The Man in the Mirror
I cannot imagine a world without Michael Jackson in it.
For the past forty years we have all been witness to Michael’s heroic rise and tragic fall. We cheered as he made history with record after record, album after album. We watched in awe as he broke barriers and made impossibilities become realities. We appreciated his iconic sense of style – one sequined white glove, white socks, black leather shoes, red leather jackets, and a black fedora – and longed to do the moonwalk with perfect precision. We watched in shock as he transformed his image time and time again. We felt outrage at the allegations of child molestation, not knowing who or what to believe. And we watched in sadness as the world’s longest-running reality show reached its tragic and somewhat surreal conclusion on 25 June 2009.
After his death, I went back to Neverland to conduct a tour of the estate as part of my coverage of Michael’s death for CBS News. The first timeI set foot on the property was before Michael had even purchased it. As it happened, in the spring of 1983 Michael’s publicist, Bob Jones, invited a few select members of the press to the Santa Ynez Valley to watch as Michael and Paul McCartney made the video for ‘Say, Say, Say’. Something happened – we never did find out what – and Michael didn’t show up for the taping. So Paul invited the contingent of reporters to the home he was renting during the production – Sycamore Valley Ranch, which, of course, became Neverland. Once we got to the ranch, we in the press corp never even saw Paul again. However, he made sure we were well fed and then sent us on our way. I wasn’t invited into the house but from the spacious grounds – acre after bucolic acre – I knew it was a special place. When I found out six years later that Michael had purchased the home, I thought he was certainly moving up in the world.
Standing in the empty main house after his death, I remembered the four or five occasions – all press events to announce certain charities in which Michael was involved – I was invited to the estate during the seventeen years Michael lived there: 1988 through 2005, certainly many of the most pivotal and, also, confounding years of his life. The house and surrounding grounds were always filled with laughter and music, even if at times it seemed a somewhat eerie and unreal place. In the past, I had only been permitted access to the living and dining rooms and, once, as I recall it, into the kitchen. I believeI was in the library once with Michael’s attorney John Branca as well. But now, on this strange day, I had free reign to explore the entire estate. There’s something very sad about an abandoned home, and Michael’s was no exception. Seeing it empty was a strange experience. Even Michael had never seen it that way; he purchased it furnished and then added his own –
many
of his own – pieces. He would have been astounded to see the place so completely empty. How lucky Michael was to live here, I thought. To have come from such meager beginnings in Gary, Indiana – and I’d also been to that small clapboard house, incidentally – to this sumptuous estate was, without a doubt, a journey like no other. I remember him pointing out the barbecue area outside the kitchen and telling me, ‘You can take all of Hayvenhurst’ – the estate he and his family bought in the early 1970s and which he remodeled in the 1980s after buying out his father – ‘and fit it right there in that little corner. How about that!’
But what must it have been like, I wondered, for Michael to walk the bricked halls of the main house in the middle of the night, fearing that he might spend almost twenty years of his life in a jail cell? That had to have been the flip side of living at Neverland in his final years there. How did he ever survive the fear, the anguish? And then I thought, My God! If he had gone to prison, maybe he would still be alive! But, then again, what kind of life would that have been for Michael Jackson? No, I decided, he would rather be dead than be in prison. No doubt about that, I’m afraid.
As I walked into Michael’s bedroom, it was as if his spirit still remained. I looked at the fireplace and imagined it lit with a warm glow. I thought about the painting of The Last Supper that had once been placed over his bed, with Michael in Christ’s place. I thought it was the most ridiculous and maybe even blasphemous piece of art I’d ever heard of when I learned that he’d bought it for this room. But suddenly, standing there, it seemed to make sense to me. Crucified by the circumstances of his life, it was as if poor Michael Jackson had no chance at all.
I thought about him alone at night in that very room, trying in vain to sleep. Rising, pacing the halls, going back to bed... surrounded by bottles of pills and who knows what else... taking anything to escape the insomnia, the anxiety. The never-ending tape loop of his thoughts. I walked into his bathroom and over to his sink. I looked at the tile on the counter – each one seemed to be a royal crest from a different European family. ThereI stood, gazing at the very mirror into which Michael had stared day after day, while probably wondering the same questions that many of us have asked ourselves at one time or another in our lives: Why doI look this way? Why doI feel this way? What can I do now to make that one crucial change that will help me, if not to truly love myself, at least to achieve some peace of mind? And I looked into my own eyes. I studied the reflection of a man in the mirror who had spent so many years of his own life trying to comprehend another person’s journey, looking for threadbare clues that might answer the simple question: Why? As I did, I began to realize that, as is always the case with our most legendary celebrities and icons, while their gifts, talent and dynamism are often unparalleled, they are at the very core no different, no more or less unique, extraordinary and difficult to understand than anyone else. I began to feel at one with the sheer humanity of Michael Jackson, and all its complexity, fallibility and grace. I never thought such a thing possible about somebody at once so magical and yet so mystifying to the point of madness. Our lives had been so different. But, finally, I think I understood the truth about Michael – a truth that, in the end, is far easier to understand than the man who personified it on the greatest stage of all for a generation. Like most of us, he was a man who did the best he could with the cards he’d been dealt, sometimes with magnificent results, sometimes with tragic failure; the results of which were magnified a thousand times over because of his astounding success, and the vulnerable young age at which he achieved it. Indeed, staring at my own reflection in Michael Jackson’s mirror, I began to feel such empathy for him, such pity for him...and such great love for him as well. But more than anything, I felt immeasurable sorrow for him and for what his life should have been like – could have been like – in only...