Michael Jackson's Last Close-Up Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
Postmortem
Christopher Weiss wants to be a doctor, but he is not, at first glance, a dream candidate for medical school. He went to junior college and got mediocre grades—and then he spent the better part of the next decade trying to make up for his feckless youth. Getting his bachelor’s degree at U.S.C., doing breast-cancer lab research, working as an E.M.T., and getting his paramedic’s license, the 29-year-old slowly built a résumé that could impress admissions boards. But he always worried that he wasn’t saving enough of his income, that med school would require him to take on a crushing load of debt. Then, in 2007, his boyhood friend Ben Evenstad, also 29, offered Weiss a chance to make a lot of money. When Evenstad co-founded the photo agency National Photo Group, he hired Weiss and taught him how to be a paparazzo.
Though Weiss says he’s not very interested in celebrities, he came to enjoy the job, especially when he got to shoot Michael Jackson. “From the first time I saw him in person, at a Barnes & Noble, when he was wearing Band-Aids on his face, I was mesmerized,” Weiss says. His boss, Evenstad, shares the fascination: “As a pap, you spend most of your time chasing sex symbols, but M.J. was different, almost like a Howard Hughes character,” he says. “With the masks and the umbrellas and the mystery, I thought Michael was more interesting than any other celebrity, and he has more interesting fans than any other celebrity—this group, mostly female, who would follow him all over the world. If he went to Ireland, France, Bahrain, Neverland, they were there. The same individuals. Nobody else had what he had. I set out to document why.”
Evenstad started as a pap in 1999 (he was also a professional autograph collector at the time), and he worked for a photo agency that questioned the amount of time he spent chasing Jackson, during a period when photos of the singer were not commanding premium prices. “For me, it was kind of a fan thing. As a fan, I wanted to get his photo. It wasn’t until 2003 when his legal troubles got bad that pictures of him started to be worth a lot again,” Evenstad says.
Although this may sound self-justifying, it is in earnest. I have known Evenstad for eight years—I wrote about him for The New York Times Magazine, in 2001—and from the day we met, he named Jackson as his favorite quarry.
Jackson’s most devoted fans recognized a fellow enthusiast in Evenstad, and they developed a mutually beneficial relationship, exchanging tips with one another about the singer’s comings and goings.
National Photo Group, from the beginning, “wanted to be the Michael Jackson agency,” Evenstad says. “There’s always money to be made with Michael, so we started shooting him every day.” Last fall, when Jackson moved into the Bel-Air Hotel, in Los Angeles, Christopher Weiss and another photographer were assigned to be, as Weiss puts it, “soldiers of the sit.” He, too, became friendly with the singer’s core group of fans: mostly young, attractive, European women.
Jackson and one of his many young female fans, October 2008. Despite his penchant for wearing masks, he was not afraid of physical contact with his admirers. By Dean/National Photo Group.
Weiss, whose voice has the clear, generous intelligence of a Boy Scout, remembers, “The girls would huddle outside the hotel gate that was closest to Jackson’s bungalow, sitting very quietly so that security would not find them. And sometimes Michael would come out and say hello. One time he handed out five handwritten letters that said things like ‘I can feel your energy through the walls. You inspire me so much. I love you all. Thank you for being there. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for loving me. With all the love in my heart, Michael Jackson.’ I was always impressed by that, how deeply he seemed to care for these girls. When he hugged one of them, he would put one hand on her neck, behind her head, that extra-comforting move like you would do to a person you know. The writing in those letters had a style that was personal, deep, flowery, ornate. It was not ‘Thanks guys. Have a good night. I hope you like the music.’”
This, too, may sound like a sentimental exaggeration, but it is not. I spent a week with the women that Weiss and Evenstad are talking about, while researching Starstruck, a book I wrote about relationships between celebrities and fans. No star was more generous to fans (every member of the core group of Jackson fans that I met had, at some point, been invited into his house to have dinner or to watch movies and hang out), and no group of fans treated one another with more generosity than these women.
“To figure out who would get the letters that Michael wrote to the group,” Weiss says, “the girls would draw straws. They would write their names on pieces of paper and throw them in my camera bag, and I would reach in and draw names. The girl who got the letter would take it and make photocopies and give them to all of the others.”
Two notes Jackson reportedly wrote to fans at the Los Angeles hotel he was staying at last November. “I truly love all of you[.] I am recording tonight, for all of you, you are my true inspiration forever. I am living for you, and the children,” he wrote in one. And “You make me sooo happy.… The sky is the limit. Higher consciousness always.… I love you. Michael Jackson.”
Last December, National became the first photo agency to learn the address of the mansion Jackson was renting on North Carolwood Drive, in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. Evenstad, who was also friendly with members of Jackson’s staff, managed to keep the location a secret for a couple of weeks. Throughout the winter and spring, even when no one else was around, there was almost always at least one photographer from National staking out the gates alongside the die-hard fans.
On June 25, National sent a photographer named Alfred Ibanez to the house. Just after noon, Ibanez called Evenstad, panicked: “There is an ambulance here. Get your video camera and get here now.”
On the way to the scene, Evenstad called Weiss and the rest of his photographers on their cell phones, ordering them to Jackson’s house immediately. Weiss, who was staking out Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s driveway (the couple had spent the previous night at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, Pitt had just returned home in his black Prius, and Weiss was waiting in hopes of getting a shot of Jolie, as well), raced 7.9 miles to Jackson’s. He arrived to find the National photographers (the only paps there) talking to two fans and three autograph collectors who’d been in front of the house all morning. Weiss saw an ambulance inside the gates and a fire truck parked on the street. Ibanez had zoomed in through the window of the fire truck with his telephoto lens and snapped a picture of the call screen, which provided a few details about the situation inside. At this point, Weiss’s experience as an E.M.T. came in handy. He read from the digital image: “50-year-old male … not breathing … ”
“That told me this was probably serious,” Weiss says, “and not just an anxiety attack like he’s had in the past.” Still, he adds, “you can never know exactly what ‘not breathing’ means at that point. It’s laypeople being quoted in a clinical context.” The more time passed, the less serious Weiss figured Jackson’s problems must be. “We were there for 20 minutes,” he says, “and if you’ve got a full arrest”—when a patient really has stopped breathing—“the paramedics usually load and go within 8 to 10 minutes.”
Having been scooped in the past, Evenstad knew anything could happen. As the ambulance started backing down the driveway toward the gate, he barked orders at his guys: “This might be the biggest picture ever, so get up to the windows of that vehicle and shoot. I don’t care if you can’t see. Just shoot.” When he saw Weiss standing a foot from the window, he worried that Weiss would get nothing more than a picture of the reflection of his own camera flash. Weiss says, “Ben told me, ‘Put your lens against the window, and shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.’”
“We couldn’t see inside the ambulance,” Weiss continues. “For all I knew when I was taking the pictures, Michael could have been sitting up on a gurney with oxygen on.”
The National photographers jumped in two cars that followed the Jackson entourage’s two blue Escalades that followed the screaming ambulance to the emergency room at U.C.L.A. medical center—and by then, TMZ and other paps were on the scene. When Evenstad rushed the ambulance, one of Jackson’s bodyguards tried to block his camera and said, “‘C’mon man. Don’t do this. This isn’t cool,’” and Evenstad said, “‘When it’s this big, we have to,’ and I ran around to the other side, because at a certain point there’s no delicacy. We gotta do what we gotta do.”
Weiss saw a look on the guards’ faces that made him believe something was really wrong: “They were being aggressive, but it was remorseful aggressiveness. ‘Please guys, please just stop.’ They kept saying ‘please.’”
By then, Weiss had checked the last few frames he’d shot through the ambulance window, and all he saw was a reflection on the glass. “I thought, I didn’t get it. I was depressed that I missed a shot that could have been a big deal.”
Evenstad collected the memory cards from everybody’s cameras and headed to National’s office to edit the images. Not long after, he called Weiss again: “Chris, you have made up for every knucklehead maneuver you have ever done. We have a usable frame of M.J. in the back”—the now ubiquitous shot of Jackson strapped to a gurney, his face shown in profile as one paramedic attempts chest resuscitation and another pumps oxygen into his mouth.
At this point, National’s paps were still in an ethical twilight zone. Was the picture they’d taken no more than an intimate shot of Michael Jackson’s most recent histrionics? (“This is Michael we’re talking about,” Evenstad says. “Crazy shit is run-of-the-mill.”) Or, as they were beginning to dread—with an unsettling edge of excitement—did they have something more significant on their hands?
They were still editing the shots when TMZ, at first, and then the TV networks reported that Jackson was dead. Weiss, who was in National’s office by then, says that everyone stopped briefly and looked at one another, stunned. Then, Evenstad says, “something clicks in, and you just start working again like a machine. You have to sell this. And you have to not shortchange yourself. We didn’t make him die. Whatever happened to him physically happened because of what he was doing. We were only there to report the goings-on of his. The last thing I want on earth was for him to die.”
Adorer and adored trade waves as Jackson heads to a doctor’s appointment in Beverly Hills, February 10, 2009. From National Photo Group.
The morning after Jackson’s death, Weiss says, he was “happy because we got the picture. I took the last picture of Michael Jackson, ever. Because we had, as much as a photographer could for the last six months of his life, a relationship with Michael. There were days, like when he went to the doctor’s office sometimes, when we would just put our cameras down and visit with him. It’s weird to say this, as paparazzi, because the world can’t stand us, even though they can’t put our magazines down, but there was a closeness that our photographers had with Michael. If there was any fate to getting the shots, maybe that was it. We didn’t go out celebrating. We just watched the news all night.”
How does it feel, knowing that Jackson might well have been dead when the picture was taken? Weiss struggles to formulate an answer, then says, “I am glad, if somebody had to take that photo, that it was me. But I would rather it not have happened. I’d rather have a photo of him carrying his kids piggyback in the park, which is something that’s never been shot and I used to hope for. I understand the magnitude of the photo and that it has a kind of place in history. But it sucks. It just sucks.”
This ambivalence was eating at both of the photographers the day after Jackson died. Evenstad, who didn’t sleep that night, says, “I’m not a morbid person. I don’t want to celebrate someone’s death because I’m making money. I wish Michael wasn’t dead. And I would do better, business-wise, if he were still alive. But given that he died, I am not sorry that we got the last photo. That’s something that the world wants to see. It took skill and effort to get that photo, and for that I’m proud. But we are in mourning.”
He and Weiss were both worried about the fans. A few of them had been texting some of National’s photographers during the night: “I am dead inside,” one message read. “Nothing means anything.”
“For the last 18 hours, we have been playing M.J. songs, and we have a poster in the window of our office that reads ‘R.I.P. King,’” Evenstad said at the time. “And look, I’m still stunned. It hasn’t hit me yet. He was the only celebrity that, if you were devoted enough, he would let you into his house. You think somebody could go to Bruce Willis’s house and say, ‘I love you, I love you,’ that you’d get in? He’d call the police. That’s what all of them would do. All but Michael. If you said ‘I love you, I love you’ to Michael, he would assume you meant you loved him, and he would let you in.”
Jackson’s death leaves a void not only in the fans’ lives but also in Evenstad’s. As much as he may mourn the singer, though, Evenstad also mourns the rare complexity of relationships that surrounded the King of Pop. “This is what hit me halfway through the night: What do I do now? Chase fucking Zac Efron around?,” Evenstad asks. “What is the point?”
Christopher Weiss plans to retire from the paparazzi if he gets into medical school this fall. By the end of the weekend, his photograph of Michael Jackson in the back of the ambulance had grossed sales in the high six figures, with many foreign sales still pending. The first, and most notorious of these sales was closed during my conversation with Evenstad, when a bicycle messenger was pedaling across London, delivering a paper check—for about $500,000—from OK! magazine to National’s U.K. lawyer. Yesterday, the New York Post’s “Page Six” called Weiss’s photo “ghoulish,” reported that some OK! staffers were outraged by the purchase, and suggested that Jay-Z and Sean Combs may organize a boycott of the magazine. Combs’s publicist denied the rumor, and it’s unclear how much controversy the shot may inspire—but this image is sure to have a long and prosperous life. Frank Griffin, one of the deans of Hollywood paparazzi, was quoted as saying the shot would earn $1 million. That should go a long way toward paying tuition.
In January, Weiss went from commission to salary with National, he says, not quite able to hide his disappointment. But he’ll probably make out fine. Ben Evenstad explains, “Our whole staff will get bonuses on this. Once we exceed quarterly sales goals, everybody gets a piece of the pie. When we created that system, we never figured that a picture would ever make this much money. The bonuses might be six figures. If not, then damn close.”
Michael Joseph Gross is the author of Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
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