Post by betseyby67 on May 6, 2011 4:33:34 GMT -5
During the past almost two years I have been doing research on Mike and I find that because of some amount of secrecy he wrapped around himself, the confusing contradictions and lots of misinformation out there, it is usually difficult to get a definitive handle on certain aspects of Mike’s life and personality. Aside from unsolicited information, most of the time we get tantalizing glimpses from interviews of his family members, friends (and non-friends), workmates and colleagues. Even then we don’t usually take them at their word and we generally rely on an informal credibility index with Mesereau at the top, someone like Chopra near the middle, and Klein somewhere at the bottom, with variations on their reliability depending on the timeframe and our own personal beliefs and impressions.
Having said that, here are two different interviews of Stuart Backerman. Not much is known about him, having been Mike’s publicist for about 20 months in 2002 to 2004, but he offers some interesting insights on Mike. Some are believable, some are already well established, and some are doubtful. For example, when asked if Mike has ever had a real relationship with a woman, he said, and I paraphrase, “in terms of a romantic, sexual relationship, not really, not even with Lisa Marie Presley.” It is disingenuous of him to say this because he was not around at the time when Mike and Lisa were together in the 1990s and Lisa was no longer in the picture when he was working for Mike. He also has his own views about Mike’s sexual orientation.
It is noteworthy though that even though he wrote of his experiences with Mike in a book titled “In the Court of the King: Inside the World of Michael Jackson”, he stopped publication when Mike died because he said he did not want to be seen as taking advantage of his death.
Here is the first interview which was conducted by the Vancouver Sun the day after Mike died.
Stuart Backerman of Vancouver was Michael Jackson’s publicist for nearly two years, from 2002 to 2004. He was having knee surgery Thursday when he heard that Michael Jackson had been rushed to hospital, and when we woke up, found that his former client was dead. Here an edited transcript of an interview with Backerman the day after Jackson’s death.
BACKERMAN: I was literally on the operating table when I heard the nurses outside. Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital! He had a cardiac arrest and may die! I’m like freaking out, but basically I was given this shot [of anaesthetic]. I had the surgery and woke up. The first thing I asked was ‘What’s happening with Michael?’ And unfortunately the news was that he had passed away.
SUN: Were you shocked?
BACKERMAN: I was shocked on a certain level. It happened out of the blue in a way, and nobody expected it to happen. On the other hand...to be quite honest, his lifestyle, the anxiousness he’s been under, and stress in terms of the concerts in London [was incredible]. Remember, he signed up for 50 concerts, [performing] every other night. [That’s a lot] for a guy who hasn’t performed anything since 2001. Even in 2001 he could barely do two sets of 20 minutes at that Madison Square Garden [Motown] celebration. Since then he hasn’t really practiced. I’ve heard from very, very good sources, in fact it’s been confirmed as I understand it that at 11:30 a.m. yesterday he was given an injection of Demerol. Because he used Demerol following the Pepsi commercial and the burning of his hair and the scalding of his scalp, Demerol. Yesterday at 11:30 he was injected with Demerol. So I would say between that, the pressure he’s been under trying to practice and rehearse and get in shape after all the years of doing nothing and all the other stresses that I’ve mentioned...it created almost a lethal cocktail of situations that put him over the edge and taxed his heart to the degree that he couldn’t handle it.
SUN: Was he anorexic? He was always skinny.
BACKERMAN: Very skinny. He didn’t really want to eat, he didn’t want to look like his father when he got older. That’s part of the reason why he had a lot of surgery. He didn’t want to end up looking like his father in a sense. That’s number one. Number two is, he’s a celebrity, and wanted to keep slim and trim. He went overboard because of his lifestyle, basically, and didn’t really take care of himself like he should have. It’s not like he starved, he had all the money in the world, he just didn’t eat properly, and clearly didn’t take the supplements that were necessary in order to keep a reasonable weight. He just wasn’t really healthy, notwithstanding [the fact that] he looked okay. Because thin people in our society look good, you know what I mean? If you see somebody who looks thin, you’re assuming they’re in shape, they’re working out, they’re swimming or whatever they’re doing. But that wasn’t really the case with him, he wasn’t working out, he wasn’t really eating properly. I don’t know if you classify him as being anorexic, because that intimates throwing up and various other things. It was just that he didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to look heavy...and he didn’t want to look like his father in older age. He really went overboard.
SUN: So what was his lifestyle?
BACKERMAN: His lifestyle was a contradiction. I saw him in incredibly positive, childlike, beautiful situations. I remember an occasion...Michael’s 45th birthday. I had produced an event at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. About 10 days later at Neverland we had a big charity event with a lot of celebrities. In the evening when most of the guests who were invited to this $5,000 a ticket gold-plated charity event had left, there were only some celebrities and close people, staff, friends and family who stayed on. In this big circus tent a cake was rolled out, a biiiiiiiggggg cake, one of those big cakes, you know what I mean, huge. We all sang happy birthday to Michael. Michael was on a stage. He had come in through the back of the tent with me and a couple of other people. We stood up on the stage, and the crowd was below the stage singing happy birthday. After the birthday song, Aaron Carter and Nick Carter of N’Sync [were there]. Aaron Carter started off by taking a little piece of the birthday cake and rubbing it on Michael’s nose. And Michael said ‘You’re not going to get away with that!’ He then took a piece of his own birthday cake and threw it at Aaron Carter. Then Nick Carter got into the act and then Ryan Seacrest and the KISS-FM people got into it, and I got into it. This whole tent was an incredible food fight, and Michael was like shrieking with joy. He was enjoying that like a 12-year-old would, you know what I mean, like a pillow fight or a food fight. So I saw that side of him, and other occasions where he was really in a beautiful space. But I also saw him in situations where he was tormented, in a sense, that victimhood of having a difficult childhood and having too much money, which really ruins a lot of people. Too much money, too much material focus, and too much of the prescription drug situation following the unfortunate scalding of his head. I saw him insecure about his looks. There were times where I saw him where he basically looked through me and he didn’t even know me, in a sense. He might or might not have been on Demerol at that time, or whatever. I saw him being disloyal to people, letting them go after these people had done some beautiful things for him. And I saw him being kind, giving of his time and his money, supporting charities and creating charities. So Michael was a classic contradiction, and I saw it all.
SUN: Was he detached from reality?
BACKERMAN: No. He wasn’t detached from reality. I guess like us all we could occasionally be off, you know what I mean? He was not all there at times. But a lot of other times he was very Machiavellian and shrewd, about his own public relations, for example. He wasn’t so swift on the business side, although he liked to think of himself as the titular head of his empire and a businessman. Let’s give credit where it’s due, [to] his lawyer John Branca, that brilliant Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. With [Branca], they bought up the ATV Beatles catalogue, which was one of the greatest business acquisitions in the world.
SUN: To the outside world, Michael Jackson seemed to be a totally happening guy around the time of his Off The Wall album, and then all of a sudden he started getting these weird nose jobs and stuff. What was going on?
BACKERMAN: I’ll tell you what was going on with that. I go back to the Pepsi commercial. The Pepsi commercial was in the heyday, he got the largest commercial payout in the world at that time, to do that Pepsi commercial. Millions, some incredible amount for that time in the 80s, [$5 million] or more. When that pyro-technic accident occurred, he burnt off his hair and he burnt his scalp. He was significantly in pain, and significantly damaged his scalp and his hair. He was in pain, deep, incredible pain, and he was prescribed Demerol. Like a lot of people who get prescription drugs, that turned into a semi-habit. And created the situation of him being ‘off’ sometimes, because of his Demerol. It also transferred into the cosmetic situation. Because his scalp was burned, he could never have that gorgeous head of hair that he had in the Thriller days, that girls died for. He was such a handsome African American male. He had the perfect, beautiful Afro, tied back, he was the handsomest guy around, really. But he couldn’t grow his hair anymore, so he had to wear different wigs which made him look strange.
SUN: He wore wigs?
BACKERMAN: He wore wigs. Those were all wigs, all of them. That kind of parted down the middle dopey look that you see. Sometimes you could see that he didn’t have the wig on properly, and it covered what was really just stubble on his hair, because of the accident. Cosmetically he had to get that, and that sort of led to his thinking about other cosmetic approaches. The greatest fear in his life...he saw a computer graphic of what he would look like at about 50 years old, and he freaked out, because he thought he looked just like his father Joe Jackson. That combined with the wig that got him thinking about changing his look...the wig stirred the pot about that, and he didn’t want to look like his father, and it created that situation. That Pepsi commercial debacle was a seminal event in Michael Jackson’s life.
SUN: Basically it gave him health issues which led to mental issues.
BACKERMAN: Correct.
SUN: Why would anybody that famous want to be even more famous? If you already have the biggest selling record of all time, why would you do a Pepsi commercial for $5 million? That’s chump change.
BACKERMAN: I can answer that fairly simplistically. Rich people don’t consider themselves ever having enough, because they have to compete. They have to feel richer. Rich people — and when I’m talkin’ rich, I’m talkin’ really rich, not somebody who lives in Dunbar or something — they always have to keep up with the Joneses, they always have to have bigger and better. Celebrities are the same way. You can’t have enough money. Michael liked to brag before Oprah that he was a billionaire. He wasn’t satisfied with the Beatles catalogue and making oodles of money with Pepsi commercials or anything else. He did the Pepsi commercial because a), it was a great publicity vehicle as a followup to Thriller, and just as importantly, for the moolah. Nobody’s going to throw away $5 million in 1985 or 86 or whenever that was. He wasn’t a fool. Certainly at that point he may have had many of the problems and torment that he had from his childhood situation, but he was still pretty right on in those days. He was in the heyday. So he took the opportunity as it came to him. Just like A-Rod [Alex Rodriquez], the baseball star for the New York Yankees. He wasn’t shy about negotiating a $250 million deal, you know what I’m saying? People will go for what they can get, notwithstanding that they’re so wealthy already. To me the money part of Michael was part of his undoing as well. Because when you have so much money, you become profligate, and that’s what happened to him. And frankly to a lot of wealthy people, they just get caught up in the material side and they don’t nourish their spiritual side enough. Michael was always searching. He tried Judaism, he grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, he played with Islam, although he never really believed in it. His brother very much did, Jermaine. He played with various other spiritual activities, but he never saw the goodness and the wisdom that comes from within yourself, not from outside, you know?
SUN: It sounds like he had a very tortured relationship with his dad.
BACKERMAN: Very much so. He couldn’t go out and do the things five, seven, eight, 10 year olds could do. Basketball, hanging out. [His father] was very hard on Michael, being the lead singer and being the youngster. He pushed him around, and he pushed his brothers around. Michael was very scared of his father. He grew up...that’s the point, he never grew up. He never really grew beyond the prepubescent 12-year-old, in a sense. That’s why he was attracted to — and I don’t necessarily mean sexually — but he was attracted to hanging out with 11, 12, 13-at-the-most year-old boys, you know? Because he felt comfortable with them. They didn’t judge him, they loved him, and he could love them.
SUN: Let’s talk about that. Was Michael doing anything bad? He paid off one kid, maybe more. What really happened there?
BACKERMAN: I’d like to think that Michael Jackson had innocent relationships with these boys, similar to what a lot of 12 and 11 and 13-year-old boys might experiment with, in a sense. Kind of innocently. ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours’ kind of situation, at the most. I certainly know with [one of his accusers], that that was a scam, because I know for a fact, having experienced that, being at Neverland and knowing what was going on with that situation, that truly he was exonerated appropriately, because he did not have an affair, a sexual affair, with that boy. His big mistake was being an idiot with the Martin Bashir documentary. That was the stupidest thing in the world, and he was warned about it, but Michael does what Michael wants. Putting his arm around Gavin Arvizo really set off what eventually [became] the raid at Neverland. So that was tremendously ill-advised. I believe Michael was very innocent in his relationships. I like to think that. On the other hand, if you’re a thinking person, one has to question why somebody would pay off another person $20 million if you have nothing to hide. [But] when you’re in that position and you know that that will be drawn out and will create a tremendous impact on your career — even the allegations — and you’ve got a billion dollars of assets...$20 million isn’t a significant amount, if it means that it goes away, and goes away very quickly. You can understand that too. I had no personal experience seeing Michael in any dalliance. I’d like to think that whatever he had going with any boys was reasonably innocent pre-pubescent experimentation — if that.
SUN: Did he ever have a relationship with a woman, a real relationship?
BACKERMAN: Not really. Not with Lisa Presley, not with Debbie Rowe, not with anybody in terms of a romantic, sexual relationship. He had his hairdresser and other women, his mother, but he wasn’t...built that way, you know?
SUN: Do you think he was gay?
BACKERMAN: I don’t know if he was gay. I would say he was maybe...not that interested in sex, per se, he was put off by it, not feeling comfortable enough in his own skin to go that step, in a sense, you know what I mean?
SUN: As a child star he would have had lots of opportunities to have sex when he was a kid.
BACKERMAN: Well, you know the story goes that he slept in the same room as his older brothers and saw some very strange happenstances, and that maybe turned him off, to a certain degree. Maybe his own innate character was that he was a little turned off that way. Maybe there was a predisposition to being gay in a sense, although he didn’t followup on it, certainly in an adult sense. Maybe his ability to express himself that way was done via his relationships with these younger prepubescent boys.
SUN: How did Michael Jackson have financial problems? Thriller sold 100 million copies, he would have made hundreds of millions off that alone.
BACKERMAN: Well you can. Lots of people have gone broke in the last seven months since this economic downturn. People borrowed against their assets. You have a home that’s worth say $1.5 million, and you refinance that home and borrow significantly against that. Then there’s a downturn, and your cash flow dries up and you have to borrow more money, or the house is worth a hell of a lot less than it was, blah blah blah blah. The same thing happened to Michael Jackson. He had significant asset base, and royalties coming in, but because of his crazy profligate shopping habits and unfettered spending, he spent more than he was bringing in, and had a tremendous burn rate of several million dollars a month running Neverland, shopping and going crazy, flying people all over the world. He kept borrowing against his asset base, and put himself in a deep cash flow situation. If you have an asset base you can liquidate that, and then you have X amount, minus the debts and you have X left. If Michael had wanted to liquidate his stake in the Beatles catalogue, minus all his debts, he would have been left with whatever, $100 million, $200 million. Who knows exactly how much, but he wouldn’t have been poor. But he didn’t want to do that, because he had an emotional attachment [to the Beatles catalogue]. Remember, he bought that from under the nose of Paul McCartney. He felt that was the greatest achievement of his life as a businessman. And he saw himself as a businessman. He didn’t want to perform anymore. The stress of doing it...was going against the grain of his soul. The reason he hired me and other people was that he wanted to reposition his life. He wanted to go into owning animation studios, maybe doing choreography, being a businessman. He didn’t want to perform. He wanted to be a businessman, and he saw the Beatles catalogue as the culmination [of his business acumen]. And it was one of the greatest business decisions of all time, particularly for a celebrity. So for him to give that up, liquidate it, pay off his debts and then have whatever he had left...would be a real blow to his ego. And more importantly,a blow to his acumen. When you have too much money...it’s very very dangerous. You see all these young teen [stars], the Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans who have made a couple of million bucks. They don’t know what to do with it and they get themselves in trouble. Michael was no different, only the numbers were larger, with more zeroes.
SUN: You were there from 2002 to 2004?
BACKERMAN: Middle 2002 to early 2004, about 20 months. Almost two years. SUN: You left because? BACKERMAN: The Nation of Islam got their grimmies on Michael, which I’ve written in my book that I’m not going to publish.
SUN: You’ve written a book?
BACKERMAN: Yeah I have. I quit because...when Michael found out about the raid at Neverland in 2003, December 22, he freaked out. His nanny Grace Rwaramba, with the advice of his brother Jermaine, called up Louis Farrakhan with security. Because as soon as that raid happened there were like death threats on him: ‘You crazy freaking pedophile,’ that kind of business. So he called in the Nation of Islam. Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Muhammad his son-in-law came down from Chicago. Not to provide security, although they did that. They basically took over Michael’s business and isolated everybody. Except me, because...it was too sensitive to get rid of me, because I was liked by the press. I got along with the press well and told them the truth. The Nation of Islam guys realized that, so I was the last guy standing. When Michael left Las Vegas after being booked and charged to go back to Neverland, the Nation of Islam, under my strong objection, decided to have an event called You Are Not Alone. Basically a celebratory event of Jackson coming back to Neverland. They invited me down, they had never met me before. Leonard Muhammad called me to invite me to this celebration, He called me up and said ‘How do you spell your last name, Stuart?’ And I said my last name is Backerman. He thought that I was German, like the German guys that brought me in [to Jackson’s camp]. To his chagrin when I met him at this event, given my Semetic features and that I’m Jewish, he knew exactly where I was at. At that moment, I got a real, real icy reception, and he forbid me to talk to the press. I said ‘I don’t work for you, I work for Michael, and want to see Michael now.’ He didn’t allow me to do that, so I knew then that was the end. So I left Neverland, never to return, and resigned a few days later on CNN
Readmore:http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Transcript+John+Mackie+interview+with+Stuart+Backerman/1737792/story.html#ixzz1KWzu11mJ
Having said that, here are two different interviews of Stuart Backerman. Not much is known about him, having been Mike’s publicist for about 20 months in 2002 to 2004, but he offers some interesting insights on Mike. Some are believable, some are already well established, and some are doubtful. For example, when asked if Mike has ever had a real relationship with a woman, he said, and I paraphrase, “in terms of a romantic, sexual relationship, not really, not even with Lisa Marie Presley.” It is disingenuous of him to say this because he was not around at the time when Mike and Lisa were together in the 1990s and Lisa was no longer in the picture when he was working for Mike. He also has his own views about Mike’s sexual orientation.
It is noteworthy though that even though he wrote of his experiences with Mike in a book titled “In the Court of the King: Inside the World of Michael Jackson”, he stopped publication when Mike died because he said he did not want to be seen as taking advantage of his death.
Here is the first interview which was conducted by the Vancouver Sun the day after Mike died.
Stuart Backerman of Vancouver was Michael Jackson’s publicist for nearly two years, from 2002 to 2004. He was having knee surgery Thursday when he heard that Michael Jackson had been rushed to hospital, and when we woke up, found that his former client was dead. Here an edited transcript of an interview with Backerman the day after Jackson’s death.
BACKERMAN: I was literally on the operating table when I heard the nurses outside. Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital! He had a cardiac arrest and may die! I’m like freaking out, but basically I was given this shot [of anaesthetic]. I had the surgery and woke up. The first thing I asked was ‘What’s happening with Michael?’ And unfortunately the news was that he had passed away.
SUN: Were you shocked?
BACKERMAN: I was shocked on a certain level. It happened out of the blue in a way, and nobody expected it to happen. On the other hand...to be quite honest, his lifestyle, the anxiousness he’s been under, and stress in terms of the concerts in London [was incredible]. Remember, he signed up for 50 concerts, [performing] every other night. [That’s a lot] for a guy who hasn’t performed anything since 2001. Even in 2001 he could barely do two sets of 20 minutes at that Madison Square Garden [Motown] celebration. Since then he hasn’t really practiced. I’ve heard from very, very good sources, in fact it’s been confirmed as I understand it that at 11:30 a.m. yesterday he was given an injection of Demerol. Because he used Demerol following the Pepsi commercial and the burning of his hair and the scalding of his scalp, Demerol. Yesterday at 11:30 he was injected with Demerol. So I would say between that, the pressure he’s been under trying to practice and rehearse and get in shape after all the years of doing nothing and all the other stresses that I’ve mentioned...it created almost a lethal cocktail of situations that put him over the edge and taxed his heart to the degree that he couldn’t handle it.
SUN: Was he anorexic? He was always skinny.
BACKERMAN: Very skinny. He didn’t really want to eat, he didn’t want to look like his father when he got older. That’s part of the reason why he had a lot of surgery. He didn’t want to end up looking like his father in a sense. That’s number one. Number two is, he’s a celebrity, and wanted to keep slim and trim. He went overboard because of his lifestyle, basically, and didn’t really take care of himself like he should have. It’s not like he starved, he had all the money in the world, he just didn’t eat properly, and clearly didn’t take the supplements that were necessary in order to keep a reasonable weight. He just wasn’t really healthy, notwithstanding [the fact that] he looked okay. Because thin people in our society look good, you know what I mean? If you see somebody who looks thin, you’re assuming they’re in shape, they’re working out, they’re swimming or whatever they’re doing. But that wasn’t really the case with him, he wasn’t working out, he wasn’t really eating properly. I don’t know if you classify him as being anorexic, because that intimates throwing up and various other things. It was just that he didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to look heavy...and he didn’t want to look like his father in older age. He really went overboard.
SUN: So what was his lifestyle?
BACKERMAN: His lifestyle was a contradiction. I saw him in incredibly positive, childlike, beautiful situations. I remember an occasion...Michael’s 45th birthday. I had produced an event at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. About 10 days later at Neverland we had a big charity event with a lot of celebrities. In the evening when most of the guests who were invited to this $5,000 a ticket gold-plated charity event had left, there were only some celebrities and close people, staff, friends and family who stayed on. In this big circus tent a cake was rolled out, a biiiiiiiggggg cake, one of those big cakes, you know what I mean, huge. We all sang happy birthday to Michael. Michael was on a stage. He had come in through the back of the tent with me and a couple of other people. We stood up on the stage, and the crowd was below the stage singing happy birthday. After the birthday song, Aaron Carter and Nick Carter of N’Sync [were there]. Aaron Carter started off by taking a little piece of the birthday cake and rubbing it on Michael’s nose. And Michael said ‘You’re not going to get away with that!’ He then took a piece of his own birthday cake and threw it at Aaron Carter. Then Nick Carter got into the act and then Ryan Seacrest and the KISS-FM people got into it, and I got into it. This whole tent was an incredible food fight, and Michael was like shrieking with joy. He was enjoying that like a 12-year-old would, you know what I mean, like a pillow fight or a food fight. So I saw that side of him, and other occasions where he was really in a beautiful space. But I also saw him in situations where he was tormented, in a sense, that victimhood of having a difficult childhood and having too much money, which really ruins a lot of people. Too much money, too much material focus, and too much of the prescription drug situation following the unfortunate scalding of his head. I saw him insecure about his looks. There were times where I saw him where he basically looked through me and he didn’t even know me, in a sense. He might or might not have been on Demerol at that time, or whatever. I saw him being disloyal to people, letting them go after these people had done some beautiful things for him. And I saw him being kind, giving of his time and his money, supporting charities and creating charities. So Michael was a classic contradiction, and I saw it all.
SUN: Was he detached from reality?
BACKERMAN: No. He wasn’t detached from reality. I guess like us all we could occasionally be off, you know what I mean? He was not all there at times. But a lot of other times he was very Machiavellian and shrewd, about his own public relations, for example. He wasn’t so swift on the business side, although he liked to think of himself as the titular head of his empire and a businessman. Let’s give credit where it’s due, [to] his lawyer John Branca, that brilliant Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. With [Branca], they bought up the ATV Beatles catalogue, which was one of the greatest business acquisitions in the world.
SUN: To the outside world, Michael Jackson seemed to be a totally happening guy around the time of his Off The Wall album, and then all of a sudden he started getting these weird nose jobs and stuff. What was going on?
BACKERMAN: I’ll tell you what was going on with that. I go back to the Pepsi commercial. The Pepsi commercial was in the heyday, he got the largest commercial payout in the world at that time, to do that Pepsi commercial. Millions, some incredible amount for that time in the 80s, [$5 million] or more. When that pyro-technic accident occurred, he burnt off his hair and he burnt his scalp. He was significantly in pain, and significantly damaged his scalp and his hair. He was in pain, deep, incredible pain, and he was prescribed Demerol. Like a lot of people who get prescription drugs, that turned into a semi-habit. And created the situation of him being ‘off’ sometimes, because of his Demerol. It also transferred into the cosmetic situation. Because his scalp was burned, he could never have that gorgeous head of hair that he had in the Thriller days, that girls died for. He was such a handsome African American male. He had the perfect, beautiful Afro, tied back, he was the handsomest guy around, really. But he couldn’t grow his hair anymore, so he had to wear different wigs which made him look strange.
SUN: He wore wigs?
BACKERMAN: He wore wigs. Those were all wigs, all of them. That kind of parted down the middle dopey look that you see. Sometimes you could see that he didn’t have the wig on properly, and it covered what was really just stubble on his hair, because of the accident. Cosmetically he had to get that, and that sort of led to his thinking about other cosmetic approaches. The greatest fear in his life...he saw a computer graphic of what he would look like at about 50 years old, and he freaked out, because he thought he looked just like his father Joe Jackson. That combined with the wig that got him thinking about changing his look...the wig stirred the pot about that, and he didn’t want to look like his father, and it created that situation. That Pepsi commercial debacle was a seminal event in Michael Jackson’s life.
SUN: Basically it gave him health issues which led to mental issues.
BACKERMAN: Correct.
SUN: Why would anybody that famous want to be even more famous? If you already have the biggest selling record of all time, why would you do a Pepsi commercial for $5 million? That’s chump change.
BACKERMAN: I can answer that fairly simplistically. Rich people don’t consider themselves ever having enough, because they have to compete. They have to feel richer. Rich people — and when I’m talkin’ rich, I’m talkin’ really rich, not somebody who lives in Dunbar or something — they always have to keep up with the Joneses, they always have to have bigger and better. Celebrities are the same way. You can’t have enough money. Michael liked to brag before Oprah that he was a billionaire. He wasn’t satisfied with the Beatles catalogue and making oodles of money with Pepsi commercials or anything else. He did the Pepsi commercial because a), it was a great publicity vehicle as a followup to Thriller, and just as importantly, for the moolah. Nobody’s going to throw away $5 million in 1985 or 86 or whenever that was. He wasn’t a fool. Certainly at that point he may have had many of the problems and torment that he had from his childhood situation, but he was still pretty right on in those days. He was in the heyday. So he took the opportunity as it came to him. Just like A-Rod [Alex Rodriquez], the baseball star for the New York Yankees. He wasn’t shy about negotiating a $250 million deal, you know what I’m saying? People will go for what they can get, notwithstanding that they’re so wealthy already. To me the money part of Michael was part of his undoing as well. Because when you have so much money, you become profligate, and that’s what happened to him. And frankly to a lot of wealthy people, they just get caught up in the material side and they don’t nourish their spiritual side enough. Michael was always searching. He tried Judaism, he grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, he played with Islam, although he never really believed in it. His brother very much did, Jermaine. He played with various other spiritual activities, but he never saw the goodness and the wisdom that comes from within yourself, not from outside, you know?
SUN: It sounds like he had a very tortured relationship with his dad.
BACKERMAN: Very much so. He couldn’t go out and do the things five, seven, eight, 10 year olds could do. Basketball, hanging out. [His father] was very hard on Michael, being the lead singer and being the youngster. He pushed him around, and he pushed his brothers around. Michael was very scared of his father. He grew up...that’s the point, he never grew up. He never really grew beyond the prepubescent 12-year-old, in a sense. That’s why he was attracted to — and I don’t necessarily mean sexually — but he was attracted to hanging out with 11, 12, 13-at-the-most year-old boys, you know? Because he felt comfortable with them. They didn’t judge him, they loved him, and he could love them.
SUN: Let’s talk about that. Was Michael doing anything bad? He paid off one kid, maybe more. What really happened there?
BACKERMAN: I’d like to think that Michael Jackson had innocent relationships with these boys, similar to what a lot of 12 and 11 and 13-year-old boys might experiment with, in a sense. Kind of innocently. ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours’ kind of situation, at the most. I certainly know with [one of his accusers], that that was a scam, because I know for a fact, having experienced that, being at Neverland and knowing what was going on with that situation, that truly he was exonerated appropriately, because he did not have an affair, a sexual affair, with that boy. His big mistake was being an idiot with the Martin Bashir documentary. That was the stupidest thing in the world, and he was warned about it, but Michael does what Michael wants. Putting his arm around Gavin Arvizo really set off what eventually [became] the raid at Neverland. So that was tremendously ill-advised. I believe Michael was very innocent in his relationships. I like to think that. On the other hand, if you’re a thinking person, one has to question why somebody would pay off another person $20 million if you have nothing to hide. [But] when you’re in that position and you know that that will be drawn out and will create a tremendous impact on your career — even the allegations — and you’ve got a billion dollars of assets...$20 million isn’t a significant amount, if it means that it goes away, and goes away very quickly. You can understand that too. I had no personal experience seeing Michael in any dalliance. I’d like to think that whatever he had going with any boys was reasonably innocent pre-pubescent experimentation — if that.
SUN: Did he ever have a relationship with a woman, a real relationship?
BACKERMAN: Not really. Not with Lisa Presley, not with Debbie Rowe, not with anybody in terms of a romantic, sexual relationship. He had his hairdresser and other women, his mother, but he wasn’t...built that way, you know?
SUN: Do you think he was gay?
BACKERMAN: I don’t know if he was gay. I would say he was maybe...not that interested in sex, per se, he was put off by it, not feeling comfortable enough in his own skin to go that step, in a sense, you know what I mean?
SUN: As a child star he would have had lots of opportunities to have sex when he was a kid.
BACKERMAN: Well, you know the story goes that he slept in the same room as his older brothers and saw some very strange happenstances, and that maybe turned him off, to a certain degree. Maybe his own innate character was that he was a little turned off that way. Maybe there was a predisposition to being gay in a sense, although he didn’t followup on it, certainly in an adult sense. Maybe his ability to express himself that way was done via his relationships with these younger prepubescent boys.
SUN: How did Michael Jackson have financial problems? Thriller sold 100 million copies, he would have made hundreds of millions off that alone.
BACKERMAN: Well you can. Lots of people have gone broke in the last seven months since this economic downturn. People borrowed against their assets. You have a home that’s worth say $1.5 million, and you refinance that home and borrow significantly against that. Then there’s a downturn, and your cash flow dries up and you have to borrow more money, or the house is worth a hell of a lot less than it was, blah blah blah blah. The same thing happened to Michael Jackson. He had significant asset base, and royalties coming in, but because of his crazy profligate shopping habits and unfettered spending, he spent more than he was bringing in, and had a tremendous burn rate of several million dollars a month running Neverland, shopping and going crazy, flying people all over the world. He kept borrowing against his asset base, and put himself in a deep cash flow situation. If you have an asset base you can liquidate that, and then you have X amount, minus the debts and you have X left. If Michael had wanted to liquidate his stake in the Beatles catalogue, minus all his debts, he would have been left with whatever, $100 million, $200 million. Who knows exactly how much, but he wouldn’t have been poor. But he didn’t want to do that, because he had an emotional attachment [to the Beatles catalogue]. Remember, he bought that from under the nose of Paul McCartney. He felt that was the greatest achievement of his life as a businessman. And he saw himself as a businessman. He didn’t want to perform anymore. The stress of doing it...was going against the grain of his soul. The reason he hired me and other people was that he wanted to reposition his life. He wanted to go into owning animation studios, maybe doing choreography, being a businessman. He didn’t want to perform. He wanted to be a businessman, and he saw the Beatles catalogue as the culmination [of his business acumen]. And it was one of the greatest business decisions of all time, particularly for a celebrity. So for him to give that up, liquidate it, pay off his debts and then have whatever he had left...would be a real blow to his ego. And more importantly,a blow to his acumen. When you have too much money...it’s very very dangerous. You see all these young teen [stars], the Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans who have made a couple of million bucks. They don’t know what to do with it and they get themselves in trouble. Michael was no different, only the numbers were larger, with more zeroes.
SUN: You were there from 2002 to 2004?
BACKERMAN: Middle 2002 to early 2004, about 20 months. Almost two years. SUN: You left because? BACKERMAN: The Nation of Islam got their grimmies on Michael, which I’ve written in my book that I’m not going to publish.
SUN: You’ve written a book?
BACKERMAN: Yeah I have. I quit because...when Michael found out about the raid at Neverland in 2003, December 22, he freaked out. His nanny Grace Rwaramba, with the advice of his brother Jermaine, called up Louis Farrakhan with security. Because as soon as that raid happened there were like death threats on him: ‘You crazy freaking pedophile,’ that kind of business. So he called in the Nation of Islam. Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Muhammad his son-in-law came down from Chicago. Not to provide security, although they did that. They basically took over Michael’s business and isolated everybody. Except me, because...it was too sensitive to get rid of me, because I was liked by the press. I got along with the press well and told them the truth. The Nation of Islam guys realized that, so I was the last guy standing. When Michael left Las Vegas after being booked and charged to go back to Neverland, the Nation of Islam, under my strong objection, decided to have an event called You Are Not Alone. Basically a celebratory event of Jackson coming back to Neverland. They invited me down, they had never met me before. Leonard Muhammad called me to invite me to this celebration, He called me up and said ‘How do you spell your last name, Stuart?’ And I said my last name is Backerman. He thought that I was German, like the German guys that brought me in [to Jackson’s camp]. To his chagrin when I met him at this event, given my Semetic features and that I’m Jewish, he knew exactly where I was at. At that moment, I got a real, real icy reception, and he forbid me to talk to the press. I said ‘I don’t work for you, I work for Michael, and want to see Michael now.’ He didn’t allow me to do that, so I knew then that was the end. So I left Neverland, never to return, and resigned a few days later on CNN
Readmore:http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Transcript+John+Mackie+interview+with+Stuart+Backerman/1737792/story.html#ixzz1KWzu11mJ