Michael Jackson, could it have been any different?

Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom. Not long after arriving in the famously tolerant state, he caused uproar when he entered the ladies’ loos at the Ibn Battutah Mall dressed in female headgear and positioned himself at the mirror to put on his make-up.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, things are getting a bit wild with Michael Jackson’s finances. The star was about to be made bankrupt over a $240 million debt to the Bank of America – he was also being sued by 90 of Neverland Ranch’s employees, who hadn’t been paid for some time – when the bank sold the debts to the Fortress Investment Group, which has issued Jackson with a $270 million loan, saving him from bankruptcy but costing him part of his share in his greatest asset, a music catalogue which gives him rights to four thousand classic songs, including two hundred by the Beatles. Jackson bought the catalogue against stiff competition, including that of Paul McCartney, in 1985, and it is said to be worth a fortune, though perhaps it’s worth more than money to Jackson, who proved by purchasing it that he was bigger than the Beatles, who were once said to be bigger than Jesus.

What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us. For my money he also constitutes a mind-boggling and vaguely uplifting example of human instability in pursuit of perfection. In a sense he is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet?

Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that Michael never quite seemed like a child, that even in his nappies he ‘felt’ old. At little over a year and a half he would stand with his bottle and dance to the rhythm of the washing-machine. Joseph, his father, was angry and ambitious, an excellent if often sorry combination in the parent of a child who wants to be successful in showbusiness. Everything that is bad for a child might be good for a performer – including, I suspect, being locked in a cupboard by one’s father – and the horrors of his childhood very soon became part and parcel of Jackson’s act. In many ways, the early career of the Jacksons is a classic American showbusiness story – the Gumm sisters with spandex trousers – except that the boys were black and suburban and they became unprecedentedly popular in white America< P> Only in the early 1980s, after Jackson went solo, did he go from being a musical genius to being a genius at selfhood. He remade his nose, he started getting interested in robots and toys, he began to wear make-up every day, and he began to fashion himself as an only child and a lost boy. He began, in other words, to disappear into some region of total ambiguity. In his biography of the star, J. Randy Taraborrelli describes going to interview Jackson at his California home in 1981. Jackson’s sister Janet was there and Jackson insisted that the journalist ask her his questions, then she would ask Michael, who would tell her the answer and she could then tell Taraborrelli. Here’s part of the exchange:

‘Let’s start with the new album, Triumph. How do you feel about it?’

Michael pinned me with his dark eyes and nodded towards his sister. I redirected my question. ‘Janet, would you please ask him how feels about the album.’

Janet turned to Michael. ‘He wants to know how you feel about the album,’ she said.

‘Tell him I’m very happy with it,’ Michael said, his tone relaxed. ‘Working with my brothers again was an incredible experience for me. It was,’ he stopped, searching for the word, ‘magical,’ he concluded.

Janet nodded her head and turned to me. ‘He told me to tell you that he’s very happy with the album,’ she repeated. ‘And that working with his brothers was an incredible experience for him.’

There was a pause.

‘You forgot the part about it being magical,’ Michael said to her, seeming peeved at her for not doing her job properly.

‘Oh, yes.’ Janet looked at me with apologetic brown eyes. ‘He said it was magical.’

‘Magical?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Magical.’

Jackson has what might be called a supernatural relation to his own personality, a position which, far from holding him back in the real world, led in the months after this interview to the making of his album Thriller, which became the biggest-selling album of all time (fifty million sales, plus seven Top Ten singles). That level of success seems both to have enlarged his sense of messianic purpose and deepened the role of fantasy in his life. He had more and more operations on his face, he went to Disneyland every chance he got, he starred in a remake of The Wizard of Oz, he befriended a monkey called Bubbles, he pretended to sleep in an incubator each night, his skin got whiter and whiter, he became a recluse, and he invited children to stay at his ranch.

Margo Jefferson’s essay on Michael Jackson displays a lively understanding of black performing history. Thankfully, there is not (yet) a Department of Michael Jackson Studies at Harvard, but Jefferson makes clear the extent to which the former child star is a loose-limbed signifier for the kinds of issue that matter to cultural studies majors: black history, gender politics, the aesthetics of the closet and all that. But Jefferson is enough of a writer to convince one, rather quickly, that the big-hearted, firm-minded essay – more than the novel or the biopic – may be the place where such issues can begin to find their most open-ended resolution. She makes it clear that Jackson had a freak-making childhood, and argues energetically that his career should be seen as an emotional extrapolation of everything he fears about adult power and the loss of innocence:

When Jane Fonda told Michael that she wanted to produce Peter Pan for him, he began to tremble. He identified so with Peter, he told her; he had read everything written about him. Did he know that the book’s original title was ‘The Boy who Hated His Mother’? As Michael wrote in his autobiography: ‘I don’t trust anybody except Katherine. And sometimes I’m not so sure about her.’

In his extensive reading about Peter Pan, Jackson cannot have failed to notice the recently very popular view that J.M. Barrie was a paedophile, haunted by his dead sibling David, and animated by his fascination with the Llewellyn-Davies boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens. Jefferson does not pick up on the parallels – the horrible accusation, the sibling psychodrama, the company of children – but she has a lot of time for the idea that we live in a culture that enjoys the oddness of child stars behaving like adults (singing about sex) and also enjoys punishing them for having an odd relation to childhood when they become adults:

We could go a stage further, and suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite. ‘Here’s an ugly fact,’

What is it about fame that can make people unbearable to themselves? In the right conditions – the wrong conditions – a dreamy and over-watched person of sizeable talent can turn steadily into a tragic being, as vulnerable to the psychically destructive forces of the age as the great heroines of the 19th-century novel or the doomed figures of Romantic opera. Moral captives such as Emma Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield have destruction written into their code of happiness, as does Cio-Cio-San or Verdi’s Desdemona, suffocated by bad men or bourgeois custom but most effectively by a public (an audience) that loves to be complicit in the undoing of women and the aestheticising of their pain. Once you get to Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe or Billie Holiday or Lena Zavaroni, the thrill has become a fetish, and you can see how self-change and death-throes have become in a rather naked way the bigger part of their performance. Michael Jackson has all of that by rote, and is distinguished among such figures as a black man who wants to be a white woman; a person who wants to unperson himself, to become something beyond nature, something entirely concocted of private fears and public desire.

At the height of his 1980s mega-success, Jackson still attended meetings at the Kingdom Hall with this mother. Two or three nights a week, he would also go door-to-door with the Watchtower magazine, trying to recruit for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. To make things easier, he would cover his head for these outings and wear a false moustache and glasses. Wandering around the suburbs of California, he would suffer the usual abuse and door-slammings. One girl, Louise Gilmore, recalls a man coming to her house. ‘Today, I’m here to talk to you about God’s word,’ he said, and she let him in. According to Taraborrelli, the girl didn’t recognise Jackson, but noticed he was odd. ‘He looked like a little boy playing grown-up,’ she said. He spoke to her about his faith, then drank a glass of water and left. When a neighbour later told Louise that the visitor had been Michael Jackson she says she almost fainted. She didn’t join his religion, but she kept the pamphlets he gave her as souvenirs she would treasure all her life.

Source Andrew O Hagan