While his is an end long foretold, it will nevertheless receive and, by tabloid rules require, obsessive explanation and a search for both evil parties and an appropriately squalid back story.
The
New York Post and cable news stations were out in front with the drug-related version of events: injections and Demerol and possible other dangerous combinations. The
British tabloids were nearly you-are-there in descriptions of the slowing pace of his faltering breathing until the final quiet end.
“People close to the Jackson family said he had been given an injection of a powerful narcotic shortly before he collapsed, and they hinted that his relatives had grown increasingly concerned about the people around him lately,”
reported the Post, in a sentence that you would not actually have had to pick up the phone to write. Of course that is what happened. And if family members had not been concerned before—and one would fairly assume family members had long ago tired of their concerns about Michael—they are now.
Such concern is partly to deflect responsibility, but also because people know their roles in such a story. Their role is to dramatize and embroider it.
“If you think the case with Anna Nicole Smith was an abuse, it’s nothing in comparison to what we have seen taking place in Michael Jackson’s life,” said someone identified as a “Jackson family lawyer.”
(Getty Images)
It will be the war between the factions of retainers and underlings and advisers and family who surrounded him in life, joined by those who, having escaped, want back in after death. We’re present at the creation of a tabloid industry: the Jackson death.
And, in fact, it’s hard not to be interested.
Has there ever been a person who has come apart so publicly and for so long as Michael Jackson? Is there a stranger, more inexplicable, tale? Inquiring minds want to know.
Did plastic surgeons kill him? His family? The prosecutor in Santa Barbara County? His debts? His revolving-door business managers? The Media? Demons known and unknown? What was it?
Forget Anna Nicole Smith. Even Elvis is not going to be at the level we’re talking here. Actually, this could be the biggest death in history.
It’s a comeback.
