George michael, p.20
George Michael, page 20
Kahane warned the promoter that Michael was unwell and might not perform. The news aroused suspicions that he might try to flee the country and pocket his fee. As Michael and his entourage reached the airport, a military jet waited to take them to Málaga. From there, a jeep with armed personnel drove them to the stadium. Michael cried all the way.
The audience waited an hour: no George Michael. They grew loudly angry. A doctor administered to Michael’s eyes with soothing drops. Michael pouted to Kahane: “If I go onstage, I’m just gonna sit in a chair. I’m not gonna move.” Fine, Kahane told him. “Then you’ll become Stevie Wonder for the night. I don’t care. Just get onstage.” Finally, Michael stepped out before forty-four thousand fans. He sat for the first song. Then he rose to his feet—“and it ended up being one of the best gigs on the whole tour!” said Cameron. “It was possibly the only time I remember George throwing caution to the wind. He was definitely not on autopilot that night.” Two nights later he performed in Barcelona, where the show reverted to its old quality: “same.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After the death of Wham!, Michael had taken the cockiness he’d learned from Andrew Ridgeley and built it into an epic persona. But Ridge-ley’s dream of becoming a star drag-racer had literally ended in smoke as he wrecked car after car. Ridgeley had bought a home in Los Angeles to bring him closer to a film career, but that dream, too, had crashed and burned. “He was pretty despondent about the way the press treated him,” said Michael. “And it’s not just the press. The public treated him with a great degree of disdain. He was seriously pissed off.” Finally, Michael’s ex-partner made the safer choice of opening a restaurant with friends in a town outside London.
Sony retained an option on a Ridgeley solo record. Announcements of it had appeared as early as 1987; Michael had pledged to write songs for it, but the comeback was a risk that Ridgeley didn’t rush to take. Finally, three years after the breakup of Wham!, he began work on the album, to be called Son of Albert. With Michael’s encouragement, Kahane and Lippman took him on as a client. The former trumpeted Ridgeley’s potential to the Los Angeles Times: “This album will show that he’s more than just a sideman . . . that he is a very talented writer, producer, and performer.”
If Michael had ditched his bubblegum façade, maybe Ridgeley could do the same. Having fallen for Def Leppard and Van Halen, he hoped to create “very macho, very raunchy rock. . . . My music is rooted in sexual energy, though intellectual energy is important, too.” Ridgeley seemingly didn’t want too many of Michael’s thumbprints on the project; he wrote with other collaborators, including his coproducer Gary Bromham, who played bashing drums and blaring electric guitar. Amid the metal, Ridgeley’s voice was heard at last: a high, braying, boy-band sound that aimed to lash and snarl.
He was no leader, and his old partner—who sang backup on one track, “Red Dress”—saw him floundering. Michael revealed later that he had urged Ridgeley in vain to redo certain vocals. The album’s only video, “Shake,” cast him, none too convincingly, as a rocking sex machine surrounded by writhing, seminaked women.
With Son of Albert due out in May 1990, Chris Heath interviewed a “super-suspicious” Ridgeley for Smash Hits. “My personal view,” recalled Heath, “is that he wasn’t that committed to being a solo artist and felt awkward about it.” Chrissy Iley, a blonde-bombshell celebrity profiler for the Daily Mail, found Ridgeley a lot more receptive. Iley noted the “breezy insouciance” and “confidence overspill” of old as Ridgeley downed five cocktails, mooned over the opposite sex (“Dark women appeal to me”), and boasted of his style sense: “I don’t go shopping because I have a shoemaker, a shirtmaker, and a tailor who makes everything to my specific instructions. I have personal motifs—laurel leaves for strength, a rose for love, and angel’s wings for purity.” With so little irony in his words, it was hard to believe him when he stressed that the lyrics on his new album were “meant to be funny. They’re a satire on male sexuality.”
The humor was lost on Entertainment Weekly’s Greg Sandow, one of the few critics to review Son of Albert. He called it “fake-raunchy rock ‘n’ roll” unsuited to Ridgeley’s “eager, tiny voice.” Sandow’s rating: C+. Ridgeley would never release another album. Nearly thirty years later, when Son of Albert appeared in a new edition, Ridgeley said in the booklet: “I am surprised the album is being reissued, baffled in fact—particularly in view of how poorly it performed first time ’round!”
In the original credits, he had thanked his former partner “for never doubting me.” Even after Son of Albert had come and gone, Michael defended him. “I’m convinced that there were maybe four hit records on that album and I’d never have believed that this stigma would have held that strong. . . . He knows it’s not a great voice, but he fucking tries. . . . I don’t know what he’s going to do now.”
•••
Michael was in the throes of a much more elaborate self-recreation.
His album was due out in September 1990. Michael had chosen the title Listen Without Prejudice—a plea to listeners to wipe his old image from their minds and embrace the new George. To the main title he added “Vol. 1,” in anticipation of a sequel. The front of the album wouldn’t show his name, the title, or his face; Michael assumed he was so famous that none of them were needed. Instead, he and Simon Halfon, his favorite cover designer, found an image they loved in a photography book Halfon had given him for his birthday. The new album would display a square-sized portion of a photo, Coney Island at Noon Saturday, July 5, 1942, taken by Weegee, the photographer known for his stark black-and-white street photography. His picture showed a sea of swimsuit-attired bathers huddled together and staring at the camera; Weegee had danced and screamed to make them look his way. The photo, with so many near-naked men standing shoulder to shoulder, had a homoeroticism that Michael liked.
To mark what the Sunday Times called his “transformation to serious respectability,” there could be no higher anointing than his hour on The South Bank Show, the long-running British documentary series hosted by an aristocrat of British television, Melvyn Bragg. The show had begun as a lofty celebration of high-art figures and venerated popular artists: Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness, Francis Bacon, Oscar Peterson. More recently it had swerved toward such ratings-friendlier subjects as the Pet Shop Boys and Eric Clapton.
Even so, Kevin Jackson of the Independent found Michael—“a bright crafter of dance-floor numbers”—to be an “odd candidate for Melvynization.” Jackson was puzzled to hear the host “speak of George’s origins in Bushey in the same tones he might apply to Beethoven’s in Bonn.”
Chris Heath reported that the star had exercised “considerable editorial control” over the show, which detailed how he had shed all traces of frivolity and was now, above all else, a songwriter. Michael was shown working intently in the studio, reinforcing “I Want Your Sex” as a pro-monogamy statement, defending his soul singing against charges of cultural appropriation, and offsetting his old arrogance with a newfound show of humility. “I don’t believe that I am important as a pop star,” he said. “I believe I can leave songs that will mean something to other generations.”
That month also brought the publication of Bare, Michael’s “official” life story. Though marketed as a memoir, the book was more of a biography, written by Tony Parsons, a scuffling music writer whom Michael liked. Parsons had proposed the book to Michael, who consented because he “had become sick of the Niagara of lies, innuendo, and trivia that a tabloid deity has to endure,” explained Parsons.
On February 23, 1989, the day after Michael’s Album of the Year Grammy win, the scribe began interviewing him for Bare. With the star’s okay, he also quoted several of Michael’s intimates, although his family was off-limits. Michael chose the title, with its two-pronged thrust of titillation and candor. But Bare was “superficial stuff,” said Rob Kahane. “It was more of a PR move.”
He and Parsons wove a portrait of a contented young genius who had left drugs, sex, and other glamorous excesses behind. Michael discussed romance in gender-nonspecific terms, while letting Andros effuse at how his studly friend used to sleep with “everything that moved, from air hostesses to unbelievable amounts of girls . . . I’m talking about three or four girls a night.” As for the present, Michael left things vague: “I’ve settled into a life on my own so well that I find it really difficult to imagine living with somebody.” A few revealing statements slipped through, including a poignant admission of how hard it was to find love when most people couldn’t see past his stardom: “It wouldn’t matter if I met someone tomorrow and fell hopelessly in love with them, and they with me. I would still always be George Michael to them.”
The real Michael, of course, could not bare his soul to the public; he had a major secret to hide. The tabloids kept hunting down old pals and associates, tempting them with payoffs and hoping, said Michael, “that someone’s going to be much more down than they were the last time they called.”
Most of his true friends stayed fiercely protective. When Shirlie and Pepsi did a show in Providence, Rhode Island, on a solo tour, Billy Masters went backstage to chat. The women were charming—until Masters mentioned that he had spent time with Michael in Boston during Wham!’s first U.S. tour. “They immediately shut down with me,” he said.
Michael knew he could also rely on Tony Russell to protect his interests. In February 1990, months before the anticipated blockbuster release of Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, Russell resumed his testy contract renegotiations, notably for a boost in Michael’s royalties to American superstar rates. For now, he and the singer withheld a major piece of news: As part of his rebranding, Michael planned to “kind of disappear.” He would halt interviews indefinitely and appear in no new videos—an explosive gamble at a time when they were crucial to a pop star’s success. “Very little in this album is right for video,” he explained to Adrian Deevoy. “When you are trying to express things with metaphors and much more subtlety, that’s when you are doing yourself a disservice by making a video. . . . I just want people to use their imaginations.” Kahane saw him scrambling to banish his fake façade: “He was just never comfortable in his own skin. I lived with him so I saw the pain he was going through in terms of living as something that he wasn’t.”
But there was more to it than that. Maybe if he withdrew from the spotlight he could at last find love and a stable personal life. He expected a “sharp drop in sales,” but would accept the tradeoff.
•••
On September 4, Sony president Norio Ohga had stunned the industry by firing Walter Yetnikoff, Kahane’s closest ally. Sales were dwindling, and rumors had spread that Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, with whom Yetnikoff had clashed, might leave. As the new president of CBS Records Group, Ohga chose Don (Donnie) Ienner, who had recently joined CBS after having managed Arista. At thirty-six, Ienner was as volatile as Yetnikoff, with his eye ruthlessly set on boosting the sagging family of labels to number one.
Dave Novik, who worked with him, recalled Ienner as “very brash, very arrogant. He wanted to be right all the time, and he didn’t want anybody else to take credit.” As Ienner told Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times: “Our job is to take the artist’s vision into the street and to get as many people to hear it as we possibly can. And when that process gets messed up, I get angry. I get loud. I get excited. That’s who I am.”
A member of the company’s art department had been warned that when he entered Ienner’s office to show him a design, he should stand at least six feet away—“because there was a very good chance he’d throw his stapler at you during the presentation. People were genuinely terrified of being around him.”
That June, Michael played his new tracks for Paul Russell; the next month he did the same for Donnie Ienner and Tommy Mottola, Sony Music’s Chairman/CEO, when they visited London. Michael would later claim he had explained his intentions fully to all executives. But according to Mottola, Michael merely said he didn’t want to appear in the album’s first video.
With time running out to seal his client’s demands, Tony Russell stepped up the pressure. Sylvia Coleman, Sony U.K.’s Director of Corporate Business Affairs and a lawyer herself, was Paul Russell’s contract advisor. One day, Tony Russell called. If she and Paul did not agree to everything he wanted, he would tell Michael how difficult they were being—thus poisoning the star against his record company. In subsequent calls, he turned even nastier. “I was extremely concerned,” she recalled, “because I felt that throughout the negotiations the U.K. company had acted with the utmost good faith, and we had genuinely endeavored to see that George Michael received full superstar status.”
In late July, the renegotiation agreement was signed. Michael had gotten everything he wanted. Only thereafter, as the marketing department began preparing a promotional plan for the album’s September release, did Michael reveal the full extent of his plans to “disappear.” He had decided to grant interviews to only three newspapers: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. As for videos, he would not appear in any. “If my life goes the way I want,” he said, “I would like never to step in front of a camera again.”
Paul Russell and Andy Stephens, Epic U.K.’s Head of International Marketing, begged him to reconsider. He wouldn’t budge. “It was very hard for me to deal with,” said Rob Kahane, “because I had helped create that character and it was incredibly successful. He and I had huge fights over it. Yelling, screaming, throwing shit. My wife was always on his side, like, ‘You have to respect what he wants.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I just worked my ass off all these years to build this thing and now he wants to tear it down.’ Can you imagine going back to the label and saying, ‘But you’re not gonna have George there to promote it’? They went nuts. I don’t blame them.” As Jerry Blair, a Columbia executive in charge of radio promotion, pointed out: “If you bought a piece of property and spent millions to make it more valuable, would you just sit there and go, ‘Hey, no problem,’ and write it off?”
Nonetheless, Mottola made a peacemaking statement. There would be “a lot of disappointed fans,” he said, “but when they get to understand his point of view and hear the record, I don’t think there will be any problem.” Paul Russell, too, played the gentleman. “I told George Michael that I respected his position, so long as he was fully aware that we would have more difficulty marketing the album, which he was. I said we would still be fully behind the album and would do everything we could to ensure that it received maximum promotion.”
For the album’s first single, Michael had vetoed Sony’s choice, “Freedom! ’90,” and demanded the somber “Praying for Time.” MTV needed a video, but it would not contain Michael. Once more, Prince became his blueprint. Michael’s hero had declined to appear in two of his own videos; in one, “Sign O’ the Times,” the lyric unfolded onscreen in multicolored graphics. Something similar would have to do in “Praying for Time.”
All the while, Michael kept giving publicity about his desire to avoid publicity. His “escape” seemed like a series of therapy sessions as he struggled to explain himself to reporter after reporter. No more, he insisted, was he “driven by an insatiable desire for everyone to love me. . . . I now believe that I’m worth loving and I don’t need the world to tell me anymore.” He cited Bob Dylan as an example of what he never wanted to happen to him. “I can’t see the mystique anymore,” he told Bryan Appleyard. Dylan, he said, “writes great lyrics still, but as a person he seems such a casualty. And that documentary made about him in the sixties—Don’t Look Back—what an arsehole! He wouldn’t get away with that now.”
On September 9, 1990, the Los Angeles Times gave him pages of talking space. “I’m not stupid enough to think that I can deal with another ten or fifteen years of major exposure,” he told Robert Hilburn, the newspaper’s pop critic. “I think that is the ultimate tragedy of fame . . . people who are simply out of control, who are lost. I’ve seen so many of them, and I don’t want to be another cliché.” But what did he want? Michael, wrote Gary Graff in the Detroit Free Press, “doesn’t seem to know. . . . Never has someone who’s been so successful complained about it so much. . . . He’s a pop star wailing ‘This is what I’m not!’ without defining what he is.”
On the day the Los Angeles Times article ran, the ultimate legend of classic pop, who was old enough to be Michael’s grandfather, felt moved to send a response. To him, Michael was a spoiled brat. A first-person letter from Frank Sinatra to Michael was sent by his office to various newspapers; it was syndicated all over the United States. Although Michael doubted that Sinatra had written it himself, its hardboiled, wisecracking, all-knowing air was pure Sinatra.
“Come on, George,” the letter said. “Loosen up. Swing, man. Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments. And no more of that talk about ‘the tragedy of fame.’ The tragedy of fame is when no one shows up and you’re singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint that hasn’t seen a paying customer since St. Swithin’s Day.”
Michael was furious at having been publicly shamed by a legend; why couldn’t Sinatra have simply sent the letter to him? The memory of that letter stung; its advice went unheeded. Following Sinatra’s death, Michael released a comment: “I think that Sinatra was the finest singer of his time and probably ours too, but I did not respect him because of his connections, and his actions towards others were well documented. And respect is earned by what you do, not just what you do with the gifts that God has given you.”
