Diego O. Rocha retweetledi
On a TMZ documentary that aired this February, music journalist Steven Ivory said it plainly. "I really do believe that Michael would still be here today if he had not done the Pepsi commercial."
Before January 27, 1984, by every account from his family, Mike had never touched a drug. After the burns, he tried to refuse the painkillers entirely. Twenty-five years later he was dead at 50, from a drug hospitals only use to put people under for surgery.
Sixth take of the day. Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, in front of three thousand fans there to make the commercial look like a real concert. Pepsi wanted Mike walking down a staircase as fireworks went off behind him. They fired too early. His hair was packed with styling gel and went up like a candle. He kept dancing for a few seconds before the crew rushed in to put it out. Second- and third-degree burns on his scalp. In his 1988 autobiography Moonwalk, Jackson wrote that the burns on the back of his head "almost went through to my skull."
Then came the surgeries. Doctors stuck balloons under his scalp to stretch healthy skin over the burn scars. His own hairstylist, Carol LaMere, later said the procedures just made his hair fall out worse. The pain from the burn itself never really left him.
Doctors gave him Demerol, a strong painkiller, in 1984. That was the first. By 1993, he cancelled the rest of his Dangerous World Tour and checked into rehab for painkiller addiction. By 1996, an anesthesia doctor was traveling on tour with him to put him to sleep every night using propofol, the drug hospitals use during surgery. By 2009, his personal doctor Conrad Murray was being paid $150,000 a month to do the same thing every night so Mike could sleep. On the morning of June 25, 2009, Murray gave him a dose of propofol and stepped out of the bedroom. Mike stopped breathing. The LA County coroner ruled the death a homicide. Murray went to prison for two years.
Pepsi paid Mike $1.5 million to settle, about $4.6 million in today's money. He gave every dollar to the burn unit that had treated him. The hospital renamed it in his honor. The Pepsi advertising executive who put the deal together, Phil Dusenberry, later titled his memoir "Then We Set His Hair on Fire."
Toluwase@Toluwase_x
The $5M Michael Jackson Pepsi ad (1983) He demanded that his face not be shown for more than 3 seconds. He never wanted to do the commercial; he did it so his brothers could make money. Nobody was getting paid when Mike left. $5M in 1983 was a BAG 💰
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