CauseImBad
Proud Member
If there was one thing that Michael Jackson hated, despised and obsessed about, it was the soubriquet ***** *****, invented, rather cleverly I always thought, by a Sun sub-editor after the performer was photographed lying down in a premature baby’s oxygen tent.
He insisted to me that he wasn’t remotely “wacko” again and again during a bizarre time a decade ago when I worked alongside him for almost a year, writing a doomed, subsequently unpublished, book on, er, the sanctity of childhood.
Michael’s explanation for the episode was compelling to anyone who knows the ways of the popular end of press photography. And it didn’t give me a lot of scope for defending the Sun headline writer.
The incident, in Michael’s view, stemmed from a joke that he cracked to a photographer. He had been opening a wing of a children’s hospital in LA and spotted the respirator.
RELATED LINKS
A surreal journey into Neverland
Abuse cases showed star's dark side
PR suicide with the help of Martin Bashir
“Gee, if I had one of those, I could live to be 150,” he claims that he said. The snapper then coaxed him into the machine on the pretext that it would be great publicity for the hospital, fired off a few frames and gave birth to a myth about Michael actually owning and sleeping in such an appliance.
Well, this could be true or it could be a desperate invention, and the person who would have known least what it was, in my view, was Michael himself.
Some of his associates and, more tellingly, former associates regarded Michael as an inveterate liar. He never told me anything I could precisely prove was a fib, but his relationship with what a normal person would call the truth was tenuous.
Take the facial plastic surgery thing. Despite it taking Michael an hour every morning to “fix himself up” as he put it, he coyly denied having had “work done”. I excused that as so much Hollywood shtick; what star ever does confess it? Yet Michael would then segue straight into talking about his appearance and what I am sure was the real, unaffected man was at last revealed.
In this mode, he morphed from being a charming, amusing and often enchanting flake into a serious, mature, tortured man, whom I believe was being wholly honest.
He told the late Jackie Onassis, who helped him with his autobiography, Moonwalker, that he used to wear masks to hide, and told me that his father, the famously harsh and demanding Joseph Jackson, bullied him as a child, repeatedly telling the little boy he was ugly, fat and spotty.
This must have been a pretty scarring inheritance. When I caught a surreptitious glimpse of Michael eyeing himself in a hotel bathroom mirror — his actual leveé, although as complicated seemingly as Louis XIV’s, was attended only by his childhood friend and manager Frank Tyson — I was minded of an anorexic teenager who is never quite satisfied with the image he sees in the mirror and has to keep changing it.
Establishing what was truly reliable was nonetheless difficult with Michael, like him hugely as I did during our acquaintance. Often, I think he was at a loss to remember stuff about his own life. Who can recall accurately anything before the teenage years? Almost nobody, yet a significant part of Michael’s career took place in the indistinct, muddled fog of childhood. Often, then, Michael’s memory of far-off times was either inaccurate or built up in retrospect.
When it came to Michael’s trial in the Santa Monica court house, of course, the dodgy memories (and, perhaps, financially motivated inventions) of children again became important — and might yet have ensured that Michael’s tragic death took place in a federal penitentiary.
I am confident he was truthful when he insisted he was no child molester. This is partly because Michael’s strict religious background — he was a Jehovah’s Witness although he flirted with Judaism and, latterly, Islam — ensured that even if his slightly ambiguous sexuality urged him to molest, his personal morality would have made such behaviour wholly impossible for him.
More to the point, no social worker or child protection expert I ever spoke to or heard believed that he fitted anything like the classic profile of an abuser.
Almost all paedophiles, as I understand it, are serial offenders with dozens or hundreds of victims. Michael, through his love of children and the small matter of having a free funfair in his back garden, was in contact with tens of thousands of children every year. Where was their testimony when the district attorney wanted it? Or will it all come out only now?
Another mystery. I remain swayed by the theory that Michael was a genuinely childlike individual, with an emotional age of about 14, this the result of having had one of the weirdest upbringings in history — a combination of being an international star from the age of 5, having a violent and abusive father, and being brought up in a sweet-natured but lunatic religious sect.
In other words, Michael’s sexual development may have progressed no farther than the childish and ultimately harmless “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” stage.
Yet how, I can’t help wondering, did his childlike nature square with his considerable maturity in business? Sure, he spent his money like a 12-year-old with an Amex card in Hamleys, but in earning that cash mountain, generations of record company executives will attest that he was something of a boardroom shark, with a meticulous eye for balance-sheet detail and a merciless way of dealing with incompetence or fiscal treachery.
I suppose these two Michaels could have co-existed, but it is odd, isn’t it, suggesting that the childlikeness could be a pose, a manipulative front he put on to lure vulnerable children into his traps?
Everyone who knew him sometimes questioned Michael Jackson’s relationship with the truth; yet with, in effect, a cash prize on offer after the massive deal with Jordan Chandler for anyone able halfway convincingly to allege abuse, there were barely any applicants.
Surely one would have expected a queue of chancers all the way from Neverland to Los Angeles trying to ring up three cherries on the Jackson fruit machine? Yet the families who took their cases to court weren’t even convincing enough to sway a sceptical, verging on hostile, jury in a city and a country that had long since fallen badly out of love with Michael.
It must count as a tribute to Michael’s credibility that the case against him failed so unexpectedly.
(I think this is the only objective, non-predjuduce article i have ever read about MJ in mainstream media, and considering it's from TIMES, that says a lot, maybe not every reporter is as malicious as the previous when it comes to michael.)
(although the beginning was a little uh, not nice.)
He insisted to me that he wasn’t remotely “wacko” again and again during a bizarre time a decade ago when I worked alongside him for almost a year, writing a doomed, subsequently unpublished, book on, er, the sanctity of childhood.
Michael’s explanation for the episode was compelling to anyone who knows the ways of the popular end of press photography. And it didn’t give me a lot of scope for defending the Sun headline writer.
The incident, in Michael’s view, stemmed from a joke that he cracked to a photographer. He had been opening a wing of a children’s hospital in LA and spotted the respirator.
RELATED LINKS
A surreal journey into Neverland
Abuse cases showed star's dark side
PR suicide with the help of Martin Bashir
“Gee, if I had one of those, I could live to be 150,” he claims that he said. The snapper then coaxed him into the machine on the pretext that it would be great publicity for the hospital, fired off a few frames and gave birth to a myth about Michael actually owning and sleeping in such an appliance.
Well, this could be true or it could be a desperate invention, and the person who would have known least what it was, in my view, was Michael himself.
Some of his associates and, more tellingly, former associates regarded Michael as an inveterate liar. He never told me anything I could precisely prove was a fib, but his relationship with what a normal person would call the truth was tenuous.
Take the facial plastic surgery thing. Despite it taking Michael an hour every morning to “fix himself up” as he put it, he coyly denied having had “work done”. I excused that as so much Hollywood shtick; what star ever does confess it? Yet Michael would then segue straight into talking about his appearance and what I am sure was the real, unaffected man was at last revealed.
In this mode, he morphed from being a charming, amusing and often enchanting flake into a serious, mature, tortured man, whom I believe was being wholly honest.
He told the late Jackie Onassis, who helped him with his autobiography, Moonwalker, that he used to wear masks to hide, and told me that his father, the famously harsh and demanding Joseph Jackson, bullied him as a child, repeatedly telling the little boy he was ugly, fat and spotty.
This must have been a pretty scarring inheritance. When I caught a surreptitious glimpse of Michael eyeing himself in a hotel bathroom mirror — his actual leveé, although as complicated seemingly as Louis XIV’s, was attended only by his childhood friend and manager Frank Tyson — I was minded of an anorexic teenager who is never quite satisfied with the image he sees in the mirror and has to keep changing it.
Establishing what was truly reliable was nonetheless difficult with Michael, like him hugely as I did during our acquaintance. Often, I think he was at a loss to remember stuff about his own life. Who can recall accurately anything before the teenage years? Almost nobody, yet a significant part of Michael’s career took place in the indistinct, muddled fog of childhood. Often, then, Michael’s memory of far-off times was either inaccurate or built up in retrospect.
When it came to Michael’s trial in the Santa Monica court house, of course, the dodgy memories (and, perhaps, financially motivated inventions) of children again became important — and might yet have ensured that Michael’s tragic death took place in a federal penitentiary.
I am confident he was truthful when he insisted he was no child molester. This is partly because Michael’s strict religious background — he was a Jehovah’s Witness although he flirted with Judaism and, latterly, Islam — ensured that even if his slightly ambiguous sexuality urged him to molest, his personal morality would have made such behaviour wholly impossible for him.
More to the point, no social worker or child protection expert I ever spoke to or heard believed that he fitted anything like the classic profile of an abuser.
Almost all paedophiles, as I understand it, are serial offenders with dozens or hundreds of victims. Michael, through his love of children and the small matter of having a free funfair in his back garden, was in contact with tens of thousands of children every year. Where was their testimony when the district attorney wanted it? Or will it all come out only now?
Another mystery. I remain swayed by the theory that Michael was a genuinely childlike individual, with an emotional age of about 14, this the result of having had one of the weirdest upbringings in history — a combination of being an international star from the age of 5, having a violent and abusive father, and being brought up in a sweet-natured but lunatic religious sect.
In other words, Michael’s sexual development may have progressed no farther than the childish and ultimately harmless “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” stage.
Yet how, I can’t help wondering, did his childlike nature square with his considerable maturity in business? Sure, he spent his money like a 12-year-old with an Amex card in Hamleys, but in earning that cash mountain, generations of record company executives will attest that he was something of a boardroom shark, with a meticulous eye for balance-sheet detail and a merciless way of dealing with incompetence or fiscal treachery.
I suppose these two Michaels could have co-existed, but it is odd, isn’t it, suggesting that the childlikeness could be a pose, a manipulative front he put on to lure vulnerable children into his traps?
Everyone who knew him sometimes questioned Michael Jackson’s relationship with the truth; yet with, in effect, a cash prize on offer after the massive deal with Jordan Chandler for anyone able halfway convincingly to allege abuse, there were barely any applicants.
Surely one would have expected a queue of chancers all the way from Neverland to Los Angeles trying to ring up three cherries on the Jackson fruit machine? Yet the families who took their cases to court weren’t even convincing enough to sway a sceptical, verging on hostile, jury in a city and a country that had long since fallen badly out of love with Michael.
It must count as a tribute to Michael’s credibility that the case against him failed so unexpectedly.
(I think this is the only objective, non-predjuduce article i have ever read about MJ in mainstream media, and considering it's from TIMES, that says a lot, maybe not every reporter is as malicious as the previous when it comes to michael.)
(although the beginning was a little uh, not nice.)
uke:
