Essay

The Eulogy That Wasn’t

I was filming a TV show with my family in Iceland when my office called and shared the terrible news of Michael’s passing. My wife and children were with me in the van and we could scarcely believe what we had heard. The children all remembered Michael fondly. He had given them their dog Marshmallow, who is still a member of our family. My daughter teared up. My heart bled for his children, whom he adored and who adored him in turn. I thought of Prince and Paris who were my children’s playmates, and their brother Prince II, known as “Blanket,” who I never met, and how attached they were to a father who regularly told me that he knew that when they grew up they would be asked by biographers what kind of parent he had been. He wanted them to have only warm memories to share. Alas, the memories will remain largely incomplete.

Yet I was not shocked to get the news. I had dreaded this day and knew it would come sooner rather than later.

During the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life, what most frightened me was not that he would face another child molestation charge, although he did. It was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, in an internationally telecast interview, “My greatest fear. . . is that Michael’s life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity, you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis. . . Michael is headed in that direction.”

Michael’s family publicly disputed any insinuation that he would die. As CNN reported in response to my interview “Jackson's family has denied suggestions that the pop star's life is unhealthy, insisting he is doing very well, particularly for someone who faces his unique pressures.”

I was also rebuked in that same interview by Raymone Baine, Michael’s spokesperson through the trial and for several years thereafter, who said I was being wreckless and irresponsible for saying that Michael was going to die. On May 6, 2009 Raymone Baine sued Michael for $44 million. Six weeks later it didn’t matter much because Michael was dead.

I am no prophet, and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. He confused an affliction of the soul with an ailment of the body. But all the barbiturates in the world could never cure a troubled soul that had lost its way.

Yes, from the media’s infatuation with every prurient detail of the aftermath of his death one would think that it was a cartoon character, a caricature of a real man, who had died rather than an actual person. Michael always had a mutually exploitive relationship with the American people. He used us to feed his constant need for attention and we used him to feed our constant need for entertainment.

Still, it would have been hard to believe that Michael’s story could be more bizarre in death than in life. But from the mother of Michael’s two older children “deciding” whether or not she wanted her kids; to his dermatologist leaving open the possibility that he is the father of Prince and Paris; to Joe Jackson talking up his new record label as his son’s body lay unburied; to nurses coming forward to claim that Michael asked them to inject him with quantities of painkillers that would have felled a water buffalo; to doctors being pursued by the Feds for acting as medically sanctioned pushers, clearly the impossible has been achieved.

And just when you thought this theater of the absurd had reached its zenith, the news came that Michael’s memorial service would take place at a basketball arena complete with twelve thousand fans and that the Ringling Brothers Circus would be occupying the same arena the very next day.

Were there no adults present to bring proper sobriety to the moment, to actually remind us that a human being had died, that a tormented soul had finally lost its battle with life, and that three innocent children had been orphaned? Was there no one to say that what actually destroyed Michael’s life and what brought such untold misery to the Jackson family as a whole was an inability to cope with fame? Was there no one who saw that something important and lasting could be learned from Michael’s passing by sending him off in a quiet, dignified, truly religious ceremony that focused on the silent acts of kindness he performed rather than the albums he sold?

To my mind his death is not just a personal tragedy but an American tragedy. Michael’s story is the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grew up in Gary, Indiana, ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency with which we can purchase self-esteem. Being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.

When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb he had worked so hard to develop, he famously quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Anyone who witnessed the tragic implosion of the life of Michael Jackson and its circus aftermath in the weeks following his death might amend the saying to read, “I am fame, destroyer of lives.”