Michael was by now four weeks into tour rehearsals at Center Staging in Burbank, LA. All of the dancers had been auditioned and chosen, signing a two-year contract in line with the plans for what would take place after London. The first thing he had worked on, with LaVelle Smith Junior, was a routine for ‘Dangerous’ – he wanted to devise a new adaptation. He was apparently doing ‘amazing work’ and ‘kicking ass’ – working on twirls and other moves – showing tour choreographer Travis Payne how hard he had been rehearsing in preparation. When I spoke with my brother at the Indian restaurant, there was no question that he was fit, healthy and focused. He was skinny, but only in an athletic sense, and the photos that still stand on an end table in my living room confirm it. More importantly, he was genuinely excited about ‘doing something special for the fans’ and there was talk of special guest appearances by the likes of Slash and Alicia Keys. At least, that was an idea he had been toying with.
The only thing he complained about was that he’d signed up to do ‘10 shows only’ as advertised but somewhere along the line, due to the demand for tickets, AEG had added an extra 40 dates. Even they sold out within five hours on-line. Michael said no one had checked with him first, but at no point did he give me the impression that the schedule was too punishing or beyond him, because it wasn’t. Not for a man in his condition. Two shows a week, which was what it was at the start, was a country-club schedule for my brother and it was exactly what he’d done on ‘HIStory’, but now he didn’t have to travel because he was rooted in one city. He was 50, but he was dancing in rehearsals like it was 1996 all over again.
‘This Is It’ should have been a walk in the park for an entertainer like Michael. He had found a mansion in Kent, which was a 30-minute drive from the arena, and I know he was looking forward to exploring the south of England with the kids. That was what really mattered to him. He couldn’t wait for Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’ to see him perform, but he’d ensured that he’d have plenty of quality time with them. At this time in his life, he’d found a rare work–life balance. Gone were the days of staying up and writing songs until 3am. He always had breakfast and dinner with his kids, and while they went to bed at around 8pm, he soon followed around nine. He had been sleeping soundly (his insomnia was only ever tour induced) and he seemed the most centred and content I had seen him in years.
I had got talking with him at the bar before we all started eating, and I was raving to him about his song ‘Fly Away’. I started singing its harmony – Baby don’t make me, Baby don’t make me, Baby don’t make me flyyyyyy awayy. He started to join in, and we were going back and forth, just like old times, and laughing. ‘I love the way you do backgrounds, Michael,’ I told him.
‘That means a lot coming from you,’ he said. ‘I love the way you do backgrounds, too.’
During dinner, he was seated with the children at Jackie’s table and Janet was on the far side of the room when, out of nowhere, she started making this weird Jim Carrey-type sound that was half-scream, half-cackle … and Michael put his hand to his mouth, chuckling. It was clearly an in-joke they shared from way back and the more Janet did it, the more he laughed. Like brother and sister of old. Eventually Michael was laughing so hard – throwing his head back, unable to contain himself – that his hoots were all you could hear. Freeze-frame that moment, and hold it in time. I love that this is the abiding memory that has stayed with me.
When it was time for him to leave, everyone hugged and said their goodbyes. ‘You’re all coming to London, right?’ Michael asked us.
‘Yeah! We’ll be there!’ I said, as we all did.
‘Okay, everyone. See you in London!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Gone Too Soon
I WAS OUT NEAR PASADENA, THE city at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, at a business meeting with people from China when a good friend – CNN host Larry King – called my wife’s cell-phone to ask if we knew anything ‘about a TMZ report saying Michael has been being rushed to UCLA hospital’.
I wasn’t immediately alarmed because it was hardly the first time the media had got excited about my brother being ‘rushed’ to hospital. But then I called Mother and caught her hurrying out of the door at Hayvenhurst. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was very wrong: she sounded fraught with anxiety.
‘Jermaine! I’m rushing down now. I’ll call you when I get there! Leave now,’ she said.
Halima and I jumped in the car, not knowing what to think for the next hour or so as I sat in the passenger seat and she fought traffic, waiting for Mother or someone to call back.
En route, attorney Joel Katz called. ‘Jermaine, I hear it’s really, really bad,’ but he knew little else. Details were scant, it seemed, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the radio and listen to the media grapevine.
Halima was driving like she owned the highway, and I’m glad she was because I would have been incapable behind the wheel. I felt physically sick and I was trembling – which, looking back, was probably my body’s way of bracing me.
Janet called from New York and she was losing it, too. I don’t even remember what was said but we seemed to be talking only to hold on to one another. No sooner had I ended that call than the phone rang again. Mother’s number flashed up – the only time in my life that I didn’t want to take a call when her name illuminated the screen.
‘Mother?’
‘HE’S DEEAAAD!’
I don’t know what has haunted me most about that moment: hearing the hardest news or the sound of Mother’s pain, a guttural wail that I can’t describe.
I started yelling. ‘HE’S DEAD? MICHAEL IS DEAD?’
‘He’s dead.’ Softer now.
Halima was crying. I was crying, and the rest of the journey to the hospital was a blur. I remember seeing about 12 news helicopters in the sky, circling the same spot. The surrounding streets in Westwood were taped off and the crowds were growing, all walking in the same direction. When a policeman spotted us, he waved us through and Halima dropped me by an alleyway that led to the hospital’s side door as she went to park. Half running, half walking, I hurried inside, down corridors and through double doors.
‘Where is she? Where’s my mother?’ I called to a nurse.
She showed me into a conference room. Inside, Mother was alone, just sitting there in the silence, at the far end of the table, wearing her dark glasses: not crying, just staring into space. There was no possibility of denial now.
I walked over, knelt beside her and hugged her as tight as I could. She was rigid. I kept holding her – we both needed comforting – until my cousin Trent walked in, allowing me to leave her in his strong company. All I could think about now was getting to Michael.
Outside in the corridor, La Toya rushed past and then Randy, looking shell-shocked. ‘Somebody did this,’ he kept saying. ‘Somebody did this.’
That comment didn’t really register. I wasn’t capable of listening. Randy showed me the way to the room where our brother lay, pointing to a door that he clearly didn’t want to walk through a second time.
It was like a sitting room, with a lamp and a sofa, but a window looked into a room within the room. La Toya was already there, standing alone, leaning down into Michael’s face, like she was talking to him. He was lying on a trolley in a hospital gown. Momentarily I felt like an observer, looking through that window, as if being on the outside somehow didn’t make it real. But then La Toya looked up, tears streaming down her face.
I steadied myself, took a breath, and entered the side door to the right. I went over to the other side of Michael, reaching down to take his hand, rubbing his still-soft skin, like you do when you comfort someone. I couldn’t believe how skeletal he was. He seemed half the size he had been a month earlier. If a stranger had walked into the room, they would have assumed he had been ravaged by cancer or anorexia. Or, as one of the paramedics would later say, that he had been ‘a hospice patient’.
What’s happened to you?
I knew no amount of rigorous dancing could have left him in this state. Grief didn’t allow me to process the impossibility of how he looked. I was still coming to terms with seeing him lifeless. I leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, telling him I loved him. I found I couldn’t pull away. I lifted one of his eyelids because I wanted to look into his eyes, ‘see’ him one last time.
Look at me, Michael. Look at me.
I rested my forehead against his and wept.
I did this despite the Islamic teachings that told me I was looking into a shell whose spirit had already flown; a spirit that was probably looking down on me, telling me not to cry, telling me he was okay. I remembered how we both said we liked stepping out of our bodies to observe and critique ourselves. That was what I thought he was doing now, watching over us.
Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’ walked in with a nurse. What they said and did deserves to remain private, between them and their father. But the moment I saw those kids crumple, I had to get out of there and leave them with their auntie. I wasn’t strong enough for them and I could feel my legs giving way.
People describe grief as a physical pain, but I didn’t know how wrong they were until that day. It’s not a wound that can be stitched and there is no surgeon who can heal it; it’s an emotional pain. It’s a resident pain that just moves in and you have to look at and sit with it every day for the rest of your life. And, for us, we’d have Michael’s fans look at us and measure our grief, to see if we were grieving enough for the grief they felt. Because, beyond those hospital walls, an entire world of fans – the millions of strangers he referred to as his second family – were inconsolable, too.
Outside in the corridor, I saw a cast of suits standing around: AEG’s CEO Randy Phillips, Frank Dileo, the manager fired long ago by Michael but rehired by AEG, and Tohme-Tohme, also recently fired by my brother, but I didn’t have a chance to focus on them. Someone walked over to me and said they wanted me to read a press statement that confirmed Michael’s death. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘His fans need to know.’
‘We just have to find a room without a window, because there’s so many fans out there that if you go out front, there’d be a crush against the glass,’ I was told.
Some fans have wondered why I made the announcement and not a doctor. All I can say is that it was the idea of the attorneys and the medical staff, and it felt right to me that someone with a personal connection to Michael should do it. Let the fan community hear it from family first.
I stood in a back room, waiting to walk on, going over lines written for me. Just reading them once to myself left me short of breath. I couldn’t process this script. He was ready to make his comeback and prove everyone wrong. He can’t be dead. This can’t have happened. How can …?
‘They’re ready for you now, Jermaine,’ someone shouted.
I walked in, greeted by the flutter of cameras. As I stood before a cluster of microphones and spotlights, I took a deep breath and started: ‘My brother, the legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson, passed away on Thursday 25 June 2009, at 2.26pm. It is believed he suffered a cardiac arrest in his home. However, the cause of his death is unknown until the results of the autopsy are known. His personal physician, who was with him at the time, attempted to resuscitate my brother, as did the paramedics who transported him to hospital. Upon arrival, a team of doctors attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour. They were unsuccessful …’
We would later come to understand the futility of these attempts, because Michael had been dead before anyone dialled 911. It was around 12.05pm when he had apparently stopped breathing in his bedroom and, it seems, 12.21pm before an emergency call was placed.
After the press conference, I walked back to the room where Mother was. Joseph was on his way from Vegas. She hadn’t moved from her seat, but she responded as I walked in this time. ‘Hi, baby, you okay?’ she asked, reverting to the mother’s role, making sure everyone else was all right. We were sitting there, holding hands, and she told me how she had prayed all the way to the hospital for Michael to be alive. Tears rolled down her face as she re-lived that hope with me.
Our conversation was interrupted when a tall black guy walked into the room, wearing a heavy face. Security, I told myself. He sat down, looking uncomfortable. Everything about him was awkward. He was across the table from me and sitting side on to Mother. It dawned on me that this was Dr Conrad Murray, my brother’s personal physician. He said he wanted to express his condolences. He had travelled in the back of the ambulance and had broken the news to Mother when she arrived: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Jackson, but he’s gone.’
I would later learn that he had been in my brother’s life long before ‘This Is It’ was ever planned. Apparently he had been called out for the first time in Vegas to treat Paris for something and Michael had retained him soon afterwards. At Michael’s request, he was hired by AEG for the tour. I don’t know what, if any, checks they made in regards to his suitability but, by having him on their payroll, they were, in my opinion, responsible for his duty of care to their artists.
The house where Michael died was in Carolwood Drive, Holmby Hills, a neighbourhood next to Beverly Hills. It was a mansion that AEG had rented for him and his children while he was in rehearsal – the previous month he had stayed at the Bel Air Hotel. I couldn’t face going there after his death; none of the brothers could. In our numbed state, we came together at my house and comforted one another.
Meanwhile, Mother, Janet and La Toya felt the need to be there. In fact, La Toya’s boyfriend Jeffre Phillips stayed there overnight by himself for two weeks, presumably to guard against vultures.
Around July, it would become clear that the house was a no-go zone for anyone because it had become ‘a crime scene’: the LAPD elevated its accidental-death enquiries into a homicide investigation.
The autopsy report ruled that Michael had had a healthy heart and had died from ‘acute propofol intoxication’, with no other factor related to the immediate cause of death. The media would go on to portray him falsely as a ‘junkie’, trying to make the link with prescription-drug usage but that, and drugs like Demerol, were not the reason why his heart stopped: what was clear is that the anaesthetic propofol was everywhere in his system.
I didn’t even know what propofol was, but I’ve since learned that it is not a recreational drug and it was not prescription medicine. propofol is what people are given intravenously as an anaesthetic before major surgery, or doctors use it for sedation. This, I would find out, is what Michael relied on to be knocked out when desperate for sleep. According to the instructions it should be given only by a trained anaesthetist and the patient’s intake must be carefully monitored with the appropriate medical equipment in place.
Michael was usually beset by sleeping problems only on tour so it was, to the best of my knowledge, a departure for him to be using this kind of sleep-inducer during rehearsals. It’s also worth noting that the last time Michael would have needed something like propofol would have been during his last tour, ‘HIStory’, in 1996. It didn’t surprise me that his insomnia was returning in the run-up to his London dates because of the unimaginable pressure to which he was subjected, most of it self-imposed. He was his own biggest rival in the relentless drive to be perfect within the great comeback he’d envisaged.
Pressure. It would become a theme in everything I went on to discover about the final days of his life.
We, as a family, would face a struggle in our pursuit of the facts. Understandably, the LAPD had its investigation to conduct and Dr Conrad Murray’s actions would be central to its enquiries. But I didn’t expect to run into a wall when I wanted to know what really happened during rehearsals for ‘This Is It’. We needed to understand how, from 14 May when we had last seen him, Michael could lose his life – and all that weight – so rapidly. He had gone from 150–155 pounds to what his autopsy report said was 136 pounds: that is not only abnormal, it’s frightening. For a man of his height (5
ft 9in), it was thinner than anorexic-thin.
Many fans, understandably passionate to know the truth, have criticised us for not banging the drum loud enough for justice, but it has taken two years of quiet work to establish a mere outline of events. What I shall share with you next is what I have discovered. It has made me understand that the movie This Is It, showing Michael in rehearsals, was not the whole picture. Like everything else in his life, it was just another clever edit. That footage might have provided a glimpse of what could have exploded onstage in London, and I know it can be argued it’s a great film that portrayed who Michael was as an artist. But that well-chosen footage didn’t show the truth of what went on at rehearsals: that was a whole other disturbing story.
BY THE START OF JUNE, REHEARSALS were taking place at the Forum in Inglewood and Michael was apparently still focused and business-like. Everything was going wonderfully well. Some people who saw him dance said he wasn’t on fire, but he had always held back, reserving his 100 per cent for the concerts. That was why no one saw any electric moves or signature magic. Anyone who truly knew his method would have known this was his normal half-speed.
By now four opening tour dates had been pushed back and there was speculation that the reason was health-related, but the truth, which didn’t please my brother, was that pre-show rehearsals in London had been booked in error at Wembley Arena. No artist was going to perform without rehearsals at the actual venue, so the dates had to be moved to build in essential rehearsal time at the O2.
Outwardly, and apart from the insomnia that was creeping in and getting him down as usual, there was no alarm about his health at this stage, even if some people around him were worrying about how loaded the schedule was getting. In fact, Michael had told his friends that he ‘was going to have a word and change things’, so those concerns had been heard.