PART FIVE
The Michael Jackson show was still going on, even bigger in his absence than it had been while he was around. New media and old were seized by the revelation of his passing on a scale and to a depth that surpassed all understanding. Order would not be easily restored.
The Los Angeles–based “entertainment news” purveyor TMZ.com claimed credit for breaking the story of Michael Jackson’s death with a terse bulletin it had issued at 2:44 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. CNN needed two full hours after TMZ’s initial report to confirm the news. Word of Michael’s death had first gone public twenty-three minutes before TMZ announced it, however, with a Facebook status update posted at 2:21 p.m., five minutes before the official announcement by the UCLA Medical Center. By the time the media was alerted, a crowd of praying, chanting, clamoring fans had already formed at the main entrance to the hospital, serenaded by Michael’s own performance of his song “Human Nature,” played repeatedly on speakers that had been stacked in the windows of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house across the street.
People had begun to gather even earlier outside the gates of the Carolwood chateau, where, in an only-in-Los Angeles moment, a celebrity homes tour bus happened to pull up outside Michael Jackson’s rented home at the very moment the entertainer’s body was being driven through the open gates in a cherry-red ambulance. Several passengers disembarked right there and became the nucleus of a crowd that by three o’clock was swollen with grief-stricken fans who sobbed to Michael’s music, many already dressed in various renditions of his wardrobe. Among them was Marie Courchinoux, one of the dancers Michael had selected for his London shows, who wore a single white glove and explained through tears that she simply didn’t know where else to go. A second tour bus passed by and many of the passengers demanded to be let off to join the mourners.
An even thicker crush of people had assembled outside the wrought iron gates of the Hayvenhurst estate, holding signs and carrying portable music players that blasted Michael’s greatest hits. Many wore an outfit of one white glove, a fedora hat, and big sunglasses.
Joe Jackson was in Las Vegas but had written himself into the story early on, even before the Facebook announcement of Michael’s death. As early as 1 p.m., Joe informed E! News that his son had gone to the hospital by ambulance and was “not doing well.” At 1:50 p.m. Joe again spoke to E! News by phone, informing a reporter that Michael had suffered a heart attack and “is not okay.” Joe would keep talking all afternoon.
Long before CNN gave the story of Jackson’s death the stamp of its weakened authority, news organizations were reeling from what they had watched occur in cyberspace during the first minutes and hours after the doctors at UCLA made it official. TMZ’s ringmaster Harvey Levin was crowing that, “No matter what they say, people know we broke this story.” The surge of online traffic so overwhelmed Google that it began to respond as if under attack, answering “Michael Jackson” searches either with “error” messages or the squiggly letters of a “captcha” screen. Wikipedia reported a crash within the first hour after Jackson’s death. Twitter messages had doubled within seconds of the first TMZ bulletin, the company said, increasing to 5,000 per minute by mid-afternoon. Wikipedia reported that there had been nearly a million visitors to its Michael Jackson biography within a single hour, the most in the online encyclopedia’s history by far. The Los Angles Times, which had put out the story of Jackson’s death at almost the same moment CNN did, said its Web site was subsequently swamped by nearly 2.3 million page views in an hour, more than it had seen on the day of Barack Obama’s election. Facebook announced that its status updates tripled during the first hour after the news of Jackson’s death went public. The 16.4 million unique visitors to Yahoo! News easily eclipsed the 15.1 million total that had been reached on the day of the presidential vote. At AOL Instant Messaging, which had collapsed for forty minutes in the immediate aftermath of Michael’s death, company officials issued a message saying that, “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it . . .”
Cameras and microphones poked through the mob pressed against the barriers at UCLA Medical Center, where the hospital was in full lockdown mode. The scene was almost as frantic inside the building as tense administrators attempted to forestall a scandal like the one that had erupted a year earlier when nineteen of its employees were caught snooping through the private medical records of Britney Spears, presumably with an eye toward cashing in the way their colleague Lawanda Jackson had when she sold the tabloids information lifted from Farrah Fawcett’s files. A group of sobbing girls that blocked the hospital’s emergency room driveway was ushered aside by police as Michael Jackson’s body was surreptitiously loaded into the helicopter that would fly it to the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office.
By nightfall there were huge crowds outside the Apollo Theater in New York; at Hitsville U.S.A., the old Motown headquarters in Detroit; and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where a memorial wall was posted with photos that chronicled Michael’s career from his days as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 right up through the HIStory tour. In Gary, Indiana, flags were lowered to half-mast and the people who stood singing and crying outside what was once the Jackson family residence included the city’s mayor. Back in Los Angeles, crowds gathered at the GRAMMYMuseum in downtown Los Angeles and at the Staples Center farther south. A group of women locked arms and marched down the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard singing “We Are the World.” Farther north, people were already making pilgrimages to the gated entrance at Neverland Ranch.
By the morning of June 26, there were Michael Jackson shrines and crowds of mourners at the Angel de la Independencia monument in Mexico City, on the square in front of the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame in Paris, and outside the U.S. embassies in Moscow, Tokyo, Nairobi, Odessa, and Brussels. In London, after the Liberal Party prime minister Gordon Brown issued a brief statement reading: “This is very sad news for the millions of Michael Jackson fans in Britain and around the world,” his Conservative Party opponent David Cameron promptly answered with: “I know Michael Jackson’s fans in Britain and around the world will be sad today. Despite the controversies, he was a legendary entertainer.” Nelson Mandela made a rare public appearance to salute Michael’s ability to “triumph over tragedy on so many occasions in his life.” Two separate ministers of the national government in Japan issued statements expressing their sadness at this “tragic loss,” while former South Korea president Kim Dae-jung proclaimed that, “We’ve lost a hero to the world.” Imelda Marcos said she cried when she heard the news. In Paris, French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand told reporters, “We all have a Michael Jackson within.”
Back in the United States, politicians remained more circumspect. While California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised Jackson as “one of the most influential and iconic figures in the music industry,” he was careful to add mention of the “serious questions about his personal life” that remained unanswered. Barack Obama declined to pay homage with a personal appearance, sending press secretary Robert Gibbs out to tell White House correspondents that the president saw Michael Jackson as “a spectacular performer,” but also believed there were “sad and tragic” aspects to the entertainer’s life. The U.S. House of Representatives paused for a tribute moment of silence, which spared them and the American public from anything they might have spoken out loud. The Associated Press dredged up a memorandum written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts back in the 1980s when he was working as a young White House attorney that objected to a letter being sent to Michael Jackson on behalf of President Ronald Reagan: “Frankly, I find the obsequious attitude of some members of the White House staff toward Mr. Jackson’s attendants, and the fawning posture they would have the president of the United States adopt, more than a little embarrassing.” The atmosphere was such that the AP actually imagined Justice Roberts might want to clarify his remarks.
At the Wimbledon tennis tournament in London, both Serena Williams and Roger Federer began the press conferences marking their third-round victories by answering questions about Michael Jackson. “What did Michael Jackson mean to you personally?” was the first query put to Williams, who would take eleven more MJ-related questions before hearing one about tennis.
Even people who hadn’t exactly been on friendly terms with Jackson in recent years felt obliged to assure the world of their love and admiration for him. “I feel privileged to have hung out and worked with Michael,” read Paul McCartney’s press statement. “He was a talented boy-man with a gentle soul. His music will be remembered forever and my memories of our time together will be happy ones.” Former arch-foe Tommy Mottola described Jackson’s death as “one of the greatest losses” ever, then added, “In pop history, there’s a triumvirate of icons: Sinatra, Elvis, and Michael . . . Nothing that came before him or that has come after him will ever be as big as he was.”
The Wall Street Journal, of all newspapers, heartily agreed. “The Age of Celebrity died with Michael Jackson’s heart,” wrote the Journal’s deputy editorial-page editor, Daniel Henninger: “Michael is the last celebrity because he rose to fame in the 1980s, and in the 1980s there was no World Wide Web. We didn’t have a thousand cable TV stations . . . It has taken some time to see how modern media squashed the life out of genuine celebrity.” As if to prove Henninger’s point about the degraded nature of modern celebrity, stars such as John Mayer, Miley Cyrus, and Demi Moore all took the opportunity to tweet their deep feelings and shallow thoughts about Michael Jackson’s passing.
Missing from the cacophony of competing voices was insight from someone who actually knew Michael Jackson, but no such thing was forthcoming.
“There were a number of people who went on Larry King after he died and professed their great love for Michael Jackson and their great sense of loss,” Tom Mesereau recalled, “who I happen to know would not step forward and help him when he needed it during the trial. With friends like that, Michael didn’t need enemies.”
Elizabeth Taylor, one of the few women who had been close enough to Michael Jackson to say anything meaningful about him, begged off, explaining through a spokesperson that she was “too devastated” to comment. In the end, the most incisive public observation came from another of Michael’s female friends, Liza Minnelli: “When the autopsy comes, all hell’s going to break loose, so thank God we’re celebrating him now.”