Michael loves the high Elizabethan language of Shakespeare. He has seen the plays and films about Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth. He appreciates these characters’ complexity. But sometimes language, especially the loftiest, taxes his mind. Sometimes he wishes to avoid even simple song lyrics. Sometimes he wants to lose himself in wordless music.
At the start of May of 2009, Kai Chase, the chef who had been told she would accompany the family to London, is dismissed by Michael’s assistant, Michael Amir. No reason is given. Michael is preoccupied with the upcoming shows. He knows he has less than ten short weeks to prepare for the London opening. He knows he needs to be more conscientious. Having missed many rehearsals and meetings, he also knows that without his hands-on participation, the shows will suffer. At the same time, he knows himself. He requires relaxation. He must resist the pressure to work night and day. He must not become obsessed. His fatherly duties come first. He must respect his peace of mind by protecting his tranquility. Mental tranquility is everything. Without it, he’ll crumble. With it, he’ll soar. Michael has every intention of soaring.
To maintain emotional balance, he has decided to turn his attention, at least for now, to the suite of classical music he has been composing for well over a year. Today he is meeting an orchestrator.
Composer-conductor David Michael Frank arrives at the Carolwood estate not knowing what to expect. When Michael appears dressed in black, Frank is cautious about shaking his hand. He has heard that Michael is germophobic. But there’s no hesitancy on Michael’s part. His handshake is robust. To Frank’s eyes, the singer appears thin but fit.
Michael recognizes Frank from when they worked together on a TV tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. at the Shrine Auditorium in the winter of 1989. Michael sang a song of heartfelt appreciation, “You Were There,” to the ailing entertainer, who would die a few months later.
Frank listens as Michael explains that he’s simultaneously working on three projects: the tour, new pop songs, and an album of classical music. It’s the classical music that requires Frank’s help.
Before they get to work, Michael wants to discuss music. Frank senses that the singer is hungry for intellectual dialogue. Michael mentions his love of Aaron Copland’s compositions, especially Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Lincoln Portrait. He also mentions the music written by Leonard Bernstein for the film version of West Side Story. Frank wonders if Michael also knows Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront. Michael does. A friend of the film’s star, Marlon Brando, Michael has watched the movie several times.
The talk turns from Leonard to Elmer Bernstein. The minute Frank names The Magnificent Seven his favorite Elmer score, Michael starts singing the theme. As the music talk continues, Prince and Paris wander in and out of the room. Exhortations of “I love you, Daddy,” “I love you, Paris,” “I love you, Prince” reverberate.
Paris finds her father a CD player so Frank can hear Michael’s work in progress. The instrumental music is ethereal and highly melodic. Michael explains that he needs Frank’s help with some incomplete sections.
They move from the main house to the pool house, where a piano is situated. As Frank sits at the keyboard, Michael hums one of the missing sections. Frank provides the harmonic structure under Michael’s melody.
“Your instincts are totally right about the chords,” Michael tells Frank.
Frank is impressed with Michael’s perfect pitch. For several minutes, the two musicians weave together their constructions, all the while capturing the sounds on Frank’s digital tape recorder. Each piece is from seven to ten minutes long. To Frank’s ears, one suggests an Irish origin; another has the feeling of John Barry’s score for Out of Africa. Each bears the mark of a mature composer.
Michael is delighted with Frank’s suggestions for bringing the music to fruition: the use of Celtic harps, the orchestration of a full string ensemble, the establishment of Michael’s melodies against countermelodies.
Before the session is over, Michael again stresses how these compositions are close to his heart. It is his lifelong wish to write beyond the categories in which he has previously worked.
Michael walks Frank to the door and thanks him for his time. He assures Frank that their writing sessions will continue. Meanwhile, Frank will begin writing arrangements and suggests that they set up a recording date at one of the big movie studios. Would Michael have someone call about arranging a budget? Michael readily agrees.
A few weeks later, Michael calls Frank to ask if he’s making progress. Frank says that he is, but he still hasn’t heard from anyone in Michael’s camp. Michael reassures him that someone will be in touch. He reasserts his wish that this new music be as beautiful as Debussy’s Arabesque no. 1, a piece he has committed to memory. He also mentions a jazz composition he has recently completed.
Given Michael’s hectic rehearsal schedule, Frank suggests that they record these pieces in London when the This Is It shows are over. Michael concurs.
The idea lingers in Michael’s mind. It isn’t merely that he seeks recognition beyond his role as pop star. Classical and jazz melodies have been haunting him for years. He cannot escape their lure. Music does not simply amuse or divert Michael; it pursues him. The motifs preoccupying his mind have been there since he was a child. The preoccupation can be a source of pleasure or exasperation, depending upon the theme. If Michael feels victimized, for example, his method is to extricate himself through song. Take “D.S.,” the song from HIStory that attacks Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara district attorney who for twelve years unsuccessfully struggled to take Michael down. Written after the initial accusations in 1993 but before the trial in 2005, “D.S.” is Michael’s method of purging his rage. Sneddon, fictionalized as “Dom Sheldon,” is characterized as a “cold man.” Michael imagines D.S. in cahoots with the CIA and the KKK, an insanely zealous prosecutor who will go to any length to get his man, dead or alive. On this track, a restrained rhythm and blues guitarist will not do. Michael employs Slash, the gunslinger guitarist from Guns N’ Roses, to decapitate his opponent.
Michael’s only effective weapon is his music. He is not a forceful speaker or a convincing polemicist. In Live from Neverland Valley, his famous 1993 television appearance, he explained his recent rehab for pain pill addiction and the “horrifying experience” of being scandalized by the “incredible, terrible mass media” for publicizing the false allegations against him. At the start, he said that “I am doing well and I am strong,” but the sight of Michael—seated before the camera in an open-collar red shirt, his hair askew, his face a whiter shade of pale—was hardly reassuring. His testimony felt forced and overwrought. Watching him, one had the feeling that he’d have been far more convincing had he sung a song about his predicament.
The songs of his innocence—“Childhood,” for instance, which like “D.S.” is from HIStory—perhaps do far more to win us over than any prepared statements. And, while Michael is not the author of “Man in the Mirror,” when he performs that song, we believe that he is genuinely self-reflective and self-critical.
Self-consciousness, though, never impedes Michael’s creative process. As a pure artist, he is possessed. He has no choice but to express the sounds inside his head. He must write. During his darkest days—alone in Moscow, exiled in Arabia, isolated in Ireland—music is always his way out. The music never stops. And if now, in the spring of 2009, music is renewing his spirit, he is doubly grateful for the fact that the music has assumed a wordless shape. He has lived through enough stories. In his songs he has told enough tales. He is delighted to be composing motifs free of narrative form. His classical and jazz pieces are about feelings unrelated to events. They are about pure joy, an emotional state that has long eluded him. To remain in this state is Michael’s purpose in connecting with David Michael Frank. When Frank says that when they record he will be using a baton that once belonged to Leonard Bernstein, Michael, who once met the late maestro, is thrilled.
If there was only a way to forgo the impending series of shows and devote himself entirely to making music without considering the marketplace! No thought of sales! No worries about breaking records! No anxiety about being considered irrelevant and out of fashion!
Yet anxiety follows Michael like a recurring ailment for which there seems to be no cure. Anxiety about the heavy schedule of rehearsals. Anxiety about the upcoming dates. Anxiety about the way he feels and the way he looks.
For these all-important dates—these super-critical comeback concerts—he must look better than at any time in his life. That’s why the Botox treatments are so crucial. Botox will erase any trace of aging, mask any imperfections, and give him the confidence to reintroduce himself to his army of fans. Botox will also keep him from being soaked in sweat after each dance number. He can’t stop getting Botox.
On Monday, May 4, and Tuesday, May 5, he goes back to Dr. Arnold Klein’s office for more dermatological treatments and more Demerol—three hundred milligrams each day—to dull the pain. On Wednesday, May 6, the Demerol is reduced to two hundred milligrams. For eight weeks, since March 12, Michael has been injected with heavy-duty Botox and Botox-related medicines; it is also for eight weeks that he has been fed a steady diet of extraordinarily high doses of Demerol.
If his mind was clearer, perhaps he could work with David Michael Frank again. If his mind was clearer, perhaps he could begin attending rehearsals more consistently. If his mind was clearer, perhaps he could meet with management to make certain that his interests were being protected.
Instead, after these long and exhausting treatments at Klein’s office, his energy is sapped. It’s enough to go home and be with the kids. Enough to insulate himself in the cocoon of the Carolwood estate. Enough to select a film with the charm to captivate his heart and soul, a film with the power to turn his mind from his own problems to the problems of a fictional character, a character whom he can shower with love and affection.
One such character is Antoine Doinel, hero of François Truffaut’s 1959 classic, The 400 Blows, an autobiographical treatment of the director’s troubled childhood. Michael counts it among his favorite films. He returns to it in the privacy of the lush screening room, with the knowledge that it will comfort him. Comfort comes in the form of Truffaut’s extraordinary empathy for children. Like the director himself, Michael feels deeply for Antoine, with his inability to adjust to a life controlled by callous adults: uncaring teachers, insensitive parents, apathetic neighbors. Michael identifies with the desperate loneliness that sits at the heart of Truffaut’s central character. As a child commanded by his father, surrounded by his brothers, and adored by his fans, Michael nonetheless felt isolated and misunderstood. Like Antoine Doinel, he walked through the world as an alien.
Even today he feels suffocated by an odd sense of estrangement. He wants to reengage with the world. That’s what this upcoming series of shows is all about. He wants to reengage with his family and fans. But he also fears the consequences of doing so, of falling back into the vortex of hyperactivity—the concerts, the praise, the attacks, the ungodly amount of scrutiny—that alienates him from normal life.
So he clings to his children. He withdraws into the absolute closest unit—his own nuclear family of four—hoping that, inspired by films like The 400 Blows, he will find the strength to venture back out and reassert his autobiographical art, his release from the pressures that continue to make his inability to sleep a diurnal nightmare.