‘Their last shot’
Michael may have been treated like an American hero in May 1984, but the tide would turn in June when the plan for distribution of tickets for the Victory tour – now scheduled to begin in Kansas City on 6 July – was announced. Joseph Jackson, Don King and Chuck Sullivan came up with a unique concept: tickets would be thirty dollars each and sold in lots of four
only.
Ordering tickets did not guarantee getting them. The names of those who ordered would be selected at random by a computer drawing coupons that had to be cut out of advertisements published in local newspapers. Therefore, the Jacksons fan had to send a $120 postal money order
*
–
plus
a two-dollar service charge for each ticket –
and
the coupon, all in ‘a standard Number Ten envelope’, to the ticket address printed in the advertisement.
Promoters predicted that as many as twelve million fans would mail in $1.5 billion in money orders for the twelve-city, forty-two-concert Victory tour, but only about one in ten applicants would actually receive tickets. In order even to be considered, the money orders were to be postmarked at least two weeks before the concert. With the delay in returning money to the unlucky ones – four to six weeks – the promoters and the Jacksons would have use of it for six to eight weeks. Assuming the tour sold $144 million in tickets, as the promoters estimated, $1.4 billion in excess payments would have to be returned. In a common money-market deposit account in a bank, which paid about 7 per cent interest, that money would earn eight million dollars a month for the promoters and Jackson family. The Jacksons' spokesman, Howard Bloom, said that whatever interest that would accrue on each $120 order would go toward costs of handling and postage for unfilled orders.
If you were a lucky winner and allowed to see the Victory show, you wouldn't know if you were going to go – or which show you would attend – until two days before the concert. If the mail was delayed, the tickets could easily arrive
after
the concert.
The tickets were obviously priced too high for even white middle-class kids if they had to buy them in lots of four. It's almost impossible to imagine that many of Michael's most loyal followers, kids from the ghetto, would be able to afford the luxury of seeing the concert.
Making matters more distasteful, The Jacksons and their promoters said that they would like to not have to pay for the advertisements from which the coupons were to be clipped, saying that those ads should be run free of cost as ‘public service advertisements’. Of course, most newspapers didn't see it that way. ‘It's just a way to make more millions for the Jacksons,’ said Bob Haring, executive editor of the
Tulsa World.
Before the outrageous plan was announced, Michael and John Branca met with the brothers to try to talk them out of it.
‘We got to get as much as possible for the tickets,’ one of the brothers said. ‘The sky's the limit.’
‘No,’ Michael argued. ‘That's not the way to do it. There's going to be a backlash. The tickets shouldn't be more than twenty bucks each. And the mail order idea is terrible.’ In fact, the tickets for concerts by the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen at this time were sixteen dollars each. Michael had wanted a simple twenty dollar ticket price, no lots of four, no money orders, no coupons.
The brothers voted against Michael, five to one.
‘Okay, that's it,’ Michael decided later in a meeting with John Branca and Frank Dileo. ‘This is going to be my last tour with the guys. I'm very serious. SoI don't want you to try to run anything. Let them do it all their way. I'm just one vote out of six. Let them do their thing. This is their last shot. I'm out of it.’
‘But why, Mike?’ Frank wanted to know. ‘They're gonna fuck it up.’
‘Because if anything goes wrong I don't want to hear about it,’ Michael explained. ‘I don't want to hear about it from my mother, my father or my brothers. Let them do it their way and I'm out of it. Maybe the money they make from this will set them up comfortably. Then, I'm out of it.’
When the plan was made public, fans from coast to coast were outraged. The
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
ran a telephone poll with the question: Are Michael Jackson's fans being taken advantage of? Of the 2,795 people who responded, 90 per cent said yes.
The newspaper published an editorial chastising the Jacksons: ‘It's hard not to conclude that the Jacksons' promoters, if not the young stars themselves, are taking advantage of their fans. It's been said that all the Jackson brothers, including Michael, helped plan the tour. If so, they should have shown a little more consideration for the fans who have made them so rich and famous.’
Other newspapers across the country followed suit, lambasting the Jacksons and, because he was the most famous one, Michael, in particular. ‘The Jackson tour has not been about music. It's been about greed and arrogance,’ wrote the Washington columnists Maxwell Glen and Cody Shearer. ‘What good does a drug-free, liquor-free, I-brake-for-animals image do when the overriding message is “Give Me Your Piggy Bank.”’
As a youthful role model, the press was terrible publicity for Michael. ‘I didn't even want to do this tour,’ he complained, exasperated. ‘Now look what's happened.’
Despite the furor, when the first coupons were printed in the
Kansas City Times,
scores of fans waited in the dark for the early morning papers to hit the streets. The
Times
published an extra 20,000 copies to meet the demand. Postal employees were ready with 140,000 money order forms for the expected avalanche. The tickets sold out rapidly.
Still, it looked bad for Michael. Frank Dileo advised him that if he didn't take a position against the brothers' and the promoters' apparent greediness, his reputation could be damaged. ‘They don't care about your future,’ Frank told him. ‘Their only concern is their present, to make as much as they can, while they can. You have a career that's gonna be longer than this tour. They probably don't.’
Michael wasn't sure how to handle the matter. ‘What I really want is for all of it to just go away,’ he said, which wasn't much of a problem-solving strategy. Finally, an open letter appeared in the
Dallas Morning News
that impacted Michael. Eleven-year-old Ladonna Jones wrote that she'd been saving her pennies to see The Jacksons but that she couldn't possibly save enough to buy four tickets. She very pointedly asked Michael, ‘How could you, of all people, be so selfish?’
When an aide showed Michael the letter, he was upset by it. Greed and selfishness really had been at the heart of the tour plans; he knew it. But hadn't his family already made more money than most people would ever make in their lifetimes? Of course they had. It took a child's sadness, however, to force him into action.
Though he hadn't wanted to make any major decisions about the tour in order to be distanced from the drama of it, he now realized he had to take action. He called a meeting with Joseph, Don King and Chuck Sullivan. ‘Change the ticket policy,’ he told them. ‘It's a rip-off. You know it. I know it. Now, change it. Or I won't tour.’
‘But, Mike,’
Michael wouldn't discuss the matter. If the situation wasn't changed, he said, the brothers would have to tour without him.
The next day, plans were made to change the system.