'Michael's in great shape' says Kenny Ortega
In September 2012, emails written by Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips, discussing Michael Jackson's health came to light - see Los Angeles Times. For those of you that are not aware, Lloyds of London insured Michael for the 'This Is It' shows, and Lloyds of London have a lawsuit out which contends that AEG Live hid Michael's health problems from them. They had asked for Michael's medical records for the 5 years preceding 2009, but never received them, Murray said Michael refused to hand them over to him.The emails have been collected by Lloyds of London for their lawsuit.
When I first heard that Michael had died of a possible overdose (initially it was reported it may have been a Demerol overdose), one of the first things that crossed my mind was :
'Michael must have been in the last few weeks of rehearsal for the shows. He must have been onstage every day with dancers, musicians, choreographers, lighting crew etc.etc. Why didn't anyone notice that there was something wrong?'
I later found out that several people working on 'This Is It' had worked with Michael on previous shows, so they must know how he behaved during rehearsals and performances. This included Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, the show's director and choreographer, as well as Paula Gongaware, who was now working for AEG.
These emails reveal that problems were apparent as early as March 2009, when Michael went to London to announce the 'This Is It' shows. According to the emails :
"MJ is locked in his room drunk and despondent," Phillips wrote in a March 5, 2009, e-mail to AEG Live's parent company. "I (am) trying to sober him up."
In March 2009, Michael had yet to hire Conrad Murray as his personal doctor, and as far as we know, Propofol was not being administered to him at this time. He passed a health test for Lloyds of London the same month, having been tested by Dr Slavit in January, and in this month he also asked nurse Cherilynn Lee to advise him on nutrition. She administered a vitamin cocktail to Michael several times in March, because he was experiencing a lack of energy and she also advises him on how to beat insomnia. Michael started rehearsals at Centerstaging at the end of March.
So it seemed that nothing is too seriously wrong with Michael at this point, and you could just put the problems of 5th March down to fear and nerves. In a previous post, This Time Around I cover corporate bullying, but what I haven't mentioned is the physical impact it can have on an individual, and how it can cause stress, fear and loss of confidence. I think that this is what Michael was experiencing, although I doubt anyone knew it at the time.
On 4th April 2009, Michael and Kenny Ortega flew to Las Vegas, with Conrad Murray. It is in Vegas that Murray first witnesses Michael being administered Propofol by another doctor, and by April 6, Murray is ordering Propofol by the box. He could be ordering the Propofol for another patient, but by then he was unofficially working for Michael, and he has since admitted that he administered Propofol for about 2 months by 25 June. So that means he started administering in April. At this point Murray's contract was not drawn up, and it wasn't written on paper until May 15, so technically Murray could have walked away from working for Michael at any point, up until the contract was signed by himself and Michael ( and it was never signed by Michael). His claim that he was 'entrapped' by Michael just makes him appear even more of a liar.
During May, Michael was still rehearsing at Centerstaging, and he took part in selecting dancers for his shows. The rehearsal room at Centerstaging was only just large enough to take the size of the 'This is It' stage, and I imagine it was here that the finer details of the music and choreography were thrashed out by the musicians and chorepgraphers, before the show was rehearsed in a larger theatre.
May 20th is the date that the first week of 'This Is it' shows were moved from 2009 into 2010. It is also the date of the video at the top of this Blog. By this time, Michael was being given Propofol 5 nights a week by Murray for over a month. At the time of writing, there is no anecdotal evidence or emails to show that Michael was unwell during May. However, more evidence may emerge as the lawsuit progresses. When the shows were moved to 2010, there was a lot of speculation in the media that this had been done because Michael was ill. Since January 2009 there had been various wildly speculative articles saying that Michael had a rare lung disease or skin cancer. In the video above, Ortega and Phillips are attempting to reassure people that the shows were not postponed for health reasons, but merely because of staging technicalities. As I write I am not clear how much interaction Ortega or Phillips had with Michael at this point in the rehearsals. We shall see.
The problems seem to escalate in June.
May 30, and the rehearsals moved to The Forum. From June 1 to 11, Michael was in Culver City to film the Dome Project, which is the HD footage to be shown during each concert. Some fans visited Michael on set June 11, and said that he was like a skeleton. By June 12, fans report that Michael does not want to go onstage, and security starts taking extreme measures against the fans who are waiting outside the Carolwood house.
June 14 AEG Live Co-CEO Paul Gongaware wrote an e-mail to show director Kenny Ortega addressing concerns that Murray had kept Jackson from a rehearsal the day before:
"We want to remind (Murray) that it is AEG, not MJ, who is paying his salary. We want to remind him what is expected of him."
June 16 and the fans report that Michael did not go onstage again, and is often groggy when leaving home and after visiting Dr Arnold Klein. The emails leaked to the Los Angeles Times in September 2012, show that :
'Those rehearsing with Jackson began sounding alarms in mid-June, according to the emails, a month before his scheduled debut in London. They complained he missed rehearsals, was slow picking up routines and would have to lip-sync some of his signature numbers.
"MJ is not in shape enough yet to sing this stuff live and dance at the same time," the show's musical director informed supervisors in an email. Jackson missed another week of rehearsals, and when he finally showed up June 19, he was too weak to perform.'
On June 19, Michael was shivering, incoherent, and obsessing. Kenny Ortega sent him home.
He wrote in an e-mail to AEG Live President Randy Phillips:
"It is like there are two people there. One (deep inside) trying to hold on to what he was and still can be and not wanting us to quit him, the other in this weakened and troubled state. I believe we need professional guidance in this matter."
Phillips responded with a glowing endorsement of Murray:
"This doctor is extremely successful (we check everyone out) and does not need this gig so he is totally unbiased and ethical."
This is the point where someone, one of those many people who said they were Michael's 'friend', should have stepped in and said "he's not fit enough to continue". Unfortunately, it seems everybody saw it as someone else's responsibility, and they all seemed to hope that Michael was going to 'pull it out of the bag' at the last minute.
- They obviously knew Michael was not fit enough, so how did they expect him to make a miraculous recovery?
- I also don't understand how Phillips can say that he checked Murray out - the fans who checked out Murray after 25th June 2009 soon dug up all sorts of money issues that Murray had.
- And why wasn't Ortega's suggestion of professional help acted upon?
The next day, June 20th, Kenny, Michael's then manager Frank DiLeo, Murray and Phillips met at Michael's rented Carolwood house. Their attitude was that Michael needed 'tough love' in order to gee him up and get him back to rehearsals. Michael was asked about the missed rehearsals, and alarmingly, Murray answered for Michael and said he was in good health. If I had been at the meeting, I would have been concerned by this - why would the doctor need to respond on behalf of Michael - was Michael at the mercy of the doctor, or were they both trying to cover something up? If I had seen Michael the day before, wrapped in a blanket on a Summer's day, I would not have believed there was nothing wrong. Are showbusiness people in Hollyood so used to turning a blind eye to artists' problems, that they no longer can see when someone is physically unfit to perform? Can they not tell the difference between genuine illness and laziness? After receiving these reassurances, Phillips and co. left the house, seemingly confident that the rehearsals would now get back on track. Unbelievable.
You may ask yourself, why Michael himself did not ask for some time to recover. It may have been because, as a younger performer, he would have been told that the show must go on. I have some personal experience of this as a child attending ballet school. Every year we put on a show at Christmas, and we were told that if anything went wrong onstage, we were to carry on and not let the audience know that there was a problem, and we had to finish the scene and sort out the problem after we left the stage. It was also made clear that if we were unwell and could not go onstage on the day of the show, that we would be letting everyone in the show down, and that an understudy would have to be found which would be a great inconvenience to everybody. People seemed to be angry that you would dare to fall ill, as if you were doing so just to annoy them. Professional dancers will often go onstage when sick, because they fear the consequences of 'letting everyone down'. Most dance companies have a dedicated physiotherapist, who will advise whether dancing with an injury will cause further physical damage or not. Dancers know that injury may end their careers, so they do listen to the physiotherapists advice. It may be that AEG Live thought that this was the kind of service that Murray was performing for Michael, advising him how to stay healthy when he was tired or injured. But most performers are not likely to readily say 'I can't go on tonight'. Especially when, as with Michael, they are solo performers, and there is no one to understudy them! They know that if they do not turn up at rehearsal or for a show, that everyone in the show will be sent home, and a paying audience will have their money refunded.
So if Michael was not going to ask for help, and the big guns running 'This Is It' were washing their hands of responsibility, who was left to help Michael?
Michael may not have realised that he would not be able to cope, when he signed the 'This Is It' contract in January 2009. He hadn't performed a series of concerts for 12 years, but he would have no reason to think he couldn't do it again. Even if he did have doubts, he needed the cash, and from the year 2000 music sales for any artist no longer generated good revenues, so he was forced to do live shows, which had proved to be successful money makers for other artists. He agreed, knowing that doctors had warned him not to tour again, as it would not be good for his health. The doctors knew that Michael often did not eat or drink enough during tours, and he became dehydrated and lost a lot of weight.
Some of the comments that Randy Phillips made about Michael during the 'This Is It' rehearsals, suggest to me that he has no idea of the physical and emotional pressure on a performer. From personal experience, I can assure you that giving an electrifying performance is not only physically but also emotionally draining. Even if Michael was only rehearsing and not performing full out, he was still the only person who could say 'yes, the music is played correctly', or' no, you aren't doing that dance routine correctly', because he wrote nearly all the music and helped create the iconic dance moves. He had to do all that extra work on top of rehearsing his own performance. It's a lot to take on, especially when you know you have to do it, even though it will probably make you ill.
Some of the comments that Randy Phillips made about Michael during the 'This Is It' rehearsals, suggest to me that he has no idea of the physical and emotional pressure on a performer. From personal experience, I can assure you that giving an electrifying performance is not only physically but also emotionally draining. Even if Michael was only rehearsing and not performing full out, he was still the only person who could say 'yes, the music is played correctly', or' no, you aren't doing that dance routine correctly', because he wrote nearly all the music and helped create the iconic dance moves. He had to do all that extra work on top of rehearsing his own performance. It's a lot to take on, especially when you know you have to do it, even though it will probably make you ill.
I am sure that once he started rehearsals in April, he would begin to feel the pain of any old injuries, and if he had not recovered from the corporate bullying that I believe he suffered, he could be stressed, fearful and riddled with self-doubt. As a seasoned performer, he would know that this was not the way he should be feeling, and he may have worried that couldn't continue like that. Maybe that is why he was asking for the vitamin injections? Maybe when they did not help, he turned to Propofol, just to get some sleep?
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that by June, he was showing signs of being unwell, and Ortega and Phillips knew it. Phillips seems to think Michael is being lazy, and Ortega saw signs of problems, but didn't follow through and make sure that Michael had professional help.
As well as the Lloyds of London lawsuit, there is also the Jackson family wrongful-death lawsuit, which is going to trial to look at whether AEG Live were negligent in hiring Dr Murray, starting April 2. Let's see what else it reveals.
As well as the Lloyds of London lawsuit, there is also the Jackson family wrongful-death lawsuit, which is going to trial to look at whether AEG Live were negligent in hiring Dr Murray, starting April 2. Let's see what else it reveals.
"There is a triable issue of fact as to whether it was foreseeable that such a physician under strong financial pressure may compromise his Hippocratic Oath and do what was known by AEG Live's executives to be an unfortunate practice in the entertainment industry for financial gain," Superior Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos wrote in her order, which became public on March 1.
"Triable issues of fact exist as to whether it could have been foreseeable that Dr. Murray would engage in the exact behavior alleged here: Dr. Murray's provision of drugs which led to Decedent's death," she said.
