Shockaholic Page 5

Michael was, to say the least, out of the ordinary—miles out. Somewhere that leaves ordinary far behind. But to be such a distance from ordinary obviously makes you a singular sort of person. And Michael certainly was that. Peerless, unlike any other, uncommon.

  Michael was so distinctively “other.” He possessed qualities that very few others could lay claim to. Some qualities that few would wish for, but others that to some would seem blessed. He could move—and move others—like no other. He altered any room he was in. Which could not only make someone want to be in those rooms but perhaps also want to stay out.

  One weekend, Billie and I were invited to Neverland, Michael’s ranch somewhere north of L.A. We weren’t invited by Michael, but by Arnie. Michael had loaned Arnie his house for the weekend so he could have people up there to celebrate his birthday. So it was Billie and myself and one of her five-year-old friends from school and Arnie and his lover, plus an assortment of Arnie’s overweight gay male buddies (called “bears” by the “community,” as it were). Arnie is a big man himself, and he likes to surround himself with other similarly fleshy bears of a feather.

  So we gathered in Michael’s vast manicured acreage, on which was ensconced a neat cluster of guest houses, complete with their own little Neverland bars of soap, which I naturally coveted, stole, and then promptly lost. (How often I have thought of that soap, how I could have showed it off to friends, and maybe even have made a little Michael Jackson soap altar with a little spotlight shining on it in kind of a solemn circle causing the soap to alternately shine and glow.)

  Who else could have the whole Disneyland train thing at the entrance of his humble home, not to mention the rides and the projection room with the candy shop and the pizza parlor? Can you even conceive of being able to have all these things? How much does constructing an empire like that widen the gap between you and everyone else? How many other private zoo and amusement park owners can you commiserate with about what it’s like when the roller coaster breaks down? “What a hassle, right? Who do you use for that? ’Cause I can’t find anyone! And how’s your gorilla doing? Did you take him to that groomer I recommended? It’s really hard to find a good gorilla groomer nowadays, you know? Did you find a new pilot for your G5? I’ll have my assistant call yours with the name of this great guy who flew Geffen’s jet for a while . . . ”

  And on and on and on, placing yourself beyond the reach of any and all ordinary discourse. Of course, you don’t have to only talk to people in your tax bracket. You can be with people with far less income, but you might find yourself apologizing for the disparity, you know? I know, how sad, right? You have so much money that your social options become more limited.

  Anyway, Michael’s social options were severely restricted. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. He kind of stood apart from everything and everyone, pulling whatever focus was available, and waiting to see what would happen, who would gather, and how it would be. The exceptions were his children. He made himself a trio of companions to share his unique space, so distant from the ordinarily inhabited realms.

  Michael and I both had childhoods that were, by most standards, decidedly unusual. How many children start performing at such a young age? (He was six, I a relatively more reasonable thirteen.) How many children perform for actual audiences to begin with? For that matter, how many people of any age ever perform for actual audiences?

  Michael was famous long before he could even dimly understand what being adult meant. He was probably “someone” to other people long before he knew who he was to himself. At least I had arrived at the complex stage of puberty outside the hungry glare of a spotlight. But Michael . . . well, Michael was a child doing an adult’s job. A job that set him apart from everyone else his age—or pretty much everyone else, period. Who were his peers? Who could he relate to? Who would not have to pretend not to be weirded out by his radioactive celebrity?

  You know the term “starstruck”? An odd term, no? And of course it can only happen to people who aren’t stars. The starstruck are thrown off—impacted by celebrity in a way that they find difficult to recover from, at least in the immediate time frame. I think that maybe one of the reasons that Michael could trust me—to the degree that he was able to trust anyone—is that I was immune to celebrity’s charms. Repeated exposure to anything renders it increasingly ordinary. The same especially holds true for what might otherwise (or initially) be considered extraordinary. Sort of like “too much of a good thing.” The charm wears off, the bloom shakes off the rose, and it’s midnight at Cinderella’s ball.

  I never went into show business. It surrounded me from my first breath. A neater trick would’ve been for me to sneak out. I never wanted to be an actress, let alone a celebrity. I’d grown up watching the bright glow of my parents’ stardom slowly dim, cool, and fade. I watched both my parents scramble to stay in the light. But fame has an unpredictable half-life. While not necessarily fleeting, it is guaranteed to inevitably flee. Running and screaming from the room.

  When I got the part of a princess in this goofy little science fiction film, I thought, what the fuck, right? It’ll be fun to do. I’m nineteen! Who doesn’t want to have fun at nineteen? I’ll go hang out with a bunch of robots for a few months and then return to my life and try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Who knows! Maybe I’ll even go to college! You know? Real college this time—not a pretend drama one. Or I could get a Eurail Pass and blunder around Europe with the rest of the hippie students. But then this goofy, little three-month hang-out with robots did something unexpected—it misbehaved. It did something no movie had ever really done before. It exploded across the firmament of pop culture, taking all of us along with it. It tricked me into becoming a star all on my who-gives-a-shit own.

  I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because there are absolutely amazing things about being a celebrity. Things that are really fun, you know? Things like traveling, getting a good table at a full restaurant, and generally being treated better than almost any human could possibly deserve. But from the very beginning, I knew something that wouldn’t ordinarily have crossed another brand-new celebrity’s mind. I knew it would be over eventually, that I was on the clock in a way that the other newly famous folks had no idea about. And this knowing of mine put a kind of damper on the whole thing. I was playing a waiting game. My expensive car would return to being a more affordable pumpkin, and my designer ballgown back to being the knockoff attire they once wore. So, rather than wait for this shoe to drop—for this glass slipper to shatter—I thought, why not break it myself and get it over with? Break it and go back to that place where I had a more manageable amount to lose.

  What does all of this have to do with Michael Jackson?

  Frankly, I can’t quite remember how I got out here on this limb of what’s so bad about looking familiar. But I do know that if there’s any kind of a vibe that I emanate, it’s the one of not being enthused about being a celebrity. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s not that I don’t care about it, it’s that I don’t trust it. It’s shaped my entire life. Maybe not shaped so much as distorted, because that’s another part of what it does. It’s a magnifier, in a way. It can make good people great and bad people awful-ish. It makes life more lifelike.

  I was watching a documentary about New Guinea recently and in it a man from one of the tribes there was marveling at how much stuff Americans seemed to need. “Why you all have to have so much cargo?” Well, to me that’s part of what celebrity is. A massive amount of cargo. Cargo and spectacle. “You know who I am, therefore I am.” Or, perhaps more to the point, “You know who I am, therefore I must be someone. Right?”

  Anyway, it radiates out of me. My at least partial pose of how indifferent I am. And that was a big deal for Michael Jackson, because you’d see people around him who would completely transform, becoming virtually idiotic. Michael was so famous that he transcended humanness. Becoming a kind of Jesus Michael Jackson Christ.

  His fame distorted whiche
ver situation you were in with him. His otherness could actually overwhelm his gifts a lot of the time, which was quite a feat because I know I bring no news when I say he was a very gifted human being.

  I am fairly certain that I first met Michael in Arnie Klein’s office around the time Billie was born, which makes it about eighteen years ago. My friend Bruce Wagner is one of her godfathers, and Arnie is the other. Billie would call Arnie “Godfather Two.”

  When Billie was about six months old, Michael saw some pictures of her in Arnie’s office, called, and left me a message, in that voice of his, with its own dialect. And picking up this message of his was an amazing and disconcerting thing. In a way, it was like getting a communication from Santa Claus, or some other fairy-tale character. Michael’s message was that he wanted pictures of Billie. Now, that was odd. But you know, also—given that all the court case stuff hadn’t happened yet—kind of sweet. It was like he identified with or was drawn to all things innocent. And yet everyone turned that into something perverse. No one could believe that he was that innocent or that his motives were innocent. But I actually did.

  But getting back to the special medical access I mentioned earlier, I had this dentist at the time, a Dr. Evan Chandler, who was a very strange character. He was what would be referred to as the Dentist to the Stars! And as one of the people who would have unnecessary dental work just for the morphine, this man was one of those people who could arrange such a welcome service. He referred his patients to a mobile anesthesiologist who would come into the office to put you out for the dental work. And as if that wasn’t glorious enough, this anesthesiologist could also be easily and financially persuaded to come to your house to administer the morphine for your subsequent luxury pain relief. And I would extend my arms, veins akimbo, and say to this man—“Send me away, but don’t send me all the way.”

  But remember that dentist who sued Michael for molesting his kid?

  Yes, that was my dentist. Evan Chandler, D.D.S. Dentist to the Stars. And this same Dr. Chandler—long before the lawsuit was brought (though not necessarily before it was contemplated)—needed someone to brag to about his son’s burgeoning friendship with Michael Jackson. (This was years before Michael had children of his own.) And so my “dentist” would go on and on about how much his son liked Michael Jackson and, more important, how much Michael Jackson liked his son. And the most disturbing thing I remember him saying was, “You know, my son is very good looking.”

  Now I ask you—what father talks about his child that way? Well, maybe some do but (a) I don’t know them, and (b) they probably aren’t raising an eyebrow and looking suggestive when they say it. Over the years I’ve heard many proud fathers tell me, “My son is great,” or “My kid is adorable,” but this was the only time I’d ever heard this particular boast:

  “My son [unlike most average male offspring] is VERY [unsettling smile, raised eyebrows, maybe even a lewd wink] good-looking [pause for you to reflect and/or puke].”

  It was grotesque! This man was letting me know that he had this valuable thing that he assumed Michael Jackson wanted, and it happened to be his son. But it wasn’t who his son was, it was what he was: “good-looking.”

  So here was Dr. Chandler telling me how Michael was buying his kid computers and taking him to incredible places and sleeping in the same bed and getting him . . . WAIT!

  “Hang on,” I said. “I have to interrupt here. Let’s just go back a tic, okay?”

  “Sure,” Chandler said.

  “They’re sleeping in the same bed?!”

  He blinked. “Well, yeah, but my ex-wife is always there, so it’s okay, and his stepfather and . . . and . . . and . . . ”

  Dr. Chandler’s stories became longer than my treatments. The drugs were wearing off before the story. Not that there was enough dope in the world to make these stories palatable. This was one creepy story. Off hand, I’d say the creepiest. And somehow I’d become this freak’s confidante.

  So I told this bizarre tale to my friend, Gavin de Becker, who specializes in, among other things, celebrity weirdness, with a particular expertise in protecting celebrities from stalkers. He’s written four compelling books about fear and security and the like. So I called Gavin and told him about this dentist dumping this ghastly tale of his son and Michael Jackson in my lap, and Gavin told me, “Here’s what you should say to the guy: ‘Let me get this straight. You’re telling me your son is having sleepovers in the same bed as Michael Jackson. Let me put this to you another way and tell me if you think this is okay. Your thirteen-year-old son is sleeping in the same bed as a thirty-something African-American millionaire. Is that okay with you? Or does it need to be Michael Jackson to make this incredibly flawed situation make sense?’ ” I said this to Chandler and, as I dimly recall, we didn’t speak much for a while after that.

  Then one night some months later, Dr. Chandler came up to my house again and told me that he and his wife were going to sue Michael.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” he explained rationally, “Michael is sleeping in the same bed with my boy.”

  Now, I know for a fact that when this first started happening, the good doctor saw no problem with this odd bunking! Excuse me, he had been creepy enough to have allowed all this to happen, and now he’s suddenly shocked—shocked!—virtually consumed with moral indignation! “Can you believe it? I think Michael may have even put his hand on my child’s privates.” Well, what was this man thinking in the first place? Why did he encourage him to sleep in the same bed as Michael Jackson to begin with?

  He did it because he knew, somewhere, he would eventually be able to say, “Oh, my God! I suddenly realize that this thing between Michael and my son is weird. I’m horrified. My son may have been damaged! And the only thing that can repair this damage is many millions of dollars! Then he’ll be okay! And we’re not going to buy anything for ourselves with that money! It’s all going toward our son being okay!!!” This was around the time that I knew I had to find another dentist. No drug can hide the fact that one’s skin is crawling.

  The thing is, though, I never thought that Michael’s whole thing with kids was sexual. Never. Granted, it was miles from appropriate, but just because it wasn’t normal doesn’t mean that it had to be perverse. Those aren’t the only two choices for what can happen between an adult and an unrelated child spending time together. Even if that adult has had too much plastic surgery and what would appear to be tattooed makeup on his face. And yes, he had an amusement park, a zoo, a movie theater, popcorn, candy, and an elephant. But to draw a line under all that and add it up to the assumption that he fiendishly rubbed his hands together as he assembled this giant super spiderweb to lure and trap kids into it is just bad math.

  I actually don’t think Michael was sexual at all. Incredibly talented, yes. Childlike, for sure. Pathologically kind, absolutely. But how stupid would you have to be to have sex with the little kids you’re endlessly hanging out with? And Michael was not stupid. He might have been a little naïve and definitely richer than most anyone in the whole world, and it was this absolutely fatal combination that made people want to desperately try to figure out how to squeeze some of that money out of his enormous wallet.

  But wait! Check this out! Let’s say your “really good-looking son” started hanging out with this odd-looking famous multi-multimillionaire that could maybe be persuaded to give you twenty-two million dollars if you threatened to tell everyone in the world that he touched your son’s underage, maybe-not-even-fully-grown-yet member. Well, I don’t know what you’d do? But when my dentist was presented with a choice between integrity and twenty-two million dollars, you’ll never guess what he did! That’s right—he went for the cash! But hey, he was only human-ish, right? But really, who could blame him? I mean, besides you and me and anyone else alive who cares about ruining their kid’s life, who else could blame Dr. Chandler for what he did? (I’ll wait while you think.)

  Moving on . . .

&n
bsp; I always felt that a huge part of the appeal of kids for Michael was that they couldn’t be corrupted by his fame. Obviously a celebrity is a person set apart from the throng. Someone who not only has a private life, like all humans, but a public one as well.

  “What are they like in real life?”

  What sort of question is that?

  “Oh, he’s so nice,” people will say after they encounter a celebrity. “Incredibly down-to-earth.”

  Down-to-earth from where? Where did they get back to earth from?! And was it a long trip? Will they go back soon? And why? And will they take me with them?

  Michael’s celebrity turned many people into eager, greedy stargazers who only wanted something from him above and beyond what a normal human is willing or expected to give. They were there for the anecdote. It’s what I call the “shine.” People want to rub up against it, and in so doing, their own value is increased. But I’d like to propose a reason why Michael might’ve preferred the company of children to what I’ve heard referred to as adults.

  Kids of a certain age, being too young to understand the peculiar phenomenon of fame, are potentially easier to trust and hang out with than a certain kind of adult, who, as I said earlier, more often than not have a tendency to start acting completely disorganized around someone as outrageously famous as Michael. And children are far less likely to act this way because they don’t exactly know what fame is yet. To them, famous is cartoon characters, or Muppets, or Barney. It’s too abstract a concept for kids.

  Obviously, children are more likely to feel important if they’re treated well. I don’t think that they necessarily compute need and/or feeling better because they’re treated well by millions of strangers. Their toys aren’t more fun than ovations.

  The other people who aren’t rendered strange around famous people are generally . . . other famous people! In such instances, the issue of celebrity is neutralized, and they are free to move on to whatever they like or don’t like about one another in the usual human way. So that partly explains why Michael might have enjoyed hanging out with say, Elizabeth Taylor, for example, or even maybe me! (Yes, that’s what all this finally boils down to—me, me, me, me, me!)