I had to turn off the ABC special on Michael Jackson. The guy's just too weird, and seemed too clueless as to what he was doing to his own image with the interview.
In 1987, I worked briefly on a proposed cartoon series called Michael's Pets, which would have been based on a then-current line of plush toys. The plush toys were, in turn, based on…well, on Michael's pets — the animals he had on the grounds of his mansion. The show never went anywhere largely because though Michael had once been the star of an animated series (The Jackson 5ive — that was how they spelled it), he now thought it would be detrimental to his image as a rock star if he appeared on a kid's show. Since the network wouldn't buy the series if Michael wasn't going to appear in it, that pretty much ended that.
(Michael did, however, make it clear that he loved Saturday morning cartoons. He just didn't want to be one again. At one point, he noticed one credit on my résumé and said, "I really love Richie Rich." I looked around at his house and said pretty much what you would have said. I said, "Michael, you are Richie Rich!")
I was only at his home (the one in Encino) three times for less than an hour each, so my impressions are definitely from afar, and possibly out of date. But he struck me as a big kid who either had no one around to tell him "no," no matter how wrong he was, or was long since past the point where he'd listen to anyone who told him "no." I was then reading a number of books about Howard Hughes — a man to himself, was carried out. I couldn't help but note the parallels. Some of those who worked for Michael seemed to be giving him good, pragmatic advice but I got the feeling that if he had suddenly decided he wanted to see Ventura Boulevard paved with chocolate pudding, somehow that would have happened.
Like Hughes, he fascinates us because we can't fathom how someone with that much success could so fritter it away on childish self-indulgence; how a person could spend so much constructing their private prison and lose all contact with the real world.
While I was waiting for him to come downstairs for what turned out to be our last conference, I had a quick fantasy. In it, I said to Michael, "Come on. Let's leave the bodyguards and all these handlers, get in my car, and I'll drive us down to Carney's for a couple of burgers." Shocking all his aides in my daydream, he agreed — and we went there and as he ate a veggie burger and I had beef, I explained tactfully to him why he was becoming a public laughingstock. (At the time, the jokes were just about him being effeminate and suffering from arrested development. They have now evolved to explicitly charging that he rapes small children.) In my fantasy — which lasted all of 30 seconds before he walked in and the real meeting commenced — he "got it." Though I drove him home and never saw him again, he began leading a life that raised fewer eyebrows and triggered fewer monologue jokes and Enquirer headlines.
But of course, that could never have happened. If he could have understood or changed, he would have long since done both. And I guess the reason I had to turn last night's interview off was the same reason I can't watch news footage of accidents where you think, "If only someone could have done something before it was too late." In Michael Jackson's case, I'm thinking it was probably too late about the time he stopped dancing alongside Jermaine and Tito.