Smash hit

It was hardly surprising when Jackson claimed in court that he was addicted to anti-stress medications and painkillers. It made sense too that, after his acquittal in June 2005, for the next four years he should disappear from public view. There were still 47 other suits in progress, mostly claims for payment by bankrupted merchandise suppliers, though two related to further, unreported allegations of child abuse. As well as his hefty mortgages, he was carrying $36m of unsecured personal debt.

According to one of Jackson’s legal representatives who, in the absence of a manager, had to deal with these issues at the time, “He was in complete denial of financial reality. If you tried to tell him he had to sell any of his assets he would have a screaming fit. Meanwhile, skeletons just kept falling out of the closet. Michael would carry on denying everything to your face until you showed him an affidavit.”

In the summer of 2005, when Jackson shuttered Neverland and decamped to Bahrain at the invitation of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the 33-year-old second son of the Gulf island’s king, he seemed to be making a clean break. Two years later, Abdullah joined the long queue of litigants who had entered into what they understood to be a business arrangement, only to learn that Jackson didn’t quite see it that way. The sheikh was an occasional songwriter who had, as a teenager, become friendly with Michael’s brother Jermaine. He believed that his new production company, Two Seas, could rescue Jackson’s career. The deal he was proposing encompassed a new album, a ghosted autobiography and a stage musical in the style of the Abba vehicle, Mamma Mia! Abdullah’s main idea, according to a friend who describes him as “totally honourable”, a “his-word-is-his-bond type of guy”, was “to enhance Michael’s profile and finances without him having to do anything much in public”. There was another side project he hoped Jackson might go for: a charity single in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, written by himself.

By the time the case reached the High Court in London in November 2008 — where a financial settlement was reached just before Jackson took the stand — the sheikh’s business motives were hotly disputed. According to the defence, Abdullah was a fawning wannabe, an amateur intent on smuggling his own material onto the next Michael Jackson album. The money spent paying off some of his debts — the Arvizo legal bill, and $35,000 for unpaid utilities at Neverland — was, Jackson insisted, “a gift”.

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Over the coming year, the court learnt, there were more gifts, to a value of $7m, as the sheikh bankrolled Jackson’s lifestyle in the Bahraini capital, Manama. Along with giving him with $500,000 spending money and $350,000 for a holiday to Europe, he paid for Jackson’s eight bodyguards — more security than the king employs in a country where crime is almost nonexistent. “I saw the payments as an investment in Michael’s potential,” the sheikh said in a statement read out by his lawyer in court. “He said he’d pay me back… through our work together.”

The sheikh did much besides to smooth Jackson’s reception on a quiet island smaller than Middlesex with a population of 700,000. He helped to broker a deal with a local property development company, AAJ Holdings, which loaned Jackson a palatial villa in exchange for a “consultancy”. He fended off the objections of a leading conservative Muslim cleric who branded Jackson “effeminate” and an unwelcome emissary of “the iniquities of Las Vegas”. He endured the embarrassment of an incident in November 2005 in which Jackson was spotted re-applying his make-up in the ladies’ toilet of a Dubai shopping mall. In the ensuing melee, a woman who had photographed the scene on her mobile phone was manhandled by Jackson’s bodyguards before being apprehended by the police. “Michael Jackson might be a big name but that does not give him the right to go into a ladies’ washroom,” the woman protested. Two months later, Jackson was in trouble again when identified in Islamic drag in a shoe shop, his black, all-enveloping woman’s abaya betrayed by his size-10 men’s shoes. “That’s when I guessed it must be Michael Jackson,” the sales assistant told the Dubai daily Khaleej Times.

By May 2006, with no discernible progress on any of the Two Seas projects and another $2m wasted on an abortive foray to London to get Jackson to record something, anything, the sheikh’s patience was wearing out. Jackson’s initial response was to deny having signed any agreement with Two Seas — despite the published photographs of the signing ceremony — and to leave Bahrain for Japan, briefly, and then Ireland. Guy Holmes, the British music executive flown in to manage Two Seas, said later: “Michael’s an extraordinarily intelligent man, but sadly, his moral health is far worse than one could imagine.” Others go further. “Jackson tells barefaced lies without any regard for the consequences,” says his former legal representative.

“At times it can be like dealing with a sociopath.”

All agree, though, that Jackson is anything but the basket case he sometimes appears. The loss of his all-expenses-paid lifestyle in the Gulf acted as a wake-up call. With one more heavyweight creditor, the sheikh, on the warpath, and expensive judgments against him piling up, generating cash flow became his priority. After receiving a fat fee for hosting an awards show in Japan, Jackson moved to the west of Ireland, where his privacy was unlikely to be disturbed and his tax liabilities would be minimal. He stayed first at Castlehyde in Cork with his friend, the dancer Michael Flatley, with whom he shared a criminal lawyer, Bert Fields. Fields had successfully helped Flatley to countersue a woman who had falsely accused him of rape in a Las Vegas hotel in 2003, and had previously represented Jackson in the Jordy Chandler case.

For the next six months, Jackson worked harder than he had for years. At Grouse Lodge recording studio in Westmeath he prepared new tracks for a 25th-anniversary reissue of his 1982 magnum opus, Thriller, with the R&B star Will.i.am. He phoned the British impresario Simon Fuller, sometime manager of the Spice Girls and creator of the US talent show American Idol, to talk over ideas for a comeback. His most high-profile public appearance as an entertainer in this century came when he performed at the World Music Awards in London in November 2006. On Christmas Eve that year, Jackson relocated to Las Vegas, “a great place to call home”, as he told the local paper, which noted that “his handshake and voice were strong and firm”. According to one source who attended meetings with Jackson over the coming months, “The penny had definitely dropped… that he would only now make any serious money out of some kind of live performance.”

But what kind? With CD sales plummeting and ticket sales through the roof, a return to the concert arena was the obvious way of servicing his debts. A Las Vegas residency similar to the one undertaken by Celine Dion was widely rumoured to be on the cards after Jackson was spotted in cahoots at the Wynn hotel with the award-winning director Kenny Ortega, who had worked on his live shows in the 1990s. “We’re talking business and looking at lots of different possibilities,” Ortega commented enigmatically.

At this point the possibilities that really appealed to Jackson were the ones that excused him from the onerous responsibilities of performing live. Randy Phillips of AEG, who made his first approach to Jackson in early 2007, was turned down flat. Much more attractive then was Simon Fuller’s idea of converting Jackson into a “virtual online presence” — a brand, maybe in the cartoon style of Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz. A Fuller aide recalls many Vegas planning meetings in which Jackson spoke glowingly of the local Cirque de Soleil production of the Beatles’ hits, Love. After a parting group hug that the aide recalls as “a rather bony experience”, Jackson and his entourage — now down to one bodyguard and his youngest child, Blanket — would return home to their $60m, 100,000 sq ft Spanish-style palace, kindly loaned by another exotic royal, Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei. Here, all ideas of relaunching Jackson into cyberspace stalled because, according to Fuller’s aide, “there wasn’t enough money in it upfront for Michael”.

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