Man in the mirror: victim or villain? Man-child or child abuser? Do we really understand Michael Jackson? And who are we to judge?
It was Thursday, November 20, 2003, and every television news camera in the world seemed pointed in the same direction--at a private jet sitting on the tarmac of a Santa Barbara airport. Reporters were falling all over themselves to capture one image: Michael Joe Jackson, the legendary King of Pop in handcuffs, complete with mug shot and booking number.
Jackson, according to papers filed by the district attorney in Santa Barbara County, faces seven counts of a "lewd act upon a child ... with the intent of arousing, appealing to, and gratifying the lust, passions, and sexual desires of the said defendant and the said child." He also faces two counts of "administrating intoxicating agent"--wine--"to enable and assist himself to commit ... child molestation." The three-page filing claims Jackson had "substantial sexual contact" with the then-12-year-old John Doe and details felony acts carrying a minimum of two to eight years in prison.
Los Angeles, a town financed on sequels, would now have a new Trial of the Century, with Jackson's white Gulfstream G4 replacing O.J. Simpson's white Ford Bronco, and shots of Jackson's 2,700-acre Neverland Ranch replacing those familiar helicopter shots of Simpson's Rockingham Avenue estate. Jackson himself was reduced to sports metaphors while proclaiming his innocence. "Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons," he declared.
Long before the most recent charges of child abuse, we knew that something was definitely out of whack in Michael Jackson's self-created Fantasyland. It wasn't just his plastic-surgery obsession, or the fact that his skin was becoming whiter by the minute. It seemed that Michael had undergone an entire personality shift. He was no longer that friendly child who grew up in our living rooms. He had become a ghost of himself, his face becoming scarier than any ghoul in his now-classic Thriller video.
Then there were his marriages, first to Lisa Marie Presley in 1994, and then to Debbie Rowe two years later. That he married Elvis Presley's daughter wasn't strange in and of itself. What was weird was the couple's apparent need to assert to the world--with that famous kiss at the 1994 MTV Awards and in Jackson's 1995 You Are Not Alone video, in which he and Presley appear almost naked--that they were actually having sex. The marriage lasted 20 months.
The second time around, Jackson quietly married Debbie Rowe, a former nurse whom he had reportedly hired as a surrogate to bear his children. Rowe did give birth to two of Jackson's three children before their divorce in 1999. His third child, carried by another surrogate, arrived in 2002.
Fatherhood seemed to make Michael even more eccentric. lie kept his children sequestered, allowing us only glimpses of them on outrageous Vegas shopping sprees or trips to the zoo. They sometimes resembled characters out of Aesop's Fables, their white faces peering out at the world through sheer veils that obscured their features. The veiled public appearances culminated, finally, in that incident in Germany in November 2002 when Michael dangled his baby, head shrouded in a blanket, over the railing of a Berlin hotel balcony for a bizarre photo op.
And now Michael has been accused--not for the first time--of deplorable acts. Was this, as his older brother Jermaine surmised, a "modern-day lynching?" Did Michael's many millions make him, as his defense attorney Mark Geragos claimed, the target for "a shakedown," the intersection of "somebody who's looking for money with somebody in the investigation that's got an ax to grind"? Or did Black America just brush off Michael's post-Thriller behavior as just Michael being Michael, in much the same way that we turn a blind eye to an uncle who gets too touchy-feely with the "chilluns"? Was some seriously Dangerous stuff being kept "In the Closet"?
"This is all about money," Geragos told the Los-Angeles Times. But ten years after Jackson settled with another child and his lam fly over eerily similar allegations, how could we even begin to believe the pop superstar could possibly be innocent?
I'll tell you how. One minute and 47 seconds into the song "Butterflies," track number seven on Jackson's 2001 album, Invincible, the answer is quite clear. When his falsetto hits your eardrums, all is right in the world. The performance is so effortless, so brilliantly mesmerizing, you think that what you're hearing is, quite possibly, the most beautiful voice ever bestowed on a human being. I had to pull my car over the first time I heard the song. When he's in the recording studio, Michael still has "it," whatever "it" is. That's why we still believe in Michael Jackson, despite the questionable lifestyle, the face changes, the spending habits, and the charges. He still makes us believe in magic.
Most 18-year-olds know who Michael Jackson is, but they don't remember Michael Jackson. They've seen how his face has morphed over the years, but they don't recall the Michael we do--the one who first gave us butterflies. They don't remember the kid with the fedora tipped to the side on his Afro, raincoat slung over his shoulder as he sang Frank Sinatra's signature show tune, "It Was a Very Good Year," with the poise and panache of a performer four times his age. Or the coolest music video ever-not Thriller or Billie Jean, but one made years before for the song "Can You Feel It," in which the Jacksons appeared like titans, towering over the world while they rocked it.
And, of course, the most impressive memory of all--Tuesday morning in the school cafeteria after Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever aired. All anyone could talk about was Michael's moonwalk when he floated across the stage during "Billie Jean," a performance that helped propel Thriller from a languid-selling LP into a cultural phenomenon that made it one of the greatest-selling albums of all time.
Unfortunately, we're all old enough to remember the rest. Jackson waited five years to get from Thriller to Bad, and by the time it came out, Bad wasn't good anymore. Run-DMC and LL Cool J had made the sequined glove and Jheri curl culturally irrelevant, and many of us were shocked by the dude appearing with the lightened skin and bondage suit on the album cover. There were some gems--'Another Part of Me," "Man in the Mirror," "Smooth Criminal," "The Way You Make Me Feel"--but the love affair was ending. It seemed that Michael had put so much pressure on himself to outdo Thriller that he undid himself. And the weirder he became, the more his hard-core African-American audience turned away.
We learned later that Jackson wasn't a good dancer only because of his talent. If he or his brothers missed a step, Michael says, their father beat them. At an age when most kids were discovering spitballs and pizza, Michael was becoming the cornerstone of the burgeoning multimillion-dollar family fortune. He was too overworked to cultivate true friendships, and when he tried--when he wasn't mobbed by screaming girls ripping at his clothes--he couldn't trust that others liked him for himself and not just because he was Michael Jackson.
So when he made his millions, Jackson built the sprawling Neverland Ranch (inspired by Peter Pan's "Never Land") as a place where kids never had to grow up. The grounds, filled with zoo animals, carousels and expensive antiques, became his refuge from the world's prying eyes. "I am Peter Pan," the singer told British interviewer Martin Bashir in 2003. "Peter Pan," Jackson explained, "represents youth, childhood, never growing up, magic, flying ..."
In the movie classic Citizen Kane, "Rosebud" was Charles Foster Kane's last word before dying. It turns out that it was the name of a sled, his only connection to the simple pleasures of childhood left far behind him when he became a multimillionaire. Jackson's obsession with sleepovers became his Rosebud, his connection to a childhood forever lost. All the cartoons, the amusement park rides, the water balloon fights, the prepubescent playmates--all were a chance for Jackson to recapture what had been taken away.
"I was in awe," 17-year-old Ahmad Elatab told the Associated Press about his visit to the ranch. Elatab said Jackson's activities there were benign. "It was like heaven for kids," he explained. "It's made just right for kids. All the rides, all the animals, the toys, everything."
But the sleepovers were always a problem. In 1993 a young boy, a frequent guest of Jackson, claimed he was molested at one of those sleepovers. The charges were eventually dropped, with the boy and his family reportedly accepting a $15 million settlement. For Michael, that should have been a wake-up call. Whether or not people believed he was molesting young boys, it was clear that he should, at the very least, keep children at a distance. He never did.
People asked then, and still do: Where were the parents? How could they let a grown man share a bed with their kids? But as much as we want to blame the parents, why did Michael's own circle seem to sit idly by, watching as he fell into this quagmire, not once but twice? Why didn't someone stage an intervention, pull his coat--Uh, Mike, heal the world, Ryan White, and all that good stuff--but man, separate rooms and chaperones, just like at summer camp. We know you never got a chance to go, but we can tell you about it.
And what about the rest of us, especially those of us who grew up with Michael and remember him back in the day? Those of us who loved him as an artist and thought we knew him have been dismayed by his prolonged disintegration. And with the recent charges, we wonder if we have been somehow codependent, indulging, by our gawking and inaction, someone who was not merely a very gifted eccentric but also a tormented man far more in need of our help than of our ridicule or adoration.
Now, following Michael Jackson's appearance on 60 Minutes, the Nation of Islam seems to have indeed staged an intervention, turning my hypothetical scenario into reality. According to The New York Times, Leonard Muhammad--Minister Louis Farrakhan's son-in-law and chief of staff--had set up camp in attorney Geragos's office and, quicker than you could say As Salaam Alaikum, had taken over Jackson's business affairs. The Nation has since denied any "official business or professional relationship" with Jackson, and yet several of their members, sober-faced and in business suits, lined up outside the Santa Maria courthouse at the singer's arraignment last January. More than a thousand Jackson supporters thronged the streets in front of the courthouse, holding up signs and cheering as they strained for a glimpse of Michael, who was accompanied that morning by his mother, father, brother Jermaine and sister Janet. Suddenly a roar went up. There was the King of Pop on the roof of a vehicle waving his arms and blowing kisses at the screaming crowd.
Ironically, it was our attention that led Jackson here in the first place. We didn't just love Michael. We worshipped him. We tugged at his clothes, cried in his presence and gazed at him so much that we warped his sense of who he was. Maybe if we had just let Michael be a child, an adolescent, a human being--and maybe if he had had a few more years in Gary, Indiana--he might have become another kind of man. It could be that we're not in any position to judge Michael Jackson, given that oar obsession with him harmed his psyche as much as any belt his father, Joseph, allegedly held in his hand.
Maybe only God, or Allah, can be the judge.
by
Cheo Hodari Coker
