Michael Jackson, death by showbusiness

Michael Jackson, death by showbusiness
IN 1992, Michael Jackson published a slim volume of "poems and reflections" entitled Dancing The Dream.

By Mick Brown
Published: 11:53AM BST 27 Jun 2009


It is a curious and, in the light of his death, poignantly revealing collection of writings on the subjects that were apparently close to his heart – music, dancing, God, his mother, the plight of the dolphin and children.

It is the nearest that Michael Jackson – a man who had long since transcended the need or desire for public confession and disclosure, and indeed, did everything within his power to avoid – ever came to autobiography.

Michael Jackson: the best of the tributes"We have to heal our wounded world," Jackson wrote in Children of the World. "The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment. Often this alienation has it roots in an emotionally deprived childhood. Children have had their childhood stolen from them."

Beneath the sweeping generalisation – all children? – lay a painful personal truth.

There are three figures who will stand as defining icons of popular music in the second half of the 20th century: Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Jackson. And just like the deaths of Elvis and Lennon, so Jackson's passing can be seen as a consequence of the extraordinary demands and vicissitudes of fame, particularly the extraordinary fame that Jackson came to — can we really use the word? — enjoy throughout his life.

If Elvis’s death can be seen as the most extreme consequence of excess, and Lennon’s as the most horrific outcome of the malevolent attention of strangers, Jackson’s can surely be attributed to the imperative that was driven into him from childhood — to perform, to dazzle and to pay the bills.

It was in order to pay off debts estimated at £200 million, as well as to rebuild his tarnished career, that Jackson was persuaded to return to the stage and undertake the residency at the 02 that was due to commence in two weeks.

While it is still unclear exactly what caused Jackson’s heart attack, he was not a well man. The cancellation of the first four shows due to “technical issues”, the rumours of his absence from rehearsals and the strenuous insistence by the show’s promoters that he was a picture of health and unbridled energy all suggested that he was under enormous pressure.

Blame is being laid on the pharmacopia of painkilling and anxiety-abating drugs that Jackson was allegedly being fed by “enablers” in his entourage. The coroner’s report might just as well read “Death by showbusiness”.

There is a theory that applies to any child star, that the age at which you become famous is the age at which some part of you becomes forever, and irreparably, arrested.

Jackson was just 11 years old when he first topped the American charts with the Jackson 5 single I Want You Back. By then he was already a showbusiness veteran. The seventh of nine children, his father Joe was a journeyman musician who projected his own, failed ambition on to his children.

By the age of seven Michael was coming home from school at three in the afternoon to rehearsals that would often last until 10 at night. In later years Jackson would speak of the violence and abuse that he suffered at the hands of the man he was instructed to call “Joseph” — never “Dad”.

In 1993 he told Oprah Winfrey how Joe would beat him before sending him on stage. “He was very strict, very hard and stern. Just a look would terrify me… There were times when he would come to see me and I would feel sick. And I would say, 'Please don’t get mad, Joseph. I am sorry, Joseph.’ ”

Joseph apparently took the phlegmatic view. “When you chastised a youngster back in the early days we called it a whippin’,” he once explained. “Now they call it child abuse.”

Signed to Motown, it quickly became apparent that Michael was the star turn.

He made his first solo albums while still part of the group but it was when he broke from them altogether and released Off The Wall in 1979 that his solo career truly began to blossom.

Soul music — the well from which Jackson’s talent and style sprang — is first and foremost a music of raw emotion and authenticity; yet, paradoxically, Jackson’s greatest skill was to conceal himself beneath layers and layers of artifice.

The expression of romantic feelings might have touched a universal chord in his audience, yet seemed to have nothing to do with his own life; the expressions of sexuality, paranoia and fear seemed to have been learned from films and comic books rather than felt. Slick and sublime, his music was the ultimate construct, which is what Jackson strived to be.

What is clear is that his rapid acceleration from childhood to the hothouse of fame was to have a crippling effect on his development as a rounded human being. His friendships were made exclusively within the hermetically-sealed world of the famous, the odd and the similarly damaged — Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Uri Geller, at whose wedding Jackson was improbably best man, and Liza Minelli.

From an early age, touring with the Jackson 5, Michael had been the prime target of the libidinous attentions of teenage girls; yet accounts from that period suggest that he was too shy, or too moral, to exploit his position. The relationships that later surfaced into public view seemed to be more the stuff of the public relations department than the heart – such as dating Tatum O’Neil and his brief marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley.

A second marriage — to his dermatologist’s assistant, Debbie Rowe — was even more unlikely. It produced two children, allegedly by artificial insemination, and lasted barely two years. It would be reasonable to ask whether Jackson had ever enjoyed sexual relations with an adult.

One is left with the inescapable impression that he had little sense of who he actually was; his lifetime was to be spent in relentless pursuit of an identity he could feel happy with, beyond colour and gender – a pursuit that would lead to plastic surgery, skin bleaching, and wreak terrible damage on his appearance.

Fame, as John Updike famously observed, is the mask that eats the face — an observation that was to prove all too true in Jackson’s case.

He revealed almost nothing of himself publicly; such interviews as he gave were exercises in damage limitation.

His silence served only to feed the mythology around him, to the point where it became impossible to discriminate between fact and fiction: the oxygen tanks, the bizarre adoption of hygiene masks — what was that all about?

Keep ’em guessing. It’s the oldest carnival trick in the book, and Jackson was nothing if not a showman.

If in some respects Jackson seemed — clearly was — divorced from reality, he also had a shrewd grasp of his value as an entertainer and how best to exploit it, artistically and commercially.

I remember covering the Jackson Brothers “Victory” tour of America in 1984, when Jackson, who was riding the crest of the success of Thriller, had agreed to perform with his brothers, basically to give them one last payday.

“Forget anything that has ever happened in entertainment before,” the tour publicist entreated me. “This tour is Guatemala, it’s El Salvador.”

He was referring to the 650 journalists — enough to cover several minor wars — who had besieged the tour’s opening date in Kansas City.

But he might as well have been referring to the infighting and intrigue that beset the tour, and from which Jackson emerged as playmaker, locking horns with the most fearsome impresario in American entertainment, Don King, and effectively bumping him as the tour promoter.

“Part of [Michael] may be a 10 year-old, with all the enthusiasm that implies,” John Branca, Jackson’s lawyer told me. “But the other part is a

60-year-old genius. He’s the shrewdest artist I’ve ever come across.”

Frank Dileo, one of the many managers that Jackson hired and fired over the years, put it more colourfully, describing the singer as “a cross between ET and Howard Hughes”.

Yet even this sure-footedness as an artist and a businessman would eventually desert him. The recordings became progressively more lacklustre, suggesting that he had lost touch with his musical gift and the tastes of his audience.

Whatever gains he made from his business acumen were cancelled out by his extravagance — the million-dollar shopping sprees for custom-made SUVS and toys for the Neverland ranch. With its roundabouts, Ferris wheel and petting zoo, Neverland was a creepy testament to the fact that Jackson could find consolation only in his friendships with children and animals.

The cruelest irony of all is that his attempts to reclaim some sort of lost innocence, to find his way back to a childhood he had never known, should have proved his undoing. His poem Children of the World is superficially of saccharine blandness but it contains a sinister foreboding of the events that would engulf Jackson a year after the book’s publication.

“Children of the world, we’ll do it/With song and dance and innocent bliss/The soft caress of a loving kiss/We’ll do it.”

The accompanying illustration showed Jackson at the head of a line of children walking through a wonderland of fluffy clouds and doves of peace. It was a motif that Jackson would employ over and over again, depicting himself less as pied piper, it seemed, than as Jesus — “suffer the little children to come unto me”.

And come unto him they did.

In 1993, the family of a 13-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler laid the first allegation of child abuse. Jackson categorically denied the charge, and for his fans it would have been easy to dismiss it as an exploitation of his generosity — had he not struck an out-of-court settlement with the family for an estimated $20 million.

But it was to be further allegations of abuse that would result in his arrest in 2003 and the subsequent trial two years later that would provide the defining chapter in his life.

Jackson again vehemently denied the allegations, saying that he would “slit my wrists” before hurting a child.

Was he truly a child-abuser? We shall probably never know the truth. He had become so insulated from the world that he was unable even to comprehend that people should have found his intense affection for children, and his habit of sharing a bed with them, both aberrant and deeply suspect.

“Do you know how this looks to a lot of people? I mean, do you understand that?” he was asked by an interviewer for CBS in 2003.

“How does what look?” Jackson replied.

“How the fact that you…”

“Know why?” Jackson interrupted. “People think sex. They’re thinking sex. My mind doesn’t run that way. When I see children, I see the face of God. That’s why I love them so much. That’s what I see.”

The trial ended in acquittal but it proved the truism that for a celebrity an acquittal in a court of law does not guarantee acquittal in the court of public opinion. Where once he had inspired adulation, Jackson was now a figure of revulsion, pity and mockery. His financial empire collapsing around him, he became a refugee, migrating from one air-conditioned bolt-hole to another — Bahrain, Dubai, Las Vegas — to end up in the rented Beverly Hills mansion where he died.

The abiding irony is that Jackson should have died preparing for a series of performances designed to restore both his fortunes and, more importantly, his reputation as the undisputed King of Pop. Superstar, freak, the greatest showman of the 20th century, warm and loving human being, musical genius, alleged child-abuser. The roll call of adjectives and nouns will feed the Jackson myth for years to come.

Dancing The Dream, contains another “reflection”, simply entitled Innocence.

“It’s easy to mistake being innocent for simple-minded or naïve,” he wrote. “We all want to seem sophisticated; we all want to seem street-smart. To be innocent is to be 'out of it’.”

What Michael Jackson wanted most of all, it seemed, was to be free of it all.