REALITY BITES

Roll over Derrida and tell Nietzsche the news: Michael Jackson was the Eighties Superman, his own and many others’ God. Even his grandfather who died in poverty, deserted by his family, believed Michael was the new Messiah. Now that he has married Lisa Presley, professors of Greek civilization are doomed to concede Olympus was the original Las Vegas.

Don’t call it post-modernist irony. After a nuclear holocaust in the year 2023, 26th Century archaeologists will find a video recorded last summer and decide it was Michael Jackson who single-handedly liberated Eastern Europe from the Communist scourge. We may think that fantasy video was the ultimate proof his superstar ego had gone supernova but the future generations shall know the truth and worship Michael Jackson as the abundantly merciful God the Father, who loved all his children.

Laugh bitterly but just like Elvis, Michael Jackson is adored. No other false idols will be allowed come between humanity and his Godhood. His priests will all wear a single white glove, Prince will be cast into exterior darkness and instead of communion wine, his feast will be celebrated with O.J..

Of course, all copies of Christopher Andersen’s biography will have been burnt. The Chandler case will be deemed a malignant conspiracy, the last temptation of Michael Jackson by his wicked enemies who could neither understand nor share in his simple, celibate love of children. In this fairy-tale, everyone lived happily ever after . . .

A satire perhaps but in the case of Michael Jackson, reality has been italicized. In its raw, abrasive and disrobed state, reality, as we once thought we knew it, hardly figures. The Jackson scandal catapults all observers into dreamland with all the non-sequiters and surreal shifts that typify that state. The charge and counter-charge tennis match begins and Perry Mason is serving to himself.

Andersen’s book does its best to unblinkingly relay the damning facts but it rarely pauses to ponder or philosophise. Quite clearly, Michael Jackson’s tragedy is an event of maximum American pop-culture denial. Just like Elvis Presley in his later years, the music hardly matters. Just like Elvis, Michael Jackson as the King of Pop is a cult, attracting the most ardent and desperate believers in the American Dream. Too much faith has been invested in his sanctity for him to be toppled from his throne.

And yet one incident distills the horror. Two months after the Chandlers made their allegations, Jackson cracked up in Mexico City. His balance disrupted by stress and a disabling combination of painkillers, stimulants and tranquillizers, he drove his head against his hotel-room’s wall, scrawled gibberish with a felt-pen all over the furniture and every surface in the bedroom, and finally curled up, trembling in a foetal position. Or to paraphrase the Trammps: “BURNIN’ BURNIN’ FOETAL INFERNO”.

Sadly but accurately, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Michael Jackson may have been corrupted into a monster of conceit but there can be no doubt but that he also once was a victim, a member of a most dysfunctional family, terrorized and emotionally devoured by their tyrannical father, Joe.

Sexual confusion came early. Michael was but 8 when the Jacksons played crude Chicago strip-joints and his father encouraged an act wherein Michael peeked up the skirts of any women in the audience. Meanwhile the father flaunted his many affairs in front of his children. At 15, Michael froze in terror when without his foreknowledge, his brothers hired two hookers who strove but failed to take his virginity. His brothers would follow his father into the world of masculine sexual competition, marrying and divorcing early usually with violence to their wives. Smarter and far more sensitive, Michael would find an escape route that eventually led to other traps.

Andersen mentions one uncorroborated story that Jackson himself may have been abused by an older relative but even if this sordid event didn’t happen, Michael Jackson would associate adult sex with violence, trauma and power. The result: he shared his father’s fierce will but sought another self and shelter from the family’s traumas in a fantasy world of innocence. The problem: once he became an untouchable superstar, the two worlds were set to fuse.

One doesn’t even have to believe the accusations of paedophilia. Anderson convincingly characterizes Jackson as a most vicious businessman whose ambitions were increasingly untempered by any scruple. In this, he followed his father; this Bambi always wanted to be the biggest, baddest beast in the jungle.

It was also understandable. Michael Jackson wanted to be his generation’s version of Elvis Presley but Presley without the rip-offs. In consequence, he became not only Elvis but Elvis and his own Col. Tom Parker. When his manager, Frank Dileo, became too familiar and took too much credit for himself, he was abruptly sacked. Jackson would always be the master, never the servant.

Take his relationship with Chuck Sullivan who paid $18 million for the rights to all Jackson merchandizing. With Jackson a recluse, unwilling to promote the products, the lines bombed and Sullivan, owing $30 million, was forced into bankruptcy. Jackson showed no pity; he held onto the millions Sullivan had paid him.

Meanwhile he played the faun. It was convenient to ascribe his role-playing to publicity scams, L.A. eccentricity and his background as a child star. This was his original strategy to avoid the pitfalls of superstardom. Jackson would deal with business by being both Presley and his own Col. Tom Parker and escape alimony and sexual entrapment by playing the faux naif.

Andersen’s book is also a parable of sycophancy. As the richest man in pop, Jackson believed that family and servitors would always look the other way. And yet as early as ‘82, stories were circulating that Jackson’s interest in young boys might not be so saintly. But nobody blabbed and Yoko Ono was quite content that her (and John’s) son Sean was a regular Jackson playmate.

Of course when the allegations about Jackson’s relationship with Jordan Chandler emerged, the Jackson camp instantly claimed it was an extortion attempt. Their problem was that either/or logic doesn’t happen in Los Angeles. The motives of Jordan Chandler’s parents and lawyers may have been most suspect but that doesn’t change the facts of the case.

I confess I became suspicious when they didn’t produce immediate proof. Superstars have their own sophisticated security systems. Phone-calls are logged and taped; they also have access to the most modern bugging devices. Even the most devious and professional blackmailer can be entrapped but Jackson’s private eye, Anthony Pellicano could offer only obviously bogus and crudely edited tapes of conversations with Jordan Chandler’s father.

Pellicano did tape an August 17 meeting with the Chandlers’ lawyer, Barry Rothman but he produced no record of an earlier meeting on August 4 when he claimed Rothman demanded $20 million dollars. Perhaps Rothman did but might any tape also have included incriminating material against Jackson?

The Jackson team's other tactic was to insist on the star’s (s)exceptionality. Quoth Pellicano: “If it’s a 35-year-old paedophile, then it’s obvious why he’s sleeping with little boys. But if it’s Michael Jackson, then it doesn’t mean anything.”

“He never had a childhood” correctly claimed one of his attorneys. But why did Jackson have a string of 12-year old companions, all eventually dropped for the next in line? And why did none of these relationships develop into an adult friendship?

Of course, the Chandler family left ample opportunity for their own reputations to be blackened. Jordan’s mother, June, divorced and remarried, was initially happy to accept Jackson’s bounty. Bizarrely she let Jackson move into to her own home and sleep 30 nights with her son. Then in May ‘93, she swanned off with the pair to the World Music Awards in Monaco. Jackson gave her a blank cheque to buy whatever she wanted in the principality.

Michael Jackson’s defenders also played the race card. Rev Jesse Jackson contacted newspaper editors to counteract hostile coverage. As late as last January, Michael Jackson appeared as a prize-giver at the nationally televized ceremonies of the prestigious and senior civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s Image Awards.

He even found support among black women activists. Said Von Alexander, the Director of Entertainment for the National Congress of Black Women: “I can’t believe this is being done to such a humanitarian.”

In the end, the two parties settled but the damage was done. Chandler was spared the second trauma of testifying against Jackson’s lethal legal team but payment of $26 million (higher than the Chandlers were initially alleged to have demanded) hardly indicates an uncompromised Michael Jackson. Meanwhile the California police have refused to close the case. Reading the weight of circumstancial evidence and the testimony of the number of witnesses that Andersen has assembled, one realizes they had no other option.

If one accepts Andersen’s damning case, it really was the ultimate betrayal of trust. In Ireland, we get incensed by clerics who abuse but Jackson was in a even worse position, not a priest but literally almost a deity. The story gets even more squalid as Anderson infers that there were parents who were panderers paid off in Mercedes, cash and jewellery while Jackson gambolled and gambled with their sons. Just as in the O.J. Simpson case, skin colour is either armour or an irrelevence; money rules; and celebrity is a shield against the law.

And yet he may salvage his position. Michael Jackson may never play live again but he has the money, talent and advisors to keep recording and selling albums. As Andersen notes, American radio-play and sales of his records boomed in the immediate wake of the scandal. Perhaps this is not so surprising; P.T. Barnum is one of Jackson’s heroes.

He claims only to have read Peter Pan and the Bible, escaping his own pain by finding a second childhood that was a most sentimental substitute of spurious Victorian invention. Artistically, it worked with Off The Wall and even the darker passages of Thriller gave hope for his development. But will anyone be able to listen to his later records without thinking of the Oscar Wilde of “Dorian Grey”, the one contemporary of J.M. Barrie he might have read with profit?