The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Margo Jefferson’s essay On Michael Jackson displays a lively understanding of black performing history. Thankfully, there is not (yet) a Department of Michael Jackson Studies at Harvard, but Jefferson makes clear the extent to which the former child star is a loose-limbed signifier for the kinds of issue that matter to cultural studies majors: black history, gender politics, the aesthetics of the closet and all that. But Jefferson is enough of a writer to convince one, rather quickly, that the big-hearted, firm-minded essay – more than the novel or the biopic – may be the place where such issues can begin to find their most open-ended resolution. She makes it clear that Jackson had a freak-making childhood, and argues energetically that his career should be seen as an emotional extrapolation of everything he fears about adult power and the loss of innocence:

  Neverland is a happy pre-sexual island (‘for the Neverland is always more or less an island’) ruled by boys. Grief and loss are at its root. Peter Pan ran away from home when he was seven days old … and settled in Kensington Gardens. ‘If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days.’ The birds taught him to fly, and he settled in with the fairies and had a fine time dancing and playing his pipes night after night. Eventually he became half human and half bird, a ‘betwixt-and-between’. Sometimes, though, he would visit his house and watch his mother weep; the window was always open. He liked that she missed him, and he wanted to keep his options open. But one night when he arrived expecting a welcome, the window was locked. When he looked in, she was asleep with her arm around another child. ‘When we reach the window, it is Lock-Out Time. The iron bars are up for life.’ Devastated, he turned his back on her, flew to Neverland, and turned himself into the island’s boy-king. From that day on, he helped other children flee their parents to a life of pleasure and adventure. ‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ he crowed to his enemy, the wicked, unloved Captain Hook. Hook and his pirates were the only adults on the island. Peter and his band of Lost Boys killed them all. But they never discussed fathers. Mothers, he told Wendy, were not to be trusted.

  When Jane Fonda told Michael that she wanted to produce Peter Pan for him, he began to tremble. He identified so with Peter, he told her; he had read everything written about him. Did he know that the book’s original title was ‘The Boy who Hated His Mother’? As Michael wrote in his autobiography: ‘I don’t trust anybody except Katherine. And sometimes I’m not so sure about her.’

  In his extensive reading about Peter Pan, Jackson cannot have failed to notice the recently very popular view that J. M. Barrie was a paedophile, haunted by his dead sibling David and animated by his fascination with the Llewellyn-Davies boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens. Jefferson does not pick up on the parallels – the horrible accusation, the sibling psychodrama, the company of children – but she has a lot of time for the idea that we live in a culture that enjoys the oddness of child stars behaving like adults (singing about sex) and also enjoys punishing them for having an odd relation to childhood when they become adults:

  Michael never admits that he is angry as well as lonely and sad. And yet, what better reproach to all grown-ups – family, siblings, fans – than to have nothing to do with them except as business people you can hire and fire. Or as wives you can marry and divorce. Or as surrogate mothers you can pay and dismiss.

  Sometimes when I think back on that infamous photograph of Michael Jackson holding his baby over the balcony of a hotel, I see it as a child star’s act of vengeance. Holding a baby over a balcony is a furious, infantile acting-out – doing something outrageous when people are interfering with you. ‘You follow me, you hound me, you won’t leave me alone, you want to see me, you want to see my baby, fine. Here’s my baby. If I drop him, if he falls, it’s your fault.’

  We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don’t talk about how we treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what’s more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse? Child stars are performers above all else. Whatever their triumphs, they are going to make sure we see every one of their scars. That’s the final price of admission.

  We could go a stage further, and suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite. ‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes under-reported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerised by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’

  This is a horrible trap for a damaged and damaging person, and if that person is famous – superstar-famous – it may be the end of him. In Jackson’s case, the tabloid mentality has had a field day, thanks to his weirdness, his nose-jobs and his Neverland Ranch. Wacko Jacko was found guilty of his appearance, his little voice, his white skin, his make-up, his friendship with the young film star Macaulay Culkin: he was guilty before he was charged with anything, though every time he has appeared in court the jury has concluded that there is not enough evidence to secure a conviction. I have no information about what Michael Jackson did, or intended to do, when he invited those young people into his bed, but nobody else has any clear information either, and we are bound to forget, as the tabloids do, that having weird hair and a strange outlook and odd abilities does not place him outwith the bounds of common justice. It was those peculiarities which made him famous in the first place, and the whole circus may actually say less about the possibility of his having a criminal nature and more about our capacity for enjoying the ruination of a public figure.

  What is it about fame that can make people unbearable to themselves? In the right conditions – the wrong conditions – a dreamy and over-watched person of sizeable talent can turn steadily into a tragic being, as vulnerable to the psychically destructive forces of the age as the great heroines of the nineteenth-century novel or the doomed figures of Romantic opera. Moral captives such as Emma Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield have destruction written into their code of happiness, as does Cio-Cio-San or Verdi’s Desdemona, suffocated by bad men or bourgeois custom but most effectively by a public (an audience) that loves to be complicit in the undoing of women and the aestheticising of their pain. Once you get to Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe or Billie Holiday or Lena Zavaroni, the thrill has become a fetish, and you can see how self-change and death throes have become in a rather naked way the bigger part of their performance. Michael Jackson has all of that by rote, and is distinguished among such figures as a black man who wants to be a white woman; a person who wants to unperson himself, to become something beyond nature, something entirely concocted of private fears and public desire.

  Jefferson quotes Ralph Ellison’s line that the challenge for a black artist ‘was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face’. Has this been Jackson’s greatest crime: to attempt to ‘pass’ for white in full public view? Did this put him beyond all possibility of acceptance or belonging? An alien? In The Human Stain, Philip Roth showed us Coleman Silk, a black man whose whole life had been a shoring-up of a place of greater safety for himself as a member of the white intelligentsia, a person who sought to put his secret s
elf permanently out of sight in order to live as he wanted. He thought he could ‘play his skin however he wanted, colour himself just as he chose’. The world comes down on Roth’s character after he is accused of racism. One can barely conceive of what the world has in store for Michael Jackson, who has appeared to flout every rule of selfhood and secrecy made fashionable or necessary by the times he lives in.

  The most interesting artists are a compound of talents and shibboleths. Everything that happens to Jackson, including his unacceptableness, which has recently come to seem final (thus Bahrain), is drawn eventually into his wonder and into his madness and into his work. A few years after the first charges of child molestation were brought against him, Jackson released a song called ‘Ghosts’. The video is a funny, frightening and slightly stressed response to Jackson’s many alarming situations, internal, external and otherworldly, but it also shows how his work can transform his isolation into yet more public performance. I’m not sure he can do this any more. Jefferson gives an excellent description of the video for ‘Ghosts’:

  The parents carry torches to the castle, like the villagers in Frankenstein. The castle is a cavernous, Poe-like dwelling with heavy brocade curtains and suits of armour. Lightning flashes; a raven flaps its wings; thunder cracks and doors slam shut, closing the intruders in. The Maestro appears, first as a skeleton in a black robe, then as Michael Jackson in a white shirt with a single row of ruffles, a white T-shirt, black pants and black shoulder-length hair.

  The Mayor calls the Maestro a freak and orders him to leave town. The Maestro challenges the Mayor … twisting his face into masks that are part ghoul, part nineteenth-century black minstrel. ‘Did you think I was alone? Meet the family,’ he adds, and summons forth creatures who shape themselves into the skeletons of antique courtiers, ladies and jesters. The skeletons dance with African squats and robotic rotating knees and shoulders, with flamenco stamps and Native American stomps up the walls and across the balcony, cluster around a golden chandelier and drift lyrically down. Then (surely a reference to the gossip about his plastic surgeries), the Maestro tears his face off to reveal a skull. Later he bends down and, starting from his feet, tears off his whole body. Now he is Mister Bones in a Walpurgisnacht minstrel show.

  The music is a bit insipid and nonsensical, the dance moves freakazoid and ridiculous, the scenario grandiose and egotistical, but the whole package is nevertheless a riveting, baroque and show-stopping amplification of Jackson’s fractured self-image. Whether he means it or not, Michael Jackson is a constant projection of his own nervous imagination, a showman and a shaman embedded with all the hysteria and all the ambition of the age. And to think there’s a little boy in there somewhere, asking for love in the dark.

  At the height of his 1980s mega-success, Jackson still attended meetings at the Kingdom Hall with this mother. Two or three nights a week he would also go door-to-door with the Watchtower magazine, trying to recruit for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. To make things easier, he would cover his head for these outings and wear a false moustache and glasses. Wandering around the suburbs of California, he would suffer the usual abuse and door-slammings. One girl, Louise Gilmore, recalls a man coming to her house. ‘Today, I’m here to talk to you about God’s word,’ he said, and she let him in. According to Taraborrelli, the girl didn’t recognise Jackson, but noticed he was odd. ‘He looked like a little boy playing grown-up,’ she said. He spoke to her about his faith, then drank a glass of water and left. When a neighbour later told Louise that the visitor had been Michael Jackson she says she almost fainted. She didn’t join his religion, but she kept the pamphlets he gave her as souvenirs she would treasure all her life.

  England and The Beatles

  MAY 2004

  There is something very English in the marriage of boredom and catastrophe, and the England that existed immediately after the Second World War appears to have carried that manner rather well, as if looking over its shoulder to notice that lightning had just struck a teacup. Reading the work of V. S. Pritchett or the absconded Auden, you pick up the notion that Europe had just come through a spell of bad weather, as though the only important question emerging from the war was about how it might have affected the course of English normality. The great horror was that things would remain the same, second only to a fear that things would never be the same again. The mood is captured nicely in ‘1948’ by Roy Fuller, a poet who happened to spend his life working for the Woolwich Equitable Building Society:

  Reading among the crumbs of leaves upon

  The lawn, beneath the thin October sun,

  I hear behind the words

  And noise of birds

  The drumming aircraft; and am blind till they have gone.

  The feeling that they give is now no more

  That of the time when we had not reached war:

  It is as though the lease

  Of crumbling peace

  Had run already and that life was as before.

  For this is not the cancer or the scream,

  A grotesque interlude, but what will seem

  On waking to us all

  Most natural –

  The gnawed incredible existence of a dream.

  England appeared then to be a country of old men, a place in which dreams were routinely gnawed down by broken teeth, while America in 1948 appeared to the English like a stately pleasure dome, housing this great new phenomenon, the teenager, and busy with every kind of plan for the future, from abbreviated hemlines to the hydrogen bomb. The compulsions of teenagers have come to so dominate the world that we might sometimes forget they used not to exist. In 1900, for instance, 20 per cent of American kids between ten and fifteen were in full-time employment and, even as late as D-Day itself, Andy Hardy represented a world where young people did useful things and had fun before going to bed alone at ten o’clock. What was the teenage market in 1945 but comic books, bobby pins, and the Toni home perm? But in 1948 the transistor radio was invented (kids could suddenly listen to music in their own rooms), and the 194°Cadillac came with tail-fins and a radio console, a vehicle customised for teenagers and featured in a blazing new magazine called Hot Rod.* It was also the year of the Kinsey Report. Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town was first aired in that summer of 1948 and it would eventually promise a world in which the likes and dislikes of young people in blue jeans could appear to run the culture.

  In a bombed-out Liverpool, a dozen years later, new shining buildings were being erected and English normality was erupting into something of a classless, American-accented meritocracy: four cheeky lads with scuffed shoes, the Beatles, came bursting with new harmonies and even newer energies, and they appeared to be telling young people they had choices. John Lennon, quoted in The Beatles Anthology:

  America used to be a big youth place in everybody’s imagination. We all knew America, all of us. All those movies: every movie we ever saw as children, whether it was Disneyland or Doris Day, Rock Hudson, James Dean or Marilyn. Everything was American: Coca-Cola, Heinz ketchup … The big artists were American. It was the Americans coming to the London Palladium. They wouldn’t even make an English movie without an American in it, even a B movie … They’d have a Canadian if they couldn’t get an American … Liverpool is cosmopolitan. It’s where the sailors would

  come home on the ships with the blues records from America.

  Devin McKinney’s intelligent study of the Beatles, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, finds the four in a Liverpool coated in the grime of Empire; among the cellars, bunkers, and backstreets of post-war Britain, they ‘listened to America and lived on fantasies of everything their culture lacked’. McKinney listens to a tape of the sixteen-year-old John Lennon singing with the Quarry Men, the ramshackle group that preceded the Beatles, at a church garden fête. It is the day Lennon met Paul McCartney. ‘The music,’ writes McKinney, ‘though it resembles rock and roll, sounds as if it owes nothing to any form, because it is so completely itself. It feels like ug
ly British kids make it, and sounds as if it comes from under the ground.’

  Like most British pop groups of the time, the Beatles sang with American accents, which shows you what Britain was becoming in those years. Yet the group were the first to echo the sound of America back on itself, only louder, newer, with more screams, and their story, rightly divined in McKinney’s book, is about how they came to represent the thrill of rock music as a high form of dreaming in the present tense of history. It is exactly forty years since the Beatles landed at JFK. What did they bring with them apart from an instant legend of old Europe transmogrified by America? Greeted by ‘a squall of unmediated adolescent emotion’, the Beatles never questioned the meaning of the sobbing girls who crowded around them, or of the outraged adults who would later oversee the burning of their records. America was ready for something new in 1964, and the Beatles surprised even themselves at their agility when it came to meeting that readiness. Paul McCartney in the Anthology:

  There were millions of kids at the airport. We heard about it in mid-air … The pilot had rang ahead and said, ‘Tell the boys there’s a big crowd waiting for them.’ We thought, ‘Wow! God, we have really made it.’ I remember, for instance, the great moment of getting into the limo and putting on the radio and hearing a running commentary on us: ‘They have just left the airport and are coming towards New York City …’ It was like a dream. The greatest fantasy ever.

  Ringo Starr, the drummer, showed all the excitement of a wallflower suddenly plucked onto the dance floor by the college jock. ‘On the plane,’ he said, ‘flying into the airport, I felt as though there was a big octopus with tentacles that were grabbing the plane and dragging us down into New York.’