White.”