MJ (28 page)

After that, the booming intensity abruptly drops, as if the lustful, glass-smashing Michael Jackson has rushed off the stage, only to be replaced with Harry Belafonte: “Heal the World” is orchestral and sappy, another pass at “We Are the World,” positioning MJ as soothing philanthropist. The second half of
Dangerous
whiplashes from “Black or White” (which contains the best guitar riff ever on an MJ song) to the power ballad “Give In to Me” to a lushly arranged version of Buz Kohan’s calculated weeper “Gone Too Soon.” Yet this portion of the album includes “Will You Be There,” MJ’s prayer-poem that taps into the power of gospel music even more intensely than “Man in the Mirror”—its first lines are “Hold me / like the River Jordan,” and his teary poetry reading at the end is as poignant as his famous breakdown at the end of “She’s Out of My Life.” The album closes with the upbeat
“Dangerous,” about addicted lovers who can never come together, leaving the frustrated, murmuring narrator with, to paraphrase an old blues song, stones in his passway: “I cannot sleep alone tonight / my baby left me here tonight / I cannot cope till it’s all right.” It’s a fantastic album, perhaps the only time Michael ever found the perfect balance between revving up the dance floor and working out his issues.

The MJ of
Dangerous
had grander aspirations than just an album. “Heal
the World” became a foundation, from which Michael intended to actually heal the world. (Its goal, he announced, was to raise $100 million for children suffering from war and disease, although the foundation wound up with $4 million before being suspended in 2002 for neglecting yearly accounting statements.) Around this time, he instructed Epic’s Stessel to give him a title.
“Elvis is the King and Bruce is the Boss,” Michael said. “I want to have a name.” Capitulating to the star’s request, in November 1991 Matt Farber of MTV wrote a memo to his staff, signed by the channel’s founder and boss, Bob Pittman: “We need to refer to Michael Jackson as ‘The King of Pop’ on-air.” MTV complied, awkwardly at first, but over time, it turned into a formal title. “It was laughed at,” Stessel says, “and then it became part of the vernacular.” Executives at Epic’s parent company, Sony Entertainment, reluctantly endured MJ’s extravagant behavior.
“You just had to deal with unrealistic requests when one of his managers would come in and ask for millions more for short films,” said Tommy Mottola, the company’s president. “More, more, more, more, more.”

*  *  *

Joni
Sighvatsson, who ran Propaganda Films, should have known when he signed on to make the “Black or White” video that Michael Jackson was not going to cooperate. His first meeting with MJ, at a studio where he was recording the
Dangerous
album, was supposed to begin at six
P.M.
, but Michael didn’t show until eight, bringing Bubbles with him. Then, at 8:30, Michael insisted on halting the meeting to watch
The Simpsons
. Unsurprisingly, when Sighvatsson came around to shooting the video, Michael was not particularly reliable about showing up, and the crews found themselves with little usable footage. So Sighvatsson contacted John Landis, who’d directed the “Thriller” video.
“You have a good relationship with Michael Jackson, right?” Sighvatsson said. “I think he’ll show up for you. Would you come in and do a video?” Recalls Landis: “They’d blown through what the budgets were, and produced nothing.” The director asked for big money—and received it—and a paycheck every Monday.

Jackson greeted his old friend warmly. Landis saw that while he pursued his own vision of “Thriller” out of Michael’s desire to become a monster, “Black or White” would be more collaborative—
“trying to make something out of all of Michael’s ideas.” Like the
Dangerous
album, the
“Black or White” video is unfocused but powerful, beginning with a vignette involving a rebellious Macaulay Culkin, an electric guitar, gigantic speakers, and George Wendt of
Cheers
as the repressive dad blasted into space in his easy chair. Michael dances in a white dress shirt and black pants with African dancers in a desert, with Egyptian dancers in a small room, with Native American dancers on a platform surrounded by guns and horses, with Russian dancers in the snow. Then he walks through fire with a burning cross in the background. The video ends with a new technology, in which actors and dancers, including model Tyra Banks, morph from Rastafarian man to Asian woman to poofy-haired white guy. “There were things I’d always wanted to do, so we took advantage of the budget to do it,” Landis says. “ ‘Black or White’ is a mess. It was just a bunch of stuff, and I was making it coherent.”

The original final four minutes of the “Black or White” video begins with an animated panther walking down a set of stairs, then transforming into Michael Jackson. From there, MJ performs one of the most extraordinary dance sequences of his career. Wearing a black fedora, splashing through puddles, screaming “Ho!” like he would later do in concert, Michael furiously tap-dances sideways, thrusting his hands into and out of his pockets, bending his knees and elbows in unnatural ways. “Making shit up,” is how Landis describes it. He was bathed in blue light, dressed in black, and wearing an oddly fashionable lace-up brace on his right arm—that came from a production assistant who’d fallen off his bicycle. (“That’s so neat,” Michael told him on the set. “Can I wear that?”)

In the original cut, Michael-as-Black-Panther causes general mayhem, throwing a trash can through a hotel window, a reference to Mookie inducing the riot in Spike Lee’s 1989 film
Do the Right Thing,
and hopping on top of an old car to smash its windows with a crowbar.
He also grabbed his crotch numerous times, forcefully, then conspicuously zipped up his zipper, suggesting
masturbation more blatantly than he ever had with this longtime stage move. Critic Elizabeth Chin called the panther dance “a taking off of the mask, a revelation of the abiding rage and anger that whites both fear and suppress: a truth that cannot be morphed into something palatable either in dreams or in reality.” Michael himself later affirmed these motives:
“I said, ‘I want to do a dance number where I can let out my frustration about injustice and prejudice and racism and bigotry,’ and within the dance I became upset and let go,” he said, adding that he ran the idea by his sister Janet. “I think at the time people were concerned with the violent content of the piece, but it’s, like, easy to look at. It’s simple.”

Landis struggled on the set to contain MJ’s sexual expression. At one point, as Michael reached into his crotch, Landis yelled, “Cut!” and told Michael to knock it off—this was a family production. Michael defied the instruction, instead unzipping his fly and reaching his hand further into his crotch. Landis stopped filming again and said he was uncomfortable with the move. They asked choreographer Vince Paterson for his opinion; he agreed with Landis. But Michael insisted on calling Gallin, his manager.
“Sandy was a screaming queen. A very flamboyant homosexual,” Landis said. “Sandy Gallin comes to the set, looks at the playback, and he goes, ‘Do it, Michael! Do it! Do it!’ ” During the editing process later, Landis says he cut the most objectionable crotch-grabbing images and “what’s in the finished piece, I thought was fine.”

But when the video made its debut, during prime time on a Thursday night in November 1991, angry parents declared the video too violent and too sexual. Network spokespeople criticized the clip. Michael capitulated, issuing an apology and releasing a new version of the video minus the last four minutes. Another version soon came out with swastikas and “KKK Rules” graffiti stamped onto the walls and car windows of the city scene—a tidier target for MJ’s complex racial feelings. This version suggests that, as Chin writes,
“violence like Jackson’s can be
understood only if it comes as a response to overt racism (rather than, as in the original, a response to structural racism).” The reaction, and MJ’s response to it, was a shame. The dance was one of the few times Michael’s social activism came across as something other than benignly trying to unify the races. Today, Landis says he appreciates the timing of the video, panther dance and all, just a few months before the Los Angeles race riots.
“Very prescient,” Landis says. “When it came out, it generated all this controversy. What does that do? It sells records.”

During the actual Los Angeles riots, in spring 1992, Michael Jackson was on Chicago’s West Side, shooting a video for “Jam” in an old armory building with basketball superstar Michael Jordan. To maintain secrecy, director David Kellogg and his crew had told Chicago officials they would be filming a
mayonnaise commercial. Word spread, though, that for half a day, the two MJs were filming together in this part of town. (The video showed Michael Jackson shooting hoops and Michael Jordan dancing, both graceful but struggling to master the other’s discipline; filmmakers later dubbed in a voice actor for Jordan’s dialogue.) After the Rodney King verdicts, riots had been breaking out in neighborhoods throughout the US, from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, but they were absent in this part of Chicago. “Something about the presence of these two guys in this neighborhood in this moment kind of squashed the notions of riot,” Kellogg says. On the third day of filming, long after Jordan had returned to his day job with the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jackson called the director to say he wouldn’t be showing up due to a lunch meeting. It turned out to be with President George H. W. Bush, in Washington, DC, to receive a humanitarian “Point of Light” award for his work with disadvantaged children.

His Black Panther days were over.

*  *  *

In May 1992, the
Dangerous
album had been out for six months. MJ was driving his Jeep down Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills when his car broke down. Michael’s calls to 911 were of no help—for some reason, the
operator didn’t consider Michael Jackson in traffic an emergency. Then came a stroke of what seemed like good luck. A woman married to Mel Green, a Rent-A-Wreck employee, happened by Michael’s car and took in the sight of the helpless King of Pop in a black turban, a scarf, and mirrored shades. Green went out and retrieved Jackson from the side of the road. Then he contacted Dave Schwartz, founder of his company. Stunned, Schwartz called his wife, June, a beautiful former model whose dark hair was the same shade and length as Michael Jackson’s. Her son Jordan Chandler, twelve, happened to be a Michael Jackson fanatic. He’d spent much of his childhood imitating Michael, wearing one white glove and a jacket like the one in “Billie Jean” and mastering Michael’s dance moves. Jordan had been an MJ fan since he’d encountered him briefly at the
Golden Temple, a health-food restaurant on Third Street in LA, when he was roughly five years old.
Vanity Fair
’s Maureen Orth described Jordie as
“fine-boned, delicate and dark like his mother, and who looks much younger than he is”; one of the few photos of Chandler to emerge during this period suggests a movie-star charisma, with big, sad, brown eyes.

The Chandlers were not a happy family at the time. June had recently divorced from Evan Chandler, dentist to the stars, and married Schwartz, which was hard on Jordie and his stepsister Lily.
“The parents had separate families, so there was a lot of tension between the families,” says Larry Feldman, the attorney who would represent Jordan, “and a lot of finger-pointing between the mom and the dad.” That day in LA, though, Jordie and June were thrilled. So was Michael.
June gave Michael her phone number and he agreed to call.

The Schwartzes received the call at home within a month or two. It was certainly unusual for the Chandler family that
Michael Jackson
would call to say hello, even after a vague promise, but it wasn’t for people who knew Michael. From Terry George in England to the late Ryan White to Australian Brett Barnes to Macaulay Culkin, Michael maintained phone friendships with children, frequently boys, around
the world. Michael and
Jordie shared a love for video games, and Michael invited his new seventh-grade friend to his
“hideout” condominium in Century City, where he had an arcade of his own. But June wouldn’t let Jordie go—he had tests at school. Anyway, Michael was preparing for his
Dangerous
tour, scheduled to open in Europe that July.

That tour began much like Victory and
Bad
. It was to be the biggest ever, with the most spectacular special effects, the most brilliant costumes, an unprecedented production, and a fleet of trucks and jets to carry it all.

“The feel was different,” says Eddie Garcia, a dancer who’d been on the
Bad
tour. “It was on a bigger scale. This was the first time you had the stage split open and rise up.”

Michael asked for a
thirty-foot wall containing 350 super-high-powered aircraft-landing lights. When Peter Morse, the tour’s lighting designer, finally unveiled it to Michael, he smiled and said, “Now can I get that all the way around, on the sides and the top, too?” Management eventually denied the request.

McPhillips, the set designer, and his staff batted around ideas under pressure—initially they wanted to hang a canopy over the stage, so it would resemble the busy, colorful cover of the
Dangerous
album. But, someone said,
“We can’t have that. The headlines will say,
IT’S LIKE A CIRCUS
.” When McPhillips showed Michael a model for the stage, he left to think about it, then returned half an hour later with yet another impossibly big idea. “I need rocket man,” he said. “I need to fly around the stage.”

The equipment to fly MJ around the stage cost $20,000 per show to transport. Michael wouldn’t wear the spacesuit—action star Chuck Norris’s stunt double handled the job. “Michael would step away and this other guy would run in and he’d successfully fly off the stage with the jet pack,” recalls Ken Graham, the Victory veteran hired as a
Dangerous
site coordinator. “The logistics of moving this hazardous rocket fuel from city to city, and on jets and trucks—that was a whole movie unto itself.”

The tour was absurdly expensive—a company called Rock-It Cargo, which specialized in massive international tours, had to lease three huge
Soviet An-124 air freighters to haul the production between Europe, Asia, and South America.