MJ (49 page)

The dancers stuck around for a while, and some of the musicians joined them.
“The room was dark and candles were lit in the dressing room,” recalls Darryl Phinnessee, a longtime MJ backup singer. “It was just quiet.” Finally, Ortega led a prayer and the ensemble dispersed.
“Is it true?” paparazzi and Michael Jackson fans yelled at the dancers, and others from This Is It, as they finally left the arena. Nobody knew what to say. In coming days, Grant had to turn off his phone, he was getting so many calls.

As news spread that Michael Jackson had died, mourning began
small and personal, on plots of land nearest to MJ’s body. Hundreds gathered at UCLA Medical Center, some wearing familiar Michael costumes, crying, texting, blasting
“Heal the World” on iPods, forcing police and security to block off the entrances; the nearby Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house added to the din by cranking
“Human Nature” over its large speakers. Outside Michael’s house on Carolwood, so many cars parked along the street that police had to shoo away drivers using a loudspeaker. Fans swarmed the Jackson family home on Hayvenhurst, blasting music and showing off single white gloves. In Gary, Indiana, fans streamed to the house at 2300 Jackson Street to drop off
teddy bears and flowers. In Detroit,
three hundred people pulled up to the Motown Historical Museum, site of the original Hitsville headquarters, blasting MJ music from cars and trucks. A forty-five-year-old teacher set up a photo of Michael on an easel, surrounded by roses and an American flag, in front of the porch. At the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where the Jackson 5 performed, CNN reported so much dancing and cheering that
“it’s almost like Michael Jackson’s last concert.”

Every time an iconic artist dies, fans gravitate to a song, a film scene, or a photo—like Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” or Robin Williams’s “it wasn’t your fault” clip from
Good Will Hunting
. As this process played out via Twitter and Facebook, fans were drawn to “Man in the Mirror,” with its cathartic gospel chorus. Mercifully, media coverage finally began to shift from “Michael Jackson is a weird creep” to “Michael Jackson was an entertainment legend.” Smokey Robinson went on Larry King to say he was devastated. Kenny Rogers added, “You try to find something to smile about, something to laugh at just to keep you going and get you through this.” Berry Gordy said he was numb. Rapper Wyclef Jean called MJ his
“musical god.” A CNN correspondent called Michael
“the Jackie Robinson of MTV.” The
Atlanta Examiner
website posted a
four-thousand-word list of all the charities to which MJ had contributed. The
Chicago
Sun-Times
concluded,
“Whatever else you might think, he left us ‘Thriller.’ ”

MJ mourning went international. In Japan, TV stations cut in live from the US. Former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung said:
“We lost a hero of the world.” Fans gathered in Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and Nairobi, and officials from South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to England’s Gordon Brown paid tribute. So many people googled “Michael Jackson” that the massive search engine’s computers perceived the requests as some kind of hacker attack. The most common way of mourning involved old-fashioned consumerism. In Grand Prairie, Texas, fans lined up at a record store called
Forever Young and bought everything they could find with Michael’s name on it—CDs, posters, eight-track tapes. Radio stations, which had been avoiding all but the best-known Jackson singles in recent years, went into all-Michael-all-the-time mode. In New York, WBLS opened the phone lines for listeners, who happened to include MJ producer Teddy Riley, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Michael Bivins from New Edition.
“Although we always had played Michael Jackson, we went back to get many, many more hits that had kind of gotten lost,” Skip Dillard, the station’s program director, would say. “It was amazing how much people, and all of us, had really missed those.” In the week before his death, Michael’s top sixty-four tracks, including “Man in the Mirror,” “Thriller,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” sold
thirty thousand copies via iTunes; from June 25 to 28, sales of those same tracks hit 1.8 million; by year’s end, he would sell
8.2 million.

The official cause of death was a heart attack, brought on by an overdose of sleep medication. Police wanted to know more. Detectives Orlando Martinez and Scott
Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department visited Michael’s Carolwood bedroom. “It’s just weird,” Martinez recalls. “It’s not like a room where somebody sleeps. It looks like a room where somebody’s being treated.” In the clutter of pill bottles, they found one with a hole for a syringe, and that’s when they heard the word
propofol
for the first time. They began to treat MJ’s death as a homicide investigation.

Finally, Murray’s attorney Ed Chernoff provided the doctor’s side of the story. At 4:02
P.M.
on Saturday, June 27, police met with Murray and Chernoff at the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Rey. In Murray’s retelling, he asked MJ how he was feeling at one
A.M.
on June 25. “Oh, tired and fatigued, and I’m treated like I’m a machine,” the singer told him. He took a quick shower, changed, and returned to his bedroom. Murray administered a dermatological cream onto Michael’s back to treat his vitiligo, then connected the needle from an IV drip into the back of Michael’s leg. Michael took a 10-milligram Valium pill to help him sleep. Then Murray added 2 milligrams of lorazepam through the IV. But by 4
A.M.
, Michael was still awake and growing frustrated. “I got to sleep, Dr. Conrad,” he said. “I have these rehearsals to perform. . . . I cannot function if I don’t get the sleep!” Around 5
A.M.
, Murray gave MJ 2 more milligrams of lorazepam. At 7:30
A.M.
, he added another 2 milligrams of Versed. At 10
A.M.
, after nine straight hours of not sleeping, Michael finally confronted Murray. “I’d like to have some milk,” he said. “Please, please give me some milk so that I can sleep, because I know that this is all that really works for me.” Dutifully, Murray added 25 milligrams of propofol to the IV drip—an important detail he had neglected to mention to the EMTs and hospital doctors on the day of Michael’s death. “I’ve given it to him before,” Murray recalled. “He handled it fine.” Actually, the doctor had administered propofol to the pop star every day since he’d begun to work with him two months earlier. Michael, finally, went to sleep.

The doctor did not explain to police that propofol was never intended for home use under any circumstances.
“We don’t use it for rest or for sleep or psychological reasons,” Dr. Alon Steinberg, a cardiologist who reviewed the case, would say in court. “I have never heard of it.” Murray also didn’t mention he lacked the proper equipment to administer such a dangerous drug—his pulse oximeter did not contain an alarm to alert the doctor in case Michael Jackson’s pulse were to abruptly stop, and he had no EKG monitor to check Michael’s heart
activity. While Murray continues to insist he was trying to “wean” MJ off his propofol dependence, he could not square that with the dozens of bottles he’d had shipped to his girlfriend’s apartment.

After administering the drug to Michael Jackson, Murray passed the time speaking to friends and associates on his cell phone. The calls were at 10:14, 11:07, 11:18, 11:42, and 11:51—that last one was to Sade Anding, one of his girlfriends. About five minutes into the call, Anding heard a commotion and realized Murray was no longer on the phone.
“I said, ‘Hello, hello,’ and I didn’t hear anything,” she would say. “And that’s when I pressed the phone against my ear, and I heard mumbling of voices.”

It was the sound of Michael Jackson dying.

*  *  *

Memorials, big and small, spilled into every community remotely related to Michael Jackson’s life. At the Apollo Theater, July 1 in Harlem, six hundred fans heard the Rev. Al Sharpton pinpoint Michael’s role as a sort of ambassador from the African-American community to the white world:
“Michael made young men and women all over the world imitate us.” In Montego Bay, Jamaica, promoters at the Reggae Sumfest presented
Tito Jackson with giant plaques emblazoned with drawings of his late brother.

The biggest memorial, of course, was at the Staples Center, where Jackson had been rehearsing less than two weeks earlier. Twenty thousand people watched as Mariah Carey dueted with Trey Lorenz on “I’ll Be There”; Jennifer Hudson sang “Will You Be There”; Usher cried during “Gone Too Soon”; and Berry Gordy Jr., Brooke Shields, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Lakers greats Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant sat in the audience. MJ would have appreciated the enormity of the event—big stars, big music, including a full-on Andrae Crouch Choir performance of “Man in the Mirror”—but the most memorable moment was tiny, not like the King of Pop at all. For the first time, eleven-year-old Paris Jackson
emerged from the veils she’d been wearing in public most of her life and said, “I just wanted to say, ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine.” She then collapsed into her aunt Janet’s arms. AEG paid most of the $
1.5 million for the memorial, and much of the This Is It crew pulled it together in three days. Michael’s family wore black. His brothers wore matching black suits and bright-red ties, red roses in their lapels, as they carried his casket.

*  *  *

Once Michael died, Randy Phillips called Tohme Tohme and suggested he lock down the Carolwood home. Tohme hired Ron Williams, who’d worked in the US Secret Service for twenty-two years and was by then chief executive of a private security firm called Talon Executive Services, to zoom to the house and set up security. When the LAPD finished their investigation, Williams’s people took over,
“with orders that nobody was allowed onto the property,” he recalls. (Talon similarly secured the Jackson family’s Hayvenhurst house and Michael’s Las Vegas property, where he stored valuable items in the basement.) Later that night, though, Ron Boyd, police chief for the Port of Los Angeles, arrived with La Toya Jackson and her boyfriend Jeffre Phillips. In a flurry of phone calls, the security crew discussed shutting out the family, but in the end, they decided to let them be. Katherine Jackson showed up three hours later, and the Jacksons stayed in Michael’s home for five or six days. At one point, they brought in a U-Haul truck and, as Williams recalls, “took out whatever they wanted from the residence.” It’s unclear what the Jacksons removed—
Rolling Stone
and
Vanity Fair
said La Toya carried out bags of cash, but La Toya later sent a cease-and-desist letter to
Vanity Fair
, insisting the allegation was untrue. (She’d said previously that by the time she arrived, all the cash Michael kept around the house was gone.) The
Times
of London quoted Michael’s former nanny, Grace Rwaramba, about receiving a call that night from Katherine Jackson in the Carolwood home.
“Grace, the children are crying. They are asking
about you. They can’t believe that their father died,” Katherine told Grace. “Grace, you remember Michael used to hide cash at the house. I am here. Where can it be?” Rwaramba suggested Katherine search “the garbage bags and under the carpets.” The Jacksons did remove valuable items from the house during this time—Taj Jackson, one of Tito’s sons who was in the hit R&B group 3T, recalled Jeffre
Phillips giving him two computers, one containing MJ’s music. He gave the music computer to Michael’s estate and stored the other computer, with a password set by Michael Amir Williams that Taj couldn’t crack, in Prince Jackson’s bedroom closet.
“They backed up trucks, removing everything,” Frank DiLeo would say. “They thought Michael owned it all, so they took even the rented furniture.”

For several days after Michael’s death, his estate was in chaos. Nobody could find a will, so his assets were put in a trust, to be turned over to his three children when they turned eighteen. Nobody else in Michael’s family was to receive his half a billion dollars in assets, including 50 percent of the lucrative
Sony ATV catalog and the rights to his own songs. (They also wouldn’t have been responsible for any of his
$400 million in debt.) Katherine applied in court to oversee the estate. She and Joseph filed documents saying they believed there was no valid will.

But the Jacksons received a shock when a voice from Michael’s past suddenly resurfaced. Michael had fired his longtime attorney, John Branca, years earlier, but rehired him on
June 17, at the
request of newly returned manager Frank DiLeo, shortly before his death. When Michael died, Branca and his associates searched their offices and found not one but two wills, the most recent one dated July 7, 2002, bequeathing all of the singer’s assets to a family trust, payable to his children when they turn twenty-one, with larger payouts at ages thirty, thirty-five, and forty. (An attorney from a different firm had found a third will, from 1997, suggesting Michael had been crafting new versions with the birth of each of his kids.) As Katherine positioned
herself to take over Michael’s affairs, Branca submitted documents in probate court June 30. The newly discovered will—conveniently, some in Michael’s family would argue—named Branca himself as a coexecutor of the MJ estate along with longtime Jackson family friend and veteran record executive John McClain. Signed by Michael with his usual flourish, his initials scrawled next to every paragraph, this newly discovered will gave Branca and McClain
“full power and authority at any time or times to sell, lease, mortgage, pledge, exchange or otherwise dispose of the property,” among many other things. Katherine was to serve as guardian for his three children. (Diana Ross was to take her place if something were to happen to his mother, which was an interesting image to contemplate.) He left the rest of his family (and, pointedly, Debbie Rowe) out of the will.

Joseph Jackson and others in Michael’s family, particularly Randy, were furious. Michael had fired Branca on February 3, 2003, they said, and instructed him to turn over all legal papers, including wills. Branca had not done so. They also believed Michael had actually been in New York on the date he appeared to have signed the will in LA. (Branca wouldn’t comment on the will, but his reps pointed to a 2012
Forbes
story titled
“The Scandalously Boring Truth about Michael Jackson’s Will,” which noted the three previous versions of the will are “remarkably consistent” and “the will is in no real danger of being overturned.”) The Jacksons convened at Janet’s condominium in Westwood. Several family lawyers were on hand, including L. Londell McMillan (on the phone). He had initially pushed for his client, Katherine, to take over the MJ estate as executor, but became noncommittal once Branca produced the will. In a presentation to the family at the condo, Jackson family attorney Brian Oxman declared the will a “big fraud,” recalls Adam
Streisand, another attorney of Katherine’s.