George michael, p.24
George Michael, page 24
Now Mercury, who had sung “We Are the Champions” like a gay Apollo and empowered millions, would be extolled like a savior at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, April 20, 1992. The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness would launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust, an HIV/AIDS charity; the concert would be telecast worldwide. In it, Michael, at Queen’s request, would sing two of Mercury’s songs.
The lineup ranged from pop-rock royalty (Michael, Elton John, David Bowie, Roger Daltrey, Annie Lennox) to heavy metal (Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses) to Liza Minnelli, whose “warbling and thoroughly out-of-place voice in the encore of ‘We Are the Champions,’” wrote Jim Farber in the New York Daily News, “was just the wildly camp touch Mercury would have loved.” An impassioned plea for safe sex came from Elizabeth Taylor, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and the first screen legend to lend her support to the cause.
The show teemed with contradictions that mirrored the stigmatized nature of the virus. This four-and-a-half-hour appeal for compassion and acceptance honored a pop star who had led a band called Queen, yet never come out to the public. Nearly everyone onstage, wrote David Keeps in the New York Times, “sidestepped the matter of his sexuality.” The presence of Guns N’ Roses gave many viewers pause. It was led by the at-times openly homophobic Axl Rose, who in one of his most notorious songs, “One in a Million,” sang of “immigrants and faggots” who “spread some fucking disease.” Yet Rose listed Mercury, Elton John, and George Michael among his idols. Above the stage was a white eagle, a symbol of the freedom Mercury had never quite had.
Then there was Michael, whose clandestine boyfriend had AIDS. Michael cared deeply about supporting the cause, but his frequent assertion on the subject—“I don’t care if people think I’m gay; it’s beating this disease that matters”—belied the fact that he cared a lot. No one knew he was singing to Feleppa, who was in the audience. Michael insisted upon five days of rehearsal with the band. “I was just not gonna get this wrong,” he recalled.
While waiting to make his entrance, Michael stood in the wings between Rose and Elton John. He wore an orange jacket over a black T-shirt and a red AIDS ribbon. Finally, he emerged to the roar of seventeen thousand fans.
His fifteen-minute segment opened with the folklike “ ’39,” a Queen song that he had once sung as a metro busker. With Lisa Stansfield, a young British soul singer whom he admired, he sang “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” the No. 1 hit that Queen had recorded when Mercury was dying. He closed with “Somebody to Love,” Freddie’s combustive prayer to the Lord to ease his loneliness: “I start to pray ’til the tears run down from my eyes, Lord . . . can anybody find me somebody to love?” Asked about that choice, Michael told the Daily Mirror: “Everybody is looking for one person to love, ultimately. Nobody really sets out to change partners on a regular basis. It’s a dangerous thing to do these days.”
Michael had memorized Mercury’s roller-coaster glides, his gospel-like cries and quavers. Now he could become his idol—a “childhood fantasy,” he said later. “It was probably the proudest moment of my career.” In stadium-filling voice, Michael came closer than anyone to channeling Mercury’s thunder. He incanted “somebody” over and over while, in the distance, a white-robed gospel choir kept echoing the word. “I want to hear every single person, hear every single pair of hands,” he said; instantly he beheld a sea of hands clapping in the air. He pointed the mic at the crowd and demanded they sing along. He held the final “to” for several moments. “That’s probably the bravest note I ever hit,” he said later.
The performance was cloaked in autobiography. “Try to imagine that you fought with your own sexuality to the point that you’ve lost half your twenties,” he told the Independent’s Johann Hari. When “real love” had finally found him, along came a fatal disease to destroy everything. Fate had never seemed crueler. “I couldn’t go through it with my family,” he said, “because I didn’t know how to share it with them; they didn’t know I was gay. I couldn’t tell my closest friends, because Anselmo didn’t want me to. So, I’m standing on stage, paying tribute to one of my childhood idols who died of that disease . . . the isolation was just crazy.”
Michael’s between-songs comments about AIDS were much quoted. That night and for years to come, he strained to avoid sounding as though he were speaking as a gay man; he tilted his public concern in the direction of heterosexuals and bisexuals. “People here are probably taking some small comfort in the fact that though Freddie died of AIDS, he was publicly bisexual. It’s a very, very dangerous comfort.” He quoted a forecast that by 2000, HIV would infect at least forty million people. “If any of you out there really think that all of those are going to be gay people or drug addicts, then you’re pretty much lining up to be one of those numbers. So please, for god’s sake and for Freddie’s sake and your own sakes, please be careful, all right?”
After the concert, After theMichael threw his attention into compiling Five Live, an EP to benefit the Phoenix Mercury Trust; perhaps it would somehow accelerate treatment that might save his lover’s life. He chose “Somebody to Love”; the Stansfield duet, “These Are the Days of Our Lives”; and three songs from Cover to Cover: “Killer,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and “Calling You.” He added a surprise, performed not by him but by Freddie. Michael remembered a minute-long Queen song, “Dear Friends,” written by bandmember Brian May. Accompanied only by May on piano, Mercury had sung as plaintively as a choirboy. The song was a hymn of hope, sung after a loved-one’s death to the ones who were left behind: “Go to sleep and dream again. . . . From all this gloom life can start anew.” Michael dedicated the disk to Mercury: “who probably saved me from life as a waiter.” Five Live hit No. 1 in England. In the United States, it stopped at No. 46.
•••
Still, AIDS was giving him a cause beyond himself. Red Hot + Dance was in production, and Michael, said John Carlin, “wanted to be the star of the album”—even to the point of having his own people design the cover. Michael had decided to donate three of his Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2 tracks to the disc, the rest of which consisted of remixes and previously issued songs, notably by Madonna. Michael handed over “Happy,” “Do You Really Want to Know,” and “Too Funky,” an urban-funk dance track with a laid-back groove. It sounded like an Ecstasy-fueled come-on: “I’d love to see you naked, baby.” The song, he explained, was “the biggest pile of bollocks I’ve written in ages. But I like it.”
He chose “Too Funky” for a video that would appear in the Red Hot + Dance TV special. Since Sony was financing the project—although it would recoup expenses before proceeds went to charity—Michael did not hold back on spending the company’s money. To that end, he invited back the five supermodels from the “Freedom! ’90” video. Michael made it clear that all participants would donate their services for AIDS.
He was stung when only Linda Evangelista said yes. Substitutes for the rest would have to be found. In the meantime, Michael lined up a glamorous first-time director: Thierry Mugler, the fiery French fashion designer whose runway shows were circuses of outrageous spectacle—just the kind Michael wanted to depict in “Too Funky.” Mugler, wrote a Vice blogger, was “obsessed with doing things on an extreme, massive scale.” Drawing on bondage, video-game action figures, sci-fi superheroes, and golden-age Hollywood, he turned his models into everything from insects to dominatrixes. Even his simpler clothes were skintight, broad-shouldered, and flesh-exposing. “It’s all about getting a great fuck, darling,” he explained.
Mugler was exhaustively capricious and demanding, but his confidence attracted Michael. If anyone in fashion owned the word freedom, it was he. Observed Danilo, the video’s hairstylist: “I think Thierry and his views on sexuality and sensuality were things that very much titillated George.”
In advance of the shoot, Mike Southon, on board as cinematographer, flew to Paris to meet the designer in his atelier. Southon walked up a sweeping white staircase and was ushered into Mugler’s office. He waited an hour before the designer appeared; then they had a five-minute meeting. Southon asked about his concept for the video. “Well, it’s a fashion show,” said Mugler. “I just want to have a high shot of the catwalk and the models will walk up and down. But I want to do some stuff with a boy lip-synching to George’s lyrics.”
Southon thought, “That ain’t gonna happen!”
Mugler sketched out the storyboards. He had devised a spoof of “fashion heaven and fashion hell”—a portrait of the backstage mayhem that went on during a seemingly flawless show. Everyone, of course, would wear his designs. He brought aboard the eighteen-year-old supermodel Tyra Banks and veteran Hollywood sexpot Julie Newmar, who would play a seamstress with hidden ambitions. Dipping into the New York drag scene, Mugler cast one of its icons, the performance artist and singer Joey Arias, to portray a bossy couturier based on Edith Head, the fabled movie costumer.
Evangelista would frolic with cover girl Shana Zadrick on a bed and another rising supermodel, seventeen-year-old Beverly Peele, in a shower. That was fine with Michael, who had visions of another seminaked cause célèbre. He assured Mugler that he would leave the direction in his hands. Both men agreed that Michael would not appear on camera.
Three shooting days were scheduled at Boulogne Studios in Paris. By nine A.M. on the first morning, crew members swarmed on a giant sound-stage; tables filled up with extravagant French catering and bottles of wine, served by waiters. Mugler walked Michael around, introducing him to everyone, including Arias. “Oh, it’s a pleasure!” Michael said. “Do I call you Mistress Arias? Or Madame Arias?” With mock hauteur, Arias answered, “Just call me Mistress.” The singer loved it.
He had allowed a few journalists onto the set, including Chris Heath, who covered the shoot for the Daily Telegraph. But Michael would still not be interviewed.
Heath did slip in a question: What did this song have to do with fashion? “Nothing,” answered Michael. “Are you joking?”
Giddy with excitement, he boarded an overhead camera platform, which ascended and glided over everyone’s heads. “If you have enough money you can do anything you want!” he told Heath. But Mugler stayed flamboyantly in charge. Arias recalled “hundreds of people running around, talking in French, no English. I think George was intimidated.” Indeed, Michael sat down with the designer and grilled him over what he had in mind. When Mugler got to the part about having a pretty lad moving his lips to Michael’s voice, the singer froze. “Nobody lip-synchs me,” he said. It was fine when supermodels did it, “but he wasn’t gonna have some young, attractive boy pretending to sing his lyrics,” said Southon, who was there at the meeting. Michael went on to explain that this was a pop video; he wanted movement, energy, rhythm, not plot development and characterization. “They were not seeing eye to eye,” recalled Southon. Sensing he was being discarded from his own video, Michael made an announcement: He wanted to appear in it after all. Mugler informed him that it was too late to change the storyboards. “I knew he took it badly,” said the designer.
In an attempt to assert control, Michael approached Arias, who was styled à la Head with a dark pageboy, tinted glasses, a plain but stylish black suit, and a cigarette holder. “Okay, Mistress Arias,” said Michael. “I want you to go to that guy and grab his cock and then kiss him.”
“I looked at George,” recalled Arias, “and said, ‘I’m a lesbian. There’s no way I’m gonna grab a man’s crotch.’ I could see Mugler was kind of smiling. George said, ‘Well, you do have a point there.’”
Julie Newmar, the only TV pro among them, took the reins. In her big scene, behind-the-scenes chaos sent her into a comic meltdown. Per Mugler’s direction, Arias grabbed her arm and shook her. “No,” said Newmar, “I want you to really slap the hell out of me.” Arias gave her a hard whack on the behind. From there, Newmar darted onto the runway and tossed off her white robe, revealing a black latex catsuit. At fifty-nine, Newmar fell onto her back, flung her legs in the air, and improvised a split that wowed everyone.
But tension grew as Mugler obsessively pursued his vision, oblivious to timeline and budget. “It was all about detail—the way the nails looked, the way the lashes sat,” said Arias. “Mugler would always check everything to perfection.” Two days passed and the designer still hadn’t shot the runway footage Michael wanted. “That’s what keeps the rhythm of the song going!” the singer declared. Mugler, he felt, was also too busy shooting the drag queens instead of the Evangelista-Peele shower scene. “What are you doing wasting all this film shooting closeups of the extras?” he yelled. That night, he ran into Mugler at the hotel. “Thierry was crying,” recalled Michael, “saying that I was about to ruin his artistic vision.”
By the third day, the shoot had devolved into what Newmar called “hysteria, lots of smoking, and raw nerves.” She told Arias: “I don’t really drink, but man, I could do with a whisky and Coke!” Mugler asked for two more shooting days, which would have sent the video soaring even higher over budget. Michael exploded.
On an empty stage, everyone met to discuss the warfare. “There were the ones who sided with Thierry,” said Southon, “and there were the ones who sided with George. It was very French Revolution.” Michael screamed at Mugler: “I’m the one who’s made the millions of dollars, I’m the recording artist—you’re a fashion designer!” He told the designer he was fired. Mugler recalled “a deathly silence on the set,” followed by the imperious voice of Newmar rebuking Michael—“We’re all here for Mugler and not for you!”—and vows from the supermodels to leave if the designer did. “George stalked out and locked himself in his dressing room,” said Mugler, “after his bodyguards had tried in vain to throw me out.”
Exasperated crew members finally spoke up. Recalled Danilo, “We the collective said: ‘You know what? This is all about AIDS. It’s not about anything but that. We need to move ahead.’” According to Arias, Evangelista played peacemaker and got them to talk more calmly, and the shoot got finished.
Mugler was still in charge of editing, or so he thought. He produced an unexpectedly hilarious and savage spoof of the fashion world in which he lived—a candy-colored explosion of gay camp and bitch-fighting that evoked Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, and every absurd excess of the nineties runway. The drag queens are indistinguishable from the female models; shirtless male ones pose, preen, and do go-go boy moves. Evangelista’s giant blonde wig looks like a lacquered space helmet. Even Mugler’s trademark latex and leather bondage-wear is played for laughs. Backstage, Arias tussles with Newmar; temperamental models snarl at being endlessly primped. Once on the runway, they strut to the voice of George Michael as though this were a Fire Island drag show. A fawning crowd applauds.
At the end, Mugler gives a homoerotic spin to the famous image from the “I Want Your Sex” video. A muscle god is shown from behind, arms outstretched, with a serious message penned on his back: WE MUST PROTECT OURSELVES.
This was no sexually ambiguous George Michael video; it was blazingly out of the closet, and certainly too gay for MTV. The singer scrapped nearly the entire edit and designed one of his own. Out went almost all the camp humor, homoeroticism, and backstage satire. Michael opened the video with the voice of film actress Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, intoning the famous lines: “I am not trying to seduce you. . . . Would you like me to seduce you?” With that, “Too Funky” turned into conventional MTV fare. The drag-queen footage was mostly axed to provide extra screen time for the supermodels to strut to the beat. After all of Michael’s campaigning for safe sex, WE MUST PROTECT OURSELVES was cut.
There was a bigger surprise. Throughout the video was Michael, who had cast himself as a cameraman in a baseball cap. It was his way of telling the world who had really directed. Having initially demanded an onscreen credit, Mugler now insisted his name not appear. Michael twisted the knife. The video ends with a reference that only insiders would have understood:
Directed by
?
Then comes a closeup of Michael, one eye peering through the view-finder, the other glaring out sarcastically. “He completely butchered the video,” said Mugler, “and we ended up with something insipid because his only goal was the promotion of his album.”
•••
In the summer of 1992, Red Hot + Dance and the “Too Funky” single were released. With no new solo album in sight, these projects had to prove that a world full of fans still loved him. Red Hot + Dance made the Top 10 in several countries, but in the United States it sold a modest 240,000 copies. In Michael’s mind, the project had flopped; never mind that little on it, aside from his tracks, was new. The video—which had cost more than the whole remainder of the project—proved a nonevent. For all the cost and talent involved, it seemed like a poor man’s “Freedom! ’90,” and it vanished quickly.
Carlin had no issue with Columbia’s handling of the album, but Michael was quick to agree with Rob Kahane, who called the marketing a “complete joke.” The singer didn’t help matters when he made an appearance at the CD’s New York launch party. “George immediately sat in the deepest, darkest corner of the event space with his back to everyone,” said Carlin. “When Don Ienner came in, George would not get up and shake his hand.”
Michael had made up his mind: He had to leave Sony. His lawyers had contrived the only possible way out: They would need to prove that his contract was unenforceable due to restraint of trade. Sylvia Coleman defined that gray term as “basically a concept whereby the courts will intervene if they feel that it was a heavyweight against a lightweight, with an unfair advantage that one party had over the other.”
