Sense and Sensibility

Our Riveting Public Mourning

It was all about the music, we kept hearing.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it wasn’t the queerly androgynous looks. Maybe it wasn’t the chimp, the surgical masks, the glove, the baby dangling or the increasingly Caucasian features. Maybe none of it [---] the child molestations allegations, the freakish court appearances in pajamas, the surreal marital history [Dash] mattered. Listening to the mind-numbing hagiography that preceded yesterday’s orgiastic Michael Jackson memorial tribute, it was easy to believe that Jackson was just another uber-talented American entertainer, chronically misunderstood. It got so bad that even before a single performance, you were grateful for a pre-emptive weather alert that assured you that Tuesday’s severe thundershowers were not a precursor to the Apocalypse.

Yesterday’s mourn-a-thon, which began at dawn and droned on until nearly 4 p.m., was an elegy of epidemic proportions. It featured battalions of performers, preachers and politicians as well as a final, choking sob from his daughter that reminded viewers of the personal anguish of a very public wake.

And yet the whole, lurid, immoderate spectacle, from Mariah Carey’s tentative version of the early Jackson hit “I’ll Be There,” to Jermaine Jackson’s haunting “Smile,” was strangely riveting. At Tuesday’s memorial, Jackson’s real intimates [Dash] not the Jackson sycophants who have stumbled, sputtered, and equivocated through the last 10 days of non-stop coverage [Dash] but his actual friends took the stage. Some of their memories, like those of Motown founder Berry Gordy, of playing on baseball teams and swimming together, were sincerely touching. When Gordy, speaking about the 1983 release of “Billy Jean,” said, “Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down,” you could dismiss the more sinister undertones of the remark.

The montages of Jackson videos [Dash] cinematic dance masterpieces that drew inspiration from Fred Astaire, through Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse [Dash] were the finest testimony to Jackson’s uncanny choreographic sense and enduring influence on the entertainment world. The memorial was oddly Motown-centric, even though Jackson’s biggest success came after he left that record label and went solo. Perhaps that was in deference to Jackson’s brothers, who sat in the front row wearing black suits, gold ties, sunglasses and a single sequined glove each.

Jackson, memorialized yesterday by people like Stevie Wonder, whose celebrity Jackson’s strangely mirrored and then eclipsed, was hardly the first American entertainer to warrant massive outpourings of public grief. From Rudolph Valentino, through James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Americans seem to love their celebrities sensitive, child-like and chronically misunderstood. Even the Brits we have embraced [Dash] John Lennon and Princess Diana [Dash] had the kind of impish fragility that the culture simultaneously celebrates and condemns.

A trembling Brooke Shields, fighting off tears, said that Jackson’s “laugh was the sweetest and purest of anyone’s.” It was Jackson’s improbable artlessness [Dash] in an industry that hardens the delicate [Dash] that cemented his fan base and confounded his critics. Cynics found Jackson’s breathy, edge-of-tears ballads a ridiculous camouflage that masked Jackson’s unsettling peccadilloes. Admirers saw in Jackson a vulnerability and innocence that captivated and consoled. When Jackson triumphed [Dash] through boundlessly innovative creativity [Dash] it was a victory for Peter Pans everywhere.

Somehow when Michael Jackson sang and when he danced … we felt he was right there,” said Queen Latifah. “We had him. Whether he knew he was ours or did not know, he was ours, we were his.”

The memorial was not without its clumsy moments. Michael Jackson sold more than 750 million records, but until Tuesday, basketball fans never knew that Jackson was responsible for Magic Johnson’s success as a point guard. Mourners could have done without a representative from the Congressional Black Caucus and “Britain’s Got Talent” 12-year-old wunderkind Shaheen Jafargholi. The memorial should have properly ended with Jermaine Jackson’s stirring “Smile,” but by the second hour, it seemed, like Jackson’s life, to spiral out of control.

The inevitable “We Are The World” finale had its predictable cathartic effect, with Jackson’s children, looking bewildered, taking the stage with the whole Jackson clan. The sobs of Jackson’s daughter Paris, saying that her “daddy has been the best father you can imagine” was a chilling coda to a celebrity circus that, for the Jackson children, is just beginning.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.