Michael Jackson: Beyond the Pale

So Michael Jackson does the moonwalk not the perp walk. Perhaps even now he's having some special friends over for a celebratory Neverland sleepover, there being apparently being no end of mothers willing to entrust their moppets to him. Here's what I wrote about the paleface for The Sunday Telegraph four years ago:

MICHAEL JACKSON flew into disease-ridden Britain last week, wisely taking the precaution of wearing a surgical mask. At Blenheim Palace, which must have seemed a bit of a comedown after Neverland, they rolled out a red carpet covered in disinfectant. Just for a change, instead of grabbing his crotch, he was grabbing his crutch, hobbling around due to some domestic misfortune. Speaking at the Oxford Union, he called on the world to adopt his Children's Bill of Rights, including "the right to be thought adorable" and "the right to be listened to without having to be interesting". The right to a $30 million out-of-court settlement, won by a 13-year old former playmate of his, was not mentioned.

Michael also revealed the pain of his own lost childhood, as tears rolled down his cheek - or whoever's cheek it was originally. It's a constant motif in his work. "Have you seen my childhood?" he sang in "Childhood", the theme from Free Willy. (Free Willy, by the way, is a motion picture and not another demand from his Bill of Rights.) The artwork of his 1995 double-album HIStory, Past, Present & Future - Book 1 includes a self-portrait of Michael as a young boy clutching a microphone and huddled in a corner: "Before you judge me, try hard to love me, look within your heart and ask, have you seen my childhood?"

Michael spent his childhood pretending to be grown-up enough to sing love songs with the Jackson Five. He's spent his adulthood pretending to be a child. For a while, he liked to hang out at Disneyland with Mickey Mouse, one of the few A-list celebrities with whom he had anything in common - not least the white gloves, squeaky voice, snub nose, bizarre albino face bearing no relation to the jet black surround, and a penchant for hanging out with kids even though you're well into middle age. Later, he was friends with Home Alone cutie Macaulay Culkin: they liked to go shopping together wearing buck teeth and false noses. But Macko outgrew Jacko and moved on to broads and booze. The last time Michael was in Britain he was accompanied by Omar Bhatis, a 12-year old boy who came first in a Michael Jackson lookalike contest in Norway: kitted out in matching white gloves and surgical masks, they checked into the Dorchester together.

For his latest visit, he was accompanied by a new best friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who, unusually for a Jacko chum, appears to be old enough to shave. His other friend is Uri Geller, for whose renewal of marital vows Michael served as best man. Mr Geller is best known for his ability to take a spoon and, by all but imperceptibly gliding his finger over the surface, bend it into a different shape entirely. You can also do that with Michael's nose, of course, but he tends to get annoyed. Still, the sight of Michael Jackson in the company of men old enough to be the fathers of his previous friends prompts a question: is the Peter Pan of pop finally growing up?

Born in Gary, Indiana in 1958, young Michael enjoyed eight relatively showbiz-free years before being forced with his older brothers into a singing quintet. According to the authorised biopic The Jacksons: An American Dream, his ambitious father isolated Michael from other boys, so that his only company was a small rodent who scurried around the kitchen floor. "Will you be my friend, Mister Rat?" he asked, and Mister Rat, no doubt cynically contemplating the prospect of a massive sexual harassment suit down the line, twitched his nose in agreement.

But, a few nights later, the Jackson Five won the high school talent competition, and Michael came home eager to show off his trophy, only to find his little chum under the kitchen table, dead in a rat trap. "He was my friend. Somebody killed him!" wailed the young singer, racing around the house accusing members of his family and trembling on the brink of inverting the old Jimmy Cagney line: "You dirty brother, you killed my rat!"

At Tamla Motown, the Jackson Five's first four records went to Number One and one of them, "I Want You Back", with an 11-year-old Michael wailing about an intensity of passion he knew nothing about then and seems unlikely ever to experience, is as good as anything Motown ever released. He didn't think anybody would want him without his brothers, but Thriller (1983), produced by Quincy Jones, artfully fused soul, rock, Vincent Price and the nascent video form to become the world's all-time best-selling album. Yet, though still just about recognisably African-American, Michael was already considerably less black than on the cover of his previous album, Off The Wall. He was also rumoured to be hanging out with chimps and llamas.

In an in-depth interview with Oprah Winfrey, the King of Pop mused on the preoccupations of the press. "If I had a chance to talk to Michelangelo," he squeaked, "I would want to know about the anatomy of his craftsmanship, not about who he went out with. That's what's important to me."

"How much plastic surgery have you had?" responded Oprah, less interested in the anatomy of his craftsmanship than the craftsmanship of his anatomy. "You can count it on two fingers," replied Jacko, holding up two he'd made earlier.

But, as with Michelangelo's David, Oprah's eye was drawn to one region in particular. "Why do you always grab your crotch?" she asked, alluding to his principal choreographic innovation. "It happens subliminally," he said, although a more plausible explanation is that he's just checking on the one bit of him the plastic surgeon hasn't got to.

There are those who say Michael changed after his hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. There were stories that he took female hormones to keep his voice high, that he slept in an oxygen chamber, that he lightened his skin. By the Eighties, his celebrity friends were mostly post-menopausal women such as Katharine Hepburn and Sophia Loren. When asked whether he'd proposed to Elizabeth Taylor, his lips remained sealed, though that may be just an unfortunate side-effect. It could be that the marriage story was simply a misunderstanding: he asked Liz for her hand and she said: "Why not? You've already got Diana Ross's nose." By the time he eventually married Lisa-Marie Presley, it seemed more to do with the King of Pop's dynastic ambitions, a desire to mate with the essence of Elvis and sire the greatest pop star of all.

But there was no progeny or even, by some accounts, much heavy petting. By the mid-Nineties, Jacko was in the papers mostly for settling out of court with two boys and prompting California prosecutors to fly to Australia to interview another. Eleven-year old Brett Barnes told investigators he and Jackson had slept in the same bed together but insisted the singer had behaved properly at all times. Reeling from the allegations and hooked on painkillers, Jacko checked into Beechy Colclough's Charter Clinic in Chelsea, west London, where Beechy weaned him off his addiction by substituting tea and biscuits for the tranquillisers. In Jacko's later videos that may look like his crotch he's grabbing, but actually he's just checking on his packet of Hob Nobs.

Since then, Michael has had two children by Debbie Rowe, the nurse who'd been treating him for his alleged pigmentation disorder. Michael's son is called Prince Michael Jr, his daughter is Paris Michael, the name "Princess Michael" evidently being thought likely to expose her to ridicule. The proud father, wearing his surgical mask, was present at the birth of both children. Whether he was present at the conception is the subject of much speculation.

It's hardly worth mentioning the records any more. After Thriller, the follow-up Bad was considered a flop: Michael Jackson became a symbol not just of his own weirdness, but of the insanity of an industry where sales of 25 million make you a loser. You could argue that Michael Jackson's ever-more-bleached complexion is a shorthand for pop's history: after a century of white exploitation of black music, he's the first black singer to become his own white cover version. Does Michael ever look in the mirror, recall that little boy with the Jackson Five and think "I Want You Back"? The Sunday Telegraph, March 11th 2001

Ismail Merchant, who died this past week, was one of the most effective film producers of recent years and, unlike the Miramax boys, a genuine independent. I met him a couple of times over the years and he was such a charmer I always came away feeling bad I didn't like his movies more. I guess my main beef was the one I make below - that, even at their best, they still seemed like "adaptations" rather than anything in their own right. A lot of people felt differently, of course. Merchant-Ivory established itself as a hugely successful brand in the Eighties, when it tapped into the same late-period Imperial nostalgia mined by the TV versions of Brideshead and Jewel In The Crown. Their lustre had dimmed a little by the time I started reviewing films for The Spectator. Scroll down for my take on The Remains Of The Day, but first, from 1995, here's something of an exotic excursion for Merchant-Ivory:

Merchant-Ivory films exist in the same relationship to their source material as National Trust gift shops do to the main property. The house itself is a monument to failure, lost to the family which built it, unsuited to modern living, impossible to heat and plumb even if you could have paid off the death duties — and then the gift shop shrieks: celebrate the country house experience by taking home this fragrant pot-pourri and a Laura Ashley stationary holder! That’s what Merchant-Ivory’s The Remains of the Day is: a sweet pot-pourri suffocating the novel’s sense of loss and melancholy and decline.

True, their early films did provide employment for rangey, floppy-fringed public school actors who otherwise would have been grubbing around Hollywood jostling for the neurotic gay hairdresser parts. But now Merchant-Ivory has begun to show a little impatience with these strictly local stars and to yearn for the real thing. A few years ago, a West End producer told me he was planning a musical version of Edward and Mrs Simpson with Tom Jones in the title role.‘Which one?’ I asked, genuinely curious. Merchant-Ivory effortlessly tops that casting with Jefferson in Paris . For Thomas Jefferson, philosopher statesman, author of the Declaration of Independence, third President of these United States, it chose . . . Nick Nolte.

Now Nolte is an amiable blonde bozo who staggers around well enough in I Love Trouble and Down and Out in Beverly Hills . But he’s not Thomas Jefferson, the man who introduced Paine’s Rights of Man to America. For one thing, Nolte looks like a 20th-century man — more specifically, a 20th-century movie star; like Stallone, his jaw is wider than his hair and his neck is wider than his jaw, and not even a luxuriant blond wig can even up the proportions convincingly enough to transform a pain in the neck into a neck into Paine.

Speaking of wigs, Merchant-Ivory films are traditionally distinguished by their cars, but the Bentleys and Rolls-Royces would have looked a bit odd trundling around 18th-century France, so the automobile budget has been lavished on the coiffures instead. Once you accept that the wigs are stand-in cars and the actors are principally there to chauffeur their hairpieces around, you just raise your eyes a couple of inches and the film drops with ease into the Merchant-Ivory pattern: brnn, brrm! here comes Greta Scacchi motoring in her sporty droptop only to be rear-ended by Nolte in his automatic pick-up; she doesn’t mind as she’s fed up with her broken-down camper (Simon Callow).

But here’s a funny thing. Although Nolte as Jefferson is ridiculous, his very ridiculousness makes him the best thing in the picture. All around him, the usual Merchant-Ivory complacency is putting the movie to sleep. According to some, Jefferson had a passionate affair with his black maid; according to others, the relationship was perfectly proper. Predictably enough, Merchant-Ivory takes the view that he did have a passionate affair and then makes a perfectly proper, non-passionate movie about it. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script is a cliché compendium of flashbacks and voice-overs that sounds like one of those interminable Radio 4 adaptations where Anna Massey reads letters to Martin Jarvis (or vice-versa). Paris is in the grip of revolutionary fervour but that would never do in Merchant-Ivory so, just to make sure that nothing whatsoever happens, the film checks out just before the revolution. When Jefferson’s daughter wrenches off her wig and shoves it down a vase, you want to cheer: liberté, egalité,, mais pas de toupée. The Spectator, June 17th 1995

Two years earlier, the company adapted Kazuo Ishiguro's widely admired novel. I was critical of it in 1993, but it's worth catching up with on TV or DVD, not just because it looks very handsome but because it's almost an archetype of the company's approach:

I don’t suppose it was difficult, but the best decision P.G. Wodehouse ever made was to write in Bertie Wooster’s voice — breezy, slangy, peppered with misfired shots at elegant erudition. Jeeves is fine in small doses, as quoted by Bertie, but left to run at length his discreet circumlocutions would rapidly transform him, in the eyes of his readers, into one of the all-time crashers.

That was presumably the challenge Kazuo Ishiguro set himself in The Remains of the Day: write a story told by a dull, fastidious pedant and try not to wind up with a dull, fastidious, pedantic book. Such distinction as the novel possessed derived from the voice — that of Stevens the butler, struggling in 1958 to make sense of a life devoted to the service of one of history's fall guys, a Nazi-appeasing peer. Motoring round the West Country, Stevens gradually realises how unsuited he is to a less formal world: he is no good at, as he puts it, ‘banter’.

This is a novelist’s device — a man who has learnt to employ language as a means of avoiding feelings finds he has no language with which to express feelings. No doubt someone somewhere could find a cinematic equivalent for this, but James Ivory and his screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala don’t even try: as with their previous collaborations, this film is content to look like an adaptation rather than attempt to be anything in its own right.

In the book, we squeeze between Stevens lines to glimpse what’s really going on: Lord Darlington's a dupe, the butler’s in love with the housekeeper. On screen, it’s laid out like a dinner service, underlined by heavy symbolism (bird trapped in drawing-room is released through window and spreads its wings), double-underlined by the dialogue which substitutes for the novels self-examination: 'Why do you always have to hide what you feel?' Miss Kenton asks him. Golly, so that's what it’s about. Only in the final moments when the audience supplies the romance the characters can’t admit to, does the movie pull off the book’s trick: it’s what's not happening that drives the plot.

In New York the other night, I caught a commercial for the film. ‘A world of devoted service,’ growls the dark-brown American voiceover, as we see Anthony Hopkins (Stevens) with James Fox (Darlington). ‘A life of unspoken longing’ — Hopkins with Emma Thompson (Miss Kenton). Immediately afterwards, Joss Ackland turned up as a pussy-stroking, Nehru-jacketed Bond villain to extol the virtues of Energizer batteries. From ‘You rang, m’lord?’ to ‘Not so fast, Mr Bond’ isn’t so very far. But fussy, soft-spoken civility is more interesting from a megalomaniac psychopath than from a docile servant. The Hopkins act works in Elephant Man or Silence of the Lambs in counter point to what’s going on around him. Here, he’s too perfectly cast.

The rest of the film, meanwhile, is perfectly wrong, losing not only the voice but also the point of view: pre-war as seen from post-Suez, a time when it wasn’t only butlers who were experiencing twinges of doubt about the old certainties. On screen, it's mostly just the Thirties with the odd flash-forward to the Fifties and, as it’s Merchant-Ivory, everything looks swell anyway. Drab Fifties austerity? Don’t you believe it. Ivory takes no chances: improving on the novel, he upgrades Stevens's car to a Daimler: the seaside resort, the Palm Court, the boarding-house, everything is blissfully untouched by post-war decline.

Well, you retort, the US Fifties didn’t look much like Happy Days or American Graffiti. But it’s not a lack of historical accuracy so much as dramatic tension. Ishiguro’s Stevens is engaging because the world is clearly not as he sees it. But, viewed through Ivory’s lens, Britain is as reserved, deferential and impeccable as Stevens himself. Poor people, peeling paint, scratched cars, factory furniture, all know their place — off-camera. Indeed, in Stevens the butler, Ivory seems to have discovered his on-screen alter-ego. When the new Earl proves unable or unwilling to maintain Darlington Hall, Stevens finds himself in service to a rich American. Similarly, with this film, Ivory has an American co-produce, Mike Nichols (!) and a Hollywood studio, Columbia. Merchant-Ivory have stumbled upon their true niche, as cinematic butlers to anglophile Americans: everything buffed and polished, exquisite manners— and they never give offence. The Spectator, November 13th 1993 Mark Steyn

2 posted on 06/15/2005 4:27:41 PM PDT by solitas (So what if I support an OS that has fewer flaws than yours? 'Mystic' dual 500 G4's, OSX.4.1)

I wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that Jacko held his post-trial celebration at Chuck E. Cheese...

4 posted on 06/15/2005 4:34:44 PM PDT by ErnBatavia (Like a fool, I looked up from 'neath the tree as the bird chirped...Vogelspooren)

For his latest visit, he was accompanied by a new best friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who, unusually for a Jacko chum, appears to be old enough to shave.

< / chortle >

My uncle insists that the prosecutor charged Jackson on such scant evidence because he hates blacks. I told him that the only one who hates Michael Jackson because he is black.....is Michael Jackson.

If future generations would like to understand life in our times they could do no better than to read Mark Steyn.

Man, it doesn't get any better than this. The man is a genius of words. "Paleface". Excellent. Oh Mark Steyn, I am SO in love with your brain!!!!!!

>>>inverting the old Jimmy Cagney line: "You dirty brother, you killed my rat!">>>

LMAO!!!!

Steyn is brilliant and I wish he were single and I were better looking. ;o)

"My uncle insists that the prosecutor charged Jackson on such scant evidence because he hates blacks."

Could be. I myself thought that Michael's appearing on international television talking about how he enjoys sleeping with little boys while holding the hand of a little boy he sleeps with might have something to do with it.

Also not a good idea was continuing to sleep with little boys after paying megabucks to another little boy to escape prosecution for molesting that little boy and then write a song taunting the lead prosecutor calling him a "bad man" and worse.

What is really sad is those three little ones, Prince Michael 1, Paris, and Prince Michael 2.

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