Devoted Michael Jackson fans are in denial about the transformation of the genius musician into a pathetic man-boy, reports Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, in Santa Maria.
The Michael Jackson fan site carries a warning: "In the past the MJFS has made it policy to avoid reporting "news" that could be construed to be tabloid or negatively controversial in nature. However the times and situations are changing and we believe it is to your benefit to be fully informed. we have decided to report "negative" information, but to precede the article with a bold, red FYI (for your information) before it. In that way you will be able to decide if you wish to read the piece."
The warning points out what is clear to anyone who encountered the fans of the pop star who gathered outside the courthouse in Santa Maria during his trial for child molestation: they have been in denial. They have directed their sullen resentment of what was going on through a wire fence at the media, which has carried the message of Jackson's humiliation, and have carried placards reading "Innocent".
They have allowed themselves to be whipped up by one or two rabble-rousers, such as a burly 20-year-old youth from Knoxville, Tennessee with a disturbing, high-pitched laugh, who is sometimes the only fan there in off-hours and who during court sessions led a small contingent screaming: "Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!" as Diane Dimond of Court TV did her regular stand-up to camera. They were convinced that she gave too much time to the prosecution case, and it got so bad on Thursday of this week that Court TV had to get a restraining order to ensure she was not physically assaulted.
The truth is that Court TV had been doing most of the around-the-clock reporting of the lurid allegations against Jackson, and had therefore attracted the most odium from fans. The cable news networks, which forced the nation's attention to every minute of the OJ Simpson murder trial, have been frustrated by Judge Rodney Melville's very sensible ban on TV cameras in the Santa Maria courtroom. But one can feel some sympathy for the fans who have come from all over the world and are so in love with Jackson's music they can lip-synch the words even of his lesser-known songs as they are played through a boom box on the grass verge. And listening to these numbers is a reminder that Michael Jackson was indeed one of the greatest and most dazzling performers of our time.
Born Michael Joseph Jackson in Gary, Indiana, the fifth of nine children of Joe and Katherine Jackson, he was a sensation from the time he began appearing as one of the Jackson 5, the group of siblings put together by their father in 1962. Joe drove Michael so hard they were estranged for a time, but he has appeared on most trial days walking in the group that escorts Michael from his tinted-window SUV to the courthouse metal detector.
The group of talented Jackson children was first discovered by singers Diana Ross and Gladys Knight at a performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Michael stood out. He had his first solo hit Got To Be There at age 12. His trajectory of success soared upwards. Jackson's 1979 album Off the Wall was a phenomenal success and made him the King of Pop. It brought a generation of young people into the post-Beatles era.
His choreography was dazzling, acrobatic and graceful, and blended well with a unique voice. Three years later he raised his profile to even dizzier heights with Thriller, which sold 26 million copies in the US and an estimated 50 million worldwide, and is often voted the greatest music video ever made.
Millions today can still hear in their heads echoes of Jackson's angelic girlish shrieks in Billie Jean and can see him in their mind's eye perform that mesmerizing 10-minute moonwalk. Five years later, the follow-up album, Bad, sold 22 million copies.
At that time everyone loved Michael Jackson, the child superstar coming of age. But there was always something childish about Michael Jackson the adult: he listed JM Barrie's Peter Pan, the story of a man who never grew up because he had been deprived of his childhood, as his favourite book; Stephen Spielberg's ET was his favourite movie; he embarrassingly formed a friendship with a chimpanzee named Bubbles; and as a grown-up he decided to live in an amusement park.
Like Peter Pan he tried to defeat the process of ageing. He got plastic surgery to narrow his flattish nose and injected his brows with permanent eyeliner. He made his face more feminine by having his cheekbones sharpened. The tightened skin gave him the ghoulish smile of the people with too many facelifts. His pigment became lighter, a phenomenon that he credited to vitiligo, a pigment disorder. His Afro-style hair was straightened. His voice became "unbroken", reverting to the high pitch of a pre-pubescent choirboy. In 1988 he had surgery to add a cleft to his chin.
The more he tried to recreate his face and the more the results became grotesque, the more he retreated into the seclusion of his 2,700-acre Neverland Valley ranch in central California's Santa Ynez Valley, which he acquired in 1988 and converted into a zoo and children's playground. Two years later he began wearing masks over his face, having developed a similar complex about germs as the equally-eccentric and half-mad Howard Hughes half a century before. But Jackson was still considered merely a fabulously-rich eccentric. This was California, after all, where odd behaviour (and youth-enhancing behaviour especially) is tolerated with some amusement if one is fabulously rich and successful and adored by a sizeable proportion of the world's population.
Michael Jackson was still at this time the highest-paid entertainer in the music industry. In 1992 his 15-year contract with Sony was worth an estimated $1 billion. An army of personal assistants, bodyguards, PR agents and lawyers protected him from close scrutiny from the world. But a shadow fell over Neverland in 1993 when Jackson was accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy. The following year he settled out of court for an estimated $20 million (€16.5 million) and no charges were made. The singer denied the allegations and claimed he had settled with the boy's parents to avoid a protracted legal battle, but a nagging doubt about his childish pleasures had begun to eat into the public's consciousness.
He married Lisa Presley that same year - which helped dispel a cloud of suspicion about his sexual proclivities - and divorced her two years later. Months after that Jackson married his dermatologist's nurse Debbie Rowe and had two children by her before his second divorce, followed by a third child by an unidentified woman. By then, he was increasingly being regarded as a real weirdo - the gloved one, rather than the megastar. His 2001 album Invincible flopped, at least by Jackson's standards, selling only two million copies.
Then came the calamitous interview with Martin Bashir. His children appeared in Bashir's documentary, Living With Michael Jackson, wearing veils and masks to hide their faces. What was this?
The pop star with the porcelain features and doe-like eyes admitted to Bashir that he invited children to share his bed at the Neverland Ranch, and protested that it was a "very sweet thing" to do and had no sexual overtones.
"Why can't you share your bed?" he asked plaintively. "The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone."
A tour of Europe became a PR catastrophe when he dangled his youngest child, Prince Michael II, from the fourth floor of a Berlin hotel to the horrified gasps of people in the street.
A year later to the day, on November 19th 2003, District Attorney Tom Sneddon issued an arrest warrant for Michael Jackson on a child abuse charge, based on the statement of the boy whose head had rested on Jackson's shoulder during the Bashir documentary. At first Jackson was defiant, blowing kisses to fans and reporters as he appeared to post bail of $3 million and proclaim his innocence. As Sneddon's prosecutors began to uncover all the unsavoury and sordid aspects of Michael Jackson's private life during the trial, however - as excruciating in detail as the report of special prosecutor Ken Starr on Bill Clinton's White House peccadilloes - the demeanour of the King of Pop grew more desperate.
As the trial turned over stones in his private life, he became the sickly one: shuffling into court under the ubiquitous umbrella; forced to sit all day in a grey-carpeted room where his only comfort was the dish of sweets on the bailiff's desk (from which he often helped himself as his accuser, now 15, answered questions about when he first masturbated - an experience that must have been excruciating for the boy).
Shortly after Jackson's arrest about 600 people, including tennis star Serena Williams, turned up to boost his morale at a solidarity party in Neverland. The person he lists on fanclub websites as his best friend, Elizabeth Taylor, publicly proclaimed his innocence. But Jackson became more and more an outcast. Drug abuse, even killing, can be tolerated in California's celebrity culture - but not the taint of pederasty.
While awaiting trial he asked actress Nicole Kidman to accompany him to the MTV music awards but she refused. Elizabeth Taylor did not seem to be around defending him as much as the trial progressed. The mystique of Neverland was shattered by stories of visiting boys running amok and pornographic magazines (available in shrink wrap in magazine shops but by their nature guaranteed to contaminate by association) lying around in Jackson's bedroom. And it emerged at the trial that the pop star is in deep financial trouble.
An accountant testified that Jackson is spending $20-30 million (€16.5-24.7 million) a year more than he is taking in. The performer had accumulated huge musical assets at the peak of his career. In 1985 he bought the Beatles catalogue of 251 songs for $47 million (more than €38 million), guaranteeing himself a royalty every time Yesterday or Let It Be or any other Beatles song is played on the radio or a Beatles album is sold. The rights to the Beatles numbers, shared now with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, are estimated to be worth $400 million (€330 million). But Jackson has had to take out loans valued at $200 million (€165 million) and in April he risked foreclosure by delaying a repayment of $3 million (almost €2.5 million) by a day.
The accountant, John Duross O'Bryan, said that a balance sheet dated June 30th, 2002, indicated Jackson had assets of $130 million (€107 million) and liabilities of $415 million (€342 million). The stakes then for one of the world's greatest entertainers have been immense, affecting every part of his life, his freedom, his financial future, his family, and his reputation and legacy.
His career was waning, but well before the verdict it had become evident that no matter which way it went, his legacy would be tarnished by the perception that he is dangerously weird and should not be around small boys.
However, Michael Jackson, singer of Billie Jean, Don't Stop Till You Get Enough and Rock with You, was so gifted as a musician in his prime that his work is now bigger than the performer, and in future years people are likely to separate the sad, private pathetic man-boy from the genius who produced it, just as the fans outside the Santa Maria courthouse do today.