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Kenny Ortega on Michael Jackson's final days
Shortly after this picture was taken at rehearsals for the hugely anticipated O2 shows, Michael Jackson was dead. One man was beside him through those last weeks and months: his friend, mentor and choreographer Kenny Ortega. In his first major interview since that June afternoon, he tells the story of the Jackson he knew, the mood of his final days and hours, and why he has decided to bring the King of Pop’s ghost back to life
Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson was dead?
Kenny Ortega knows exactly where he was: on a Los Angeles soundstage, waiting for Jackson to show up for work. They’d been collaborating for months. Decades, in fact. In an extended period when Jackson went out of his way to avoid the press – when he spent years shuttling from his Neverland bolt hole to courtroom to penthouse suite to Middle East island hideaway – the choreographer and director was one of the few people who saw Jackson on a regular basis. He’s an exuberant, positivity-spinning showbiz trouper in the old Hollywood mould. The three High School Musical movies he made for Disney may make Grease look like The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, but Ortega more than anyone holds the key to Jackson’s state of mind in the last months of his life.
So was he concerned at his old friend’s non-appearance that final day? We know, thanks to the coroner’s report, that Jackson had punctures up and down his arms, chronically inflamed lungs and an arthritic lower spine, and that he had been taking the surgical anaesthetic propofol and a variety of other sedatives. Had Jackson been unreliable, tired, in pain? Did he seem pepped up to the eyeballs on this cocktail of prescription drugs? “I’d been to his home, I’d seen him playing with his children, and seen no evidence ever of anything like that.”
Was he eating properly? “Um…” Ortega pauses. “I think he was eating as much as he thought he needed to. I wished he would have eaten more. I was always making sure there was plenty of food around. People have said they saw me carving up meat and hand-feeding him – it’s not true. I would unwrap his plate and slide it over in front of him. But I didn’t feed him.”
Ortega, clad in an unshowy suit jacket and polo shirt, the uniform of the working director, is an animated character who chats at nineteen to the dozen. When talking about Jackson’s talents he rattles out superlatives; only occasionally, when pressed, will he concede that all might not have been well with his old friend. A diehard fan, he certainly won’t tolerate any suggestion of Jackson’s darker side. In death, Jackson has polarised opinion even further: those who see a car-crash life, a horrific, Grand Guignol pantomime, and those who see a messiah-like figure who could do no wrong – an image Jackson appeared happy to reinforce in his Earth Song video. Ortega claims that he saw only good – a man who took time to visit the world’s orphanages while on tour could only have pure and saintly motives, right? And Ortega was one of the few who had a ringside view of the Jackson circus.
Jackson was 50 years old and saddled with a history of medical issues. He had rebuilt his appearance, allegedly to look more like his childhood heroine, Diana Ross. His skin – on his face at least – was now white. His hair had never fully recovered from the 1984 incident when it caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. After his 1993 Dangerous tour, he reportedly entered rehab for addiction to painkillers and sedatives. He was plagued by back pain. During his 2005 trial on several counts of child molestation, intoxication and conspiracy to commit child abduction, he often appeared dazed – on one occasion he appeared in court in his pyjama bottoms.
His mental health was further questioned because of his treatment of his children: he dangled his baby, Blanket, from a hotel balcony and sent his two elder children – Prince Michael and Paris – out on public appearances with veils over their faces. All three were white, leading to inevitable speculation about whether he was their biological father.
So wasn’t this battered, rake-thin man too frail to mount a comeback? Ortega is having none of it. “No! Look at photographs of Fred Astaire at the height of his career. They’re the spitting image.”
On the day he died, the entertainer was due to begin rehearsing Dirty Diana, the fifth single from 1987’s 30 million-selling Bad album. Ortega had been putting Jackson through his paces since the singer’s appearance at a press conference in London in March to announce This Is It: a run of concerts, first 10 shows, then 50 over 8 months, at the capital’s 23,000-capacity O2 arena. Fans from all over the world applied for tickets at, some reports said, a rate of 16,000 per second; they sold out in a matter of hours. According to the chief executive of concert promoter AEG Live, Randy Phillips, the first 10 shows alone would earn Jackson $50m (£35 million) – a much-needed fiscal shot in the arm for a man who had frittered away millions on, among other things, the upkeep of his Neverland ranch, the fees of a phalanx of lawyers and paying off his adolescent accusers.
Now, ahead of This Is It’s scheduled opening night on July 13, Jackson, Ortega and their team were on the last lap of rehearsals in the Staples Center in LA.
But Jackson’s comeback was not to be. That summer afternoon four months ago, Ortega remembers, “We were getting a lot of rumour calls, and my phone was just ringing constantly… I was waiting for one of the folks from our team who was at the hospital to call and let us know what was really happening. Of course, what I wanted to believe was that this was another of those days in the life of Michael where rumour and exaggeration take over.”
Inside the Staples Center, Ortega gathered his team around: musical director, vocal coach, dance coach, production designer, lighting designer, musicians, dancers, technicians – “Michael’s [other] family”. They joined hands in a circle, “and we did pray for him, and pray for him to return to us in a strong state of health, so that we could continue [to move] our dream forward. It was a few minutes later when I received the call from one of our team of producers that said we had lost Michael.”
It was Thursday, June 25, 2009. Jackson was pronounced dead at 2.26pm Pacific time. The autopsy confirmed he died from cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of prescription drugs. The night before he died, Jackson’s personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray – whom Jackson paid a monthly salary of $150,000 and whose continued employment was part of Jackson’s ongoing negotiations with AEG – gave him Valium, lorazepam, midazolam and, via a drip, propofol. The verdict, after weeks of conjecture, rumour and an international outpouring of grief and silliness, was homicide. Dr Murray may yet face criminal charges.
But as befits the greatest entertainer of the pop age, or one of the weirdest, depending on your view, death hasn’t stopped Jackson’s This Is It. The show that never was is now a film that few could have imagined. Ortega has edited more than 100 hours of footage filmed at the LA rehearsals into a theatrical movie that Sony Pictures have reportedly paid $60 million (£36 million) to distribute.
“At the time I was uncomfortable with the notion. My immediate instinct was: too close, too quick, too emotional,” Ortega tells me when we meet on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. He’s been frantically busy on This Is It, while also working over at rival studio Paramount on another film: his remake of Footloose, starring Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford in the Kevin Bacon role.
“But then I discovered that there was gonna be a movie anyway,” the 59-year-old continues. “And a friend of mine called me and said, ‘I’m reading online that they’re talking to other directors.’ I thought, ‘Now wait a minute – this is really sacred material here. And we were there and I’ve been there on all of these ventures in this last twentysomething years with Michael.’”
Ortega couldn’t bear the prospect of an outsider – “somebody who didn’t really know what the experience was about” – having their hands on what would become Michael Jackson’s last will and testament. He talked to other members of Jackson’s inner circle. “I thought, if everyone will agree that this is a legacy piece, about those four months and about showing the fans what it was that we were trying to do, then I should try do this. Because, you know, who else?”
As Ortega says, he was the only one who was there, who knows what really happened.
Michael Jackson’s return was to be a big production: 3-D films, gravity-defying aerial stunt work, an ecological theme, a full band of musicians. A cherry picker, rising to the height of a two-storey building, would hoist Jackson out over the audience, spinning and rotating 360 degrees, “moving him through airspace” – his Peter Pan fantasy finally coming true. Even Jackson’s stage wear was cutting edge. “We were incorporating new technology in the fabric,” coos Ortega, “wonderful breakthroughs in science that enabled video and light to be played inside his clothing.” The budget for all of this was “the upper twenties”. That is, $25-$30 million, or £15-£18 million.
It was a tall order, but Ortega was the man for the job. A Hollywood and pop music veteran, he had choreographed Jackson’s Dangerous and HIStory world tours (1992-3 and 1996-7 respectively). He taught Patrick Swayze his Baby-wowing moves on Dirty Dancing and helped Madonna with her Marilyn-channelling shimmy on the Material Girl video. He had turned High School Musical into one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of the Walt Disney Company. Ortega knew all about putting on a show, and he knew all about Michael Jackson.
.....
Shortly after this picture was taken at rehearsals for the hugely anticipated O2 shows, Michael Jackson was dead. One man was beside him through those last weeks and months: his friend, mentor and choreographer Kenny Ortega. In his first major interview since that June afternoon, he tells the story of the Jackson he knew, the mood of his final days and hours, and why he has decided to bring the King of Pop’s ghost back to life
Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson was dead?
Kenny Ortega knows exactly where he was: on a Los Angeles soundstage, waiting for Jackson to show up for work. They’d been collaborating for months. Decades, in fact. In an extended period when Jackson went out of his way to avoid the press – when he spent years shuttling from his Neverland bolt hole to courtroom to penthouse suite to Middle East island hideaway – the choreographer and director was one of the few people who saw Jackson on a regular basis. He’s an exuberant, positivity-spinning showbiz trouper in the old Hollywood mould. The three High School Musical movies he made for Disney may make Grease look like The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, but Ortega more than anyone holds the key to Jackson’s state of mind in the last months of his life.
So was he concerned at his old friend’s non-appearance that final day? We know, thanks to the coroner’s report, that Jackson had punctures up and down his arms, chronically inflamed lungs and an arthritic lower spine, and that he had been taking the surgical anaesthetic propofol and a variety of other sedatives. Had Jackson been unreliable, tired, in pain? Did he seem pepped up to the eyeballs on this cocktail of prescription drugs? “I’d been to his home, I’d seen him playing with his children, and seen no evidence ever of anything like that.”
Was he eating properly? “Um…” Ortega pauses. “I think he was eating as much as he thought he needed to. I wished he would have eaten more. I was always making sure there was plenty of food around. People have said they saw me carving up meat and hand-feeding him – it’s not true. I would unwrap his plate and slide it over in front of him. But I didn’t feed him.”
Ortega, clad in an unshowy suit jacket and polo shirt, the uniform of the working director, is an animated character who chats at nineteen to the dozen. When talking about Jackson’s talents he rattles out superlatives; only occasionally, when pressed, will he concede that all might not have been well with his old friend. A diehard fan, he certainly won’t tolerate any suggestion of Jackson’s darker side. In death, Jackson has polarised opinion even further: those who see a car-crash life, a horrific, Grand Guignol pantomime, and those who see a messiah-like figure who could do no wrong – an image Jackson appeared happy to reinforce in his Earth Song video. Ortega claims that he saw only good – a man who took time to visit the world’s orphanages while on tour could only have pure and saintly motives, right? And Ortega was one of the few who had a ringside view of the Jackson circus.
Jackson was 50 years old and saddled with a history of medical issues. He had rebuilt his appearance, allegedly to look more like his childhood heroine, Diana Ross. His skin – on his face at least – was now white. His hair had never fully recovered from the 1984 incident when it caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. After his 1993 Dangerous tour, he reportedly entered rehab for addiction to painkillers and sedatives. He was plagued by back pain. During his 2005 trial on several counts of child molestation, intoxication and conspiracy to commit child abduction, he often appeared dazed – on one occasion he appeared in court in his pyjama bottoms.
His mental health was further questioned because of his treatment of his children: he dangled his baby, Blanket, from a hotel balcony and sent his two elder children – Prince Michael and Paris – out on public appearances with veils over their faces. All three were white, leading to inevitable speculation about whether he was their biological father.
So wasn’t this battered, rake-thin man too frail to mount a comeback? Ortega is having none of it. “No! Look at photographs of Fred Astaire at the height of his career. They’re the spitting image.”
On the day he died, the entertainer was due to begin rehearsing Dirty Diana, the fifth single from 1987’s 30 million-selling Bad album. Ortega had been putting Jackson through his paces since the singer’s appearance at a press conference in London in March to announce This Is It: a run of concerts, first 10 shows, then 50 over 8 months, at the capital’s 23,000-capacity O2 arena. Fans from all over the world applied for tickets at, some reports said, a rate of 16,000 per second; they sold out in a matter of hours. According to the chief executive of concert promoter AEG Live, Randy Phillips, the first 10 shows alone would earn Jackson $50m (£35 million) – a much-needed fiscal shot in the arm for a man who had frittered away millions on, among other things, the upkeep of his Neverland ranch, the fees of a phalanx of lawyers and paying off his adolescent accusers.
Now, ahead of This Is It’s scheduled opening night on July 13, Jackson, Ortega and their team were on the last lap of rehearsals in the Staples Center in LA.
But Jackson’s comeback was not to be. That summer afternoon four months ago, Ortega remembers, “We were getting a lot of rumour calls, and my phone was just ringing constantly… I was waiting for one of the folks from our team who was at the hospital to call and let us know what was really happening. Of course, what I wanted to believe was that this was another of those days in the life of Michael where rumour and exaggeration take over.”
Inside the Staples Center, Ortega gathered his team around: musical director, vocal coach, dance coach, production designer, lighting designer, musicians, dancers, technicians – “Michael’s [other] family”. They joined hands in a circle, “and we did pray for him, and pray for him to return to us in a strong state of health, so that we could continue [to move] our dream forward. It was a few minutes later when I received the call from one of our team of producers that said we had lost Michael.”
It was Thursday, June 25, 2009. Jackson was pronounced dead at 2.26pm Pacific time. The autopsy confirmed he died from cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of prescription drugs. The night before he died, Jackson’s personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray – whom Jackson paid a monthly salary of $150,000 and whose continued employment was part of Jackson’s ongoing negotiations with AEG – gave him Valium, lorazepam, midazolam and, via a drip, propofol. The verdict, after weeks of conjecture, rumour and an international outpouring of grief and silliness, was homicide. Dr Murray may yet face criminal charges.
But as befits the greatest entertainer of the pop age, or one of the weirdest, depending on your view, death hasn’t stopped Jackson’s This Is It. The show that never was is now a film that few could have imagined. Ortega has edited more than 100 hours of footage filmed at the LA rehearsals into a theatrical movie that Sony Pictures have reportedly paid $60 million (£36 million) to distribute.
“At the time I was uncomfortable with the notion. My immediate instinct was: too close, too quick, too emotional,” Ortega tells me when we meet on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. He’s been frantically busy on This Is It, while also working over at rival studio Paramount on another film: his remake of Footloose, starring Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford in the Kevin Bacon role.
“But then I discovered that there was gonna be a movie anyway,” the 59-year-old continues. “And a friend of mine called me and said, ‘I’m reading online that they’re talking to other directors.’ I thought, ‘Now wait a minute – this is really sacred material here. And we were there and I’ve been there on all of these ventures in this last twentysomething years with Michael.’”
Ortega couldn’t bear the prospect of an outsider – “somebody who didn’t really know what the experience was about” – having their hands on what would become Michael Jackson’s last will and testament. He talked to other members of Jackson’s inner circle. “I thought, if everyone will agree that this is a legacy piece, about those four months and about showing the fans what it was that we were trying to do, then I should try do this. Because, you know, who else?”
As Ortega says, he was the only one who was there, who knows what really happened.
Michael Jackson’s return was to be a big production: 3-D films, gravity-defying aerial stunt work, an ecological theme, a full band of musicians. A cherry picker, rising to the height of a two-storey building, would hoist Jackson out over the audience, spinning and rotating 360 degrees, “moving him through airspace” – his Peter Pan fantasy finally coming true. Even Jackson’s stage wear was cutting edge. “We were incorporating new technology in the fabric,” coos Ortega, “wonderful breakthroughs in science that enabled video and light to be played inside his clothing.” The budget for all of this was “the upper twenties”. That is, $25-$30 million, or £15-£18 million.
It was a tall order, but Ortega was the man for the job. A Hollywood and pop music veteran, he had choreographed Jackson’s Dangerous and HIStory world tours (1992-3 and 1996-7 respectively). He taught Patrick Swayze his Baby-wowing moves on Dirty Dancing and helped Madonna with her Marilyn-channelling shimmy on the Material Girl video. He had turned High School Musical into one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of the Walt Disney Company. Ortega knew all about putting on a show, and he knew all about Michael Jackson.
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