Authors: Steve Knopper
Michael watched the final backup dancer audition at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.
“He just walked in with about five or six bodyguards, like the president,” recalls Chris Grant, one of the dancers, a longtime MJ fan who got so close he could smell the star’s cologne, Black Orchid. “They were wearing all black.”
In mid-April, rehearsals began at CenterStaging, a plot of professional studio spaces in Burbank. Dancers practiced in one room and the band in another; the production team worked on special effects in a third. Michael showed up occasionally to give tips. AEG’s Gongaware asked his friend Tim Patterson to help document the rehearsals, then use the video for the tour’s promotional videos. Every night, he and his colleague, Sandrine Orabona, dumped their footage onto a hard drive, after which Patterson transferred it to his home-office computer.
The musicians and crew convened for about twenty-five rehearsals, beginning May 20. Michael attended about ten of them. When he wasn’t there, Travis Payne stood in. Michael showed up to CenterStaging in late May to work on the music for “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
“Michael asked to have the lights turned down,” recalls Patterson, who filmed him as he walked in. “He was shy, and it was part of his mystique.” As the
This Is It
film would show, Michael gently encouraged his sidemen to meet his exacting standards. Bearden, the keyboardist and music director, played a pulsing reggae beat on one of his synthesizers, and the old “Bad” hit sounded funky and crisp. But MJ, wearing a black jacket with cartoonishly high and pointy shoulder pads, instructed the experienced bandleader not to “change so soon.” Bearden, momentarily confused, kept his eyes fixed on Michael as he held back the beat just a bit.
“It should be simpler,” Michael said. Bearden suggested he put “a little more booty” on it. “A little more booty—that’s funny,”
Michael said. “But you know what I mean, though,” Bearden said. “No, no, you gotta let it simmer,” Michael told him, repeating the phrase. “Just
bathe
in the
moonlight.
Let it sim
-mer
.” Bearden managed to do as he was told, and by the end, the song sounds fantastic, a hybrid of Bob Marley and James Brown—slinkier than “The Way You Make Me Feel” had ever sounded. Later that night, Michael sang “Human Nature” onstage, wearing aviator shades, and the band fired him up so much that he gave a little snarl during the line “I like ah-
lovin’
this way.”
“He was very in charge and knew what he wanted. If something wasn’t right, it had to be right,” Grant recalls. “He was never mean, but was very particular about certain things.”
Michael hadn’t done a bona fide show in nearly eight years. He was slowly building his strength, working out with conditioning coach Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno. He rarely went full-speed during rehearsals, instead running through numbers to “mark” where his musicians, dancers, and effects people had to be. On June 5, Michael and Judith Hill, a young singer in the Sheryl Crow role, dueted for the first time on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” Ortega, stocky and amiable, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and little glasses, barked out instructions. He was always concerned about falling behind the schedule, but rarely let on.
“Kenny never shows stress,” recalls Erin “Topaz” Lareau, who designed some of the costumes. “That’s why he was so great at his job.”
In early June, rehearsals shifted from CenterStaging to the Forum, a larger arena in Inglewood where the Lakers and Kings used to play. Michael began to show up every day around six
P.M.
, work on vocal exercises for a couple of hours, join the band onstage around eight or nine
P.M.
, then leave between eleven
P.M.
and one
A.M.
Ortega was beginning to combine the rehearsal pieces into a cohesive show. The pyro people set off
explosions. Michael Curry, the puppetry and design expert, showed off his huge black widow spider. Michael sailed above the invisible crowd on a cherry picker, just as he’d done on the
HIStory
and
Dangerous
tours. When Michael appeared, people snapped to attention.
“He would just fill the room up, man, with joy,” says Tommy Organ, the guitarist. Although still not yet at full speed, Michael was sharp as he ran through “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Jam,” and “The Way You Make Me Feel.” To Michael, these works-in-progress were raw, unfinished performances, the kind he was never willing to show to the public. But as he shuffled through his familiar moves with a skinny, casual grace and sang in a light, almost raspy voice, he gave surprising glimpses of his humanity as a performer. Around midnight on June 6, as he began to re-create the steps of “Billie Jean,” the dancers and crew began to cheer. Michael soaked up the enthusiasm and pushed himself harder. Wearing a blue
Sgt. Pepper’s
jacket, MJ didn’t go all the way—no high leg kicks, no climactic moonwalk. But he seemed relaxed. He strutted, snapped his fingers, and futzed with his aviator sunglasses as they snagged in his long, sweaty hair. He tapped his foot, turned and walked, spun, jogged in place, pulled up his belt, bounced his feet around. By the end, MJ was fully engrossed in the performance, grabbing his crotch and improvising air guitar. The camera captured his “crowd” screaming below the stage. Michael shrugged off the adulation.
“At least we get a feel of it,” he said.
AEG had put the tickets on sale for the first ten O2 shows in March, and instantly sold out seventeen thousand seats for each one. Promoters determined they’d have far more fans who wanted to see the shows than could fit in thirty-one O2 Arenas. So Phillips called Tohme and asked for more shows. Michael himself called back, Phillips would say. He agreed, in exchange for two things. One was a home for his family in London during the entire run,
“an English country estate with rolling hills and horses and greenery and stuff like that,” Phillips recalled. Second was
recognition by his beloved
Guinness Book of World Records
once he beat Prince’s record for most consecutive concerts at the same venue.
IV
Deal,
the AEG reps quickly responded. They ratcheted the number of shows up to fifty. Some in the concert industry warned Phillips that Michael, given his reputation, would never make fifty shows. John Scher, a veteran New York promoter, essentially spoke for the concert business when he predicted MJ would wind up doing
75 percent of them.
“I just believed in him,” Phillips told the press.
When Karen Faye, Michael’s longtime friend and makeup artist, first heard about the fifty dates, she said to herself,
“He can’t do this.” She was dubious that Michael ever agreed to the additional number of shows. Even during his peak tours,
Bad
,
Dangerous
, and
HIStory
, he spaced out the dates so he’d have a few days of rest and travel between shows. These were too close together. “He might last a week,” she thought. She approached Ortega with her concerns, but he laughed them off. For a while, Ortega’s confidence in Michael’s stamina seemed justified.
“I never noticed frailty in MJ,” percussionist Bashiri Johnson recalls. “Whenever I gave him a hug, I was hugging a solid mass of muscle.” Michael frequently wore knee pads to rehearsal, and he’d squat while watching the dancers and listening to the band. “He looked like a cheetah getting ready to pounce,” Johnson says. “I never heard him complaining about being tired or anything.” But not everybody shared AEG’s eternal talking point that MJ was in perfect condition. Michael Bearden, the show’s musical director, sent a June 16 e-mail to Ortega and Payne declaring Michael
“not in shape enough yet to sing this stuff live and dance at the same time.” (Bearden added wishfully: “Once he’s healthy enough and has more strength I have full confidence he can sing the majority of the show live.”) Ron Weisner, Michael’s co-manager during the early
Thriller
days, visited his onetime client during rehearsal. “He just looked horrific,” Weisner recalls.
“It’s a shame. He had all these people around him, but nobody was looking out for him.” Weisner called Michael’s sister La Toya—and she concurred. “I know why you’re calling,” she told him, “and it’s sad.” When costume designer Michael Bush told Faye,
“Oh my God . . . I can see Michael’s heart beating through the skin on his chest,”
Faye anxiously reported this observation to Frank DiLeo.
“Get him a bucket of chicken!” MJ’s longtime manager responded.
What nobody in the rehearsals knew was that Michael Jackson, under pressure to carry the biggest event in concert history, a production that would have made hundreds of millions of dollars and pull himself out of crippling debt, was spending his nights in devastating sleeplessness. In February, before choosing Murray as his full-time doctor, he’d hired a nurse practitioner, Cherilyn Lee, who specialized in natural sleep products and vitamin C supplements. On April 19, she came to his Carolwood home twice, and each time he asked about Diprivan, or propofol. Michael had used the drug before and seemed familiar with it.
“I’ve got to get a good night’s sleep,” he kept saying. Lee told him propofol wasn’t safe—it was hardly a drug for everyday insomnia. “What if you don’t wake up?” she asked. “You don’t understand,” Michael complained. He insisted doctors (he refused to name them) had told him repeatedly that the medication was safe for home use. One night in April, MJ fell asleep while Lee was monitoring him; after three hours, he woke up at four
A.M.
and stood upright on the bed. “I told you I cannot sleep all night,” he said. He begged again for Diprivan. “I have a very big day today. My day is going to be destroyed,” he said. “I need to have sleep.” Again, Lee refused. MJ escorted her to security and sent her home. She never saw him after that.
During the June 19 rehearsal, nearly three weeks before the shows were to begin, Michael showed up at the Forum “just lost and a little incoherent,” Ortega said. Disturbed, the director brought in a meal of chicken and broccoli, put a tray in Michael’s lap, and cut it up for him. “Kenny was getting pulled in five hundred different directions,” recalls Abby Franklin, Michael’s wardrobe supervisor and backstage coordinator. “I could see the concern.” Ortega rubbed Michael’s feet, set up a heater next to him, wrapped him in blankets, and called Conrad Murray, who did not respond. Michael asked if he could take a break for the night and let Travis Payne walk through his movements onstage. Ortega agreed.
“He just seemed he wasn’t there,” the director remembered. “There was
something wrong.” After an hour and fifteen minutes, Michael went home. Ortega panicked. He e-mailed Phillips.
“He appeared quite weak and fatigued this evening,” Ortega wrote at 2:04
A.M.
“He had a terrible case of the chills, was trembling, rambling and obsessing. Everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated.”
Karen Faye was worrying, too. As she spent more time with MJ at the Forum, the makeup artist found him
“cold to the touch” and noticed him rambling and repeating things. She begged Ortega, Phillips, DiLeo, and others via e-mail to intervene. They didn’t respond. On June 20, Phillips arranged for a meeting at Michael’s Carolwood house, summoning Ortega, Murray, Paul Gongaware, and DiLeo. To Ortega’s surprise, rather than talking about Michael’s physical concerns, Murray turned on him, accusing the director of not allowing Michael to rehearse.
“Stop trying to be an amateur doctor and psychologist,” Murray sneered at Ortega. Shocked, Ortega appealed to MJ to defend him. “Please,” he told Michael, “tell the doctor that is not the way it went down. . . . This was something that we agreed on together.” “Yes,” Michael agreed, “that’s what happened.”
Michael took Ortega aside and assured him he was healthy enough to finish the tour. “I am fine, Kenny,” MJ said, “I promise you.” They hugged. Ortega left.
Rehearsals moved from the Forum to the Los Angeles Lakers’ state-of-the-art arena, Staples Center, to accommodate the huge production and special effects. Michael showed up June 23 and June 24, full of life. On the latter day, Michael ran through four songs—“We Are the World,” “Thriller,” “Dangerous,” and “Earth Song.” Whereas the CenterStaging and Forum rehearsals had been minimalist and dark, the giant LED screen gave the Staples Center the feel of a show. For “Thriller,” the dancers were in costume as stringy-haired zombies and ghost brides, and
“all the toys were coming out,” as wardrobe supervisor Franklin recalls. Jackson smiled as the spectacle rushed past him.
“He was pretty involved and full-out and trying out all the different props
and singing,” dancer Chris Grant says. Michael had retooled “Earth Song” from a world-peace anthem to a save-the-environment anthem, replacing the ominous onstage tank of the
HIStory
tour with a bulldozer. He instructed Ortega during the performance to
“let it rumble!” Afterward, Michael went to the microphone and addressed the performers and crew. “Thank you, everybody, for all your hard work,” he said. “Good night, God bless you, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Michael had spent roughly seven hours at the Staples Center that night. After the rehearsal, bodyguard Alvarez took the wheel of Michael’s vehicle, which he used to
“secure the proper route” for Michael’s drive home. Michael Amir Williams, MJ’s personal manager, loaded up another SUV for Jackson. Another bodyguard,
Faheem Muhammad, drove him in the second SUV 17.5 miles back to his Carolwood home, where his children were sleeping. He encountered a scattering of fans in the driveway. Michael was in good spirits and rolled the window down, as he sometimes did, to exchange a few words. A few gave him small gifts, which Williams, Muhammad, and Alvarez loaded into the car. Williams noticed Dr. Murray’s BMW in its parking space in Michael’s driveway. He’d been staying with the Jacksons the last several weeks. Williams escorted Michael into the house and left for the night, returning to his home in downtown Los Angeles. Security did its perimeter check and everybody settled down for the night.
I
. I asked Weller for an interview, and he said he’d be available in October, more than three months later, well after my deadline. I asked, “Why October?” and he replied: “Because it is sooner than November, December, or Never. However, you may choose one of the above, if you prefer.” When I followed up in October, he declined.