Michael Fires Frank Dileo
Three days after the brief telephone conversation about the Jackson – Moonie Project, Frank Dileo was fired. Michael’s publicist, Lee Solters, issued a terse statement: ‘Michael Jackson and Frank Dileo have announced an amicable parting. Jackson said, “I thank Frank for his contribution on my behalf during the past several years.”’
Perhaps Michael felt he had valid reasons for firing Frank, but he did it in a cowardly way: he had John Branca do it.
‘Look, man, I hate to have to be the one to tell you this,’ John said, ‘but Michael doesn’t want to work with you any more.’
‘What? No shit? You’re kiddin’ me, right?’
‘Sorry, Frank,’ John told him. ‘It’s no joke.’
After some more discussion about the matter, Frank said, ‘Okay, fine with me, then. I just want to get paid whatever is owed me, and then I’ll be on my way.’
‘Are you pissed off, Frank?’ John asked. He felt badly about it. He liked Frank and knew that Frank truly cared about Michael.
‘Hell no,’ Frank said, trying to be the tough guy. ‘Look, Johnny, if the kid doesn’t want me, I don’t want to be around. See you later.’ With that, Frank hung up. He then left the weight-reduction centre, ‘becauseI had to get to work,’ he recalled. ‘I was out of a job.’
The next day, Frank telephoned Kenneth Choi, who was in San Francisco. ‘I just wanted to tell you that Michael and I broke up,’ he said.
‘What? What’s that mean, “broke up”?’ Kenneth asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘The kid fired me, I’m tellin’ ya. I’m finished.
Ka-put
.’
‘Oh,’ Kenneth said. ‘
That
I understand.’
Immediately, word circulated within Michael Jackson’s camp that Frank had taken the million-dollar reward money, that Michael found out about it, that this was why he fired him. Of course, this was not true. Kenneth Choi later recalled, ‘That impressed me a great deal. Frank said that if Michael did end up going to Korea,
then
he might take some money as a bonus, but not before.’
‘Frank could have had one million bucks that day, but he didn’t take it,’ Jerome Howard confirmed. ‘He could have accepted the money, never gotten Michael’s signature, and it would have taken a lifetime in court before he’d ever have to return it, if ever. But he’s an honourable man. Later, Frank told me that he very gently talked to Michael about the Korea plan. He said, “You can’t just ask Michael straight out to do something, like Joseph did on the phone. Michael has to be stroked. His ego has to be massaged thoroughly before he will agree to do anything.” I wondered if he had massaged it maybe one time too many…’
Actually, Michael was upset with Frank for a number of reasons.
First of all, Michael felt that Frank had taken too much credit for his success. He was tired of other people taking credit for what he felt was his own destiny. Because Michael refused to be interviewed, Frank had developed a high media profile as his spokesman. Many celebrities – and Michael is one of them – do not like it when their representatives also become celebrities. Michael’s ego is fragile. Frank was becoming too well known for Michael’s taste, giving interviews to the press touting his accomplishments for Michael. Every time he did so, Michael cringed.
‘Frank isn’t even creative,’ Michael told an associate. ‘Let’s face it. I come up with all of the ideas.’
Michael felt that Frank had also become too dictatorial. For instance, when the Bad tour played Pittsburgh, Frank’s hometown, he arranged a gathering so that he could introduce Michael to his close friends and relatives. ‘Michael, I expect you to be there at eight sharp,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’ He knew Michael well enough to know that he might show up, or he might not. He hoped not to be embarrassed in front of people who mattered to him. ‘SoI will expect you there, right?’
Michael didn’t say anything. Later, he complained, ‘Who is
he
to tell me what to do? Screw that,
I
tell
him
what to do.’
Michael showed up, but an hour late, no doubt on purpose. Afterwards, Frank let him have it. ‘You embarrassed me,’ he screamed at him. ‘What’s wrong with you? How could you do that to me?’
Michael seethed as Frank laid into him. Finally, Bill Bray began shouting at Frank to leave Michael alone. ‘Fuck you, man,’ Bill said. ‘He don’t work for you. You work for him. You better check yourself.’ It was an unpleasant scene.
Another matter had to do with a deal that some thought Frank had bungled on Michael’s behalf: a multimillion-dollar contract for domestic theatrical release of Michael’s ninety-minute video
Moonwalker
(which is part clip compilation and part musical autobiography).
The film features Michael’s innovative video of ‘Leave Me Alone’, in which he spoofed his image by showing a shrine to Elizabeth Taylor, a newspaper headline that read ‘Michael Confides in Chimp’ and a discomforting segment in which he dances with the Elephant Man’s skeleton. In the video, Michael moves through a surreal world of floating chairs, huge chomping teeth and amusement park rides. It took twenty-five people six months to make the four-minute-and-forty-five-second video.
The project cost Michael Jackson about twenty-seven million dollars.
Moonwalker
was released theatrically in Japan, but not in the United States because of numerous disagreements. It had been reported that Frank was behind the decision not to release
Moonwalker
domestically, angering international distributors who had bought the film for theatrical releases. When the announcement was made that there would be no domestic deal, many overseas theatres pulled the film, or scaled down its promotion and publicity. This decision cost Michael many millions of dollars in lost box office revenue.
Frank eventually did come up with a multimillion-dollar offer to distribute the film domestically, but someone else in Michael’s organization talked him out of it. Therefore, while Michael may have been angry at the way distribution of
Moonwalker
was handled, he didn’t blame Frank for it – not entirely, anyway.
Most of Michael’s associates felt that Michael
should
have been angry at Frank, however, for allowing him to spend twenty-seven million on
Moonwalker
, a video project whose budget should not have exceeded five million dollars. In the end, the video made approximately thirty million dollars in over-the-counter sales and other deals, another tribute to John Branca’s negotiating savvy and Walter Yetnikoff’s persistence (CBS Music Video Enterprises distributed the tape). No home music video had ever come close to generating that much money for its artist. Still, after
Moonwalker
, Michael would say that he felt ‘poor’ and didn’t want to spend any more money on major projects ‘for a long, long time’.
Another problem with Frank was that Michael had become disgusted with the tabloid image of himself that he believed Frank was continuing to propagate. But the hyperbaric chamber and Elephant Man’s bones stories were Michael’s ideas – not Frank’s.
One story that appeared in the
Star
(on 2 August 1988), was particularly disturbing to Michael: M
ICHAEL
J
ACKSON
B
ANS
4 P
ALS FROM
T
OUR AFTER
T
HEY
F
LUNK
AIDS T
EST
. The article said that Michael fired four employees because they had tested positive for HIV. ‘I’m really afraid of AIDS,’ Michael was quoted as having said. ‘I think about having lunch with these guys and shaking hands and spending so much time together.’ The article also said that Michael was spending a fortune having his own frozen blood moved around with him wherever he goes. ‘You never know when you may need blood, and the only blood I can be sure of is my own,’ Michael supposedly said.
Apparently, Michael was paying the price for the idea he had had years ago to have a Plexiglas shield constructed between him and his audiences to protect him from germs during the 1984 Victory tour. He realized at the time that the plan was absurd, and dropped it. Someone on his team remembered it, though, and after embellishing it with an HIV twist, then sold it to the tabloid.
The peculiar idea came to Michael during the time, after his burn accident, when he had become fascinated with medicine. He’d become a ravenous reader of medical books and enjoyed reading and hearing about dreadful diseases. For a while, he also became obsessed with learning about different surgeries, going so far as to witness operations at UCLA Medical Center.
‘Michael’s curious about surgery,’ said one former associate. ‘He gets off on it. He can watch for hours. He especially likes to watch plastic surgeries – tummy tucks, liposuctions, he’s into all of that. He has even witnessed brain surgeries.’
While he was interested in medicine, he was not obsessed with catching AIDS and had only empathetic feelings about the disease. ‘When Michael read that report, he became upset,’ said Michael Tucker, a friend of the Jackson family (not the actor). ‘Of all diseases, AIDS is one that Michael is most sensitive about. “Why would they write this about me?” he said. “That isn’t me at all. What if people believe this of me? What are they going to think of me?”
‘He became furious and wanted to know where the report originated. “If I find out that anyone in my organization planted these hurtful stories, that person will be fired. I mean it,” he said.’
It’s not known if Michael fired Frank Dileo because he wanted to end his wacky image in the tabloids. After Frank was gone, though, the stories continued. It wasn’t necessary for anyone on Michael’s staff to plant them; writers just made them up as they went along…
The primary reason Michael dismissed Frank was because he was disappointed that
Bad
was not as successful as
Thriller
. It had ‘only’ sold about twenty million copies worldwide, roughly one-fifth of what Michael had hoped for it.
Thriller
sold twenty-four million in the United States;
Bad
sold six million.
‘Michael was pissed off,’ said one friend of Frank Dileo’s. ‘He had his heart set on another huge album. When he didn’t get what he wanted, he acted like a spoiled, little kid. He threw temper tantrums. He cried. He can be very dramatic. Frank had his hands full. He had a lot to deal with.’
‘But we did the best we could,’ Frank said of
Bad
. ‘We made the best album and the best videos we could. We don’t have anything to be ashamed of.’ While that may be true, some were whispering in Michael’s ear that Frank should have done a better job. Doubt began to creep into Michael’s mind. He had to blame someone for what he thought was a weak showing for
Bad
. Therefore, he blamed Frank Dileo.
About a year later, Frank would say there was ‘No warning. Did it anger me? Yes. The way it was done was an insult. He took away my faith in people. For a long time, I’ve not been as trusting.’
Frank felt that the least Michael could have done was fire him personally. However, Michael is not a sentimental person, and never has been one. To Michael, Frank was not ‘a second father’. Rather, he was a capable businessman who had, in Michael’s view, exhausted his usefulness.