“I always felt he would never be an old man.”—Dan Beck, managing partner, Big Honcho Media
“Even though he was 50, we still think of Michael as a kid, and always will.”—Susan Blond, president, Susan Blond, Inc.
Many celebrity deaths are unexpected, some tragic, a few sensational, but nearly all end lives that are easy to comprehend, to pull together in a tidy life-story package. Not so Michael Jackson. For two days, the images, the memories have swirled, each edgier, stranger, more mysterious than the next.
Macaulay Culkin. Bubbles the Chimp. The moonwalk. The glove. The crotch grab. Lisa Marie Presley. Beat It. Elephant Man. Neverland. The veil. The disappearing nose. Elizabeth Taylor. Brooke Shields. Billie Jean. Debbie Rowe. Dangling babies. Charges in court. Saudi princes. The oxygen tank. We Are the World. I’ll Be There.
How to make sense of it? I called two old friends who worked with Michael and knew him well….or as well as it was possible to know this man-child who confounded the universe.
Susan Blond, now president of Susan Blond, Inc., was vice president of publicity for Epic during the 10 years leading up to and including “Thriller.” In 2001, she would work with Jackson again, handling the 30th-year celebration of his solo career at Madison Square Garden.
“It was very exciting,” Blond says of the Epic years, “because we were breaking barriers. Michael always felt like he wasn’t getting what he deserved—he’d see The Osmonds on the teen magazine covers, the Jackson Five couldn’t get on, and it drove him crazy. Even by ‘Off the Wall,’ when he had hit single after hit single, we had to fight to get him on the cover of Rolling Stone. ‘He’s not our audience,’ they’d say.”
In other words, no blacks on covers—a stigma that, barring Oprah and Obama, lasts to a large extent to this day.
Conquering MTV was just as difficult. Who can forget the thrills of “Thriller” and “Billie Jean”? “We fought to get those videos on TV,” Blond says.
Jackson was not only the first African-American music superstar, he was, Dan Beck points out, “the guy who met the beginning of the ultimate media explosion.” Beck, now managing partner of Big Honcho Media, worked with Michael from 1988 to 1996, as senior vice president of marketing and sales at Epic, “when he still had the big career, but there were starting to be cracks in it. The plastic surgery. The charges of child molesting. He was very smart, very competitive, but there were big blind spots.
“He was always about the Big Dream,” says Beck, who came up with the idea for Jackson’s 1995 ‘HIStory, “the Fantasy of it all. I remember Michael walking into a meeting for ‘HIStory’ and saying, ‘I see this album selling 100 million copies.’ The room stopped. It was like, ‘He’s out of his mind.’ But he just looked at us and said, ‘No one ever thought I could sell 44 million. Why can’t we imagine 100 million?”
With the agility and smoothness of Astaire, and the sexual frenzy of Fosse, Jackson was the greatest pop choreographer of the century. “He really worked at it,” says Blond. “Never let it go. He was always practicing. I remember once at a club I asked him to dance, and he said, ‘No. That’s work.’”
In the late ‘70s, as a pop music reporter, I had a brief phone conversation with Michael and came away with—not much. I remember thinking, “He talks like a child, and not a very interesting one.” Later, it occurred to me that I had been manipulated by someone who simply didn’t want to speak—or was wary of speaking in front of whoever else was in the room. Either way, it seemed to me he was imprisoned.
As the years went on, and Michael was seen increasingly with children, the question became: Is he a pedophile—or simply a childlike, asexual freak? “That was the big debate among people in the business,” Dan Beck says. “When the rumors started, I would tell him, ‘Michael you need to address this.’ But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. His attitude was, it’s the media versus me.”
It was always clear that the star himself did not have a childhood. “He did things with me that a child would do,” Susan Blond remembers. “When he was 17, he turned my pocketbook upside down, as a joke, to watch everything fall out. That’s something a four-year-old would do.
“And he was naïve—he just didn’t understand certain things,” says Blond, who began her Big City fame as a Warhol Girl. “He’d ask Andy, ‘Why don’t you have kids?’ He’d ask me the same, back when that was the last thing on my mind. He just didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want something he saw as a normal thing to want.”
His father Joe was notoriously overbearing. “One night, out of the blue, Michael asked me about my father,” Beck says. “I talked a little about how he wasn’t perfect, but I respected him, and he nodded and indicated he never had that. Then he said, ‘Say hello to your dad for me.’ The next time I saw my father, I told him, ‘Oh, by the way, Michael Jackson said to say hello to you.’ My dad just looked at me.”
“I had no relationship with Joe Jackson,” Blond says. “But those kids knew they had to be great. He made them. He drove them.”
The child-molesting suspicions and charges occurred long after Blond had left Epic to start her own public relations agency: “In a way, it was a blessing he didn’t come with me as a client. I just saw him as a child. A sweet child. “
The sweetness, on some level, remained, but the chubby, cherubic kid rapidly deteriorated to a plastic surgery head case. “I remember, by ‘Thriller,’ going down in an elevator with him and [Studio 54 owner] Steve Rubell,” Blond says, “The lights were bright and we tried not to look at him. He barely had a nose. “
“The hearsay was always that he was trying not to look like his father,” says Beck. “But the plastic surgery was also part of his competitive thing with himself, to get bigger and better. He also had the skin disease. That might have been the seed that started it.”
Rail-thin, Jackson might have had an eating disorder as well. “He was frail and didn’t eat right. He ate, like, broth,” says Beck. “That’s all I’d see him eat.” Sometimes, perhaps, to get out of performing. “He had an HBO show scheduled live at the Beacon and he was not ready. I knew he didn’t want to do it. So he got himself sick. He made himself sick to get out of it.”
We may never know if this final sickness, whichever drugs or treatments helped propel Jackson to his too-early end, were consumed in part to avoid his much-promoted Comeback Concert.
“He never competed with other artists,” says Beck. “Michael only competed with himself. It ultimately became too much, too large, to top himself.”
And how will he be remembered—as the groundbreaking artist who influenced a generation of performers to come, or as the veiled, ethereal, child-adoring freak?
“That’s part of his legend—how odd he was,” says Blond. “But nobody could dance, sing, perform like Michael. What people will remember is that this is the greatest entertainer who ever lived.”
